Contra Trump 厭美疑美憎美反美   In The American Green Zone in Our Consciousness, an earlier chapter in our Contra Trump series, we featured Patrick Marlborough, a Perth-based comic writer and broadcaster who observed that: The greatest trick America’s ever pulled on the subjects of its various vassal states is making us feel like a participant in its grand experiment.… Read

The Other China 秋風拂塵夢，落葉滿空山 相邀出城去，一路卻無言。
秋風拂塵夢，落葉滿空山。 丙午秋深，與友同游西山秋風在耳，遍地紅黃，畫以記之。
老樹隨手造一紙，略狀其行。 We made a date to leave the city,
didn’t exchange a word on the way out:
Autumn winds stirred our mundane musings,
fallen leaves greeting us in those empty mountains.… Read

Contra Trump 招兵買馬、引虎自衛 The following is a multimedia miscellany inspired by the elections held in the United States on 3 November 2026. All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the US Senate were contested in the midterm elections.… Read

Contra Trump 愛屋及烏 IFLA (I Fucking Love Australia) writes about America and its Pacific cousin on Substack. In his inimitable Australian style of prose, IFLA chronicles the saga of a benighted America, although in this chapter of Contra Trump, he finally has something to crow about.… Read

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium 下來吧 Since Xi Jinping’s rise to paramount power in 2012-2013, the Chinese Communist Party has unabashedly declared that ‘Everything in China is under the direction of the Communist Party: party, state, army, civilian life and education, as are all points of the compass’ 黨政軍民學，東西南北中，黨是領導一切的.… Read

Seeds of Fire at Forty 蜀犬吠日   In 1996, three decades ago, I was commissioned by Wired Magazine to undertake the first survey of the Chinese internet. Celebrated at the time as ‘the Rolling Stone of technology’, Wired had just published Computer Insect, my translation of an interview that the oral historian Sang Ye 桑曄 had conducted with an outspoken young tech-head in Beijing’s Haidian District, China’s nascent ‘Silicon Valley’.… Read