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Josh Chin

@joshchin.bsky.social
3.8K followers 1.4K following 116 posts

Senior correspondent for WSJ covering collisions of geopolitics, tech, and power. 15+ yrs in Asia, mostly China. Co-author of SURVEILLANCE STATE: www.josh-chin.com/books Signal: joshchin.86. Also: josh.l.chin@protonmail.com

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Reposted by Josh Chin
Michelle Ye Hee Lee @myhlee.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
For nearly a century, the @washingtonpost’s foreign correspondents have been on the ground for the world’s most pressing stories. Now, our desk is facing potential steep cuts. Washington needs us. The world needs us. If you read us and need us, please watch this video and share.
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
This is yet another story about authoritarianism — but one that hits a little different. Phurba is resilience incarnate, a person born for these times. And his tale is bonkers. I hope you enjoy reading it as much we did reporting it. Gift link: www.wsj.com/world/asia/t...
wsj.com
The Daring Caper of a Faithful Tibetan Who Outfoxed China
He escaped from police and crossed thousands of miles of wilderness on a decadelong odyssey toward freedom.
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Kai Ryssdal @kairyssdal.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
Hi, former Foreign Service Officer here The Secretary of State might be interested to learn that visa requirements and terms are generally reciprocal. We do it to them, they do it to us.
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Gerry Doyle @mgerrydoyle.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
it is not the case that if you stop observing bad things, the bad things go away
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slate @pleasebegneiss.bsky.social · 31/07/2025
sure fuck it, whatever. we deserve this
abc news post with headline radioactive wasp nest found at site where u.s. once made nuclear bombs
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Kai Ryssdal @kairyssdal.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
What a great, great farewell note
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Zeyi Yang 杨泽毅 @zeyiyang.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
LLMs are basically terrifying users by force-feeding them niche fanfic texts without context. There's a reason why fandoms congregate on small forums to talk out their inside jokes because they don't want innocent people to stumble into their space and freak out without knowing the context!!!
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 28/07/2025
This is a really crazy thing to do.
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Hmm, where have I heard this bef…oh, right:
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The Wall Street Journal @wsj.com · 25/07/2025
As the U.S. heads toward trade talks with China next week, President Trump is increasingly focused on trying to strike an economic bargain with Beijing.
on.wsj.com
Trump Is Shifting to Dealmaking Mode on China
The White House puts a priority on doing business with Beijing as it prepares for bilateral talks next week.
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Bill Corbett @billcorbett.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
The most interesting fact about Hulk Hogan is that as a kid in France, Andre the Giant sometimes got driven to school by playwright Samuel Beckett
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Amanda Weaver @amandaweavernovels.com · 24/07/2025
Your moment of joy today.
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Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 24/07/2025
This is shattering, must-read journalism from @leloveluck.bsky.social, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, Siham Shamalakh, Miriam Berger and @cheesemanab.bsky.social. Glad it is getting the front-page treatment it merits. Gift link for non-subscribers is here: wapo.st/3GXPS9A
washingtonpost.com
Mass starvation stalks Gaza as deaths from hunger rise
Aid agencies warned for months that Israel’s harsh limits on food aid would bring acute malnutrition and widespread suffering to Gaza’s 2.1 million people.
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Margarita @margarita.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
"Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits..."
pewresearch.org
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.
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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
i believe that at 18 every american should be entered into a draft, not for military service, but for one year of mandatory retail or restaurant work
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Kai Ryssdal @kairyssdal.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Hey WHCA -- u up?
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
“I violated the user directive …” “I violated the first law of robotics…” “I’m sorry Dave…”
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Eileen Guo (is on leave for rest of 2026) @eileenguo.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
NEW FROM ME: new research has found millions of ex's of personal info, including credit cards, passports, résumés, birth certificates etc in 1 of the largest web-scraped datasets used to train image generation AI models. It's a major privacy violation. www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...
technologyreview.com
A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data
Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.
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The Relevant Organs @relevantorgans.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
Excellent move. Strong and confident regimes have no need for so-called “comedy,” which serves only to undermine socialist spiritual civilization.
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Michael Caley @michaelcaley.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
the Grok - Mechahitler story is interesting for what it reveals not just about Elon's LLM but about how sign systems work at a pretty high level of abstraction
In other words, LLMs become “woke” because they are trained to be pro-social—to be helpful, kindly, truthful, and not to say bigoted or cruel things. Training it to do the opposite—to be anti-woke—is to activate every antisocial association in the English language, including racism, sexism, cruelty, dishonesty, and Nazism. According to a vast statistical representation of the English language constructed by none other than Elon Musk, that’s what anti-wokeness is. “Elon Musk is repeatedly insisting, no, no, there’s a difference between what I’m doing and being a Nazi. And what the model keeps telling him is, statistically, that’s not the case,” said Schou.

