This is the English translation of the transcript of episode 20 of my podcast Reasoned Talk (议正言辞). The episode is in Chinese. You can listen to this episode on Xiaoyuzhou , Apple Podcasts , or Spotify .

On December 1, 2018, Meng Wanzhou, then Huawei’s vice chairwoman and chief financial officer, was changing planes at Vancouver International Airport on her way to Mexico. Canadian police arrested her at the request of the United States. The U.S. government accused Huawei of using Skycom, a company registered in Hong Kong, to resell American technology products to Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. As one of Huawei’s most senior executives, Meng became a target of the prosecution.

For nearly three years afterward, Meng’s name remained at the center of international attention. Although released on bail, she could not leave Vancouver and remained under surveillance. Extradition hearings followed one after another, while relations among China, the United States, and Canada became deadlocked over the case. On September 22, 2021, Meng entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. The agreement was made public two days later, and she returned to China. In 2022, the U.S. government dismissed the charges against her.

To many people, the matter seemed to be over. But on September 9, 2026, another trial began in federal court in the Eastern District of New York. This time, the U.S. government was no longer prosecuting Meng personally. The defendants were Huawei and three of its subsidiaries, and documents Meng signed in 2021 could become highly damaging evidence against the company.

Why, then, did Huawei finally face a U.S. criminal trial four years after Meng returned home? That is the subject of this episode.

Skycom, Iran, and the Bank-Fraud Allegations

U.S. prosecutors had in fact obtained an indictment against Huawei in August 2018. It was not made public until January 2019, more than a month after Meng’s arrest in Canada. The defendants named at the time included Huawei, Huawei Device USA, Hong Kong-based Skycom, and Meng herself. The principal charges included bank fraud, wire fraud, violations of U.S. sanctions on Iran, and obstruction of justice.

To understand these allegations, we first need to look at Skycom. The company was registered in Hong Kong, but its principal business was in Iran. According to the statement Meng confirmed in 2021, all of Skycom’s shares were held by Huawei subsidiary Hua Ying Management in February 2007. In November of that year, the shares were transferred from Hua Ying to another company, Canicula, which Huawei also controlled.

Meng joined Skycom’s board in February 2008 and served until April 2009. The other directors were Huawei employees. Canicula continued to hold Skycom’s shares after Meng left the board, and Huawei continued to control Canicula. From 2010 through 2014, Huawei made Skycom’s major business decisions in Iran. People who worked at Skycom understood that they were working for Huawei and used Huawei email addresses.

The same document states that, from 2010 through 2014, Huawei arranged approximately $100 million in transactions through Skycom and a multinational financial institution. The transactions were ultimately cleared in the United States. They included $7.5 million paid to a British staffing company for engineers assigned to Iran.

In December 2012 and January 2013, Reuters and other media outlets published reports on the relationship between Huawei and Skycom. The reports also said that Skycom had offered equipment made by restricted U.S. vendors to Iran’s largest mobile-network operator.

A bank that continued to process U.S.-dollar transactions connected with business in Iran through the American financial system could face civil or criminal liability. After the reports appeared, the bank providing Huawei with international settlement services asked the company for an explanation. Reuters identified that bank as HSBC. On August 22, 2013, Meng met with HSBC executives and presented a PowerPoint deck describing Skycom as Huawei’s “business partner” and a “third party.” She acknowledged that Huawei had once held shares in Skycom, but said that all of them had since been sold. She also said that Huawei’s business in Iran complied strictly with applicable laws and sanctions.

If the statement Meng signed in 2021 was accurate, her 2013 explanation to HSBC was problematic. It meant she had concealed the true relationship between Huawei and Skycom: the shares had merely moved from one Huawei subsidiary to another Huawei-controlled entity, rather than passing beyond Huawei’s control. HSBC continued its business relationship with Huawei after the meeting.

This leaves two principal legal threads from the early indictment. First, prosecutors alleged that Huawei and Skycom violated sanctions on Iran. Second, they alleged that Huawei concealed its true relationship with Skycom through false statements to the bank, thereby committing bank and wire fraud. Before the 2026 trial began, however, prosecutors decided not to proceed on two of the sanctions counts.

Why does US law have jurisdiction?

Skycom’s business in Iran involved U.S.-dollar transactions cleared through the American financial system, while Huawei’s U.S. subsidiaries also participated in some of the relevant business. Those facts gave prosecutors several possible connections through which to apply U.S. law.

Strictly speaking, the question of U.S. jurisdiction over Huawei has three distinct layers. First, did the cross-border business have sufficiently concrete connections to the United States? Second, could each particular U.S. statute apply to conduct occurring abroad? Third, even if U.S. law applied, could the government obtain evidence, bring the defendants before the court, and enforce any judgment? These questions are often grouped together under the label “long-arm jurisdiction,” but that label can obscure their differences.

The first layer concerns the connection between the conduct and the United States. A cross-border transaction rarely occurs in only one place. A contract might be signed in Hong Kong, the goods sent to Iran, and the payment instruction issued in Europe, while a correspondent bank in New York clears the dollars. If one part of the transaction occurs in the United States and that step violates U.S. law, the transaction is no longer conduct occurring wholly outside the country. U.S. law may then have jurisdiction.

That is the theory behind the dollar transactions in this case. The critical point is not merely that the currency was the U.S. dollar. The indictment specifically alleges that transactions connected with Skycom between 2010 and 2014 cleared through banks located in the United States. Prosecutors therefore contend that part of the banking services, movement of funds, and resulting sanctions risk arose within U.S. territory.

The second layer is that a connection to the United States does not allow every U.S. law to extend indefinitely abroad. The Supreme Court has long applied a principle known as the presumption against extraterritoriality. Morrison v. National Australia Bank in 2010 and RJR Nabisco v. European Community in 2016 set out a two-step method. A court first asks whether Congress clearly indicated that the statute applies abroad. If so, the law applies within the scope Congress specified. If not, the court asks what the statute principally regulates and where the conduct relevant to that focus occurred.

Different charges therefore follow different paths to extraterritorial application. Federal trade-secret law, for example, can reach conduct abroad when the offender is a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or organization, or when an act in furtherance of the offense occurs in the United States. The money-laundering statute provides extraterritorial jurisdiction over a foreign national when part of the conduct occurs in the United States and the relevant transaction exceeds $10,000. That is why each charge in this case requires its own connecting facts.

The third layer concerns the practical ability of the United States to exercise jurisdiction abroad. U.S. statutes may declare that certain crimes have extraterritorial effect, and U.S. courts may hear those cases, but enforcing the law and the resulting judgment is a separate matter. American police, for example, could not arrest Meng directly in Canada. They had to request Canada’s assistance through the extradition process; otherwise, they could only wait for the accused to enter U.S. territory.

“Long-arm jurisdiction” is therefore not a simple or self-explanatory concept. It combines several difficult questions that must be considered separately.

Charges brought by the United States

In February 2020, before Meng returned to China or entered into the deferred prosecution agreement, prosecutors filed a third superseding indictment. It added three principal charges, including conspiracy to steal trade secrets and conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with intellectual-property disputes. Because the indictment covers many allegations, this episode focuses on two representative examples. The following account describes what prosecutors are seeking to prove in court. Except where an existing civil judgment says otherwise, these allegations have not yet been established and do not represent the views of this podcast.

With that caveat in place, consider the T-Mobile incident. In 2006, T-Mobile developed a phone-testing system called Tappy in its laboratory. A mechanical arm fitted with a rubber tip could imitate the way a person taps, swipes, and types on a phone screen. In a matter of hours, it could simulate months of use and expose software lag or display faults before a product reached customers.

According to prosecutors, Huawei Device USA began supplying phones to T-Mobile in 2010. In 2012, T-Mobile allowed a small number of authorized Huawei employees into the laboratory to test devices that Huawei planned to deliver. The companies signed a nondisclosure agreement prohibiting photographs, video recordings, and reverse engineering during the testing process. In May 2013, an unauthorized Huawei employee entered the laboratory with several authorized employees and took photographs of the robot. About two weeks later, an authorized Huawei employee removed a key component from the robot and carried it out of the lab. Surveillance cameras recorded both incidents, and the footage later became important evidence for prosecutors.

T-Mobile complained to Huawei. Huawei said that individual employees had violated company policy and later dismissed the employee involved. In 2014, T-Mobile sued Huawei in federal court in Seattle. A jury found in 2017 that Huawei had breached the nondisclosure agreement and misappropriated T-Mobile’s trade secrets, but it did not find that Huawei had acted willfully and maliciously. Federal prosecutors later incorporated the same events into the criminal indictment as part of the trade-secret allegations.

Next is the Quintel incident. In 2009, British company Quintel approached Huawei about possible cooperation in mobile antennas. Futurewei, Huawei’s U.S. research subsidiary, signed a nondisclosure agreement with Quintel limiting the use of confidential information to the parties’ discussions about a collaboration. Quintel then demonstrated an antenna technology that could adjust its angle according to users’ locations and improve signal quality. At Huawei engineers’ request, it later provided additional technical material.

The collaboration did not proceed. Prosecutors allege that, little more than a month after receiving the material, Futurewei filed a patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that made extensive use of technology Quintel had disclosed. Futurewei obtained the patent in 2014. Quintel allegedly learned of it only when Futurewei’s earlier patent surfaced during Quintel’s application for a European patent in 2015. Quintel then sued Huawei for trade-secret misappropriation and sought correction of the named inventors.

Prosecutors further allege that Huawei earned approximately $22 million between 2009 and 2016 from products using the intellectual property. They incorporated this episode into the superseding indictment as well.

The core of the case: RICO

At first glance, these events arose at different times, in different places, and on different lines of business. The central move in the 2020 indictment was to connect them by charging Huawei and several affiliated companies with a RICO conspiracy.

RICO is the abbreviation for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Congress enacted it in 1970 as part of the Organized Crime Control Act. Although originally used primarily against the Mafia, it later came to cover corporations and other forms of organization. Its provisions now appear at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961–1968.

Here, prosecutors charged Huawei and affiliated entities under § 1962(d) with conspiring to violate RICO. Three concepts are particularly important to understanding that charge.

The first is an enterprise. Under RICO, an enterprise may be a legally organized corporation or a group of entities associated and operating continuously for a common purpose. Prosecutors refer to Huawei and several affiliated companies as the “Huawei Enterprise,” alleging that they shared a common purpose and an ongoing organizational relationship.

The second is a pattern of racketeering activity. RICO lists offenses that can serve as predicate acts. The indictment in this case identifies bank fraud, wire fraud, trade-secret theft, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and criminal copyright infringement, among others. To prove the RICO conspiracy, prosecutors must establish an agreement that conspirators would commit a series of related predicate offenses reflecting continuity.

The third concept is conspiracy: an agreement to carry out the RICO violation. A conspiracy is not simply a collection of separate incidents, and no single person must commit every predicate offense. The crucial question is whether the defendants knowingly joined the common agreement. For corporate defendants, the court and jury must also determine which employees’ conduct and states of mind may legally be attributed to each company.

Whether senior management knew, whether the company rewarded employees for obtaining competitors’ confidential information, and whether the incidents followed similar patterns could all serve as evidence of a common agreement. Prosecutors must prove every element of the RICO conspiracy against each defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense, by contrast, can argue that the conduct involved isolated employees acting improperly or outside their authority, that management did not approve it, and that the company took corrective action after learning of it. It can also argue that the incidents were not connected by any common agreement and that prosecutors have not proved an agreement to invest proceeds derived from the alleged pattern in the enterprise. If these objections create reasonable doubt about any element, the corresponding RICO conspiracy charge cannot be sustained.

That is the issue the jury must ultimately decide: whether events scattered across more than two decades were isolated incidents selected and assembled by prosecutors, or whether they prove a company-level agreement satisfying RICO’s requirements for an enterprise, a pattern of racketeering activity, and the use or investment of proceeds.

In April 2026, prosecutors filed a fourth superseding indictment that reorganized the case into fourteen counts. They withdrew two counts on September 4, leaving twelve for trial. Jury selection began in the Eastern District of New York on September 8, and the parties delivered opening statements on September 9.

In those openings, the two sides offered opposing accounts of whether a criminal conspiracy existed within Huawei. Prosecutors said that the company had treated crime as a business strategy over the preceding two decades. Defense counsel said that the government had selected a handful of unrelated incidents from the enormous history of a multinational company, involving people who in some instances had never met and worked thousands of miles apart.

Key Evidence and Ongoing Trial

As noted earlier, prosecutors possess a potentially damaging piece of evidence: the Statement of Facts that Meng signed and confirmed in 2021. The four-page document acknowledges that Huawei controlled Skycom, that Huawei employees operated Skycom’s business in Iran, that the business used U.S.-dollar transactions, and that statements Meng made to HSBC in 2013 were untrue.

Section 6 of the deferred prosecution agreement provides that, if the United States prosecuted Meng again, the government could use the Statement of Facts as evidence and she could not contradict it during the proceeding.

In June 2026, the judge ruled that the statement could also be used in Huawei’s criminal trial. Meng was, and remains, Huawei’s chief financial officer, the judge reasoned, and the statement concerned conduct undertaken as part of her corporate duties. Huawei therefore could not exclude the document.

In effect, the court treated Meng’s statement as Huawei’s own adopted statement, rather than as a statement by an outside witness. Had Meng been treated as a third-party witness, she would have had to appear at trial and be available for cross-examination. Once the statement was classified as Huawei’s own adopted statement, prosecutors did not need to call Meng in person in order to offer it.

The jury must assess every count separately: which alleged facts were proved, which conduct may be attributed to each corporate defendant, whether that conduct satisfies the elements of each offense, and whether the separate incidents were connected by a conspiracy.

Many stages remain. A first-instance verdict may not arrive until the end of 2026 or later. If the jury finds Huawei guilty of the RICO conspiracy, the company could face a substantial fine and forfeiture of unlawful proceeds, as well as compliance monitoring after judgment.

Which of the two competing narratives will cross the legal threshold? How will United States v. Huawei—a case stretching across more than two decades, multiple countries, and intense diplomatic and political controversy—ultimately end? We will return to those questions after the Eastern District of New York reaches a decision. Look for Part II of this story.

This case remains pending. Except for final civil judgments and procedural rulings already in force, all statements below concerning criminal liability describe allegations by prosecutors, statements made at trial, or witness testimony. Huawei has pleaded not guilty. The trial information in this episode is current through September 18, 2026.

