Yuan Yang
@YuanfenYang
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Labour's parliamentary candidate for Earley and Woodley | new book out now - link in bio 📖 | former @FT journalist | co-founder @RethinkEcon | @ReadingQuakers
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This weekend I was selected as the Labour Party's parliamentary candidate for our new constituency of Earley and Woodley, my family home. It's the honour of my life to stand in the next general election to build a greener, fairer future for us all.🌹
@UKLabour
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Now that the Omicron variant is in Beijing and in total 9 cities across 6 provinces in northern, eastern, central and southern China - I really, really hope the govt will finally allow Pfizer & other foreign vaccines in, if Covid defence outweighs misplaced pride
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So, according to my Tory MP John Redwood, a football club is just another financial asset to be stripped by its shareholders? I can’t imagine a position more out of touch. The shareholders haven’t shown any interest in “sorting out the club” and that’s why we’re at this point.
Or not…
Wokingham MP John Redwood has ZERO interest in protecting a multimillion pound site in his area or to aid his local club,
#ReadingFC
.
Spineless.
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For the last two years I’ve been speaking to Tang Mingfang, a whistleblower who was jailed after exposing the use of forced student labour in
@amazon
’s supplier in China,
@HonHai_Foxconn
. He’s still trying to seek redress. Here’s his story
@FTMag
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This weekend’s
@FT
Life & Arts front page is an essay from me on how my family came to the UK, my forthcoming book (link in bio!), and the untold human stories of China’s economic boom - plus some 90s baby pics for good measure 📸
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Pretty incredible stats in the
@FT
today on the failure of private equity companies running our water companies:
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I would venture a guess that at this point, the average Chinese social media user is more bought into Russia's messaging than the average Russian w friends & relatives in Ukraine
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Happy that my debut book, on inequality & women’s lives in China, was chosen by
@thetimes
,
@Waterstones
and
@ObserverUK
as one of their top nonfiction books to look out for in 2024:
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One of my interviewees said "the union leadership are wearing the same trousers as the factory management" and now I can't get that image out of my head. 穿一条裤子 is possibly one of the most wonderful metaphors in the Chinese language 👖
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3, 2, 1…book cover reveal, and pre-ordering now available ☺️
Through the eyes of a quartet of women born in China in the 80s and 90s, Private Revolutions is a fascinating portrait of womanhood and society in a rapidly evolving - and increasingly repressive - global superpower:
@YuanfenYang
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A few weeks ago, my grandpa mailed me my dad's old Nikon film camera. After a hiatus of 20-odd years, today it started producing photos again. Here's Beijing's Ritan Park in the snow. Do share your advice for my experiments in using a 'real' camera! (And yes, it's manual focus)
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Thanks to
@MythiliRao
@guardian
for this wonderful “Book of the Day” review of my forthcoming book!
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London/Europe folks, say hi! This is an entirely new role, deepening the
@FT
’s global coverage of China, & what a time to shape it.
Beijing, see you soon! Words in a tweet can’t express how much you mean to me, so I’ll close with a photo of Haohao & me leaving the Beijing bureau
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Canvassing in the formerly Maidenhead parts of our new Earley & Woodley constituency this morning. With Theresa May’s resignation and who knows which Tory MP going next, only one thing’s for sure: if you want a change of government, come out campaigning with us!
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My debut book, Private Revolutions, is out in two weeks' time – and you can pre-order a signed copy from
@BlackwellsHH
at this link. Here's photographic before-and-after evidence of me signing a table-full of them 🖋️
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My mum, who since I was little always reminded me that we knew nobody in the UK, has very excitedly told me that she found out she has a friend who knows someone in Westminster called Jack or Joe or possibly John. She has just asked me if I knew him. I have had to disappoint her
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📅Out in just ten days: my debut book telling the story of China's economic transformation and slowdown through the lives of four women.
Pre-order here ➡️
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Book cover reveal! Very pleased to share both the US and UK editions for my book Private Revolutions – out May 9th in the UK & July 2nd in the US. Pre-order wherever you are from
@BloomsburyBooks
@penguinrandom
@VikingBooks
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Went to a hot baths this evening with a friend to soak away the freezing Beijing winter, and above the main pool was a huge screen playing the CCTV news broadcast. This is what all the women in the pool were staring at for an hour
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Very proud of the
@FT
team I was part of, led by
@samjoiner
, that turned a seed of an idea into a stunning data investigation - tracking the number of demolitions and defacements of mosques in China, over thousands of sites, over seven years
"How China is tearing down Islam"
by
@ftdata
(United Kingdom) just won a
@sigmaawards
for
#datajournalism
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3/3 If you'd like to have a chat, volunteer, or follow the campaign we're building in this new seat, go here – there's something for everyone to do:
And if you'd like to donate to my campaign:
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On
#InternationalWomensDay
let’s celebrate the invisible labour - of mostly unpaid and low-paid women carers - that holds all of us together, from birth to adulthood and into old age. And let’s make sure we all support the carers who support us all.
