Global Eyes
The most important stories of the day
The French Election Twitter Summit
Mark your calendar: Tomorrow at 5:00 pm Paris time. Lots to talk about. If you’re too shy to join but you have a question anyway, send us an email.
Attention! Would you like to read the Cosmopolitan Globalist in another language? It’s easy: Go to the magazine and look for the red box, depicted below. Set it to any language you prefer.
¡Atención! ¿Le gustaría leer Cosmopolitan Globalist en otro idioma? Es fácil: vaya a la revista y busque el cuadro rojo, que se muestra a continuación. Configúralo en el idioma que prefieras.
انتباه! هل ترغب في قراءة كتاب العولمة العالمي بلغة أخرى؟ الأمر سهل: اذهب إلى المجلة وابحث عن الصندوق الأحمر الموضح أدناه. اضبطه على أي لغة تفضلها.
注意力！ 您想用另一種語言閱讀《大都會全球主義者》嗎？ 很簡單：前往雜誌並尋找下圖所示的紅色框。 將其設置為您喜歡的任何語言。
Внимание! Хотели бы вы читать Cosmopolitan Globalist на другом языке? Это просто: зайдите в журнал и найдите красную коробку, изображенную ниже. Установите его на любой язык, который вы предпочитаете.
주목! Cosmopolitan Globalist를 다른 언어로 읽고 싶습니까? 쉽습니다. 잡지로 이동하여 아래에 표시된 빨간색 상자를 찾으십시오. 원하는 언어로 설정하십시오.
Beachtung! Möchten Sie den Cosmopolitan Globalist in einer anderen Sprache lesen? Es ist ganz einfach: Gehen Sie zum Magazin und suchen Sie nach dem roten Kästchen, das unten abgebildet ist. Stellen Sie es auf eine beliebige Sprache ein.
Attendite! Visne in alia lingua legere Cosmopolitanum Globalistum? Facile est: Vade ad emporium et quaere capsam rubram, quae infra picta est. Linguam appone tibi cuilibet mavis.
Go play with it and tell us how you like it. If you speak the target language, tell us how you’d rate the translations. Use a scale of one to ten.
Asia
Two extraordinary threads from Shanghai:
1. The general atmosphere in Shanghai is tense, anxiety-ridden. We can’t stop refreshing our Wechat newsfeeds, re-blogging the many cries for help, which inevitably get erased.
On April 13, a recording of a phone call went viral on WeChat. An elderly man was asking his district community worker for help. … The elderly man was suffering from chronic illnesses and had no food left.
The man answered he has been reporting his condition to his superiors for days but has heard no response. There was nothing he could do. He had no resources, either. As the call went on, the volunteer became more and more desperate.
When the elderly man said, “Why has our Shanghai become like this?” the volunteer breaks down; he feels so helpless; he truly wants to help, and he tells the elderly man: “You only see terrible conditions for one person. I witness nearly one hundred cases like yours every day. And yet there is nothing I can do. I report it to my superiors, and I get no response. I don’t know why Shanghai has become like this either. I don’t understand.”
Now, the elderly man is the one comforting him. “I really understand you,” he replies, “We will get through this.”
This post was soon deleted. Just like all the other deleted posts, many of which have more than 100,000 views, and the comment sections are their own public squares.
2. It’s gone unnoticed by many. So I felt I should properly document what just happened on Weibo today. …
It all started around midnight in China, when two topics became No. 1 and 2, respectively, on Weibo.
Shanghai handled several rumors regarding Covid.
US is the biggest country of human rights deficit.
For context, topics of this scale of sensitivity don’t top the chart unless the authorities approve. So this could be considered a propaganda effort rather that what netizens were genuinely interested in.
We’ve seen this kind of effort throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where China would direct criticism at the West and whitewash Russia. But the interesting thing is that, this time, their efforts backfired, big time.
It seemed that many netizens had had enough of the Chinese government’s attempts to escape criticism by focusing on how bad the West and US are. So they occupied the hashtag, “US is the biggest country of human rights deficit” to express their anger at the state.
Most of the criticism came in the form of satire. …
Someone brought up the women who were chained up in a rural village and gave birth to eight children. But they intentionally replaced “China” with “US,” pretended to be shocked at this kind of things happening in America, and said “I was so lucky to have been born in China” …
Xi Jinping says China must stick to its strict “dynamic COVID clearance” policy.
Chinese experts are urging Beijing to diversify dollar-denominated assets and try to dismantle the dollar’s hegemony over the long term. But that’s not so easy to do. (This may be paywalled depending how many of their articles you’ve already read.)
Japanese officials are collecting data on missiles that seem to have been fired by Russian submarines during drills near Japan. Tokyo warned Russia, “Refrain from any actions that could raise tensions in Northeast Asia.”
The world has forgotten Afghan refugees. Afghan refugees can’t.
Czar Wars
The Biden administration has vastly expanded the types of weapons it’s shipping to Ukraine before the coming massive conflict, in open fields, in the Donbas. Among the items included in the US$800 million package, for the first time: anti-personnel mines, long-range artillery, armored vehicles, radar defense equipment. The US is also planning to train Ukrainians to use these weapons.
Russia issued a démarche to the US warning it to stop sending the “most sensitive” weapons systems to Ukraine lest it face “unpredictable consequences.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Cosmopolitan Globalist to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.