That will teach me to be sunny
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On November 4, I published a short article on ChinaFile about two unrelated festivals of independent Chinese cinema, quite a sunny story about signs of a blooming of Chinese culture in cities around the world.
The next day, I recorded an episode of the Sinica podcast with Kaiser Kuo. We started Sinica together in 2010; he’s now doing it on his own, but I occasionally join as a guest. He titled the episode “We were right: Kaiser and Jeremy reunite to riff on the China vibe shift.” It’s the second show we’ve done on a really noticeable change in American attitudes to China in the last ten months or so.
I attribute the shift largely to the clown show in Washington, which makes Beijing look like the capital of global responsibility, and the Trump administration’s purge of China hawks in favor of unprincipled grifters. But there are a lot of other factors which we discuss in the show, including: American TikTok influencers dazzled by high speed trains, U.S. hypocrisy on human rights, and a softening of rhetoric coming from Beijing on the U.S. and on international issues. Whatever the cause, views of China in the U.S. seem to have warmed considerably since the nadir of 2016 to 2023 (which roughly coincides with the height of China’s strident “wolf warrior diplomacy”). We didn’t discuss it on the show, but there even seemed to be some kind of warming between Beijing and Tokyo, after Xi Jinping met Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on October 31 in South Korea.
My typical schtick on Sinica is as the cynic who can’t help pointing out all China’s failures, the foil to Kaiser’s enthusiasm and optimism about the country. But when we recorded this episode, I shared Kaiser’s exuberance. I’d just published a fun story about Chinese film, and that day, thinking about China seemed so sunny. So much more pleasant than reading the news about the U.S. And I suppose both of us are hoping that less hostility from the U.S. might also give China a nudge in the direction of openness.
A short-lived interlude of sunniness.
The day after recording the podcast, on November 6, the New York film festival announced its cancellation because authorities were harassing all the filmmakers and participants who lived in China and their family members.
On November 7, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was asked in parliament about “survival-threatening situations,” a legal term that allows Japan’s premiers to deploy the country’s Self-Defense Forces. She said that one example would be an attempt by Beijing to bring Taiwan under control using military force, language that was either calculated to anger Beijing or said without thought. Cue outrage from the Chinese government, and the return of wolf warrior diplomacy.
It seems unlikely that Takaichi will issue an apology for her comments, and the fiery rhetoric from Beijing indicates that there won’t be a quick offramp. Things could get bad. China may use its now battle-tested arsenal of trade tools to punish Japan, including rare earths export controls, and trade sanctions. Beijing has already advised Chinese citizens against traveling to Japan (Chinese tourists comprise around 23% of all international visitors to the country, making about 5.7 million trips so far in 2025).
Things could get bad. Perceived Japanese aggression or intervention in what Beijing sees as domestic matters is thought of as a red line, both for the Communist Party and for many ordinary Chinese people—whose feelings about Japan have been shaped by the memory of 20th century colonization and war crimes and the Communist Party’s persistent propagandizing about them. I remember watching protests on several different days in 2012 outside the Japanese embassy, near my apartment in Beijing. They were sparked by an escalation of tensions about the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. The demonstrations were tolerated or perhaps organized by the authorities. People surrounded the embassy and threw bottles at the U.S. ambassador’s car when he tried to visit one day. There were similar demonstrations in dozens of cities around the country, some violent, some targeting people driving Japanese cars.
If there is no savvy diplomacy, and the onus is really on Japan, we’re in for a sustained period of Sino-Japanese friction, which will probably be exacerbated by Americans egging Takaichi on.
—Jeremy Goldkorn
About China, around the internet
Recommended reading and listening
Some things that caught my eye this week:
The China connection in the Epstein files: Email correspondence dating up to the day before Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2019 shows former U.S. Treasury Secretary and former Harvard president Larry Summers seeking advice on seducing a person he was mentoring, who appears to be the economist, author, and Davos rock star Kèyǔ Jīn 金刻羽. For commentary, see: Ivy Yang and China Heritage.
“Generation Burnout” is the subject of a podcast interview with journalist Chang Che on the Face Off podcast, with former New York Times correspondent Jane Perlez and historian Rana Mitter. Chang also has his own new podcast, with writer Ian Buruma: Into Asia.
“As housing prices go down, many feel that their sacrifices and compromises made for work and mortgage during the high-growth era have been in vain,” reports Following the Yuan.
“China’s technological ambitions, in its own words” or an analysis of “the country’s technological priorities for the next Five-Year Plan,” by Jiang Jiang, a writer whose day job is at at state-run Xinhua news agency.
“Ever wonder what a coffee shop from the remote city of Ordos, Inner Mongolia, would sell as its signature drink?” asks Olivia Plotnick in her review of the Suzhou Coffee Festival.
The week’s news roundup
Fiery words, kings and queens
Japan has cautioned its citizens in China to step up safety precautions and avoid crowded places, after Beijing issued a warning to Chinese citizens to avoid travel to Japan. There seems no easy offramp to the dispute, described above, that began when Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said that military action by China against Taiwan would justify the use of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces: See state media reporter Fred Gao for an explanation of “why Beijing is so furious about Takaichi’s remarks.”
The kings and queens of Spain and Cambodia visited Beijing in the same week. One nationalist commentator wrote (in my translation): “With the kings of these two countries choosing to visit China simultaneously, the foundation of American hegemony is gradually crumbling.”
China and the U.S. suspended port fees on each other’s vessels. But China’s rare earths exports have not gone back to normal, while China’s dispute with the Netherlands over control of chipmaker Nexperia festers.
Fewer ways of making you talk? New guidelines leaked online apparently tighten the use by police of “residential surveillance at a designated location,” a form of detention that “legal critics believe is a key source of illegal interrogation that has led to multiple deaths and blocked suspects’ access to lawyers.”
The U.S. overtook China as Africa’s biggest foreign direct investor in 2023, with $7.8 billion across the continent, compared with $4 billion by China, according to the China Africa Research Initiative of Johns Hopkins University.
World-leading cancer drug scientist Lín Wénbīn 林文斌 left the University of Chicago to join Hangzhou’s Westlake University.
“Foreign purchases of Chinese equities have hit their highest level in four years, in a sign global investors are reassessing a market that until recently was considered ‘uninvestable,’” says the Financial Times.
The whiplash from optimism to reality check is perfecty captured here. The film festival cancelation happening just days after publishing about cultural blooming really underscores how fragile these openings can be. What's intresting is how the Japan Taiwan situation shows how quickly diplomatic momentum can unravel, one comment from Takaichi was all it took to trigger what could become sustained tensions with economic fallout for both sides.
A malleable, interim PM installed at short notice by party heavyweights after the LDP corruption scandal, and divert attention from Japan's economic crises - JGB 20‑year government bond yield at a record 2.75%, yen at a nearly one year low against the US dollar, and national debt at 260% of GDP - $10.2 trillion. The reality is as LDP power broker and Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara stated at a press conference that Japan’s stance on Taiwan “has not changed”, and "aims to support a peaceful solution between Beijing and Taipei."