@unisontheunion
@GwynneMP
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RIP, Daniel Kahneman. Thank you for introducing challenging ideas to economics and psychology, and for being so willing to share your time with us students. (Photo from
@rethinkecon
annual conference, 2015)
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Frank Hester’s racist and misogynistic views have no place in British public life, and his money has no place in our politics. In light of Sunak’s inaction, I’ve written to
@CllrPauline
@EarleyTories
asking if they will refuse to use his funds. Let’s see what they say.
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After many years of writing about China’s factories, today I got to visit the site of the world’s oldest industrial-era factory, Derby Silk Mill, also the site of one of the UK’s earliest major industrial disputes, now a wonderful museum
@MuseumofMaking
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Took Haohao to the local polling station, bc after all, how many Beijing-adopted snow dogs can say they’ve been to one? The first man who came out took one look at him & said he’d vote for him. “The main thing is he isn’t a party animal, like that lot” 🐺🗳
#dogsatpollingstations
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2/3 It's been an incredible honour to have worked at the
@FT
for the past eight years. I've been on leave for the duration of the selection campaign, and now I've stepped down to campaign full-time for our new constituency:
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In my
@BloomsburyBooks
interview earlier last week, I was asked which my favourite bookshops around the world were. My sad but true answer: most of them have closed down.
1/ Hong Kong independent bookstore Mount Zero, which has nurtured a community of writers and book lovers over the past six years, permanently closed on Sunday.
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I'll be speaking on
@BBCFreeThinking
@BBCRadio3
tonight at 10pm about my forthcoming book, young women in China, and the cost of free speech in authoritarian societies. Listen here:
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This is the story of an accidental adoption, and the soft boundary between written law & reality in Beijing. I've been thinking about writing it ever since I started planning to bring Haohao to the UK. Now it's safely out. My dispatch for
@FTWeekend
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"Yuan Yang’s Private Revolutions interweaves the stories of a quartet of women...The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on."
You can now pre-order:
5 New Non-Fiction Books That Are Equal Parts Gripping And Galvanising
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2/ With particular thanks to
@HannahTheaker1
,
@UslanYusupov
and other academics working to gather open-source documentation to scrutinise a policy whose victims are often silenced by the state before they can speak out
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Since the licence plates are from a southern Chinese province, I can confirm that these are not just pyjamas but winter armour. After I’ve spent a wintry week in Hefei or any other southern city without heating, my desire to live in a thick fleece onesie becomes irresistible
Don't be surprised if you see people in pajamas in China's streets or on ebikes: business casual.
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A new
@citizenlab
report. TL;DR: if you’re coming for the Olympics, consider using separate devices, and don’t use Beijing’s official Olympics app to chat, because I mean why would you even
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Spent 5 days in the freezing south w/o removing my down jacket, even to sleep. On 1st day back, the Beijing sun hits me & I suddenly smell woodsmoked meat. It's not a new restaurant. It's me. I realise I've smelt of 腊肉 for the past week. O what a delicious
#lunarnewyear
it was!
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With the myriad differences in my mum's tastes and mine,
@peterfrankopan
is one of the authors that we both agree on! I've been reading the Earth Transformed, which puts our ecological crisis in grand historical context, and would recommend (to you & your mum)
@RISC_Reading
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Suddenly, you realise everyone is stood watching the TV screens. You are the only one left talking on the phone. Ok, you think, I moved back in July and this is my second time the newsroom has gone through this, I think I’ve gotten the hang of the office culture now
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A tremendous set of results for Labour in Wokingham Borough Council - our biggest Labour Group there ever, with more gains than any other party.
Added to our Reading Borough results, we’re now the party with the most councillors in Earley and Woodley constituency.
Congratulations to the Labour Group on Wokingham Borough Council!
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Ah, finally something Pope Francis and Xi Jinping can agree on
Pope calls couples who choose pets over having children ‘selfish’
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Wow – can't believe it's been a whole year since I was part of Cohort 5! I'd wholeheartedly recommend the Jo Cox Women In Leadership program, and all of
@LabourWomensNet
's trainings – the solidarity and friendship will last you long after the programs finish.