Key Timeline

• 2007–2014: According to the Statement of Facts confirmed by Meng, Skycom’s shares moved from Hua Ying Management to Canicula, another entity still controlled by Huawei. Meng served as a Skycom director; Huawei made Skycom’s major business decisions in Iran; and related dollar payments cleared through the United States.
• 2009–2016: Quintel’s antenna discussions with Futurewei, the subsequent patent application, and resulting litigation were later incorporated into the intellectual-property allegations.
• December 2012–August 2013: Media reports examined the relationship between Huawei and Skycom. On August 22, 2013, Meng described Skycom to a bank as Huawei’s “business partner” and a “third party.”
• 2013–2017: The Tappy incident occurred, after which T-Mobile brought a civil action. In 2017, a jury found that Huawei had breached its confidentiality obligations and misappropriated T-Mobile’s trade secrets, but did not find that it acted willfully and maliciously.
• August 2018–January 2019: An indictment was filed under seal in the Eastern District of New York. Meng was arrested in Canada in December 2018, and the indictment was unsealed in January 2019.
• February 2020: The third superseding indictment added a RICO conspiracy, conspiracy to steal trade secrets, and related wire-fraud conspiracy allegations, bringing the case to sixteen counts.
• September 2021–2022: Meng entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and returned to China. After she fulfilled the agreement, the charges against her were dismissed while the corporate case continued.
• April–June 2026: A fourth superseding indictment reorganized the case into fourteen counts. The court later ruled that Meng’s Statement of Facts could be used in the corporate trial.
• September 2026: Prosecutors declined to proceed on two sanctions counts, leaving twelve counts for trial. Jury selection began on September 8, and the parties delivered opening statements on September 9.

Key Parties and Events

• Meng Wanzhou: Huawei’s chief financial officer. She is no longer a defendant in the corporate trial, but the four-page Statement of Facts she signed in 2021 has become important evidence.
• Skycom, Hua Ying Management, and Canicula: The transfer of shares and the entities’ actual control relationships form the basis of prosecutors’ account of Huawei’s business in Iran and its statements to the bank. The charging documents did not identify the bank; Reuters identified it as HSBC.
• T-Mobile and Tappy: Tappy is a phone-testing robot designed to simulate a user’s finger movements. The civil judgment is final, but the same facts must be tested again under the higher burden of proof governing the criminal case.
• Quintel and Futurewei: Prosecutors allege that Futurewei applied for a patent after receiving Quintel’s confidential antenna information. The criminal allegation remains for the jury to decide.

Core Legal Concepts

• Deferred prosecution agreement (DPA): An agreement suspending prosecution for a specified period. If the defendant performs the agreed obligations, prosecutors apply to dismiss the charges. A DPA is neither an acquittal nor a guilty plea.
• Statement of Facts: Meng confirmed that its contents were true and accurate. Section 6 of the agreement primarily addresses the document’s use if she were prosecuted again. Its use in Huawei’s trial instead depends on whether the court finds that the company adopted her statement.
• Contacts, jurisdiction, and extraterritoriality: Dollar clearing through the United States and participation by U.S. subsidiaries can create connections to the country, but whether a particular federal criminal statute applies to conduct abroad must still be analyzed statute by statute. The use of dollars alone is not enough.
• RICO conspiracy: Under 18 U.S.C. § 1962(d), prosecutors allege an agreement to violate § 1962(a) by using or investing income derived from a pattern of predicate offenses in the “Huawei Enterprise.” The government must prove not only the enterprise, predicate pattern, and common agreement, but also the required relationship between the proceeds and their use or investment.
• Corporate attribution and the burden of proof: When an employee’s conduct and state of mind can be attributed to a corporation is a central issue. Prosecutors must prove every count against each defendant beyond a reasonable doubt. The admission of evidence does not require the jury to credit it.

Principal Cases and Statutes

• United States v. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (E.D.N.Y. No. 1:18-cr-00457): the principal case discussed in this episode.
• T-Mobile USA, Inc. v. Huawei Device USA, Inc. (W.D. Wash. No. 2:14-cv-01351): the civil Tappy case.
• Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U.S. 247 (2010): reaffirmed the presumption against extraterritorial application of federal statutes and focused the inquiry on the object of the particular law and the location of the relevant conduct.
• RJR Nabisco, Inc. v. European Community, 579 U.S. 325 (2016): established the two-step extraterritoriality framework and held that some substantive RICO provisions can reach conduct abroad to the extent the relevant predicate offenses themselves apply extraterritorially. It did not resolve every question concerning the extraterritorial application of every RICO provision.
• 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961, 1962: RICO’s definitions, substantive prohibitions, and conspiracy provision.
• 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343, 1344, 1832, 1956, 1512, 2319: Provisions concerning wire fraud, bank fraud, trade-secret theft, money laundering, witness or investigative obstruction, and criminal copyright infringement. These are the principal sources of the predicate offenses listed in the indictment.
• 18 U.S.C. § 1837 and § 1956(f): The extraterritorial provisions for trade-secret offenses and money laundering. The former focuses on the offender’s status or an act in furtherance committed in the United States; for foreign nationals, the latter requires conduct occurring in part in the United States and a transaction exceeding $10,000.
• 50 U.S.C. § 1705 and 31 C.F.R. Part 560: The criminal provision and administrative regulations associated with the Iran-sanctions allegations. Prosecutors declined to proceed at trial on two separate sanctions counts.

Principal Sources

• DOJ announcement of the 2019 indictment and initial charges
• 2020 third superseding indictment (PDF)
• Meng Wanzhou’s deferred prosecution agreement and Statement of Facts (PDF)
• 18 U.S.C. § 1961 (RICO definitions) ; 18 U.S.C. § 1962 (prohibited activities)
• U.S. Supreme Court: Morrison, 561 U.S. 247 ; RJR Nabisco, 579 U.S. 325
• 18 U.S.C. § 1837 (extraterritoriality of trade-secret offenses) ; 18 U.S.C. § 1956(f) (extraterritorial jurisdiction over money laundering)
• Reuters: Meng Wanzhou’s Statement of Facts may be used at Huawei’s trial
• Reuters: opening statements on September 9, 2026
• Fierce Network: prosecutors narrow the charges before trial

The explanation sounds complete. Unfortunately, that is not what California law says. This article is not meant to dwell on the gossip itself. It focuses instead on the legal questions involved, especially California’s rules on surrogacy, assisted reproduction, and parentage.

The claim that a father who is not present must be treated as a sperm donor is legally wrong. But it happens to touch on an important question in California’s law of assisted reproduction: why might a child’s “biological father” not be the child’s “legal father”?

To answer that question, we have to return to California and a series of cases that began more than half a century ago.

The “Sperm Donor” and the Legal Father

Once the online claim is taken apart, it becomes clear that it confuses three entirely different things: egg retrieval, sperm donation, and legal parentage.

Egg retrieval is simply a medical procedure. A woman may have her eggs retrieved and frozen, use them to form an embryo with someone’s sperm, or do nothing further with them. The mere act of retrieving eggs does not somehow create a legal father.

Likewise, whether a man is a “sperm donor” does not depend on whether he personally appeared on the day of an egg retrieval. California Family Code section 7613 addresses the issue in detail. For example, when a man provides semen to a physician or licensed sperm bank for assisted reproduction by a woman who is not married to him, he is generally treated as a donor, rather than the child’s legal father.

But the statute immediately provides an exception. If, before conception, the man and the woman sign a written agreement that he is to be a parent, he is not merely a donor in the ordinary sense; he becomes the child’s legal father. Even without a qualifying written document, a court may in some circumstances find, by clear and convincing evidence, that the woman and the man had reached an oral agreement before conception to become the child’s parents.

In other words, California law is really asking what the man was doing when he provided the sperm: was he making a donation, or was he having a child of his own? That is a question of legal intent.

Intended Parents in Surrogacy

If we use the scenario suggested by the online rumor—one person provides the egg, another provides the sperm, and a third woman carries and gives birth to the child—the legal issue is usually one of gestational surrogacy.

It is important to distinguish two concepts. California law recognizes two forms of surrogacy:

• Traditional surrogacy: the surrogate both carries the pregnancy and provides her own egg, so she has a genetic relationship with the child;
• Gestational surrogacy: the gestational carrier carries and gives birth to the child but has no genetic relationship to the embryo. This is the more common form in modern commercial surrogacy.

California law creates a particularly important status within this framework: the intended parent. Family Code section 7960 defines an intended parent as an individual, whether married or unmarried, who manifests an intent to be legally bound as the parent of a child resulting from assisted reproduction. The focus is on intent—whether the person is willing to take responsibility for the child—not simply on whether that person provided genetic material.

This marks one of the most important conceptual shifts in California’s surrogacy law. In natural reproduction, the biological parents are usually easy to identify: the woman who gives birth is the mother, and the man who provides the sperm is the father. Assisted reproductive technology, however, can involve five different roles: the person who provides the egg, the person who provides the sperm, the person who carries the pregnancy, the person who plans to raise the child, and the person who ultimately assumes parental responsibility in law. The original simplicity of parentage therefore breaks down, and the law has to answer a seemingly strange question: which relationship is sufficient to create the status of “parent”?

A Man Can Be a Father Without a Genetic Link

California courts confronted this question seriously before in vitro fertilization and commercial surrogacy became widespread.

In 1968, the California Supreme Court decided People v. Sorensen. Sorensen was infertile, but he agreed that his wife could undergo artificial insemination using another man’s sperm. After the child was born, the couple lived together for several years. When the marriage later broke down, Sorensen argued that the child was not his and that he had no duty to pay support. The case may seem straightforward today, but in 1968 it presented a new problem.

The California Supreme Court held that Sorensen was still the child’s legal father. He knew that his wife would use another man’s sperm, consented to the reproductive process, and had intended from the beginning that the child would become part of their family. In the context of assisted reproduction, therefore, fatherhood is not tied strictly to genetic connection.

The decision became an important foundation for California’s law of parentage in assisted reproduction. But it also led to a harder question. If a person can be a father without a genetic link, must the woman who carries and gives birth to the child always be the mother?

Can a Woman Become a Mother Without a Genetic Link?

Johnson v. Calvert (1993) was the real turning point in California’s law of surrogacy. The Calverts wanted a child, but Crispina Calvert had undergone a hysterectomy and could not carry a pregnancy, although her ovaries could still produce eggs. Doctors therefore used her egg and her husband’s sperm to create an embryo, which they implanted in another woman, Anna Johnson. Crispina was the child’s genetic mother, while Anna was the gestational mother, who carried the pregnancy for ten months and gave birth. When the relationship between the parties broke down, the question of who was the child’s true mother reached the California Supreme Court for the first time.

The California Supreme Court adopted a standard that would have lasting influence. When the genetic mother and the gestational mother are different people, the court should ask who originally intended to bring about the child’s birth and raise the child as her own. This is the principle of procreative intent. The court ultimately held that the Calverts were the child’s legal parents.

That step was critical. From this point onward, parenthood was no longer simply a natural status automatically determined by genetic connection or the fact of giving birth. It became a legal status that also incorporates expressed intent and legal responsibility.

“Procreative Intent” Is Not All-Powerful

If the story ended there, it would be easy to draw an overly simple conclusion: in assisted reproduction, once the parties agree in advance who the parents will be, a court can simply enforce the agreement. The reality is more complicated.

Just one year later, In re Marriage of Moschetta (1994) drew an important boundary around Johnson. The parties in that case used what we earlier called traditional surrogacy: the surrogate not only carried the pregnancy but also provided her own egg. She was therefore both the child’s genetic mother and the woman who gave birth. After the child was born, she changed her mind and refused to surrender her entire maternal status.

The intended parents argued that Johnson required the court to follow the parties’ original procreative intent. The California Court of Appeal rejected that argument. Johnson had not declared that every surrogacy contract was automatically valid. In Johnson, intent was needed because the genetic mother and the gestational mother each had a basis for claiming motherhood, and the law had to choose between them. In Moschetta, however, those two statuses were concentrated in the same woman. There were not two equally situated mothers from whom the court had to choose. The court therefore held that the surrogate was the legal mother and that a traditional surrogacy contract alone could not extinguish her parent-child relationship.

This helps explain why many countries still hesitate to legalize surrogacy: surrogacy can make an otherwise simple family relationship extremely complex, disrupting traditional ideas of family and parentage. Even within California, traditional and gestational surrogacy have presented fundamentally different legal risks from the beginning.

Even Without a Genetic Link, Someone Can Still Be a Parent

The case that pushed the principle of procreative intent furthest was In re Marriage of Buzzanca (1998).

The facts were extraordinary. The Buzzancas decided to have a child through assisted reproduction, but neither the husband’s sperm nor the wife’s egg was used, and a third woman carried and gave birth to the child. The intended couple had no genetic relationship with the child, and neither did the gestational surrogate. To make matters worse, the Buzzancas separated before the child was born. The husband then argued that he was not the biological father and had no duty to support the child.

The trial court initially reached a startling conclusion: the child had no legal parents. The California Court of Appeal quickly reversed. The child had come into the world because the Buzzancas had jointly initiated and agreed to the entire assisted-reproduction process. If a person could actively bring about a child’s birth and then withdraw from parenthood simply because there was no genetic link, the child would be the only victim of the arrangement. The court therefore held that both members of the couple were the child’s legal parents.

By this point, California law had undergone a profound shift. The basis of parenthood had moved away from biological facts alone and toward a combination of procreative intent, prior consent, and the legal responsibility that follows from them.

From Case Law to Legislation

Building on these cases, California enacted AB 1217 in 2012. The law turned decades of case law into a more procedural framework and established a dedicated system for gestational surrogacy in Family Code section 7962.

Under the statute, a valid gestational-surrogacy agreement must state, among other things:

• who provided the gametes (and, if donated sperm, eggs, or embryos were used, what kind of donation was involved);
• who the intended parent or parents are;
• how the medical expenses of the gestational carrier and the newborn will be covered.

Before signing the agreement, the gestational carrier and the intended parent or parents must each have separate, independent counsel. One lawyer cannot represent both sides. The agreement must also be formally executed, with the signatures notarized or witnessed through an equivalent procedure. Once these requirements have been satisfied, the parties may ask a court to establish parentage before the child is born. The court may then determine that the intended parent or parents named in the agreement are the child’s legal parents and that the gestational carrier and her spouse or partner are not the child’s legal parents.

