timelets

“a collection of essays called The Hall of Uselessness by the Belgian sinologist Simon Leys. In one of these essays, “The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past,” Leys considers the construction techniques of Chinese builders.

Builders everywhere have attempted to overcome the erosion of time. Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe built great pyramids and cathedrals out of stone. The approach in China, as Leys points out, is for builders to yield to the onrush of time by using eminently perishable, and indeed fragile, materials. By building temples out of wood with paneling sometimes made of paper, Chinese architecture has built-in obsolescence, demanding frequent renewal. “Eternity should not inhabit the building,” Leys writes. “It should inhabit the builder.” Rather than using the strongest materials, Chinese builders have embraced transience to ensure the eternity of spiritual designs.

--- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

“I came to realize the inadequacy of twentieth-century labels like capitalist, socialist, or, worst of all, neoliberal. They are no longer up to the task of helping us understand the world, if they ever were. Capitalist America intrudes upon the free market with a dense program of regulation and taxation while providing substantial (albeit imperfect) redistributive policies.

Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist. While Xi Jinping and the rest of the Politburo mouth Marxist pieties, the state is enacting a right-wing agenda that Western conservatives would salivate over: administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration, and enforcing traditional gender roles—where men have to be macho and women have to bear their children.”

-- Daniel Wang. “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.”

“An alliance between 3Com and Huawei was attractive to both sides. Huawei would get the immediate legal protection of 3Com’s deep patent portfolio; 3Com would get Huawei’s lower production costs and its connections to the vast China market. Soon after the two announced their joint venture, called H3C, 3Com’s lawyers filed a motion to intervene in the Cisco case, calling 3Com an interested party.”

--- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

“Ren told his trusted deputy, Guo Ping, who was now Huawei’s executive vice president, to get to the US as quickly as he could. Ren invoked the fable of ancient Chinese military general Han Xin*, who had accepted the humiliation of crawling between another man’s legs to prevent a deadly fight.”

* The fable of General Han Xin’s humiliation, known as "crawling between the legs" (胯下之辱), tells of a young, poor Han Xin being challenged by a bully in his hometown of Huaiyin to either kill him or crawl through his legs. Choosing to endure this shame rather than waste his life on a petty killing, Han Xin crawled through, later becoming a renowned military strategist and rewarding the man for testing his resolve.

“On January 28, 1996, Ren Zhengfei held Huawei’s first “mass-resignation ceremony.” Each head of a regional sales office was told to prepare two reports: a work summary and a written resignation. “I will only sign one of the reports,” Ren said.

Huawei had started out in rural markets, and many of its early sales managers were provincial in their experience and network of contacts. As Ren sought to go national and international, he decided to make the entire sales staff resign and reapply for their jobs. “The mountain goat must outrun the lion to not be eaten,” he had told them ahead of the event. “All departments and sections must optimize and eat the lazy goats, the goats that do not learn or progress, and the goats with no sense of responsibility.”

They were following the strategy that Mao had used to win the Chinese Civil War of “encircling the cities with the countryside.”[9] They’d won over villages and towns in the beginning, building their strength to take on the big cities.

Ren told his followers that demotions built character and that the demoted would only be stronger when they worked their way up again.... “Even Deng Xiaoping could go down and up three times. Why can’t you go down and up three times?”

-- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”

BEIJING—Microsoft is asking hundreds of employees in its China-based cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence operations to consider transferring outside the country, as tensions between Washington and Beijing mount around the critical technology.

...700 to 800 people, who are involved in machine learning and other work related to cloud computing, one of the people said.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-asks-hundreds-of-china-based-ai-staff-to-relocate-amid-u-s-china-tensions-b626ff8c

“We highly value the balanced position of our Chinese friends when it comes to the Ukraine crisis,” Putin told Xi, according to a Kremlin transcript. “We understand your questions and concerns about this. During today’s meeting, we will of course explain our position, though we have also spoken about this before.”

https://www.ft.com/content/d1a1e185-0668-4f5f-b5a5-bd37a615e4eb

Все российские самолеты Boeing не могут летать в воздушном пространстве Китая до последующего уведомления, говорится в письме для клиентов логистической компании Global Link, которое распространено по российским Telegram-каналам. В нем отмечается, что данное уведомление получено компанией от Администрации гражданской авиации КНР.
...
речь идет о закрытии Китаем неба «для российских эксплуатантов всех самолетов, в том числе Boeing и Airbus, с двойной регистрацией».

https://www.vedomosti.ru/business/articles/2022/05/27/924013-kitai-ogranicheniya-rossii