Graduates! 🎓 Congratulations to Cohort 6 of the
#JoCoxLeadership
Scheme who’ve graduated with flying colours today! Hailing from across the
@uklabour
movement, 56 feminist leaders are ready to change the world. LWN will be following their impact with interest!🌹
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"Do not post anything unfavorable to Russia or pro-Western" — accidentally leaked directive to one Beijing media org, likely to their social media team: via
@CDT
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Trivia for non-residents: there are several different spellings of “Earley” in road/ward names in Earley, but they are all pronounced “Early”, as in, “don’t wait too late to come to Earley to canvass with us” 😌
Out canvassing on Mill Lane, Maiden Erleigh ward today with our PPC
@YuanfenYang
and Steve! Lots of Labour support, and not much love for the Tories! Only Labour can beat the Tories in Earley and Woodley 🌹🌹
#LabourDoorstep
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Tickets now live – join me and
@gideonrachman
in London on the evening of May 28th at the Tabernacle theatre!
@intelligence2
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“The longest silence follows my question about China and the risk to Tesla’s Shanghai factory, which produces between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of Tesla’s total production…He says Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.”
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Not that it's particularly innovative of me to suggest importing mRNA vaccines into China. Shanghai's Fosun not only had the idea over a year ago but actually put money on such a project with BioNTech. The vaccines they bought have since gone to Taiwan
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China Post: "According to the national Covid prevention requirements, we have disinfected the outside of your mail." Partly achieved by, intentionally or otherwise, quarantining it for 5 weeks before delivering from Hong Kong to Beijing 😇
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Another instance of this trend: more than one person told me they’d been warned by the police not to go to an embassy-hosted party for businesspeople. If they did, their health codes would turn red. The embassy eventually cancelled the party
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Congrats to
@RDGLabourCllrs
for a strong set of results, and in particular to all our newly elected councillors, our candidates and activists.
Labour has continued to increase its majority in Reading Borough, while the Conservatives have now lost every single seat here.
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The Fabians have our seat of Earley and Woodley as the crucial marginal Labour needs to win for a majority. If you want a change of government, turn up to make it happen: DM me, or find our next campaign event at
And for the data geeks out there, here's our breakdown of possible target seats ordered by the required percentage swing from the incumbent party.
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2/ You might have read this and be thinking, ok thanks for the 2,500 words, but are there more photos of Haohao? The answer is yes, there are more photos of Haohao. I will post them when I take breaks from writing ;)
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An unbelievable miscarriage of justice on such a large scale:
For more than a decade, lawyers pushed professional boundaries on behalf of the Post Office in the Horizon IT Scandal.
Today, the
@FT
puts the lawyers and law firms involved in the affair under the spotlight.
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2/ This quote resounded bc it makes me think of what Chinese interviewees have said to me, almost 300 years later. Ppl go to factories expecting difficult work and long hours - but it’s often the unnecessary cruelty of management that grinds them down mentally
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Canvassing in Kingswood for
@damienegan
@KingswoodParty
today - before, during and after 🌧️🌹 with Labour activists from Earley and Woodley
@EandWLabour
@KanishkaNarayan
and
@MattRodda
. Wonderful to see so many passionate volunteers on the streets!
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Quite aside from everything else, it’s terrible pedagogy to belittle a student who challenges you by telling them they don’t know anything. Students like
@aureIiopetrucci
deserve better educators. From the story by
@samdunningo
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Thanks to
@UniofReading
for having me to speak to
@HenleyBSchool
@icmacentre
graduate students this afternoon about a fascinating and also vitally important topic for our futures - the geopolitics of the green transition 🌍🌱
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If you like reading my writing but haven't got a full
@FT
subscription, today you can read my piece on my canine civil disobedience in Beijing via ✨FT Edit✨, our new app which gives you a selection of in-depth reads every week day
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"The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary" –
@BritishVogue
's review in its April edition of my forthcoming book, Private Revolutions () 📖❤️🔥
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Not going to tweet Musk’s proposal for what China should do with Taiwan and leave that as a, er, gem for you to discover in the piece.
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our parents gave this to us from birth for every ailment and they have no idea what it’s made of
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If it’s 11 degrees Celsius indoors in Chengdu and your interviewees are at home wearing pink flannel pyjamas with cats on them, not only are you going to look like a freak if you turn up in a suit, you’re going to be too cold to type. Trust me on this one
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Spanish journalist in Beijing had his home visited by 3 police officers before the opening of the capital’s annual political assembly. He wasn’t home, so they told his wife to tell him to report good news as well as bad.
BJ police should know this is not the best tactic
La noche (20:00) antes del comienzo de la Asamblea Nacional Popular —la cita política anual más importante en China— tres policías acudieron a mi casa en Pekín.
Venían buscándome a mí, pero como no estaba hablaron con mi mujer. Unos detalles sobre este desagradable incidente. /1
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Some hopeful news:
@ReadingFC
's negligent owner is in exclusive talks to sell the club. What stands out to me in this saga is how close a good club has come to ruin through lack of regulatory oversight of football governance and ownership. We should never have been this close.
The fight for better football governance continues.
In terms of
#readingfc
, the sale isn’t done until it’s done, but today is a good day for the club.
Let this be the beginning of the end of Dai’s tenure.