The 2017 decision in C.M. v. M.C. further confirmed this framework. A man used his own sperm and anonymously donated eggs to create embryos, which a gestational carrier carried. After becoming pregnant, the carrier changed her mind and sought parental rights. The court nevertheless held that, when the statutory procedures in section 7962 have been satisfied, the man named in the agreement is the child’s sole legal father and the gestational carrier has no parental rights. The Court of Appeal affirmed.

From Johnson to C.M., California law spent more than two decades doing the same basic thing: moving the question of “who are the parents?” from after the child’s birth to before it. The aim was to clarify responsibility while the child was still unborn and reduce disputes that could affect the child’s development.

Epilogue

The online rumor looks very different in light of this framework. California’s current law of gestational surrogacy is a detailed system. It requires a written agreement and focuses on the parties’ intentions before conception; it also requires independent counsel, notarization or witnessing, and even permits a parentage judgment before the child is born. The legal question is therefore far more complicated than the rumor suggests.

The real value of the celebrity surrogacy controversy is that it gives ordinary people who know little about these new legal relationships a glimpse into how a developed legal system has approached them. For most of human history, identifying a child’s parents was not especially difficult. Genetic connection, pregnancy, birth, caregiving, and inheritance usually centered on the same two people. Assisted reproductive technology has made that question much more complex.

When the person who provides the sperm may not be the father, the person who provides the egg may not be the mother, the woman who carries and gives birth may not be the mother, and someone who provided neither sperm nor egg and never carried the pregnancy may still become a legal parent, the law must answer a question that barely existed before: is parenthood a biological fact, or a legal relationship?

From Sorensen in 1968, through Johnson in 1993, to Family Code section 7962 today, California has taken more than half a century to formulate its answer. Genetic connection and the fact of giving birth remain important. But in modern assisted reproduction, a third element has entered the definition of parenthood: the intention and responsibility that bring a child into the world.

Primary Legal Materials

People v. Sorensen, 68 Cal.2d 280 (1968)

Johnson v. Calvert, 5 Cal.4th 84 (1993)

In re Marriage of Moschetta, 25 Cal.App.4th 1218 (1994)

In re Marriage of Buzzanca, 61 Cal.App.4th 1410 (1998)

K.M. v. E.G., 37 Cal.4th 130 (2005)

C.M. v. M.C., 7 Cal.App.5th 1188 (2017)

California Family Code §§ 7606, 7613, 7960–7962

California Probate Code §§ 6450, 6453

Note: This article discusses assisted reproduction and parentage under the law of California, United States. It does not address how Chinese law evaluates surrogacy itself, and it does not mean that a parentage judgment issued in California will automatically be recognized in another jurisdiction.

He was living in a van. Each time the police arrived, they cited him for “camping within the city limits.” He would drive away, wait for the officers to leave, and then return to the same place to sleep. A police report noted that Lee “continues to disregard the city ordinance” and returns to the van as soon as the police leave. The day shift, it added, should check the van again and prepare to have it towed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor included this episode in her dissent in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. It reads like an absurd cycle: the police successfully stopped Lee from sleeping outside six times, yet none of those interventions gave a person without housing anywhere to live. He simply left for a while, then returned in the darkness when he needed to sleep again.

The problem began with a blanket.

In Grants Pass, Oregon, a person may be “camping” under the city code if they place a blanket, sleeping bag, or other bedding in a public place for the purpose of maintaining a temporary place to live. An initial violation can bring a fine. Repeated citations can result in a thirty-day exclusion from city parks. Violating an exclusion order may then constitute criminal trespass, punishable by as much as thirty days in jail and a $1,250 fine.

In Episode 14 of Reasoned Talk, we began with Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville and explained why the vagueness of traditional vagrancy laws ultimately drove them from the statute books. But if the law no longer punishes a “vagrant” directly and instead punishes the act of sleeping on the street, has it really completed the transition from status to conduct?

In 2024, Grants Pass gave local governments a fairly permissive answer. One year later, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14321, translating that answer into a policy agenda encompassing federal grants, civil commitment, and housing programs.

Together, these two legal documents raise a more difficult question: when a person has nowhere else to go, does punishing them for sleeping in public regulate conduct, or does it drive a particular class of people away?

From “Homeless Person” to “Person Using Bedding”

Grants Pass is a small city in the American West with a population of roughly 38,000. At the time of the litigation, an estimated 600 people there were experiencing homelessness. The city had no public homeless shelter. The only organization offering beds was a religious rescue mission that required residents to abstain from smoking, attend religious services, and follow a range of rules governing work and daily life. For some people with disabilities, those unable to work, and those unwilling to accept the religious requirements, its beds were not available in practice.

The city’s camping ordinances, however, covered nearly every kind of public space. They prohibited sleeping on streets, sidewalks, and alleyways; setting up a “campsite” on public property; and camping or parking overnight in city parks. The two class representatives, Gloria Johnson and John Logan, usually slept in their vehicles. If they used bedding and treated a vehicle as a temporary place to live, they too could fall within the prohibition.

Their lawsuit relied on the rule adopted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Martin v. City of Boise in 2018. That decision held that when the number of people experiencing homelessness in a city exceeds the number of practically available shelter beds, the government may not prohibit “involuntarily homeless” people from sleeping in public. A person must sleep somewhere. If no indoor space is available, sleeping outside is not a choice that can simply be abandoned.

The federal district court followed that reasoning. It found that the homeless population in Grants Pass exceeded the number of practically available shelter beds and enjoined the city from enforcing its camping ordinances against those individuals. The Ninth Circuit affirmed. For many cities in the American West, this imposed a firm limit on enforcement: when the number of people experiencing homelessness exceeded the available shelter beds, the government could not prohibit those people from sleeping outside without potentially violating the Eighth Amendment.

Grants Pass appealed to the Supreme Court. On June 28, 2024, the Court reversed by a vote of 6–3.

The central dispute was not whether tents affected the environment, or whether the city should build more shelters. It concerned a seemingly abstract legal classification: did the ordinances punish the status of homelessness, or the conduct of camping on public property?

“Status” Cannot Be a Crime, but “Conduct” Can

In Robinson v. California in 1962, the Supreme Court confirmed that the state cannot punish a person merely for possessing a particular status or condition. California had made the condition of narcotics addiction itself a crime. The Court held that even one day in prison could not be imposed merely because a person had an illness or existed in a particular condition; doing so would amount to “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

Six years later, however, Powell v. Texas drew a fine line between status and conduct. Powell had alcohol dependence, but he was not convicted for the status of being an alcoholic. He was punished for the act of being intoxicated in public.

The majority in Grants Pass followed that distinction. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the ordinances applied to everyone on their face. A person without housing, a backpacker passing through town, or a student camping on the lawn of a municipal building in protest could all violate the same rule by camping in public. The law did not declare that “being homeless is a crime.” It prohibited an act with a conduct element.

The majority also emphasized that the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause primarily regulates the punishments that may be imposed after conviction. It is not a general instrument for reviewing what conduct a government may define as criminal. Other constitutional protections—including freedom of speech, equal protection, and due process—may constrain the state’s power to criminalize conduct. But on the specific question before the Court, the Eighth Amendment did not bar a generally applicable public-camping prohibition.

Sotomayor, writing for the three dissenters, saw the matter very differently. “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” she argued. For someone with a home, sleeping in a park may be avoidable: they can go home or stay in a hotel. For someone with no indoor place to go, however, refusing to sleep anywhere would require staying awake forever. Although the words “homeless person” did not appear in the ordinances, the conduct they prohibited was inseparable from the condition of having no home.

That was the real disagreement between the majority and the dissent. Reading the text of the ordinance, the majority treated “a person experiencing homelessness” and “a person camping in public” as separate categories. Looking at the conditions in which the law operated, the dissent saw status and conduct as two sides of the same coin whenever a person had no alternative. The majority focused on the legal text itself; the dissent focused on the law’s social effect.

The Supreme Court Did Not Give Cities a Master Key

It is tempting to summarize Grants Pass as holding that “the Supreme Court allows cities to punish sleeping outside.” That is not accurate.

First, the Court did not declare that public sleeping is a crime. Whether to enact a camping ban, where it should apply, whether to impose fines, and whether to provide designated camping areas remain matters for state and local decision-making. The Court held only that the Eighth Amendment itself does not prohibit the enforcement of ordinary camping restrictions.

Second, the Court reviewed only the claim under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. It did not decide whether the wording of the Grants Pass ordinances was so vague that it violated due process, or whether the city engaged in selective enforcement. Those practices could still violate other constitutional provisions; they simply fell outside the scope of the case.

The Court therefore preserved generally applicable camping prohibitions, but it did not give local governments unrestricted power to remove people experiencing homelessness. Cities must still ensure that their ordinances are sufficiently clear and that enforcement is not selective—for example, by overlooking a backpacker while targeting a person without housing for the same conduct. A mistake at either stage may still produce a constitutional violation. Grants Pass cleared away an Eighth Amendment obstacle to local enforcement against homelessness, but it did not hand cities a master key.

Executive Order 14321: Changing the Flow of Money Instead of Making Arrests

On July 24, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14321, titled Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets. The order cited a 2024 point-in-time count showing that 274,000 people were sleeping on streets, in parks, and in other places not meant for habitation—the highest number on record. It then placed “endemic vagrancy” alongside disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks, and described large numbers of people experiencing homelessness as affected by drugs and mental illness. The order’s central aim was to shift the policy emphasis from “how to provide housing” to “how to restore public order.” It used three policy tools to do so.

The first was federal funding. Rules governing urban camping, loitering, and squatting are principally enacted by state and local governments. A president cannot sign an executive order and directly command every local police department in the country to arrest people sleeping outside. Executive Order 14321 took a different route. It instructed the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation to review their discretionary grant programs and consider prioritizing states and municipalities that actively address open drug use, urban camping, loitering, and squatting. It also directed the Justice Department, within the limits of existing law, to make funding available for encampment removals where public safety is at risk and local resources are inadequate. This is not a direct command, but it can have a tangible effect. A local government remains free not to pursue those policies, yet that choice may affect its position when competing for federal grants.

The second tool was civil commitment. The order directed the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to promote more flexible standards for involuntary commitment, institutional treatment, and step-down care. The target population included people with serious mental illness who may endanger themselves or others, as well as those living on the street who cannot care for themselves. Civil commitment is not a criminal conviction and is usually justified in the language of treatment and protection, but it still deprives a person of liberty. In O’Connor v. Donaldson, the Supreme Court made clear that the government cannot confine a person for a long period merely because that person has a mental illness. If the person is not dangerous and can live safely alone or with help from family or friends, the state has no authority to institutionalize them involuntarily. The executive order therefore cannot transform homelessness itself into a sufficient reason for hospitalization. Officials must still confront questions such as who presents a real danger, who truly cannot care for themselves, what evidence and procedures commitment requires, and whether supportive community alternatives exist outside an institution.

The third tool was a change in the basic logic of federal homelessness programs. For more than a decade, federal policy had broadly embraced a Housing First model. Its premise is that a person should first obtain stable housing, without sobriety, drug treatment, mental-health treatment, or a minimum income serving as a condition of entry. Once housing is stable, programs offer voluntary medical care, addiction treatment, and social support. Executive Order 14321 called for ending support for certain Housing First policies, increasing treatment and service-participation requirements, and directing more resources toward transitional housing and mental-health and addiction treatment. It also allowed housing programs, where legally permissible, to collect health information and share it with law-enforcement agencies in specified circumstances.

Taken together, the three tools form a coherent policy chain: on the street, camping bans and encampment removals restore order; after people leave the street, treatment, transitional placement, and self-sufficiency requirements replace priority access to permanent housing without preconditions; and for those considered unable to care for themselves or dangerous, civil commitment becomes more readily available. This is far more complex than a simple prohibition on sleeping outside, and it goes well beyond the holding in Grants Pass.

The Judgment Encouraged “Local Experimentation,” but the Order Uses Federal Money to Set a Common Direction

The Grants Pass majority repeatedly emphasized that state and local governments should be allowed to experiment with policies for addressing homelessness. Courts should not derive a single national formula for counting shelter beds from the Eighth Amendment and then place every city’s shelter capacity under continuing federal judicial supervision. From the perspective of federalism, that reasoning is understandable. New York, Los Angeles, and a small Oregon city plainly face different conditions. Local governments must balance the competing needs of people sleeping outside, nearby residents, businesses, children, and people with disabilities in public spaces. A court can hardly govern the entire country through one rule.

Executive Order 14321, however, introduced a subtle reversal. The Supreme Court had just removed a judicial constraint in the name of respecting local experimentation. The federal executive branch then began using grant priorities to encourage jurisdictions across the country to move in the same direction: greater camping enforcement, expanded civil commitment, and treatment-first policy.

The effects were concrete. In its grant documents, the Department of Housing and Urban Development expressly stated that Grants Pass had upheld the authority of local governments to prohibit public camping, and it urged local jurisdictions to work with law enforcement to reduce public camping and open drug use. In 2026, HUD announced approximately $4.04 billion in a new round of Continuum of Care funding, proposing to prioritize $1.3 billion for transitional housing and supportive services in pursuit of the goals emphasized in Executive Order 14321.

Yet a president’s ability to set a policy direction does not mean that an executive agency may bypass Congress and freely rewrite the lawful purposes and allocation procedures governing federal grants.

On June 29, 2026, the federal district court in Rhode Island vacated two related funding notices that HUD had issued in 2025. The court concluded that the department had abruptly changed its longstanding Housing First and grant-renewal policies without adequately explaining its decision or accounting for the reliance interests of affected parties. HUD had also missed the publication deadline imposed by law. Its actions were therefore “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act and unlawful.

The judgment did not invalidate Executive Order 14321 as a whole. It addressed a more basic question of administrative law: when a government agency writes the rules governing billions of dollars in grants, it must still obey the statutes enacted by Congress and follow legally required decision-making procedures. In 2026, HUD issued another funding plan, and a group of states and service providers again filed suit. As of this writing, the new round of litigation remains pending.

The Real Question

People experiencing homelessness are not inherently people with mental illness, drug users, or threats to public safety. At the same time, outdoor encampments can create genuine risks involving fire, sanitation, drugs, and public access. Describing every attempt to preserve order as persecution of the vulnerable fails to answer the legitimate concerns of city residents. But placing everyone who sleeps outside within a narrative of “crime and disorder” does nothing to resolve why people lose housing or how they can actually leave the street.

