Jingjing Newsletter (Week 68)
Welcome to this week’s Jingjing Newsletter. Let’s continue to explore under-reported sides of world news.
In the US this week, pro-Palestinian students on several university campuses called on their universities to stop investment in Israel in light of Israel’s ongoing actions in Gaza. The peaceful protesters were met with draconian measures from university administrators and local politicians. At Columbia University, which has become the centre of the campus protest movement, the president of the university called on the NYPD to clear the student protests and announced that in-person classes would be canceled until further notice. Police have also been called into New York University (NYU), Yale, Princeton, Emerson College in Boston, Emory University in Atlanta and University of Texas at Austin, among other sites, where students and faculty have been arrested on little pretext. Harvard and NYU have closed parts of the campus to students, and Harvard has banned the Palestine Solidarity Committee from the university. The University of Southern California has canceled a scheduled speech by Asna Tabassum, a student who has recently experienced online abuse due to her pro-Palestinian views, while the police have closed access to campus to USC students and the public. This draconian crackdown on the peaceful student protest movement has been met with widespread praise from mainstream American politicians and media outlets. Despite the crackdown, however, solidarity protests have continued to spread across the US and the world. Students in Paris have set up solidarity camps with Gaza and the American protesters on university campuses while 25 Turkish universities have released a joint statement condemning the US crackdown on freedom of expression. TRT World has a good overview of the protests HERE.
Despite the US reaction to student protests being symptomatic of how the American elite will respond to speech and protest they do not like, we should be suspicious of the wall-to-wall coverage the US campus protests are receiving. These protests are fairly limited in scope, and we should question why exactly the mainstream media wants the world to focus on student demonstrations on a handful of elite US college campuses. For example, this week, international calls are growing for an independent investigation into mass graves uncovered in Gaza in areas previously occupied by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). Gaza civil defense crews said more than 300 bodies had been recovered from the mass grave at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza. Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman with the UN’s human rights office, said some of the bodies found at the Khan Younis hospital were “found with their hands tied and stripped of their clothes”. The EU has joined the UN in calling for an independent investigation into the incident, which the government of Gaza blames on the IDF. The official Palestinian death toll in Gaza is now more than 34,000, with the official numbers expected to rise now that the Gaza health authorities can start to clear some of the ruble caused by the Israeli assault. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the agency accused by Israel back in February of aiding and abetting Hamas’ assault on Israel on October 7th, has been cleared of any wrongdoing in an independent report. In response to the Israeli accusations, the West suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to UNRWA, contributing to the worsening of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now that the Israeli accusations have been shown to be baseless, there is a growing call for Israel to face accountability for the spurious allegations. And at the UN Jamaica has become the 142nd member nation to recognize Palestinian statehood. This should be a very bad week for Israeli propaganda, yet the mainstream media has become fixated on the protests on American campuses: it is worth thinking about what is driving this media dynamic.
President Joe Biden has signed a bill that may see TikTok banned in the US within the next 9 months. Plans for a ban had previously stalled in the Senate, but after the House of Representatives tied the ban of TikTok to funding for Israel and Ukraine, the Senate passed the bill this week 79-18. Biden then signed the bill into law. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, now has 9 months to sell TikTok to a US-friendly buyer or see TikTok banned in the US. ByteDance has vowed to fight the bill in court, but as the company has previously said, they would accept a US ban over sales (only about 10% of their users are based in the US); if the court battle fails, then the popular social media app could be banned by early next year. During the pandemic the social media app exploded in popularity. Around 150 million Americans have TikTok, and it has become a popular and effective way for businesses to promote themselves to young people. Around half of Gen Z report using TikTok to search for information, while 33% of users get most or all of their news from the app. With Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) limiting political content in the run-up to the US presidential election in November, TikTok had become the key social media app for political activism. Biden has struggled to win over young voters, while Donald Trump, his challenger who has reversed his policy on TikTok and now opposes any ban, has made inroads among the under 30s in recent months.
The US has agreed to withdraw over 1000 troops from Niger, the West African nation which announced the suspension of a military agreement with the US back in March. The main consequence of this withdrawal will be the closure of Air Base 201, a major military outpost in Agadez, some 920km from Niger’s capital city. Air Base 201 was an important node for the operation of the US Air Force’s unmanned drone and surveillance fleet in the Sahel region. The government of Niger had previously expelled French and European troops from the country. Prior to a coup in 2023, Niger was a key Western security partner in West Africa, but as part of the Alliance of Sahel States (along with Mali and Burkina Faso), Niger has increasingly turned to Russia as a source of military assistance against terrorist groups in the region.
