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Tobita Chow

@tobitac.bsky.social
3K followers 830 following 2.1K posts

US-China, climate, politics, imperialism and world economy Chicagoland | immigrant | he/him

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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Kyle Chan on China and “AGI”: Chinese firms talk about it but in significantly different terms and it is not a focus of Beijing’s AI strategy www.highcapacity.org/p/does-china...
There’s an understandable tendency in Washington to project our own ideas and attitudes onto Beijing. If the US is racing to AGI, then surely China must be doing the same thing. But it’s useful to take a step back and see how much of an outlier the US is here. It seems like Beijing’s attitude toward AI as a powerful technology but not a fundamental break with history is more in line with how much of the rest of the world sees it.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Interesting time to be a Chinese Canadian American
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Ilias Alami @iliasalami.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Very excited to be delivering the 2026 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture next week, “Imperial State Capitalism and the Long Arc of History”!
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matthew cunningham-cook @matthewccook5.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
on the surface military tensions are lower than a long time, no US carriers in the pacific, THAAD out of SK + pullback on joint exercises, RFA defunded, Taiwan arms sale frozen--beneath the surface, however...
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
It wouldn't take a full blown war for things to start getting very ugly, and under the surface of Trump's bromance with Xi the conditions for volatile reescalation in US-China conflict are festering asamnews.com/2026/08/26/r...
A right-wing political commentator is calling for the incarceration of Chinese Americans should the U.S. ever go to war with China.

“If there was a war between the Chinese and the Americans, and the Chinese landed in, like, Alaska and started coming through Canada, what — do think we should intern all the Chinese Americans we can find? Because it kind of seems like we should,” said Ian Crossland, the co-host of the Timcast IRL podcast, reports Media Matters for America.
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Jake Werner @jwdwerner.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
I’m delighted to have contributed a chapter with Sandy Shan in this landmark book on the future of progressive foreign policy. In our chapter, Sandy and I lay out our vision for how the US–China relationship could be reshaped, making great power peace an engine for progressive global reform.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Maybe forcing other countries into an economic bloc against China is a bad and unworkable idea
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Andres A. Chavez @andral404.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Reported ICE sightings also in Rogers Park, Humboldt Park, Stone Park and Logan Square.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
Thanks @corrientecalida.com for picking up one of my articles and translating it into Spanish
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Don't get too excited--I won't name names but some of the left congressional candidates this year reject the labor theory of value
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Jake Werner @jwdwerner.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
On @ezraklein.bsky.social, @mattduss.bsky.social plants the flag: • Progressive FP’s precondition is to break with Biden personnel and their aim of reviving US hegemony • Its substance is solidarity: reform so different nationalities are not pitted against each other, so all workers enjoy security
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
GLOBAL MINIMUM WAGE MENTIONED
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 07/06/2026
"The US now appears to control all the major power blocs in Venezuela.... Venezuela’s new acting President has become the local enforcer of the US National Security Strategy and the Trump Corollary." phenomenalworld.org/analysis/bol...
phenomenalworld.org
Bolivarian Twilight | Luis Bonilla-Molina
The recolonization of Venezuela
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Jeremy Wallace @jeremywallace.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
I'm thrilled to be writing GREEN GIANT for PublicAffairs.
Professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and author of The China Lab newsletter Jeremy Wallace's GREEN GIANT, a deep exploration of how China became the leading player in remaking the world's energy system, to Meagan Levinson at Public Affairs, by George Lucas at Inkwell Management (world English).
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
"Peru’s June presidential runoff is drawing attention in China, where analysts are watching whether the next government will reshape ties with Beijing and place new pressure on Chancay, a Chinese-operated megaport" chinaglobalsouth.com/2026/05/29/p...
chinaglobalsouth.com
China Watches Peru Election for Impact on Chancay Port
Peru’s June presidential runoff is drawing attention in China, where analysts are watching whether the next government will reshape ties with Beijing and place new pressure on Chancay, a Chinese-opera...
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
Some nasty capital flight from the economy of the world's 4th most populous country Prabowo: “The markets are not understanding me” 😬
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
"The workers have arrived!" Beijing 1989
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Benjamin McKean @blmckean.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
“Realizing a progressive hukou abolition would require immense political force to overcome resistance from privileged urbanites and capitalists addicted to super-exploited labor. That force cannot come from society, as social movements, and labor movements in particular, are anathema to the Party.”