Traditional vagrancy laws addressed this growing problem by declaring that “a certain kind of person is guilty.” Modern laws rarely speak so directly. They prefer to prohibit particular forms of disorderly conduct. As a matter of legal language, that is progress. Yet progress in legal language does not automatically produce progress in the world. After receiving a citation, a person may simply move from one block to another. After an encampment is cleared, the people who lived there must still find another place to lie down. Civil commitment can help some people who genuinely need treatment, but under some conditions it may also turn “treatment” into another form of prolonged confinement.

In 1972, Papachristou told the police not to decide first that someone “looks suspicious” and then search a vague law for a charge. More than half a century later, Grants Pass allowed cities to punish camping through more precisely defined rules, and Executive Order 14321 pushed federal policy toward order enforcement and institutional treatment. But the oldest question remains: when the state says it is merely managing the street, is it responding to a concrete danger, or is it removing disfavored people from public view?

Key Cases and Concepts

• Robinson v. California — The Supreme Court held that a state may not make the status or condition of narcotics addiction itself a crime. The case is the principal source of the rule against punishing a pure status.
• Powell v. Texas — The Court declined to extend Robinson to public intoxication, making the case an important reference point for the later distinction between status and conduct.
• Martin v. City of Boise — The Ninth Circuit held that when practically available shelter beds are insufficient, a city may not punish involuntarily homeless people for sleeping in public. Grants Pass later rejected that rule.
• City of Grants Pass v. Johnson — By a vote of 6–3, the Supreme Court held that generally applicable public-camping ordinances regulate conduct rather than the status of homelessness and therefore do not violate the Eighth Amendment.
• Executive Order 14321 — Trump’s July 24, 2025 order, Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets, uses federal grants, civil commitment, program conditions, and data policies to promote a homelessness strategy more heavily focused on order, treatment, and self-sufficiency.
• Housing First — An approach that places people experiencing homelessness in stable housing without making sobriety, treatment, or a minimum income a precondition. Supportive services remain available, but participation generally is not a prerequisite to housing.
• Civil commitment — Involuntary treatment or institutional placement outside the criminal-conviction process, generally based on dangerousness, serious mental illness, or inability to care for oneself. It remains constrained by due process and disability-rights law.
• Administrative Procedure Act — The federal statute requiring agencies to act within their lawful authority and to make reasoned, non-arbitrary decisions. It has become an important tool for reviewing measures adopted to implement Executive Order 14321.

This article is further reading for Episode 14 of Reasoned Talk, “Could Being Jobless Be a Crime? America’s Constitutional Reckoning with Vagrancy Laws .” If you have not yet listened to the episode, you can begin there for the story of Papachristou and the way traditional vagrancy laws turned a police officer’s subjective suspicion into arrest and conviction. If you have thoughts of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.

This is the transcript of episode 06 of my podcast Reasoned Talk (议正言辞). Listen on Xiaoyuzhou or Apple Podcast . The episode is in Chinese; this transcript has been translated into English.

On June 30, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its final, substantive judgment on the question of birthright citizenship. By a 6-3 vote, the nine justices struck down the Trump administration’s Executive Order No. 14160, further cementing the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This is a judgment worthy of a place in the annals of American constitutional history.

Last year, the Court had already ruled once on this same matter. But that was a procedural ruling, and in its outcome it favored the Trump administration; this year’s judgment, by contrast, is exactly the opposite—a substantive rejection of the order itself. Over the course of more than a year, from the signing of the order, to the fight over nationwide injunctions, to a last-ditch counterattack through class action, and finally to the showdown at the Supreme Court, the whole saga rose and fell dramatically. In this piece, I want to tell that story from beginning to end, in careful detail.

The Starting Point: An Order Overturning a Century-Old Constitutional Principle

Let’s go back to where it all began.

On January 20, 2025, on the very first day of his second term, Trump signed Executive Order No. 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The name was grand, but what it sought to overturn was a constitutional principle more than a century old, one many regard as a foundation stone of the nation—birthright citizenship. That principle guarantees that any child born on U.S. soil, regardless of the parents’ status, automatically becomes a U.S. citizen. Trump’s order directed all federal agencies to stop granting this, to no longer automatically confer citizenship on certain babies born in the United States.

Which babies, exactly? The scope was very broad. It covered not only the children of illegal immigrants, but also the children of people who were here legally but only for a short stay—those on student visas, work visas, or tourist visas—whose children would likewise no longer automatically become U.S. citizens.

Here is a figure to give you a concrete sense of scale: if this order had actually taken effect, roughly 250,000 newborns per year would have been affected. About 150,000 of them from undocumented families, and about 100,000 from families here legally but on short-term stays.

The moment the order was signed, American society erupted. Democratic-led states—Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, New Hampshire—together with a range of immigrant-rights organizations, filed suit almost overnight. Judges in several federal district courts quickly issued temporary injunctions.

CASA: The Blade of the Nationwide Injunction Is Snapped

A temporary injunction is a provisional measure meant to protect the plaintiffs in a case. Federal courts around the country found that Trump’s order abolishing birthright citizenship substantively violated the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, and so, before the case reached final judgment, they temporarily blocked the order.

But here was the sticking point: these temporary injunctions were not limited to the plaintiffs in the case—they extended nationwide. The Trump administration seized on precisely this point and took the case straight to the Supreme Court. Their core demand was clever: not to argue whether the order was unconstitutional, but to challenge the legitimacy of the “nationwide injunction” as a judicial tool itself.

On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3, with Justice Barrett writing the majority opinion. The core logic was this: the relief a federal court can provide has, since time immemorial, been strictly limited to the parties to the litigation, and there is no such thing as a “universal remedy” benefiting the whole country. She advanced a concept she called the “complete-relief principle”—the scope of a court’s injunction need only be enough to provide complete relief to the plaintiff, and not one inch more.

In other words, if a pregnant mother sues as a plaintiff, the court need only enjoin the government from applying the order to her own child, and that already gives her “complete relief.” Extending the injunction to every other mother in the country would not make this plaintiff-mother’s relief any more “complete.”

So the Court’s conclusion was: dissolve the nationwide injunctions, and preserve only the protection for the named plaintiffs.

The direct consequence of this judgment was a serious disparity in enforcement between the states. A baby born in a plaintiff state like New Jersey, versus one born in a state like Texas that had not joined the litigation, would face completely different mechanisms for determining citizenship. For a single, unified federal constitutional right, this is unthinkable—you cannot have some children automatically becoming Americans and others not, simply because they were born in different states.

Class Action: The Counterattack

This judicial fracture forced the plaintiffs into a crucial strategic pivot—the class action.

On the very day the Supreme Court handed down its CASA ruling, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) immediately filed a new suit, expressly seeking to have it certified as a nationwide class action.

It was a deft move. Because in her majority opinion, Barrett had in fact hinted that although the path of the “universal injunction” was now closed off, if you could satisfy the strict requirements of a class action—numerosity, commonality of legal questions, adequate representation—you could still seek relief covering the whole country.

And so, on July 10, 2025, a federal judge in New Hampshire granted preliminary certification of the class action, grouping every baby born after February 19, 2025 who was affected by the order, together with their parents, into a single class, and reissued a temporary injunction. This maneuver, at the eleventh hour, bridged the differences between the states, prevented the order from taking real effect, and paved the way for the eventual constitutional review.

Certiorari Before Judgment, and a Historic Oral Argument

In the second half of 2025, the litigation went through a series of procedural tugs-of-war. By December 2025, the Supreme Court made a rare move: it granted certiorari before judgment—skipping the circuit court of appeals and taking the case directly.

This is a fairly uncommon move for the Supreme Court. It meant the nine justices considered the case so important that they could not wait for the normal appellate process; they had to act now.

On April 1, 2026, the Court held oral argument. There is a historic detail here worth dwelling on: President Trump himself attended the oral argument in person. This was the first time in American history that a sitting president had personally sat in on a Supreme Court oral argument, and the image itself carried enormous symbolic weight.

At the argument, Deputy Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the government, tried to rewrite the history of the Citizenship Clause. His core argument was that people had long misread the Fourteenth Amendment. That phrase in the amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” he said, was by no means merely geographic jurisdiction, but required the parents to have formed a permanent, exclusive relationship of allegiance to the United States—a lawful, domiciliary presence. On this logic, because illegal overstayers and short-term visa holders had not severed their allegiance to their home countries, their children ought not automatically become U.S. citizens.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Cecilia Wang, responded very directly. The order, she said, not only conflicted with the text of the Constitution, it was a flagrant defiance of more than a century of settled interpretation and precedent.

How intense were the two hours of argument? I read through the transcript that later circulated, and the justices’ questions came down like rain, barely giving counsel room to breathe. You could feel, viscerally, the weight of this case.

The Endgame: A 6-3 Victory, a 5-4 Anxiety

Now let’s turn to the very heart of the matter.

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its final judgment. First, the vote: on the surface, the Court struck down Executive Order 14160 by 6-3, declaring the Trump administration’s ultimate defeat. But on the core question of whether the order was unconstitutional, the majority was in fact only five votes—an advantage of a single vote. That means there were very sharp divisions among the justices.

This subtle gap between “6-3” and “5-to-something” is the most intriguing feature of the whole judgment, and I’ll unpack it in detail below.

Roberts’s Majority Opinion: Three Historical Pillars

Let’s first read carefully the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts. In my view, this is one of the best opinions Roberts has written in recent years—the logic is exceptionally clear, and it takes the government’s arguments apart cleanly. He built three historical pillars.

Pillar One: The Territoriality of English Common Law

Roberts takes us back several centuries to England. He cites a very famous case in English history—Calvin’s Case. That case established a principle:

A child born within the territory of the sovereign naturally owes “allegiance” to that sovereign and enjoys the sovereign’s protection, no matter how “transient and uncertain” the parents’ presence within that territory may be.

Roberts then says the American founding generation was deeply influenced by English common law, and especially by Chief Justice Marshall’s formulation: a sovereign nation holds “full and absolute power” over everything within its territory. Whatever status you entered the United States under, so long as your person is now on U.S. soil, you must obey U.S. law and are subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. courts and police. This jurisdiction has only one extremely narrow exception: only people enjoying extraterritoriality—like the children of foreign ambassadors to the United States, or the children of a hostile occupying army—fall outside U.S. jurisdiction. If you have a child in the United States, then geographically, territorially, you are subject to U.S. jurisdiction. You cannot escape it.

Pillar Two: The Total Repudiation of Dred Scott

In 1857, that infamous Dred Scott case—the Supreme Court then ruled that Black people were not citizens. The logical foundation of that judgment was to base citizenship on “blood,” rather than on “soil.”

Roberts states plainly in the judgment that the Reconstruction statutes passed after the Civil War, and the Fourteenth Amendment that followed, had as their very purpose the complete abolition of this exclusionary standard based on bloodline and race. To bring blood back into it now is to negate the very reason the Fourteenth Amendment exists.

Pillar Three: Reaffirming Wong Kim Ark

Wong Kim Ark was the son of a Chinese laborer, born in San Francisco; because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of the time, his parents could never be naturalized as U.S. citizens. Yet in 1898 the Supreme Court ruled clearly: he was born in the United States, therefore he was a U.S. citizen, and it had nothing to do with his parents’ immigration status.

Here the Trump administration mounted a very cunning defense. They argued that Wong Kim Ark’s parents had a “permanent domicile” in the United States at the time, and so the precedent did not apply to illegal overstayers or short-term visa holders.

How did Roberts respond? He dug out the historical records of the period, and concluded: the 1898 Supreme Court never treated “permanent domicile” as a precondition for birthright citizenship. That phrase simply is not part of the core logic of that judgment.

Then Roberts said something I particularly love. Executive Order 14160, he noted, is stuffed with qualifying words—“mother,” “father,” “lawful,” “temporary”—not one of which appears in the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause, for a simple reason: they are irrelevant.

Jackson’s Concurrence: An Anti-Caste, Anti-Subordination Reboot

Having covered Roberts, let’s turn to Justice Jackson’s concurrence. She is the youngest justice, nominated by Biden, and a member of the Court’s progressive wing. Her concurrence is, in my personal view, the most intellectually profound part of the entire judgment.

Jackson advanced a concept—she called the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments the nation’s “anti-caste, anti-subordination reboot.” If you understand the Fourteenth Amendment merely as “a remedy for the particular evil of slavery,” she said, you have badly underestimated it. Its aim was far larger—to eliminate entirely any possibility of creating a permanent second-class caste within this country.

She issued a very forceful warning: if you allow the executive branch to strip particular children of birthright citizenship based on the status and lineage of their parents, you will manufacture within the United States a permanent, marginalized, second-class citizen caste. And that is precisely the social poison the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to eradicate for good.

It is a powerful passage. Because it pulls the question out of the dry debate over constitutional hermeneutics and places it in a grander sociological and political-philosophical dimension—behind the question of “who is an American” lies the question of how a nation defines itself and how it treats its most vulnerable.

The Time Bomb Kavanaugh Planted

Now let’s turn to Justice Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh voted to strike down the order, and it was his vote that made the final margin 6-3. But when I read his opinion—concurring in part and dissenting in part—I genuinely gasped. Because buried inside it is an enormous time bomb.

He stressed two things.

First, he held that Trump’s order violated statutory law, not the Constitution. The statute he meant is the Immigration and Nationality Act—a law that has already codified broad territorial rules of citizenship in statutory form. So the order conflicts with existing law and should be struck down.

Second—and this is the crux—he went on immediately to say: the Fourteenth Amendment itself does not prohibit Congress from restricting birthright citizenship by legislation. In other words, Congress could, without violating the Constitution, pass a new law abolishing birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and short-term residents.

What Kavanaugh means is: though the president cannot decide this unilaterally, so long as you go through Congress, you can lawfully abolish birthright citizenship. The right itself is not protected by the Constitution; you can take it away by ordinary legislation.

This amounts to handing conservatives a road map.

And because Kavanaugh declined to join Roberts’s majority opinion, on the fundamental question of whether the order itself is unconstitutional, the tally became 5-3-1:

• Five who found it unconstitutional: Roberts (Chief), Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, Jackson;
• Three who found it constitutional: Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch;
• Kavanaugh: finding only a statutory violation, abstaining on the constitutional question.

This means only five justices support the conclusion that “birthright citizenship is a constitutional right.” Should any one of them leave the bench in the coming years and be replaced by a conservative, this fragile majority would instantly flip to 5-4.