North Korea’s Minister of External Economic Relations has sent a delegation to Iran, the first such delegation since prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and a sign North Korea is beginning to open again after implementing some of the strictest lockdown procedures in the world. The two nations have had diplomatic relations since 1973, but the increasingly strict sanctions placed on both nations in recent years by the Trump and Biden administrations have brought Pyongyang and Tehran closer together, with both sides seeking to bolster economic, cultural, and academic ties. The two countries are also working with Syria and Russia, two other nations under strict US sanctions. America has long used the weapon of economic sanctions against its enemies, but during the Biden presidency, the number of countries and entities under sanctions has become unusually high. This has had the unintended consequence of creating a sort of informal economic alliance between sanctioned countries since they no longer have much to lose by working together. In short, the massive scope of the sanctions regime under Biden has helped to undermine the effectiveness of the sanctions regime itself.
North Macedonia held the first round of elections for the largely ceremonial position of president this week. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (more commonly VMRO-DPMNE) looks set to beat the incumbent centrist Social Democratic Union candidate, but with neither side gaining over 50%, there will be a run-off election on May 8th. In North Macedonia, the presidential is seen as something of a dry run for the country’s parliamentary elections next month, where VMRO-DPMNE hopes to unseat the ruling pro-European coalition led by the Social Democratic Union. In recent years voters in North Macedonia have become increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of their ascension to the European Union. The application for their candidacy began in 2005 but has been blocked by Greece and Bulgaria over historic disputes with North Macedonia surrounding language and national identity issues. The return to government of the more nationalistic VMRO-DPMNE (the party that ruled North Macedonia prior to 2016) may see North Macedonia less willing to concede on identity issues with disputes with its neighbors (the country even changed its name from Macedonia a few years ago in the hope of pacifying Greek opposition to their EU membership).
Jingjing’s Highlights in This Week
1. President Xi Jinping to Antony Blinken: U.S. should look at China's development in a positive light.
“Xi: China and the United States should be partners rather than rivals, help each other succeed rather than hurt each other, seek common ground, reserve differences rather than engage in vicious competition, and honor words with actions rather than saying one thing but doing the opposite.”
2. X Spaces live discussion: Is there an over-capacity in China?
Here’s the recording of my first X Spaces live discussion. We discussed the term “over-capacity”, which has been frequently mentioned by Western politicians and media recently.
What You May Have Missed This Week in the World.
1. Columbia University leadership under fire for police crackdown on protesters
“The Columbia University Senate approved a resolution on Friday, saying that Shafik's administration had undermined academic freedom and disregarded the privacy and due process rights of students and faculty members.”
2. Talks between Israel, Egyptian delegation over Gaza ceasefire reportedly 'very good'
“Negotiations over Israel's upcoming offensive in the Gaza Strip's southernmost city of Rafah and efforts to achieve a ceasefire deal with Hamas were ‘very good’ between Israeli officials and a high-level Egyptian delegation, media and sources said Friday.”
3. BreakThrough News - 'NATO is Driving Us to WWIII’: German MP Slams the West’s Addiction to War
“In the historic case brought by Nicaragua, Germany, Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the US, appeared before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Sevim Dağdelen, a member of the German Bundestag and the only parliamentary observer at the hearings, discusses the West’s complicity in the genocide as well as the profound ramifications of NATO’s endless war drive.”
4. Carl Zha - Why US Wants to Ban TikTok and Wage Economic War on China
“Carl Zha and Alex Reporterfy talk to Scott Ritter about why US Congress wants to ban TikTok, why US is waging economic war on China and how China might respond to US imposing sanctions on China for having normal trade ties with Russia.”
5. AlJazeera - Parallel economy: How Russia is defying the West's boycott
“Aided by the Russian government’s legalisation of parallel imports, Russian businesses have established a network of alternative supply chains to import restricted goods through third countries.”
6. BRIX - Seeing Xinjiang from a Different Perspective: Tour Report
“From April 9 to April 16, the Vice-Chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden, Hussein Askary, accompanied a group of reporters from different Belt and Road countries in a tour of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China.”
Page Editor: Jin Yulin
Call for Contributors!
I’ve added a “ feature article” section to my Substack homepage. It’s an open platform I specifically designed to let everyone share their own perspectives with the world. Feature articles can be related to any topic as long as you’re highly passionate about it! Article length is recommended to be within 700 - 900 words.
If you have an idea for a feature article, contact jjnewsletter@hotmail.com with a brief description of the article's focus.
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