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Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
earnest answer: a full 15 years of treating the use of DJI/consumer drones as an intelligence threat while trying to spin up $$$$ secure supply chain alternatives for cheap quadcopters meant the US fully missed how low low cost and mass production allows for innovation and iteration at scale
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Socialist realism with consumerist characteristics
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
I'm no military expert but it seems that both the US and Israel have recently been caught by surprise by drone warfare and how is that possible
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
I agree: "In this, a paradox is hard to miss: for all its autocratic and repressive tendencies at home, China has been a team player abroad, championing what many would consider progressive changes in key areas of global governance." @phenomenalworld.bsky.social phenomenalworld.org/analysis/glo...
phenomenalworld.org
Between Development and Dependence | Ching Kwan Lee
Global China and the prospects for South–South cooperation
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
Tim Barker is correct, for better and for worse phenomenalworld.org/analysis/his...
The answer to this question depends on how one defines success. Even unchecked deterioration of the US might be compatible with the persistence of the US as the strongest pole in a multipolar world.
China's accomplishments in the realm of production will not produce hegemony unless the Chinese Communist Party develops a globally appealing ideology and addresses the dramatic contradictions within Chinese society itself. In the 1920s, the US produced 85 percent of the world's automobiles, but it took the Great Depression, the New Deal, and another world war before the economic powerhouse could integrate its own working class and create a new world order. The same principles apply to the military dimension: humiliations in the Persian Gulf demonstrate that the US is not omnipotent, but as long as other countries remain militarily weaker than the US-NATO-Israel-OAS complex, there is no reason that the US cannot enjoy dominance without omnipotence.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
Haven't read yet and I can't speak to the other topics but Ching Kwan Lee and Zhang Yueran are GOAT scholars in their respective fields
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Tim Hirschel-Burns @timhirschelburns.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
It can be easy to forget how significant Jubilee 2000-inspired debt relief was. Bono, Muhammad Ali, and Pope John Paul teaming up! Over $100 billion in debt forgiven for 39 countries to enable anti-poverty spending! My new blog is on HIPC/MDRI and what we can learn from them
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
This place is a small echo chamber but it did contain some well informed hot takes about the new hukou guidelines
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China Law Translate / Jeremy Daum @chinalawtranslate.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
There aren't many details - it's a sort of broad aspirational policy document, although there are a few concrete positives like abolishing hukou restrictions on participation in social insurance where you work, and delinking hukou and medical benefits www.mee.gov.cn/zcwj/gwywj/2...
mee.gov.cn
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Eli Friedman @elifriedman.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Been burned too many times, but I will feel encouraged when I see Beijinger parents protesting against migrant kids taking local gaokao, that's when you'll know it's real
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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 26/05/2026
Great @poltheoryother.bsky.social ep with @jwdwerner.bsky.social and @tobitac.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/c...
podcasts.apple.com
China and the US - a durable thaw? w/ Tobita Chow and Jake Werner
Podcast Episode · Politics Theory Other · 18 May · 55min
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Jake Werner @jwdwerner.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
I joined @tobitac.bsky.social talking to @redandinexpert.bsky.social on where US–China relations stand in the glorious new era of constructive strategic stability.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 24/05/2026
Any good takes on the new guidelines from China's State Council easing hukou restrictions? english.news.cn/20260522/0b0...
english.news.cn
China moves to provide basic public services based on residence
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Jamie Merchant @jamiemerchant.bsky.social · 22/05/2026
My review of Eswar Prasad's Doom Loop, a book that isn't very good but vividly shows how and why economists are thoroughly washed. www.thenation.com/article/cult...
thenation.com
Are Economists Going the Way of the Dinosaur?
In Eswar S. Prasad’s The Doom Loop, he attempts to defend a profession that failed to foresee the crisis of the post-liberal world.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 16/05/2026
“Trump agreed to stability” is a hilarious claim actually
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
"'constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability' is not a slogan" is in fact the kind of thing you say about slogans
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Common Wealth @cmmonwealth.bsky.social · 14/05/2026
Today, we’re launching our first paper from the Green Planning Commission — Economic Coordination and the Limits of Markets — as an analytical foundation for why the next progressive agenda must be built around public coordination. 🧵 www.common-wealth.org/publications...
common-wealth.org
Economic Coordination and the Barriers Private Market Coordination Poses to Realizing a Progressive Agenda
Private market coordination cannot deliver decarbonization or affordable essential provisions. Instead, public coordination must be the organizing logic of the next progressive agenda and the premise ...