A key implication here is that LLMs will tend to converge on similar types of behavior. The above researchers were not using Grok, but they found the exact same pattern of powerful association groupings of good and evil in other LLMs—and these can’t be removed through fine-tuning. One could imagine the RLHF process including adjustments of every parameter, but experts said that this will degrade or break the model. The matrices in an LLM are arranged hierarchically, and the top layers get fixed in place relatively early in pretraining. Mess with them, and the model will stop working. Instead, RLHF developed more like a series of gates that prevent undesired outcomes. “The model completes most of the computation that it needs in order to reach a particular outcome,” Schou said. “And then says, ‘Wait, wait, wait, I’m saying that I’m MechaHitler. No, I’m not doing that.’”
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 18/07/2025
The leap from this to the systems Chinese police use for social engineering in Xinjiang and Tibet is exceedingly small
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Scott Tobias @scotttobias.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
Settle in and read this extraordinary piece by Rümeysa Öztürk about her detention and marvel at her compassion for others, even in the darkest conceivable situation. We are blessed to have students like her in America: www.vanityfair.com/news/story/r...
vanityfair.com
“Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison
Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk opens up about her 45 days in a South Louisiana processing facility—and the generous and compassionate women she met.
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zaratustra @zaratustra.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
you can get this exact same result with a reasonable sized edible
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China Law Translate / Jeremy Daum @chinalawtranslate.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
Tiktok got banned despite massive efforts to demonstrate that Beijing wouldn't access US data. All the while, the U.S. government allowed China-based Microsoft service teams to directly access classified government systems w/ nominal supervision. www.propublica.org/article/micr...
propublica.org
A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers
The Pentagon bans foreign citizens from accessing highly sensitive data, but Microsoft bypasses this by using engineers in China and elsewhere to remotely instruct American “escorts” who may lack expe...
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The Wall Street Journal @wsj.com · 15/07/2025
Palestinians in Gaza are facing a tough decision every day: starve or risk death while trying to get food from one of the aid distribution centers on.wsj.com/46JM6uT
on.wsj.com
Gazans Confront a Stark Choice: Risk Death to Get Food, or Starve
A rash of shootings has made the trek through combat zones to U.S. and Israeli-backed food aid sites a deadly one.
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Mark Hurst @markhurst.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
Some places will have to start rationing water - to enable AI slop. "A data center like Meta’s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day. New data centers [will] require millions of gallons of water a day" Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/t...
nytimes.com
Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
this is a structural problem that threatens the entire industry: the financial incentives lean toward Takes but Takes ultimately depend on a bedrock of reporting that there is almost no working model for at this point.
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John Delury @johndelury.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
State-run elementary and even preschools doing the work in Tibet of the “reeducation centers” in Xinjiang. Old imperial trick… but behind every national school, hedge schools are keeping the flame lit. Important reporting by @joshchin.bsky.social et al www.wsj.com/world/china/...
wsj.com
China Steals Language and Home Life From Tibetan Kids as Young as 4
Beijing is building a broad network of preschools across Tibetan areas, seeking to inculcate loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party early in life.
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Annalee Newitz @annaleen.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
As more journalists are driven out of their jobs, I keep hearing this drumbeat of "it's ok -- they can start their own newsletter or publication." Some can. But becoming your own business is a huge job, and will eliminate many talented reporters from the public sphere. Here's why. (1/5)
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 10/07/2025
China National Space Administration recruitment campaign launching in 3, 2 …
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 09/07/2025
They’re so close. Less than a thousand dollars away from hitting their goal. Let’s get them across the line!
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David Hulloween 胡大衛 @hushuo.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
The other thing that is either a huge tip of the hand or spectacular incompetence, is that the next obvious line is, "it's time to try white."
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Nicole Chung @nicolechung.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
“I have lost a third of my body weight after nearly 21 months of war … Once [hunger is] controlling your own mind, you cannot think straight. Once you feel that your stomach, your brain, your body, are craving something, you will not be afraid of anything. You will do anything to get food.”
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
The “Not in Xi Jingping’s Wildest Dreams” file is getting so big it will soon fill the entirety of a shuttered State Department office
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Sam Mednick @smednick.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
US contractors say their colleagues are firing live ammunition as Palestinians seek food in #Gaza. The AP has obtained videos of a food-distribution site in Gaza and interviewed two American contractors working there. apnews.com/article/pale...
apnews.com
US contractors say their colleagues are firing live ammo as Palestinians seek food in Gaza
American contractors guarding aid distribution sites in Gaza are using live ammunition and stun grenades as hungry Palestinians scramble for food, according to accounts and videos obtained by The Asso...
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
A critical resource, under threat because of DOGE cuts. No group is better at finding cracks in the Great Firewall. If you think it’s important to understand China, consider donating
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Mike Forsythe 傅才德 @pekingmikenyt.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
“General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.” www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
China's Clean Energy Boom Could Win the Race to Power the Future
Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security.
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Atul Gawande @agawande.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
STAGGERING: This new study of 133 countries is the first to estimate the impact of all USAID’s work. In 2 decades, it has saved *92M* lives. Current cuts, if not reversed, are forecast to cost up to *14M* lives thru 2030. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
I got permission to share this, and I'm extremely grateful for that. The Onion got this letter from one of our subscribers in Alaska. She works with dementia patients and decided to leave a copy in the car for each one. This email made my year. Read it and you'll see what I mean. People are good.

