Revisiting the End of Zero-Covid

New on the site this time:
Gan Ye, a young journalist working with Singapore-based Initium to produce a poignant piece on how ordinary Chinese people deal with the grief and anger produced by the many, many deaths that followed the end of China’s zero-covid policy in December 2022.  The topic is taboo in China, but Gan explored it to great effect by visiting the bereavement groups people join on WeChat and interviewing members who wanted to talk.
We are of course living in tumultuous times, as President Donald Trump seems determined to overturn the geopolitical and economic order built up since WWII.  This of course has produced a great deal of commentary in China, which may well stand to benefit if Trump’s moves do not produce the desired results.  I may or may not devote my post-retirement attention to this; I am still deciding.  But there are many more open source blogs and Substacks than when I started Reading the China Dream in 2018.  I’ll try to work up a complete list of them for a future post, but if you are hungry for such material, I can suggest:
Thomas Des Garets Geddis’s Substack, Sinification, as well as Zhang Qianfan’s on Trump and America’s Cultural Revolution, translated and posted on Geremie Barmé’s China Heritage site.
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