To be fair, if you look at his page and the other stuff he posts, he seems to be quite knowledgeable. But this particular tweet makes it seems like he's just woken up from a 15-year coma or something.

I can imagine the guy genuinely believes that, but it seems unlikely to be honest. The more realistic explanation is that people unfortunately just don't really care about wars going on below the Sahara.

Haha he must see quite a few of those on an average day.

Ah, so it was the spelling in the Latin alphabet they didn't like? Perhaps the border officer had this attitude that all Chinese worldwide should be using Mandarin and pinyin-based spellings of their names as the standard.

Wait, this was because they felt he should use the character that "works" in Mandarin?

Um yes, that's true too. My point is just that visiting briefly gets you nowehere in terms of understanding the country, which is perhaps why apologists are so keen for you to go and "see China with your own eyes".

Here's an article she wrote in 2018, for instance.
www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/c...

Meanwhile the EU has the second largest economy in the world after the US, and larger than China. And ordinary Europeans live better lives than ordinary Chinese or Americans.

Even setting aside issues of overcapacity and crowding out the competition, simply praising China for its renewable energy capacity while ignoring the country's huge carbon emissions makes no sense.

Even with Trump's U-turn, the fact is that China remains by far the biggest emitter on the planet, and while China's emissions seem to finally have peaked, they need to start decreasing fast if there is to be any chance of staying within 1.5 or even 2 degrees of warming.

Ah right sorry, didn't mean to make you feel old 😜

I would also disagree about the "good cheap restaurants". In Beijing, most cheap restaurants are sloppy, unhealthy and not even much good. Good cheap places exist, but they're not that abundant, and you have to know where to go.

Except for the pollution I agree, but the things I mentioned about Beijing are still true. Especially in the centre, much of the population lives in old apartment blocks with dark, filthy corridors that look like something out of a slum. The traffic is also still bad, and the subway awfully crowded.