Demographically, Sotomayor is already in her seventies this year, and Roberts is seventy. If Trump gets one more nomination in his remaining term, this fragile majority will collapse in an instant. And at that point, birthright citizenship would no longer be a constitutionally guaranteed right.

For liberals, this is not a war already won. It is merely a position held for now.

Giving the Three Conservative Dissents a Fair Hearing

As a piece of commentary that tries to be responsible, I must also lay out the conservative minority’s voices clearly, and in as fair-minded a way as I can. Because these three justices’ arguments, too, rest on very serious, self-contained foundations of constitutional theory.

First, Justice Thomas, an exceptionally steadfast and diligent originalist. He wrote a 91-page dissent all on his own. His core argument is: you have all misread the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the Fourteenth Amendment. When Congress drafted the amendment in 1866, “subject to the jurisdiction” did not mean the simple, geographic, territorial jurisdiction the majority takes it to mean, but required a complete and exclusive political allegiance. In the common sense of the nineteenth century, he says, a citizen is not someone who happens to be passing through a piece of territory. A citizen is someone rooted there, who treats the place as a permanent home, who is willing to fight for it when war comes. Short-term visitors, foreign students, those who slip across the border—their political allegiance to their homelands has not been severed, so by what right do their children automatically become American citizens? Thomas also cites specific provisions of the Reconstruction statutes, which, in defining citizens, expressly excluded “persons subject to any foreign power.” This, he says, fully proves that the lawmakers of the day never intended to grant citizenship to temporary aliens who had not yet renounced their foreign allegiance.

I may disagree with Thomas’s conclusion, but I cannot deny that his reasoning is solid. The 91-page opinion draws on a vast body of nineteenth-century congressional debate records, contemporaneous legal dictionaries, and works of political philosophy. It furnishes ample ammunition to anyone who might, in the future, try to challenge birthright citizenship along originalist lines.

Next, Justice Alito, who wrote a separate dissent with a very specific focus: birth tourism. He offered a set of figures: each year some twenty thousand-plus foreign pregnant women fly to the United States specifically on tourist visas to give birth, precisely so that the child can obtain a U.S. passport. Alito argued that the majority’s judgment would greatly incentivize this behavior, and that this is a total departure from the framers’ original intent. He also raised the problem of dual nationality: if a baby automatically acquires the parents’ home-country nationality at birth, then where is his “exclusive allegiance” to the United States?

Finally, Justice Gorsuch, whose angle of dissent is more technical, resting on procedure. He argued that the plaintiffs had brought a “facial constitutional challenge,” and that under the standards of American constitutional litigation, for a facial challenge to succeed, you must prove that the statute is unconstitutional in all its applications. Gorsuch said that even granting the order is unconstitutional in some situations—say, for undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for a long time—can it nonetheless be lawfully applied to the children of people purely on tourist visas who stay two weeks and leave? If it can, then a facial challenge should not sweep away the entire order. He also criticized the majority for over-relying on the English common-law tradition, arguing that the American founding spirit has its own distinctive understanding of citizenship, and that you cannot simply import England’s tradition of territoriality and treat it as the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

Not the End, but Halftime

Having come this far, let me say something that may not be easy to hear: although the June 30 judgment was hailed by many as a “victory,” in my view it looks more like halftime. The fighting has merely shifted from the judicial battlefield to two others.

Battlefield one: peripheral strikes at the executive level.

After the judgment, Trump raged on Truth Social, calling it a “national disaster.” But the people around him reacted faster. Former border official Tom Homan immediately declared: since the Supreme Court won’t let us take the constitutional road, we’ll use executive means to hit birth tourism “double, triple.” How? For example, recommending that the State Department add a mandatory pregnancy-status review to the visa application form, requiring pregnant applicants to make an additional declaration; for example, sharply restricting the entry of pregnant women; some have even proposed limiting the “chain migration” quotas by which children who obtained citizenship by being born in the United States can later petition for green cards for relatives abroad. None of these touches the constitutional debate, but the effect is the same—they will make birth tourism extremely difficult.

Battlefield two: legislation.

This is the true significance of Kavanaugh’s time bomb. After the judgment came down, Trump quickly changed his tune, saying Congress “should begin today” legislating to abolish birthright citizenship. He stressed that this path requires neither a two-thirds majority in Congress nor ratification by three-quarters of the states—that is the path of a constitutional amendment—all you need is ordinary legislation. Conservative lawmakers like Senator Mike Lee and Representative Brian Babin have already stirred into motion; the birthright-citizenship bill they are pushing takes direct aim at amending that clause defining citizenship in the Immigration and Nationality Act.

But here lies an interesting legal predicament. As many constitutional scholars have pointed out: of the nine justices on the Supreme Court, five have already said clearly that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. If Congress passes an ordinary law to amend it, then once that law reaches the Supreme Court again, these five majority justices would in all likelihood still rule it unconstitutional.

So from a purely legal standpoint, the road Kavanaugh drew is actually a dead end—at least so long as the composition of the Supreme Court remains unchanged, it goes nowhere. But its real function is this: it tells conservatives that your enemy is not the Constitution itself, but these five people on the Supreme Court. Replace just one of them, and everything becomes possible.

And so a constitutional right—birthright citizenship—is transformed into a question of Supreme Court personnel.

Two Intertwined Threads

Here, let me offer a brief summary. Put all these cases together, and you can actually see two threads intertwining.

The first thread is the boundary of judicial power. CASA tells us that the power of a single federal district judge is being redefined—where once he could cover the entire country with a single injunction, now he cannot. To seek broad relief, you must go through the more complex procedure of a class action. This raising of the threshold is no accident; it is the carefully engineered result of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority—it markedly diminishes the ability of a single judge to block a president’s executive order.

The second thread is the nature of citizenship. The majority opinion in the final judgment held the line on the principle of territoriality established in 1866, and did not let this country return to an age defined by bloodline. But that fragile five-vote majority, hanging over everyone’s head, is a constant reminder of just how fragile this consensus is.

As I wrote this piece, I kept returning to the passage Justice Jackson wrote in her concurrence. The true aim of the Fourteenth Amendment, she said, is to forestall the creation of a permanent second-class citizen caste within American society. And if you allow a parent’s immigration status to draw a line through the child, you are burying that line in the very soil of this country.

Today, that line has been pulled out—for now. But whether it can be planted back in depends on every political choice yet to come, every judicial appointment, and every American’s answer to this question:

A child born on this land—by virtue of what, exactly, does he become an American?

Key Figures

• Donald Trump: Used Executive Order 14160 to try to restrict birthright citizenship.
• John Roberts: Wrote the majority opinion, confirming birthright citizenship while addressing the scope of relief.
• Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson: Defended the Fourteenth Amendment principle from different angles.
• Brett Kavanaugh: Left room for later disputes over procedure and remedies.

Key Cases and Concepts

• Executive Order 14160: The direct policy instrument by which the Trump administration challenged birthright citizenship.
• CASA: A procedural dispute over nationwide injunctions and the scope of enforcing the order.
• Class action: An important path for broad relief after nationwide injunctions were limited.
• The Fourteenth Amendment and birthright citizenship: The core constitutional rule governing citizenship for those born in the United States.

Related Episodes

• Podcast 03｜How Trump Challenges the Constitution: The Legal Battle over Birthright Citizenship : Introduces the background, Wong Kim Ark, and procedural starting point of the dispute.

This is the transcript of episode 05 of my podcast Reasoned Talk (议正言辞). Listen on Xiaoyuzhou or Apple Podcast . The episode is in Chinese; this transcript has been translated into English.

On February 26, 2026, the renowned jurist Gao Mingxuan, often called a grand master of Chinese criminal law, died of illness at the age of ninety-eight.

As one of the first generation of legal scholars trained after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Gao’s life was almost a living history of Chinese criminal law. He was the only scholar who participated throughout the drafting of the PRC’s first Criminal Law. He was China’s first doctoral supervisor in criminal law. He wrote the first legal monograph published after reform and opening up, and co-edited the first nationally unified criminal law textbook.

It is no exaggeration to say that behind every criminal judgment issued in China today, there is a theoretical foundation that Gao helped lay.

But the life of any discipline lies in reflection and renewal. Law is no exception. As we remember Gao’s historical contributions, Chinese criminal law is also standing at a point of deep transformation. In recent years, scholars have fought a long and consequential debate over two systems for understanding crime: the “four-element” theory and the “three-step” theory. On the surface, this is an argument among scholars in their studies. At its core, it concerns something much larger: how the state’s power to punish should be exercised, and how the rights of ordinary citizens should be protected.

Gao Mingxuan: A Living History of Chinese Criminal Law

To understand Gao Mingxuan’s contribution, we need to begin in May 1928 in Xiandie, a small fishing village in Yuhuan County, Zhejiang. Gao was born there into a family with both scholarly and legal traditions. During the Nationalist period, his father served as a judge in the Hangzhou District Court and later as a judge of the Zhejiang High Court. His uncle and elder brother also worked in law.

In that atmosphere, Gao developed a strong interest in law from childhood. When he was nine, the full-scale War of Resistance against Japan broke out. His father refused to serve the Japanese occupiers, resigned angrily, and returned home. During that period, he strictly supervised Gao’s studies.

After junior high school, Gao entered the prestigious Wenzhou High School. The school’s principal, the educator Jin Rongxuan, held a campus essay competition on the topic “How to Build a New Wenzhou High School.” The young Gao won first prize with his strong writing, making his name known across the school.

When Gao graduated from high school in 1947, his talent was already obvious. He was admitted to Fudan University, Wuhan University, and Zhejiang University at the same time. He chose Zhejiang University’s law department. Later, because of historical changes and university restructuring, he transferred to the law department of Peking University, and in 1951 entered the criminal law graduate program at Renmin University of China.

At Renmin, he met the Soviet legal experts who would influence him for life, including Bestrova and Damaheng, and received systematic training in criminal law. In 1953, Gao graduated with top marks and stayed on as a teacher. That was the beginning of more than seventy years in legal education.

The Long Road to Legislation: From Draft 22 to Draft 38

On the eve of the founding of the PRC, the central leadership decided, for political reasons, to completely abolish the old Nationalist legal system known as the “Six Codes” and build a socialist legal system from scratch. The decision broke with the old order, but it also meant that in the early years of the new state, punishment of crime often took place in a vacuum where there was no comprehensive criminal code to rely on. Courts handled cases largely through policy or through scattered special regulations such as rules on counterrevolutionary crimes and corruption.

In September 1954, the PRC’s first Constitution was promulgated, and the creation of a unified Criminal Law finally went onto the agenda. In October, the General Office of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress formed a criminal law drafting group under the direct leadership of the Party Secretariat. Gao, who had been teaching for only a year, was selected for the team because of his academic strength. He was only twenty-six, the youngest member of the group.

He could not have known that the work would take twenty-five years.

The drafting process was a long and exhausting journey. The team worked day and night, collected cases widely, and studied domestic and foreign legislation. By June 1957, it had produced Draft 22. In October 1963, it completed Draft 33. That draft had even been reviewed and approved by the Politburo Standing Committee, and final enactment seemed close.

Then came the Cultural Revolution, and China’s legal construction fell into more than a decade of stagnation. Drafting was halted. Renmin University itself stopped operating for a time. Gao was sent down for labor and was later assigned to Beijing Medical College, where he remained for eight years. Through those long, bitter years, he preserved the materials and documents from the criminal law drafting process, waiting for the return of legal order.

At last, in October 1978, as the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee approached, the state put forward the principle that laws must be available, obeyed, strictly enforced, and violations punished. Criminal law legislation entered its third launch. The drafting group quickly restarted work based on Draft 33. After repeated revisions and intense debate, the historic Draft 38 took shape.

On July 1, 1979, the Second Session of the Fifth National People’s Congress adopted the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China. Gao was overwhelmed with emotion. He later recalled that this ended the PRC’s thirty-year history without a criminal code, and that criminal judgments without cited legal provisions had finally become a thing of the past.

From a twenty-six-year-old young scholar to a middle-aged man with gray at his temples, Gao poured the best years of his life into those thirty-eight drafts.

To preserve that precious historical memory, Gao published The Gestation and Birth of the Criminal Law in 1981. The book recorded in detail the disputes and revisions from Draft 22 to Draft 38. It was also China’s first legal academic monograph after reform and opening up, and it sold out in less than a month.

The Establishment of the Four-Element Theory

Once China had a criminal code, the next question was practical and fundamental: what logic should courts use to decide whether a person has committed a crime? This brings us to the most central and contested theory in criminal law: the theory of the constitution of crime.

As mentioned above, the early PRC abolished the old legal order and built legal education along a path of learning from the Soviet Union. In the early 1950s, Soviet experts such as Bestrova came to Chinese law schools. What they brought with them was the four-element theory, then dominant in Soviet criminal law.

To help people quickly grasp the logic of conviction during that formative period, the criminal law teaching and research section at Renmin University’s law department collectively wrote Lectures on the General Part of Criminal Law in 1957. The book introduced the four-element theory and marked its landing in China.

By 1982, in order to meet the needs of the restored college entrance examination and the rebuilding of legal institutions, the Ministry of Justice organized leading scholars to write a unified national textbook. Gao Mingxuan and Professor Ma Kechang of Wuhan University, then known together as “Gao in the North and Ma in the South,” co-edited the first national textbook on criminal law. With a total circulation of nearly two million copies, it firmly established the four-element theory as the basic framework of Chinese criminal law.

So what is the four-element theory? It holds that for conduct to constitute a crime, four puzzle pieces must all be present at the same time:

First, the object of the crime: what social relation the act infringes. A homicide violates another person’s right to life; theft violates property rights.

Second, the objective aspect of the crime: the external manifestation of the criminal activity. What did the actor do? What result occurred? Was there causation between act and result?

Third, the subject of the crime: whether the person who committed the act has reached the legal age of criminal responsibility and has normal mental capacity.

Fourth, the subjective aspect of the crime: the actor’s mental state. Was the act intentional or negligent?

Under this theory, the four elements stand or fall together. In deciding a case, the judge effectively draws a cross in the mind and fills in each element. Only when all four are complete and fit together tightly can a crime be established.

This way of thinking, emphasizing the unity of subjective and objective elements, is intuitive, clear, and easy to learn. At a time when many judicial workers had limited legal training, the four-element theory worked like a sharp and efficient knife. It helped Chinese courts sort out facts and punish crime, and it made a real historical contribution.

