This is a wild story and an incredible piece of investigative journalism from the folks at BuzzFeed. The CCP reportedly operates hundreds of camps across the Xinjiang autonomous region for re-education of Uyghur muslims.

Starting with map tiles they’d noticed were blanked out on China’s Baidu Maps service, they enlisted new data resources, built analysis tools, and combed through map data manually to identify hundreds of these prisons (only several dozen are “officially” known):

We began to sort through the mask tile locations systematically using a custom web tool that we built to support our investigation and help manage...

An interesting post from China analyst Dan Wang, who lives in Beijing, on the current state of the city in the throes of response to the coronavirus response and containment:

I see quarantine enforcement. One day in early February, a uniformed municipal employee set up a tent and a table outside my apartment compound, taking the temperatures of everyone leaving and entering. The next day, he gave me a paper slip, saying that I needed to display it every time I came in. It was a good thing that I received that entry card when I did, because I...

I don’t follow international markets closely enough to keep up with this, but interesting to see this take on Hong Kong’s relative stagnation in recent years, especially as compared to other nearby mainland China cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou:

Despite the transformation the global economy has undergone, Hong Kong’s business landscape remains largely unchanged – the preserve of a small body of property developers and conglomerates, most of them tycoon-owned, who rose to prominence long before the handover. Indeed, one of the most striking things of the city’s history for nearly three decades has been its failure to produce...

Interesting thoughts in Dan Wang’s annual letter. On China, trade, and tech.

These are not trivial achievements. But neither are they earth-shattering successes. Consider first the internet companies. I find it bizarre that the world has decided that consumer internet is the highest form of technology. It’s not obvious to me that apps like WeChat, Facebook, or Snap are doing the most important work pushing forward our technologically-accelerating civilization. To me, it’s entirely plausible that Facebook and Tencent might be net-negative for technological developments. The apps they develop offer fun, productivity-dragging distractions; and the companies pull smart kids from...

In the category of good news, this study from NASA using MODIS satellite data shows trends of re-greening happening in countries like India and China. Surprising given the media attention on overexploitation of land:

The world is literally a greener place than it was 20 years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage: China and India. A new study shows that the two emerging countries with the world’s biggest populations are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China...

China installed more than 10,000,000 surveillance cameras in 2010. Talk about a stream of “big data”:

In May, Shanghai announced that a team of 4,000 monitor its surveillance feeds to ensure round-the-clock coverage. The south-western municipality of Chongqing has announced plans to add 200,000 cameras by 2014 because “310,000 digital eyes are not enough”.

Urumqi, which saw vicious ethnic violence in 2009, installed 17,000 high-definition, riot-proof cameras last year to ensure “seamless” surveillance. Fast-developing Inner Mongolia plans to have 400,000 units by 2012. In the city of Changsha, the Furong district alone reportedly has 40,000 – one for...