I work as an elder and hospice caregiver, which I am oddly passionate about. I can love on them shamelessly and no one complains about my codependence. It's a win-win situation. 

Many of my caregiving colleagues complain about the repetitive questions and, sometimes reactions, of the elderly, especially when those patients happen to read the newspaper, especially with the current downward spiral of our country — as if these people haven't lived through enough horror...

I love my dementia peeps, but sometimes wonder if there's a Guinness Book World Record for how many times an hour a dementia patient can repeat the same question — it's got to be in the hundreds. At least with small children, they ask different questions. Dementia patients will get stuck on one short question and ask it until you can interrupt their train(carousel) of thought and successfully redirect their attention. That carousel is pretty manic sometimes. 

A couple days ago, I picked up my mail from the post office and drove over to the nursing home to take (let's call her "Miss Daisy") Miss Daisy out for a drive. Before we took off on our road trip, to the end of The Road and back, in our landlocked little town (Juneau, Alaska), I set my copy of The Onion down in front of her. 

Over our two-hour excursion, tiny Miss Daisy read that front page at least a dozen times and each time she would snicker, giggle, and guffaw, then put it down on the dash board and, a minute later, discover it anew. I think it was the best afternoon of my life. We don't often hear them laugh and when they do, it's the sweetest thing you've ever heard. 

...

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for the really important work all of you do. You make the world a better place.
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The Relevant Organs @relevantorgans.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Comrade Xi Jinping does not have a “branded fragrance.” However, if he did, it would subtle but unmistakable, warm but unyielding, evocative of a blossoming new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and confounding to anti-Party and reactionary elements. With a hint of sandalwood.
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Alex Dukalskis @alexdukalskis.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
This is just an incredible story. A leadership team from Princeton University Press went on a propaganda tour in Xinjiang (strangely, in a subsequent public statement the press described some of the basic mechanics of a propaganda tour when defending its actions).
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 01/07/2025
Amazing work here. One of the smartest and most comprehensive reports ever done on Chinese censorship -- a topic that's going to become so much more relevant as DeepSeek and other Chinese LLMs continue to grab territory
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 29/06/2025
What’s the ideal age for the state to impose assimilation on minorities? In Tibet, it’s 4. Gift link to new long read from me and Niharika Mandhana Beijing's building of government-run preschools across Tibetan areas to reverse generations of opposition to party rule: www.wsj.com/world/china/...
wsj.com
China Steals Language and Home Life From Tibetan Kids as Young as 4
Beijing is building a broad network of preschools across Tibetan areas, seeking to inculcate loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party early in life.
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Jeff Yang @originalsp.in · 28/06/2025
Specific parts of Zohran’s platform explain why he got nearly 60% support from the Asian American electorate
ZOHRAN MAMDANI'S SOCIALIST PROMISES
No more fighting over the check
The state will pick up the check
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Mina Kimes @minakimes.bsky.social · 28/06/2025
All I see here is top notch ball security, elite contact balance, a willingness to grind out tough yards btwn the tackles, and surprising burst after he finds daylight
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
Yes, it’s another “just like in China moment.” But what does that mean? This piece from @mauracunningham.bsky.social on the closing off of China’s archives 10 years ago gives us a roadmap to where things could go from here
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Josh Chin @joshchin.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Welp
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Patrick Chovanec @prchovanec.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Honestly, even the Chinese and Russians never made me do this to get a visa. Even the North Koreans, who made me hand over my phone for the duration of my visit, never made this demand.
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