From Four Elements to Three Steps: A Century-Level Debate

After reform and opening up began in 1978, China’s social structure, economic model, and intellectual life all changed dramatically. The planned economy gradually gave way to a market economy. Social conflicts and forms of crime became more complex, including new kinds of economic and financial crime.

In that context, the 1979 Criminal Law, with only 130 crimes, began to look inadequate. Between 1981 and 1996, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress issued more than twenty separate criminal laws and accessory criminal provisions to patch the gaps. In 1997, the state decided to comprehensively revise the Criminal Law. Gao participated throughout that revision as a legislative expert.

The 1997 Criminal Law greatly expanded the list of crimes and adjusted the structure of punishment. More importantly, it expressly established three basic principles: legality, equality before criminal law, and proportionality between crime, responsibility, and punishment. Gao spent his life defending the principle of legality: no crime by analogy, and no crime without an express legal provision. The final establishment of that principle marked the true modernization of Chinese criminal law and gave Chinese criminal law a stronger basis for engagement with the world.

Improved legislation created fertile ground for theory. In the 1990s, as Chinese legal education opened up, many younger scholars, including Chen Xingliang, Zhou Guangquan, and Zhang Mingkai, studied in Germany, Japan, and other major civil law jurisdictions. They translated and introduced a large body of German and Japanese criminal law literature.

These scholars brought back a very different logic of conviction: the German-derived three-step theory. Under this theory, a judge’s reasoning should not be a flat puzzle, as in the four-element model. It should be more like a funnel with three strict filters.

The three steps are:

First, fulfillment of the statutory elements: this is a factual judgment. The judge asks only whether the actor’s conduct and result match the description in the criminal statute. If you stab someone to death with a knife, your conduct satisfies the statutory description of intentional homicide.

Second, unlawfulness: this is an objective legal value judgment. Even if the conduct fits the statutory description, does the overall legal order provide a justification? If there is a justification, such as self-defense or necessity, the conduct is legally permitted and therefore not unlawful.

Third, culpability: this asks whether the actor can be personally blamed. If the conduct fits the statute and lacks justification, the judge must still ask whether moral and legal blame can be attached to the actor. A person with severe mental illness who lacks capacity, or a person acting under coercion, may not be culpable and therefore may not be criminally liable.

The introduction of the three-step theory landed in Chinese criminal law like a depth charge. Scholars such as Chen Xingliang argued openly for a transformation of criminal law knowledge: a move away from the Soviet model and toward the German-Japanese layered system. They criticized the four-element model for failing to distinguish clearly between “unlawfulness” and “responsibility.” In their view, without a progressive filtering structure, judges facing difficult cases are left to make life-and-death decisions through an inexpressible kind of intuition.

Traditional scholars struck back. They argued that the four-element theory had been refined through decades of Chinese judicial practice and had developed deep institutional fit. Starting over would confuse grassroots judicial workers. They also argued that it is absurd to blame the four-element theory alone for weak human rights protection. Human rights depend on fair criminal procedure and concrete institutional implementation, not merely on conceptual games.

The debate reached a peak in the 2009 National Judicial Examination. Some of that year’s criminal law questions clearly leaned toward three-step reasoning in classifying cases. The legal academy was shaken. Some scholars even joked that it was a “war of the gods” in Chinese criminal law.

Four Elements vs. Three Steps: A Deeper Look at the Logic

At this point, a reader may ask: are the four-element and three-step theories not both just ways of breaking down the conditions of crime? One has four baskets, the other has three filters. What is the real difference? Why are so many leading younger scholars so convinced that the three-step model is logically tighter?

To answer that technical question, we need to look at the logic more closely.

In simple cases, any theory looks smooth. To test whether a theory is rigorous, we need to pressure it with hard borderline cases. That is exactly how Chen Xingliang and others exposed what they saw as the logical weaknesses of the four-element model.

Scenario One: The Problem of Self-Defense

Suppose you are walking down the street and an attacker tries to kill you with a knife. To save yourself, you seize the knife and kill him. In law, this is self-defense and does not constitute a crime.

Under the four-element theory, the case feels awkward. If the judge says you are not guilty, which element is missing? Objectively, someone died. You are a normal adult. Subjectively, you intended to kill him in order to survive. So what is absent? Traditional textbooks can only explain this by saying that social harmfulness is excluded, then build a separate house next to the four-element structure called “grounds excluding crime” and place self-defense there. Logically, the structure is broken.

Under the three-step theory, the reasoning is much smoother. Your act satisfies the statutory elements of homicide. Factually, the killing occurred. But at the second step, unlawfulness, the law asks whether there is a justification. Because you were defending yourself against an unlawful attack, the legal order encourages and permits your act. Unlawfulness is blocked. Because there is no unlawfulness, there is no crime. The loop closes cleanly.

Scenario Two: Instigation and Juvenile Offenders

Another classic example shows the precision of the three-step model. Suppose an adult, Zhang San, instigates a thirteen-year-old, Li Si, to commit burglary.

Under the four-element theory, a person must satisfy the object, objective aspect, subject, and subjective aspect of a crime all at once. But Li Si is thirteen and has not reached the legal age of criminal responsibility, so he lacks the proper criminal subject element. He therefore does not constitute a crime.

Here comes the problem: if Li Si has not committed a crime, to whom is Zhang San’s status as instigator attached? To convict Zhang San, traditional theory often has to bypass joint crime and introduce the concept of an indirect principal offender, treating Li Si as Zhang San’s tool without independent agency. That patch feels cramped. The deeper reason is that in the four-element theory, all elements are mixed together to explain social harmfulness. Unlawfulness and responsibility are not separated, which creates a classification problem.

The three-step theory solves this neatly because it clearly separates unlawfulness from culpability.

Li Si committed burglary in the factual sense and satisfied the first step: the statutory elements. He had no lawful justification such as self-defense, so the second step, unlawfulness, is also satisfied. In legal evaluation, what Li Si did was unlawful and wrong.

For accomplice liability, the three-step theory holds that it is enough for the instigated person to commit an unlawful act. The instigated person does not have to be punishable in the end. Since Li Si’s conduct has crossed the first two steps and is unlawful, Zhang San, as the instigator, can naturally be held liable.

Only at the third step does the judge examine Li Si’s personal responsibility. Because Li Si is only thirteen and lacks mature capacity, the law does not blame him subjectively. Li Si is not punished, but Zhang San, as an adult with full responsibility, must bear criminal liability for instigation.

This is the point. The three-step theory separates “the act is wrong” from “this person can be blamed.” The act is wrong, so the instigator is punished. The child who performed the act may be excused, so the child is not punished. That layered movement from objective unlawfulness to subjective culpability is why many criminal law scholars argue for the three-step model.

A Historical Monument That Cannot Be Erased

Still, when discussing theoretical change, we must not fall into historical nihilism. Whatever criticism the four-element theory faces today, the historical monument built by Gao Mingxuan and the first generation of Chinese criminal law scholars cannot be erased by anyone or any era.

In the early PRC, when legal resources were desperately scarce and legal nihilism was widespread, Gao’s generation built the first shelter for China’s criminal justice system. The four-element theory has logical flaws, but over decades it guided millions of cases through its simplicity and usability. It contributed greatly to maintaining social order and building legal authority.

Gao’s lifetime of work also won him the highest recognition at home and abroad. In April 2015, for his outstanding contribution to criminal law, he received the Cesare Beccaria Award from the International Society of Social Defence, an honor often called the Nobel Prize of criminal law. Gao became the first Asian scholar to receive it. In 2019, on the eve of the seventieth anniversary of the PRC, the state awarded him the national honorary title of People’s Educator, making him the only representative from the legal academy to hold that honor so far.

Academic progress is possible because the shoulders of earlier generations are broad enough. What is most admirable about Gao is not only his body of work, but also his openness as a scholar and his humane spirit as an educator.

Since becoming China’s first doctoral supervisor in criminal law in 1984, he trained more than sixty doctoral students. Many leading scholars who later criticized the four-element theory and called for a transformation of legal knowledge, including Chen Xingliang, were Gao’s own students.

Facing fundamental challenges from younger scholars, Gao never used authority to suppress them. He once advised young teachers: when teaching undergraduates, focus on the basics and avoid controversial issues at first; when teaching graduate students, explain both sides of the debate fully; when teaching doctoral students, discuss the most advanced questions and encourage them to think for themselves. He lived by the idea that students need not be inferior to the teacher. That tolerance for dissent and encouragement of innovation is one of the forces that has allowed Chinese legal scholarship to keep renewing itself.

Looking Ahead

From the historical moment of Gao Mingxuan’s death, the future direction of Chinese criminal law is already quite clear.

First, the theoretical system will move from closure toward broad compatibility. On reform of the theory of crime, scholars have proposed several paths: reordering the four elements, adding or subtracting elements from the existing model, or starting over with a full three-step structure. The future Chinese theory is unlikely to be a pure copy of the German-Japanese model, and it will not simply return to the old Soviet path. More likely, it will draw deeply on Chinese judicial practice, integrate the existing elements under the statutory-element analysis, and build a new layered model that combines logical rigor with Chinese institutional reality: fulfillment of elements, unlawfulness, and criminal punishability.

Gao himself advised younger scholars to value international cooperation and exchange in criminal law: learn from others’ strengths, but also have the courage to explain China’s own experience.

Second, the philosophy of punishment will complete its shift from social defense alone toward human rights protection. As legal civilization advances, criminal law should not only be the sword that punishes crime. It should also be a constitutional charter that limits state power and protects citizens. By introducing the strict logical filters of layered theory, future judgments can better prevent abuse of punishment and ensure that every decision affecting liberty and life can withstand serious logical and ethical scrutiny.

Finally, legislation and amendment will become more refined in the face of new challenges. As Gao pointed out in his later years, China’s criminal law should continue to be revised through criminal law amendments, steadily improving the coherence of the system and the technique of legislation. Whether dealing with complex cybercrime or legal gaps created by artificial intelligence, theory must provide more precise tools.

Gao Mingxuan has left us, taking with him an age of passion, hardship, and pioneering labor. But the first stone of the rule of law that he helped lay, and the scientific spirit with which he encouraged reform and pursued truth, will continue to guide later generations of Chinese legal professionals.

The best way to remember Gao is not to seal his doctrines in a shrine. It is to inherit his courage, keep pushing the transformation and improvement of Chinese rule of law, and build China’s legal structure more firmly with both rigorous logic and deep human concern.

Key Figures

• Gao Mingxuan: Chinese criminal-law scholar who helped draft the PRC’s first Criminal Law and long defended the four-element theory.
• Ma Kechang, Chen Xingliang, and Zhang Mingkai: Important Chinese criminal-law scholars associated with the discussion of the three-tier theory.
• Cesare Beccaria: A key source of modern criminal-law thought and the Enlightenment tradition of limiting state penal power.

Key Cases and Concepts

• The 1979 Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China: The PRC’s first criminal code and the institutional background of this episode.
• Four-element theory of crime: The traditional framework judging crime through object, objective aspect, subject, and subjective aspect.
• Three-tier theory of crime: A layered analysis of Tatbestandsmäßigkeit, unlawfulness, and culpability.
• Legality and human-rights protection: The deeper issue of boundaries on state penal power.

Related Episodes

• Podcast 09｜The End of the Chinese Legal Tradition: How Late-Qing Reforms Reshaped the Rule of Law : Adds historical context for the development of modern Chinese criminal law.

The language was unmistakably Trumpian. He called Warsh a “central casting” choice and predicted that the former Fed governor would become a “great, maybe even the greatest” Fed chair in history.

The nomination marks the end of the Jerome Powell era. It also suggests that the century-old Federal Reserve is about to enter a period of sharp regime change. But this is not a calm handoff surrounded by flowers and applause. At the very moment the nomination was announced, the Fed’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue was sitting at the center of an unprecedented legal storm. The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Powell was still underway, and allegations of cost overruns in the building renovation hung over Fed officials like a blade.

Kevin Warsh, once a Wall Street golden boy, the youngest governor in Federal Reserve history, and the son-in-law of the Estee Lauder family, now returns from Stanford’s academic world to the arena of power. Trump expects from him two things at once: lower interest rates and deregulation.

The world is left asking: how will a former inflation hawk steer the flagship of the global financial system in an age of populism, geopolitical shocks, and heavy debt? Is his rise the beginning of the Fed’s return to tradition, or the prelude to the final loss of its independence?

The Power Game Behind the Fed Chair

To understand how brutal this fight has become, we first need to look at the real weight of the Fed chair. In the modern global economy, the chair of the Federal Reserve is often considered the second most powerful person after the president of the United States. In some dimensions, the chair’s influence over markets is even greater.

The Fed is not merely America’s central bank. It is the heart of the dollar system. The federal funds rate it sets is the anchor for global asset pricing. The size of its balance sheet determines how loose or tight dollar liquidity is around the world. From Tokyo’s stock market to London’s bond desks, from Brazilian exporters to Shanghai property developers, every tremor in the global economy is connected to decisions made inside the Eccles Building in Washington.

The Fed does not only shape the U.S. economy. Through the dollar system, it moves global equities, bonds, currencies, and credit.

The power structure of the office is complicated by design. The Fed chair is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate for a four-year term. But that is only half the story. The chair must also be one of the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board, and governors serve fourteen-year terms. This dual-track design was meant to protect the Fed’s independence and prevent a president from controlling monetary policy by rapidly replacing governors. In the political reality of 2026, however, this design has become a trigger for constitutional conflict.

Powell and Trump: from “my pick” to “enemy of the country”

The feud between Jerome Powell and Donald Trump reads like a modern political thriller. It did not begin today. It had years of painful buildup.

In 2017, Trump broke with decades of custom by declining to reappoint Janet Yellen. Instead, he chose Powell, a Republican lawyer rather than an economics PhD, hoping he would keep rates low and help power the economy during Trump’s term. But Powell’s technocratic instincts soon infuriated him. Faced with the risk of overheating, Powell insisted on gradual rate hikes. To Trump, that looked like betrayal.

During Trump’s first term, he shattered the old taboo against presidents publicly commenting on monetary policy. He attacked Powell on Twitter, calling him stubborn and accusing him of lacking “guts,” “sense,” and “vision.” The attacks reached a peak during the 2024 campaign, when Trump asked on social media: “Who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?”

President Biden’s 2022 renomination of Powell temporarily gave the Fed a layer of political protection. But after Trump won the 2024 election and returned to the White House, a showdown became inevitable. By 2025, with inflation recurring and Trump eager for stimulus, the White House had run out of patience. Trump declared that the Fed chair should be someone who could “talk” to the president, not a bureaucrat hiding behind data.