Goodnight all.
#SellBeforeWeDai
📸: Guy Reece (back in December 2023)
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New: Masks, smartphone health apps, I can carry my own bags now
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@stokel
no, but could I trouble you for a quote on the legacy of the Cultural Revolution by 4pm today?
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The online state media/social media vortex is even weirder. Xinhua directly reposts Russian state media (eg Russia in control of Ukrainian airspace) while social media bloggers are having a field month of clickbait disinfo, having finally found a political issue safe to riff on
Beijing’s effort to stitch together a coherent narrative of what is actually happening in Ukraine for the domestic audience in China is getting even more incoherent.
If you turned on China’s domestic news this evening, this is what you would see in a 2-minute segment.
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Meanwhile, Brookside Church in Earley is also exploring opening a food bank here – a first for quite some time, in one of the UK's most affluent boroughs of Wokingham. All corners of the Earley and Woodley constituency are going through the cost of living crisis
looking at food surplus attendance figures for the last quarter
@Whitley_CDA
. Oct 942, Nov. 962, Dec. 1089, Jan. 1413 visits. A shocking reflection on life in a working class suburb in 2024
#moremonththanmoney
@MattRodda
@YuanfenYang
@JN_Brock
@cwagstaff
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Jack/Joe/John, if you're out there and you are two degrees of separation removed from my mother, please get in touch
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2/ Chinese companies like Hikvision dominate the global surveillance market, so a large amount of kit could need to be replaced. & yet there's no new budget announced for the replacements — Foreign Affairs Committee chair
@aliciakearns
called for a procurement plan
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2/ 1h 16 min in I can report I’ve heard the first correct pronunciation of “Xi Jinping”
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With thanks to
@chinalaborwatch
and
@AHalegua
. Needless to say, it’s incredibly brave for someone like Tang living in China to speak out about his experiences. He takes that risk because he wants justice.
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the first harvest in fifteen years where my mother has outwitted the pigeons 🐦
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A tragedy of male confidence in four paragraphs:
"The fifth date wanted to show off his cooking skills and invited me over to his house for dinner."
...
"Despite his food being mediocre, he's still willing to cook, which I think is great."
Best China story of the month.
Imagine being on a first date you couldn't end? That's what happened to a woman in China whose video blogs about going into a citywide lockdown during a blind date have gone viral —
@AFP
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*looks at the spring festival sale* Why must new home appliances be equipped with the ability to listen to me talking? This is surely lose-lose for both me and the appliance
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Can’t wait to read this debut from
@madhumita29
!
I’ve emerged from my holiday-induced stupor to some very exciting Christmas post - the first
@picadorbooks
proof of my book, CODE DEPENDENT. It’s about nine ordinary people across 8 countries whose lives have been changed by their encounters with artificial intelligence.
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today's tea is lotus leaf tea 荷叶茶, initially bought in Beijing as the result of a delicious online search error when I was looking for mint tea 薄荷茶
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2) To highlight what
@davidakaye
, former UN special rapporteur on freedom of speech, said to me: the delay in the report’s release was “damning and deserves a full accounting”
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This story surprised me all the while I was reporting it. It's a story of change being pushed from the ground up, by a small group of working-level staff in a large bureaucracy. And it's a story of the thin line between engagement & appeasement.
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Thank you Paul! Getting out the University of Reading student vote is a priority – looking forward to doing more voter registration on campus with
@ReadingUniSU
in 2024 🗳️
@YuanfenYang
@UKLabour
Congratulations
@YuanfenYang
- fantastic news for Earley & Woodley residents,
@UKLabour
and
@UniofReading
. Best wishes!
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@RanaForoohar
@FT
2/ Rana channels
@SRoach_econ
's recent book Accidental Conflict in arguing for a position I am increasingly convinced of: that the most robust cure for geopolitical tensions is to get our own domestic economies in order
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I am once more finding out that 80% of the wordcount of famous philosophers is trash-talking contemporaries who are now totally irrelevant but who were completely, totally absorbing of their time and attention
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The
@FT
Big Read for today is on the EU's incoming carbon border tax – and how this may be the start of a global wave of similar measures that fragment trade into high- and low-carbon blocs – essential reading!
@alicemhancock
@sylviapfeifer
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What's happened to the absentee owner of Reading FC? Some clues from the world of China journalism:
interesting piece on Sina Finance platform looking at allegations against Dai Yongge - and the letters to Judge Zheng at Liaoning High Court.
Letters claim Dai Yongge is “on the run” from this case, sth seen on other commentary across Weibo
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Yesterday my local Alibaba Cainiao logistics guy told me I can’t send parcels within Beijing, because you can’t post to Beijing; a JD merchant told me the same today. Travel plans to Sichuan for Chinese New Year looking more than a little shaky 😕
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