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
I think a number of people are exaggerating the chances that things they oppose will happen at the Trump-Xi summit because "this is very unlikely to happen but just in case here is my 2000 word argument for why Trump shouldn't do it" is a less appealing read
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
US Chamber of Commerce calls for coordinated G7 action to respond to competitive threats from China Of course under Trump the opposite is happening www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
bloomberg.com
China’s Policies Threaten $650 Billion in G-7, US Chamber Says
China’s industrial strategy threatens hundreds of billions of dollars worth of industrial output in the world’s most advanced economies, posing a danger of hollowing out their industrial capabilities,...
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Yaqiu Wang 王亚秋 @yaqiu.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
So the Trump administration is not only going after Chinese scientists, they are now going after Americans who defend them. Who would have thought?
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
I agree with Bessner's point about ideology here. But he envisions the US allowing China to claim a sphere of influence in E/SE Asia. I don't think that's realistic because of the tremendous consequences for competition between US and Chinese capitals www.theideasletter.org/essay/power-...
theideasletter.org
Power without Ideology - The Ideas Letter
The US’s global hegemony has ended. The post–Cold War unipolar moment is giving way to a multipolar order that, Bessner argues, will now be pyramidal in structure: dominated by the…
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Tim Hirschel-Burns @timhirschelburns.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
I looked at how much the New York Times covered different countries in 2025, compared to those countries' populations. The bars for many lower-income countries are functionally invisible—much like their citizens are to readers of The New York Times
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 06/05/2026
I’ve seen like a half dozen TikToks freaking out about hantavirus and not one addressed the R0 and there is just no excuse for that
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alex williams @atwilliams.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
dems should explicitly pitch "reducing" US international aid to only 5% of GDP, a reasonable proportion that the median voter would approve of
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 04/05/2026
"Lack of financing is one of the biggest barriers to moving away from fossil fuels... Experts say the problem is rooted in how the global financial system is structured." apnews.com/article/clim...
apnews.com
Colombia climate conference highlights lack of financing for shift from fossil fuels
A lack of financing is emerging as a major barrier to moving away from fossil fuels, officials and experts said at a global conference in Colombia.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
"We may have, in fact, reached 'peak competition' under the last administration, as a senior Biden official put it in one of the private roundtables we hosted this spring." @jessicacweiss.bsky.social www.sinicapodcast.com/p/transcript...
sinicapodcast.com
Transcript | The China Debate We're Not Having" | Part 1: What China Wants
The Johns Hopkins SAIS ACF Conference, April 3, 2026
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Morgenthau's inaugural address at Bretton Woods: "Economic aggression can have no other offspring than war.... We know now that economic conflict must develop when nations endeavor separately to deal with economic ills which are international in scope."
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Have been very slowly reading my way thru The Making of the English Working Class and I think Thompson’s take on the Luddites is lovely. Here he responds to the accusation that they were reactionary and driven solely by nostalgia
which could never be revived; on the other hand, it tried to revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents. At different times their demands included a legal minimum wage; the control of the "sweating" of women or juveniles; arbitra. tion; the engagement by the masters to find work for skilled men made redundant by machinery; the prohibition of shoddy work; the right to open trade union combination. All these demands looked forwards, as much as backwards; and they contained within them a shadowy image, not so much of a paternalist, but of a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs.
Thus we must see the years 1811-13 as a watershed, whose streams run in one direction back to Tudor times, in another forward to the factory legislation of the next hundred years. The Luddites were some of the last Guildsmen, and at the same time some of the first to launch the agitations which lead on to the 10 Hour Movement. In both directions lay an alternative political economy and morality to that of laissez faire. During the critical decades of the Industrial Revolution, working people suffered total exposure to one of the most humanly degrading dogmas in history-that of irresponsible and unlicensed competition-and generations of outworkers died under this exposure. It was Marx who saw, in the passage of the 10 Hour Bill (1847), evidence that for "the first time... in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class".
The men who attacked Cartwright's mill at Rawfolds were announcing this alternative political economy, albeit in a confused midnight encounter.
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Tobita Chow @tobitac.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
We need a Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Economic Weapons
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Graham Webster @gwbstr.com · 24/04/2026
Rumors of the death of Chinese open-weight AI have been greatly exaggerated. My latest after the release of DeepSeek V4. herecomes.transpacifica.net/p/death-of-c...
herecomes.transpacifica.net
Death of Chinese Open-Weight AI Exaggerated
Three big drops in a day: DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen
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David Henig @davidheniguk.bsky.social · 24/04/2026
US political thinking overwhelmingly cannot accept the rise of China. The EU is in danger of following. What stops this becoming a bigger crisis is that companies are by and large ignoring governments. But that of course brings its own problems. www.ft.com/content/abde...
ft.com
White House accuses China of ‘industrial-scale’ theft of AI technology
Trump official Michael Kratsios says Chinese entities stealing from American labs
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