Renovation-gate: a staged palace coup

Earlier attacks were mostly verbal. The “renovation-gate” crisis of late 2025 and early 2026 moved the fight into a much harsher legal phase.

The issue was not monetary policy. It was the renovation of the Fed’s headquarters.

The Eccles Building and the nearby Martin Building had aged visibly since their construction in the 1930s. The Fed launched a major renovation project to remove asbestos, update outdated mechanical systems, and improve security. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have been an administrative matter. The Trump administration saw something else: a weapon to use against Powell.

Trump personally visited the site and confronted Powell in front of cameras. The awkward scene was recorded: Trump pointed at the construction site and challenged Powell on cost overruns, while Powell shook his head and tried to explain that the numbers in the president’s hand confused the completed Martin Building with the still-underway Eccles project.

The situation escalated quickly. The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into Powell, accusing him of concealing the true state of the renovation project in congressional testimony. Washington’s legal and financial communities were stunned. Powell responded with a sharply worded video statement, calling the investigation “unprecedented” and saying that the threat of criminal charges was the consequence of the Fed setting rates based on its best judgment rather than presidential preference.

It was against this near-constitutional crisis that the search for a successor accelerated. Trump needed someone who could replace Powell, reassure markets, carry out his will, and still survive Senate scrutiny.

Why Kevin Warsh?

The shortlist included Kevin Warsh, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett, Fed governor Christopher Waller, and BlackRock executive Rick Rieder. The press jokingly called it “the battle of the two Kevins.”

Warsh won in the end. That was no accident. He offered Trump the best balance across several demands.

First, Warsh is handsome, wealthy, polished, and exactly the kind of “central casting” figure Trump likes in senior office. More importantly, he is married into the Estee Lauder family. His father-in-law, Ronald Lauder, has been Trump’s friend and donor for decades. In Trump’s world, that kind of personal connection often matters more than a doctorate.

Second, compared with Hassett, Warsh has deeper roots on Wall Street. He was a Morgan Stanley partner and played a meaningful role during the 2008 financial crisis. Markets tend to see him as a “safe” choice: politically compliant, perhaps, but not someone likely to crash the dollar.

Third, Warsh used to be a famous inflation hawk, which seems to clash with Trump’s demand for low rates. In recent years, however, he has successfully recast his economic philosophy around a new argument: use supply-side reform and deregulation to suppress inflation, thereby creating room for rate cuts. That logic fits Trump’s political wish perfectly: low rates and high growth at the same time.

Kevin Warsh: From Wall Street to the Center of Power

The elite path: Stanford, Harvard, and Morgan Stanley

Warsh’s biography is almost a textbook version of the American elite track. Born on April 13, 1970, into a wealthy family in upstate New York, he studied public policy at Stanford, focusing on economics and statistics, and then earned a law degree from Harvard. That West Coast plus Ivy League background gave him the ability to move across academia, law, and business.

In 1995, at just twenty-five, Warsh joined Morgan Stanley’s mergers and acquisitions division. In that top-tier Wall Street arena, he quickly showed a sharp business instinct. Over seven years as an investment banker, he worked on major deals across manufacturing, technology, and financial services.

That experience did more than make him rich. It taught him how markets work at a granular level: how banks operate, how credit flows, and what happens when liquidity dries up. That set him apart from many central bankers who had spent their entire lives on university campuses.

Warsh has moved through investment banking, the White House, the Fed, and academia. That is one reason he is seen as a market-friendly nominee.

The White House and the youngest Fed governor

In 2002, Warsh passed through the revolving door into the George W. Bush administration as a special assistant at the National Economic Council. There, he became one of Bush’s key advisers on capital markets and learned how to operate where politics and economics meet.

In 2006, Bush nominated him to the Federal Reserve Board. At thirty-five, Warsh became the youngest governor in the Fed’s history.

Many observers wondered whether this young lawyer could handle such a technical institution. The Board was usually the home of older economics professors. History soon gave Warsh a chance to prove himself, and in the harshest possible way.

Trial by fire: the 2008 financial crisis

Just two years after Warsh joined the Fed, the subprime crisis erupted and the global financial system came close to collapse. In that moment, Fed chair Ben Bernanke discovered that the young former banker beside him had something many academic officials lacked: a direct sense of Wall Street fear and a deep network of contacts.

Warsh became a key link between Bernanke and Wall Street CEOs. In March 2008, he was directly involved in the emergency negotiations for JPMorgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, trying to stop systemic risk from spreading before the weekend ended.

In September 2008, during the fateful weekend that decided Lehman Brothers’ future, Warsh sat in the New York Fed’s war room as the Fed’s eyes and ears. He lived through the late-night meetings that would shape the fate of countless people. He had to explain to Bernanke why a complex derivative could bring down a bank, while also communicating the Fed’s intentions to panicked markets.

Warsh showed unusual calm for his age. He supported the Fed’s first round of quantitative easing, seeing it as an emergency measure when markets had stopped functioning: break the glass and pull out the fire extinguisher.

Breaking with quantitative easing

Once the emergency phase passed, however, Warsh’s honeymoon with Bernanke ended. When the Fed launched QE2 in 2010, his position changed sharply.

He published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and raised objections inside the Fed. He worried that prolonged unconventional monetary policy would bring serious side effects:

1. Misallocation of capital: cheap money would flow into speculation rather than productive investment.
2. Loss of fiscal discipline: central bank purchases of government debt would encourage unchecked borrowing.
3. Inflation risk: he warned that the main risk still lay with inflation and doubted the Fed’s confidence in its ability to manage expectations.

In 2011, Warsh resigned from the Fed Board before the end of his term. The move seemed aloof at the time, but it later helped him build a reputation among conservative economists as a principled hawk. That reputation became an important piece of political capital in his nomination.

A marriage into power

Any account of Warsh’s rise has to mention his marriage. In 2002, he married Jane Lauder, heiress to the Estee Lauder cosmetics empire and now global brand president of Clinique. Her personal fortune is measured in billions.

The marriage brought Warsh into a powerful social and political network. Jane’s father, Ronald Lauder, is not only president of the World Jewish Congress but also a longtime friend and major donor to Donald Trump. Some reports have even said that Trump’s strange idea of buying Greenland was originally inspired by Ronald Lauder.

In Trump’s view of appointments, personal trust often outranks professional credentials. As biographer Tim O’Brien has put it, connections to powerful or famous people matter deeply to Trump. Ronald Lauder’s quiet advocacy surely helped Warsh in this contest. To Trump, Warsh is not merely a technocrat. He belongs, in some sense, to the circle.

Warsh’s Economics: A Blend of Old and New

Warsh is not a traditional Keynesian, nor is he a pure monetarist. His thinking mixes Wall Street pragmatism, old-style fiscal conservatism, and real enthusiasm for new technology. From his recent comments, we can sketch the outline of what might be called Warshism.

Point one: the Fed needs regime change

Warsh’s most radical view is his criticism of the Fed itself. He believes the institution has suffered from “institutional drift”: it has repeatedly misjudged inflation and expanded into areas such as climate change and social equity that he thinks lie outside its proper role.

His phrase “regime change” refers not only to personnel but also to a reset of the policy framework. He has criticized Powell’s “data dependence” as driving by looking in the rearview mirror. In his view, the Fed should be more forward-looking, using theory and market signals to anticipate the economy rather than waiting for lagging employment data. He also thinks the Fed should focus more narrowly on price stability, pay less attention to short-term employment swings, and avoid deliberately creating unemployment just to bring down inflation.

Point two: inflation is a choice, and AI is the cure

Unlike mainstream economists who place much of the blame for inflation on supply chains or geopolitics, Warsh insists that “inflation is a policy choice.” Its roots, in his view, are excessive money creation by the Fed and excessive spending by the government.

To reconcile that view with Trump’s demand for rate cuts, Warsh introduces a new variable: artificial intelligence. He is extremely bullish on the productivity revolution AI may bring, seeing it as a powerful disinflationary force.

His logic is simple. AI will sharply raise productivity and reduce the cost of goods and services. Even if monetary policy is relatively loose, a supply-side boom could keep inflation down. This gives him a theoretical basis for supporting lower rates without triggering immediate inflation panic.

In Warsh’s story, AI is a key variable: productivity growth is expected to offset inflationary pressure.

Point three: ally of crypto, enemy of CBDCs

Warsh’s view of digital assets is sharply divided, which has made him popular in parts of the crypto community.

He has said clearly that Bitcoin does not make him uncomfortable. He sees it as an important asset that can provide signals to policymakers and even serve as a useful check on the dollar system. At the same time, he strongly opposes a retail central bank digital currency, calling it a financial panopticon that would allow excessive government surveillance and crowd out private innovation. He prefers regulated private stablecoins as the path for digitizing the dollar, rather than direct government issuance.

Point four: shadow banking and deregulation

Despite his Wall Street background, Warsh has been critical of too-big-to-fail banking. He has argued for stronger market discipline so banks bear the cost of their own risks rather than relying on government bailouts.

In the current political environment, however, he appears more inclined to loosen constraints on traditional banks, such as the capital requirements under the Basel III endgame, while watching the disorderly growth of shadow banking and private credit. His deeper argument is that excessive bank regulation may simply push risk into less transparent parts of the financial system. That is the logic behind his deregulatory instinct.

The World Economy in the Warsh Era

With Warsh’s nomination now settled, global attention turns to what comes next. If he is confirmed by the Senate and takes over the Fed in May, or perhaps earlier, what will the world economy face?

A new monetary mix: tighter assets, looser rates

Warsh may try a bold policy combination: quantitative tightening plus rate cuts.

He has long criticized the Fed’s seven-trillion-dollar balance sheet as a source of market distortion. He may accelerate balance sheet reduction and drain excess liquidity. In exchange, the inflation room created by shrinking the balance sheet could be used to satisfy Trump’s demand for rate cuts.

This strategy attempts to balance hawks, through balance sheet tightening, and doves, through lower rates. But the operation is extremely difficult. If the balance sheet shrinks too fast, the repo market could freeze, as it did in September 2019. If rates fall too quickly, inflation could reignite.

QT plus rate cuts appears to satisfy both sides, but in practice it requires precise control over liquidity and inflation expectations.

The Warsh paradox for the dollar

Trump has long complained that a strong dollar hurts exports. Yet Warsh’s appointment may push the dollar higher in the short run.

Markets believe that even if Warsh is politically obedient, he still carries a hawkish instinct. If the U.S. economy outperforms Europe and China under the combined stimulus of AI and deregulation, capital may continue flowing back into America. A strong dollar would keep squeezing emerging markets and increase their debt-servicing pressure.

But if Trump intervenes directly in the exchange rate, Warsh may have to coordinate with the Treasury through verbal intervention or even joint action. That would be a major test of his independence.

Powell as shadow chair

One huge uncertainty remains: will Jerome Powell leave? His term as chair ends in May 2026, but his term as a governor runs until January 2028. If anger over the Justice Department investigation leads Powell to remain on the Board, the Fed could enter an unprecedented period of dual power.

There is a historical echo. In 1948, Marriner Eccles stayed on the Board after President Truman removed him as chair, and later helped push through the famous Fed-Treasury Accord, which established the Fed’s independence. Powell, if he remains, could become a de facto opposition leader inside the FOMC, using his influence and vote to check Warsh’s more radical policies. That would make Fed decision-making more gridlocked and markets more uncertain.

A chain reaction among global central banks

European central bankers have already voiced support for Powell and stressed the importance of central bank independence. Facing a more politicized Fed, Christine Lagarde and Andrew Bailey may be forced to run more independent monetary policies to protect their economies from U.S. spillovers, including imported inflation.

At the same time, Warsh’s sympathy for trade protectionism may accelerate financial decoupling between China and the United States. If the Fed cooperates with trade-war goals and exchange-rate policy, China may speed up renminbi internationalization and asset diversification to reduce reliance on the dollar system.

Dancing on a Wire

Kevin Warsh’s nomination is more than a personnel change. It marks the fading of the central bank era we learned about in textbooks, one built around technical neutrality and political independence. Warsh represents a new spirit of the age: deep entanglement between markets and politics, and a strange fusion of elite networks with populist demands.

He will be dancing on a wire. On one side is the president in the Oval Office demanding lower rates, faster. On the other is the trillion-dollar bond market, always ready to punish policy mistakes. Beneath him is a world economy being reshaped by the AI revolution, debt pressure, and geopolitical fragmentation.

If he succeeds, he may become, as Trump says, a great chair who restores American economic dynamism and proves that supply-side reform can defeat inflation. If he fails, the Fed’s century of credibility could be damaged in his hands, and the world economy may have to face a chaotic age without a monetary anchor.

For Kevin Warsh, the real test has only just begun.

Background and preparation for the meeting

The high-stakes meeting took place at a time when Ukraine’s future fate hangs in the balance, and all parties have high hopes for it. The main purpose of Zelensky’s trip is to sign an agreement with the United States on rare earth minerals, which is considered to be a condition for continued military assistance from the United States [2]. The meeting follows weeks of intense negotiations between U.S. allies trying to reconcile differences between Washington and Kyiv. French President Macron and British Prime Minister Starmer have both met with Trump and tried to persuade him to have constructive dialogue with Zelensky [2]. These diplomatic efforts have adopted a flattering tactic, with Macron recalling Trump’s visit to Notre Dame and Starmer hand-delivering a letter from King Charles.[2]

A key background for this meeting is that the Trump administration has previously held peace negotiations with Russia, but excluded Ukraine and Europe [3]. This unilateral action triggered strong dissatisfaction in Kyiv and further aggravated tensions between the two parties. Before Zelensky arrived at the White House, his team was forced to formally agree to Trump’s plan on Wednesday, which finally led to Friday’s meeting [1]. According to the Associated Press, U.S. officials have made it clear that Trump will not meet with Zelensky unless he is willing to accept a negotiation plan with Russia.[1]

Violent clashes at White House meeting

From peaceful beginnings to violent quarrels

The atmosphere at the beginning of the meeting was relatively friendly, and it was reported that within the first half hour, Trump and Zelensky expressed politeness and respect to each other.[1] Trump even expressed his willingness to continue to provide some military assistance to Ukraine until a lasting peace agreement with Russia is reached [1]. However, the situation took a turn for the worse when Zelensky expressed distrust of Putin’s ceasefire commitment[1].

