Hope my East Coast readers are staying smog-free indoors.
Welcome to new subscribers! I love getting feedback on the newsletter or any of the articles so always feel free to email me. I have a bit of travel coming up for the rest of the month so apologies in advance if I end up skipping a week. If you have any recommendations for Medellín or Tuscany, please send them my way.
Shoutout to my friends JC and KV for sending me the Vulture essay.
Happy reading,
-Teddy
🇺🇸🇨🇳🔍 Recent high-profile departures from the US State Department raise questions about who is driving China policy and in what direction. Rick Waters, the US State Department's top China policy official, is retiring, making him the second senior State Department official overseeing China policy to depart in the last few weeks, following Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman. (Reuters | Michael Martina | May 2023)
The delays to items on the department's "competitive actions" calendar, a classified rolling list of steps the Biden administration has planned related to China, have alarmed some U.S. officials and revealed a divide between those in the U.S. government pushing for tougher action against China and others advocating a more restrained approach…
The decision to postpone export licensing rules for telecom equipment maker Huawei and sanctions against Chinese officials for abuses of Uyghurs, has damaged morale at China House…
sources said the current policy hews too closely to an earlier strategy of engagement that enabled China to extract concessions in exchange for high-level dialogues that often yielded few tangible results.
Just speculating, but it’s interesting to read that Reuters article and then see the two main names both step down soon after. I’ve seen it floated (here, here) that these abrupt departures may reflect protest against a conciliatory change in US-China policy, although the Reuters article paints at least Sherman in a dovish light.
Waters, deputy assistant secretary of State for China and Taiwan who leads the department's recently created China House policy division, will leave his role on June 23 and remain a member of the senior foreign service
Speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, they said [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] had largely delegated China policy duties to Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the United States' second ranked diplomat.
In late March, Waters told a staff meeting that the State Department would "move on" from the balloon incident with China, following guidance from Sherman who was eager to reschedule the Blinken trip, two of the sources said…
Sherman did not support stricter rules as the State Department was seeking to revive Blinken's visit
US-China rapprochement in exchange for Xi leaning on Russia to put an end to the war would be a big win for China and for Biden heading into elections in 2024. Just trying to connect the dots here with CIA director Bill Burns seeming like the authoritative voice for the Biden administration and the State Department’s China team in the middle of a re-org amidst conflicting viewpoints.
Resistance to such actions has contributed to staffing struggles at China House, with vacancy rates as high as 40%
📺📉 A great long-read on the crisis of streaming TV that we’re in right now and how we got here. Pretty much sums up a lot of the conversations I’ve had in LA recently. (Vulture | Josef Adalian, Lane Brown | Jun 2023)
“Everything became big tech — the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money; we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. Let’s take one of the truly successful money-printing inventions in the history of the modern world — which was the carriage system with cable television — and let’s just end it and reinvent ourselves as tech companies, where we pour billions down the drain in pursuit of a return that is completely speculative, still, this many years into it.’”
It’s not a new idea — it’s in this essay and I remember making the comparison to one of my first bosses in Hollywood in 2019 after reading a similar analysis then — but in many ways, I think we can see the golden-age of streaming TV we got to experience as part of the millennial lifestyle subsidy, funded ultimately by historically and artificially low interest rates, that we can say goodbye to.
The only answer I can see is that we will consume less of film and TV and find nominally cheaper substitutes like social media to take up our time and/or we will have to pay more for their entertainment. This should happen naturally too as the industry consolidates and uneconomic investment driving competition continues to dry up, leaving the surviving players alive to rationalize their economics. I also think ads will simply have to come back to make the numbers work. Netflix’s ad-supported tier already brings in more revenue per user than its standard plan and personally, I’ve been watching a lot of hard-to-find movies on Tubi, Fox’s ad-supported streaming service.
