Sharing some truly surreal news: My colleagues and I have won the Pulitzer prize for International Reporting. An incredible honor. And a real team effort. pulitzer.org/winners/dake-ka…

Progressives in China and the United States must rethink their engagement and coordination, writes Manfred Elfstrom. foreignpolicy.com/2026/06/10…

Can confirm. I am currently browsing on Twitter using an overseas esim set for China.

Great piece on the grim reality facing Chinese journalists working in Western media today. CCP censorship, combined with declining Western interest in human-centered stories, means we are increasingly flying blind when it comes to understanding China. open.substack.com/pub/mangma…

This is a sad, sobering read about the state of reporting on China today: read.mangmang.run/p/ta

really fascinating chat with @dakekang and Yael Grauer about their Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into surveillance technology ! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

本期嘉宾是获得2026年普利策奖的记者Dake Kang @dakekang ，获奖报道是一系列关于中国监控体系与美国科技公司之间复杂关系的调查。我们聊到了报道背后的故事，以及他为什么说自己曾经是个小粉红，外交部的谈话是怎样的体验，普通人对外媒的态度经历了怎样的变化？ youtu.be/reZHxTRbeTg @LiYuan6

EXCLUSIVE: How the track foreigners in China - We got rare access to demo system developed by the Ministry of Public Security in China for the prefecture of Zhangjiakou, to track and surveil foreigners visiting or being residents ( actually it applies to most nationals as well, but in this case it seems to be aimed at foreigners ). It is officially known as "Dynamic control platform for overseas personnel". 1/12

Having spent the past few weeks in Beijing giving talks and attending meetings, here are some quick observations as I wait for my flight to NYC to board: 1. The talk of the town has, of course, been the Xi-Trump meeting, but no one (not even usually well informed elite circle insiders) seems to know what it actually accomplished, other than a continuation of the detente that’s been in place for the past several months. That’s about as good an outcome as one could realistically expect, I suppose, but clearly a real “grand bargain” is not in the cards anytime soon. 2. The Chinese economy seems to be in a steady state, neither improving much nor visibly deteriorating like it was in 24-25. In that sense the government’s stimulus policies have had a positive effect, but the vast majority of industry people I talked to remain very pessimistic about domestic profits and consumption. The dominant sentiment is that the only way for major firms to generate profit growth is through direct overseas expansion. 3. That said, technological advancement is of course very real and quite impressive (although it’s not quite as visible in Beijing as it is in, say, Shenzhen). One interesting and very pleasant side effect of the EV revolution (paired with infrastructure investment) has been that Beijing is now a bike-able city again, given the sharp reduction in exhaust fumes on city streets and the expansion of bike lanes. Armed with a new bike, I could almost explore the city like I used to back in 2000. Hugely nostalgic feeling. 4. Academia is, in general, in a pretty dour mood. STEM subjects and the social sciences/humanities alike have seen very significant funding reductions over the past 2 years, but the latter have of course gotten the worst end of the deal. Political censorship also seems to be visibly ramping up again, with the sheer scale of perceived “red lines” snowballing to levels unprecedented since the early 1990s. As the recent Yang Nianqun incident suggests, administrative regulation of faculty members’ personal affairs has also expanded (i.e., consensual extramarital relationships between adults who were not in a direct teacher-student relationship would almost certainly have gone unpunished as recently as 5 years ago). 5. In general, it’s hard not to notice the steady increase in government presence in everyday life—in both positive and negative ways. The city feels safer and cleaner than it ever has been, and yet the layers of administrative review needed for just about any kind of professional activity have clearly proliferated on a vast scale (made less painful by the digitization of most government services and more uniform law abidance, but still more onerous than it used to be despite all that). 6. The most alarming thing, I suppose, is that general optimism (personal or socioeconomic) seems to be in particularly short supply among the younger generations. This is obvious even among the most intellectually gifted kids at Tsinghua and PKU, where the level of career anxiety seems to be at a level that I have never encountered before. Unsurprisingly, willingness to form families or plan ahead in general at the personal level is very low. All in all, it was, as always, a very informative couple of weeks. The stay was also made much more pleasant by the fact that I managed to do it before Beijing becomes brutally hot. I look forward to being back more often in the near future.