reading this and thinking about how there are a lot of white folks curating things on china nowadays that use valid , good writing pieces on china to sort of opportunistically dunk on chinese people over institutions https://medium.com/@nettlefish/on-identity-performing-marginalisations-and-the-limitations-of-ownvoices-or-why-i-cant-just-34880d560a09

jiayang fan is a writer i am a big fan of, but a lot of people sharing her very very good new yorker article will use it as a just so story on china, essentializing how chinese people behave as opposed to looking at the structural problems that built that story

kevin carrico does this sort of thought process very very often, including recently when he chooses to center liu cixin, trying to quote unquote cancel him due to his comments on xinjiang

Liu is very difficult to cancel at this stage in his career, and the problems are more the cultural community around him

but it's not rewarding unless there is an opportunity to dunk and to put someone in their place, regardless of what it actually does wrt uyghurs

there is an assumption that since someone like me makes a lot of jokes and thinks about race a lot, that i am quote unquote soft on china when the process has always been to figure out how to look at people- marginalized people in respective places and figure out what works best

for some reason this makes people like didi tatlow and theresa fallon very very angry and try to get me removed from my job. for some reason the loudness makes drew pavlou want to use his however many twitter followers to call me a wumao

they want only the regurgitation of the amy tan story, where China is cartoonish and nothing else. But China with all its many policy problems (which I do work about actively- hi!) is still going to require precision to examine, and not whatever sawed off shotgun they want