Streaming TV’s first decade has been compared to film’s New Hollywood of the 1970s, when studios briefly ceded control to forward-thinking young hippies, resulting in some of the greatest works in the history of the medium. But as streaming reboots itself under a mandate of financial discipline, it’s hard not to worry that its next phase might look more like the movie industry of the 1980s, when creativity was suffocated under corporate micromanaging and the rise of tentpole franchises.
🇨🇦🇨🇳 China interfered in Canada’s 2021 elections, according to lawmakers citing intelligence from CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, following a report on foreign interference. (CNN | Paula Newton, Caitlin Hu | May 2023) (National Post | John Ivison | May 2023)
Canada’s former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole has accused China of targeting him with misinformation and voter suppression campaigns during the 2021 election, while a Hong Kong-born Canadian lawmaker also said she was targeted for her human rights activism, both citing intelligence from Canada’s spy agency.
Some specific details from the report:
Global TV reported last year that China gave $250,000 to 11 federal political candidates, a story [David Johnston] downplayed by saying the prime minister and his ministers were not informed and, in any case, there was uncertainty about whether the candidates ever received the cash.
But that buried the lead. The real news was that Johnston’s intelligence sources informed him that China intended for funds to be sent to seven Liberal and four Conservative federal candidates through a community organization and political staff.
🇪🇨🇲🇽⚰️ Homicides in Ecuador “have quadrupled since 2019, reaching a record 4,800 last year and driving a surge in migration", as gang violence related to drug-trafficking plagues the country. (WSJ | Ryan Dubé | Jun 2023)
Once one of Latin America’s safest countries, Ecuador has become one of the region’s deadliest. Record cocaine production in neighboring Colombia and a war among Ecuadorean drug gangs propped up by Mexican and Albanian cartels has sparked a wave of violence…
[resembling] scenes from the drug wars of northern Mexico. Police and residents say that assassins gun down prosecutors and law-enforcement officers, bodies are hung from bridges, and gangs detonate car bombs and recruit children as hitmen.
The reason for the change:
Violence from the drug trade rarely spilled into the country even though it sits between the world’s top cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru.
But in the aftermath of a ban on aerial fumigation of drug crops in Colombia in 2015, cocaine production there soared, with much of the drug going through Ecuador because of its porous border and weak port security, according to local security experts and Western officials…
In Ecuador, much of the violence has taken place since the powerful leader of the Choneros, a gang with links to Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, was killed in December 2020, causing the gang to splinter, according to current and former law-enforcement officials… Mexican cartels encouraged the gang fragmentation
☀️🛰⚡️ Engineers are developing technology to generate clean solar power in orbit and beam it down to Earth. (WSJ | Corey S. Powell | Jun 2023)
Satellites collecting solar power could theoretically operate around the clock, dispatching emission-free electricity wherever it’s needed, anywhere on Earth. But the concept was long dismissed as too complicated and expensive. Now it is finally being put to the test…
One of the central challenges for all of these projects is finding a safe, efficient and reliable way to transmit gigawatts of power to the ground and then convert it into electricity that people can use. Microwave beams are the favored technique, in large part because they can travel freely through the air regardless of weather. While similar to those used in microwave ovens, these beams would be nowhere near as concentrated.
When I was a kid I used to get Popular Science and my eyes would pop out of my head imagining the near future filled with these incredible technological innovations that would surely solve war, poverty, death by the time I was an adult. It took a while to learn that scientific experiments don’t necessarily scale into mass technologies. But I still think it’s important to maintain that wonder, if only to appreciate the sci-fi-like technologies we do have today (EVs, smartphones, VR/AR, drones) and those that are hopefully just around the corner. Although, if we do ever end up having microwave space energy, the 5G conspiracists are going to have a field day with that one.
Rodenbeck of the Naval Research Laboratory sees military goals such as beaming energy to combat locations so that they don’t have to rely on vulnerable convoys of fuel trucks. Hajimiri envisions rolling out flexible antennas as big as a city block to bring in emergency beamed power after natural disasters, or to electrify unwired locations like remote parts of sub-Saharan Africa.