The key turning point for the deterioration of the situation occurred in Zelensky’s speech. He directly called Putin a “murderer and terrorist” and expressed the hope that Trump could stop Putin with a tough stance [3]. This comment obviously offended Trump, who believed that Zelensky’s “hatred” for Putin was an obstacle to peace negotiations[1][3]. When Zelensky tried to explain that Russia had repeatedly violated the ceasefire agreement, Vice President Vance intervened and scolded him for “it is disrespectful to try to argue in the Oval Office in front of the American media”[1][3].

Trump and Vance’s accusations

Trump issued a stern warning to Zelensky, directly threatening: “You either make a deal or we withdraw. If we withdraw, you fight on your own. I don’t think the outcome will be very good, but you will fight."[3] He further accused Zelensky of “risking World War III” and said that Zelensky’s behavior was “very disrespectful to a country that supports you more than many people think it should”[1][3].During the debate, Trump exaggerated the amount of U.S. aid to Ukraine, claiming that it had provided $350 billion, while the actual figure was less than $200 billion[2]. He also claimed that without US military support, the conflict could have ended “within two weeks”[2]. Trump made it clear that he was in the “middle ground” and had no “alignment” with Putin, but he was dissatisfied with Zelensky’s hatred of Putin and believed that this made it difficult for him to broker an agreement[1][3].

Vance became more aggressive in the argument, asking Zelensky if he had ever said “thank you” once.[3] He pointed out that Ukraine is “forcibly recruiting frontline soldiers because you have a manpower problem” and said that Zelensky “should thank the president for trying to end this conflict” [3]. Vance also suggested that the previous Biden administration’s condemnation of Putin only prolonged the conflict [2].

Zelensky’s response

Zelensky has tried to defend himself in the face of these accusations. When Vance mentioned “diplomacy” as the path to peace, Zelensky asked: “What kind of diplomacy are you referring to, JD?” and cited examples of Russia’s past ceasefire violations [1]. He also reminded Vance that Putin had violated the agreement during the Trump administration in 2019[2].

When accused of lacking gratitude, Zelensky tried to express more gratitude, but was interrupted by Trump.[2] In a particularly poignant moment, Zelensky said to Vance: “First of all, during the war, everyone had problems, including you. But you had beautiful oceans that you can’t feel now, but you will in the future."[3] This comment immediately triggered a counterattack from Trump: “Don’t tell us what we will feel. We are trying to solve the problem. Don’t tell us what we will feel."[3]

Consequences and Impact of Conflict

Immediate Consequences

This fierce conflict led to the cancellation of the planned joint press conference and the signing of the economic agreement [1][3]. After the meeting, Trump asked Zelensky to leave the White House and issued a brief but stern statement on social media: “I have determined that President Zelensky is not ready to accept peace if the United States participates because he believes that our participation will give him a huge advantage in negotiations. I don’t want an advantage, I want peace. He disrespected the United States of America in the precious Oval Office. When he is ready to accept peace, he can come back."[2][3]

Zelensky later appeared on Fox News in an attempt to repair damaged relations, saying that public disagreements with Trump and Vance “would be unhelpful to both parties."[1] However, he insisted that Ukraine would not enter into peace discussions with Russia without receiving security guarantees against future aggression[1]. “This is a very sensitive issue for our people,” Zelensky added. “They just want to hear that the United States is on our side, not Russia, but us. That’s all."[1]

Impact on Ukraine’s future

This diplomatic conflict seriously jeopardizes the future of U.S.-Ukraine relations and Kyiv’s ability to defend itself against Russian aggression [1]. Zelensky admitted in a Fox News interview that without the support of the United States, the situation in Ukraine will become more “difficult”[1]. The incident shows that the Trump administration’s support for Ukraine is rapidly waning, which may leave Ukraine in a weaker position in future peace negotiations.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a defense advocate and a staunch supporter of Trump, had previously warned Zelensky to “not be fooled” when meeting with Trump [1]. The suggestion highlights concerns among many U.S. politicians about Trump’s diplomatic style and worries about Ukraine’s future prospects.## Changes in Diplomatic Relations and Geopolitical Significance

Trump’s shift in foreign policy

This conflict clearly demonstrates how Trump is shifting U.S. foreign policy toward his “America First” philosophy, far exceeding the policies of his first term.[1] The unexpected clash has been described as one of the most heated public disputes between global leaders in the Oval Office in recent times, with traditional diplomatic protocol devolving into accusations, shouting and apparent contempt.[1]

The incident occurred a week after U.S. allies tried to resolve differences between Washington and Kyiv, and they tried to persuade Trump not to overture Moscow.[1] On Monday, French President Macron met with Trump to discuss establishing a European-led peacekeeping force in Ukraine, aimed at deterring future Russian aggression and encouraging the US president to adopt a more skeptical attitude towards Putin [1].

Trump’s attitude towards Putin

All parties have observed that Trump shows a clear preference for Putin. When asked if he was “aligned” with Putin, Trump responded: “I’m not aligned with Putin. I’m not aligned with anyone. I’m aligned with the United States of America, for the good of the world. I’m aligned with the world, and I want to end this."[3] However, he then suggested that Zelensky was the main obstacle to negotiations: “Do you see his hatred of Putin? It makes it very difficult for me to make a deal."[3]

Trump’s attitude toward Putin may stem from his belief that Russia was treated unfairly during his first term. He mentioned during the meeting: “Putin has been through a lot with me. He faced a fraudulent witch hunt, and they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia."[2] This comment refers to the finding by US intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump’s election.[2]

Jonathan Abbott (Susan Glasser), a journalist who has written books on Putin’s rise, commented: “Donald Trump has changed his position on the conflict, and I believe that context explains the conflict we just saw."[2] This comment implies that Trump is now more aligned with Russia’s position than traditional U.S. support for Ukraine.

Conclusion

The diplomatic dispute in the White House on February 28, 2025 marked a major turning point in the relationship between the United States and Ukraine, reflecting that the Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy is completely reshaping the United States’ position on the international stage. The open conflict not only damaged relations between the two countries but also exposed deep divisions in the Western alliance over its response to Russian aggression. Trump’s apparent tilt toward Putin contrasts with his harsh criticism of Zelensky, raising widespread concerns about a shift in the direction of U.S. foreign policy.

For Ukraine, the incident could mark a turning point in Western support, putting Kyiv in a more disadvantageous position in future peace talks. Zelensky’s predicament exemplifies the vulnerability of small-state leaders vis-à-vis the geopolitical interests of great powers, especially when the support of powerful allies begins to waver. As the Russian-Ukrainian conflict enters its fourth year, this White House spat could become a critical moment in determining the final resolution of the conflict, with repercussions that will extend far beyond the walls of the Oval Office and reshape the entire European security landscape.

Sources

1. Trump’s Oval Office thrashing of Zelenskyy shows limits of Western allies’ ability to sway US leader | AP News

2. Zelensky invades Trump’s ‘disinformation space’ | CNN Politics

3. Trump and Zelenskyy key takeaways: Oval Office meeting explodes into shouting match - ABC News

4. Trump Berates Zelensky in Fiery Exchange at the White House - The New York Times

5. Full transcript: Trump, Zelenskyy and Vance argue in the Oval Office | National Post

6. Trump and Zelensky Clash in the Oval Office | Council on Foreign Relations 7. Trump objected to Zelenskyy disrespect, White House says

7. apnews.com/article/zelenskyy-security-guarantees-trump-meeting-washington-eebdf97b663c2cdc9e51fa346b09591d

8. What Trump and Zelenskyy said during their heated argument in the Oval Office | PBS News

9. February 28, 2025: Donald Trump presidency news | CNN Politics

10. Key takeaways from the fiery White House meeting with Trump and Zelenskyy | Donald Trump News | Al Jazeera

11. Zelenskyy’s White House meeting ends in blowup with Trump and Vance over Ukraine’s future - CBS News 13. Full Meeting between President Trump, VP Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy in Oval Office

12. Understanding the fallout from the Trump-Zelenskyy Oval Office meeting | King’s College London

13. Excerpts From the Fiery Exchange Between Trump and Zelensky at the White House - The New York Times

14. The Trump-Zelenskyy meeting just blew up. What now? - Atlantic Council

15. Trump and Zelenskiy clash, leaving Ukraine exposed in war with Russia | Reuters

16. In Showdown With Zelensky, Trump Takes Offense on Putin’s Behalf - The New York Times 19. What U.S. lawmakers are saying about Trump and Zelenskyy’s clash at the White House | PBS News

17. Tears and shock in Ukraine and Europe after heated Zelensky-Trump meeting

18. Contentious Trump-Zelensky meeting threatens U.S. support for Ukraine

19. Trump-Zelensky clash highlights Congress at a crossroads over foreign policy

20. Trump’s Angry Meeting With Zelensky Prompts Reactions Worldwide

21. World reacts to Zelenskiy-Trump Oval Office clash

22. Trump Berates Zelensky in Fiery Exchange at the White House 26. Trump-Zelenskyy clash marks a defining turn away from U.S. defense of democracies

23. Trump-Zelenskiy clash divides US Republicans, dims aid prospects

24. Trump’s Zelenskiy outburst a culmination of weeks of frustration

25. How they are reporting it: Trump and Zelenskiy’s Oval Office shouting match

26. Lawmakers in US Congress react to Zelenskiy-Trump Oval Office clash

27. Zelenskiy, Trump clash will accelerate US probe of fraud in Ukraine aide, senior official says 32. Inside the 139 minutes that upended the US-Ukraine alliance

28. Trump touts fair deal with Zelenskiy at White House

29. White House Talks Between Trump, Zelensky Collapse

30. Week in Review: Trump Scolds Ukrainian President Zelenskyy

31. Trump speech to Congress likely to be ‘imperial,’ say analysts

32. Trump, Zelenskyy, Vance Face Off In Oval Office Shouting Match—Here’s Everything They Said

Event history

Surveillance footage recorded this horrifying scene: a white Ford pickup truck, in order to avoid a police car, rushed onto the sidewalk crazily and crashed into the unsuspecting crowd. Subsequently, the attacker jumped out of the car, armed with an AR-10 semi-automatic rifle and a Glock pistol, and fired wildly. Two police officers were injured in the crossfire. Eventually, three police officers arrived on the scene and shot the attacker dead. But those few minutes left scars on New Orleans’ night that can never be erased. The FBI characterized the attack as a terrorist attack and quickly discovered the identity of the attacker. He is 42-year-old U.S. citizen Shamsud-Din Jabbar. Jabbar is a veteran from Texas. Before the incident, he rented a Ford F-150 pickup truck and carried an AR-15 rifle, a Glock pistol and an improvised explosive device in the car. He even left a will. Hours before the attack, Jabbar checked into a house he rented through an online platform in New Orleans and placed explosive devices there, but the devices did not detonate. The FBI released a photo of a refrigerated container containing an improvised explosive device. Is it a malfunction or is there another reason? In addition, Jabbar was wearing a body armor when committing the crime. There are various signs that this was a premeditated and well-prepared terrorist attack.

The Ghost of ISIS

What is even more shocking is that Jabbar posted multiple videos on social media a few hours before the attack, declaring his allegiance to ISIS and saying that he joined the organization last summer. At the time of the attack, a black ISIS flag hung prominently on the rear bumper of his truck. ISIS, the full name of “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”, also known as “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria” (ISIS) or “Daesh” (Daesh), is a transnational Sunni Islamist insurgency and terrorist organization. The organization originated from the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 and was formerly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

ISIS is notorious for its acts of extreme violence and brutality, including mass executions of captives and minorities, sexual enslavement of women and girls, and beheadings of soldiers and civilians. In 2014, ISIS declared an ISIS-led caliphate after making significant territorial gains in Iraq. Within the territory it controls, ISIS kills, rapes and tortures members of other faiths and targets Sunni Muslims who deviate from its harsh interpretation of Islam. The international community has made a huge effort to eliminate ISIS. A U.S.-led military intervention ultimately drove ISIS from towns and cities in its self-proclaimed country. In October 2019, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed by U.S. forces in northern Syria. Although ISIS has been defeated, its ideological influence still exists, and some “lone wolf” attackers attracted by its extremist ideas will still launch terrorist attacks in the name of ISIS. The attacks in New Orleans may be one such example.

Suspicion in Las Vegas

Coincidentally, on the same day as the New Orleans terrorist attack, there was also a bombing in Las Vegas. A Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, causing minor injuries to seven people and killing the driver at the scene. The investigation revealed that the Cybertruck was loaded with gasoline cans, camping fuel cans and large fireworks bombs. Police found a body and a handgun in the exploded vehicle, and the deceased was identified as Matthew Livelsberger, 37, an active-duty soldier. Las Vegas police said the bombing appeared to be a “suicide tragedy.” Investigators believe Livelsberger shot himself while detonating explosives in the car. The FBI said there was no evidence Livelsberger was hostile to President-elect Trump and that he may have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other issues. The New Orleans attack and the Las Vegas bombing, both occurring on New Year’s Day, both using rented vehicles and causing casualties, have raised questions about whether the two incidents are related. What’s even more strange is that both cars were rented through the same online car rental platform, Turo. Despite these coincidences, the FBI said it has found no clear connection between the two incidents. The attackers in New Orleans clearly intended to cause mass casualties, while the bombing in Las Vegas looked more like a suicide. However, as the investigation deepens, the connection between the two incidents may become more confusing…

##American Nightmare

In this tragedy, 14 lives were lost. They include students, workers, and beloved family members, ranging in age from 18 to 63, with most in their 20s. They came from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, New Jersey, and even visitors from the United Kingdom. Their stories are heartbreaking.

• Kareem Badawi, 18, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a freshman at the University of Alabama. 30 He had excellent grades, was friendly to his friends, and was full of vision for the future. Unfortunately, he was killed in this attack. 30 His friends found it difficult to accept this fact and could only commemorate him with tattoos. 30 41

• Martin “Tiger” Bech, 27, from New York City, a former Princeton University football star player who worked in bond trading in the cybersecurity field in New York City after graduation. 31 His coaches and teammates remember him as a dynamic, talented athlete. 32 His brother Jack wrote on social media: “Love you forever brother! You inspire me every day and now you can be with me every moment. I will take care of my family, don’t worry. This is for us.” 31

• Nikyra Dedeaux, 18, from Gulfport, Mississippi, dreamed of becoming a nurse, but her dream faded just when her life was about to bloom. 33 Her friend Zion Parsons witnessed the moment the pickup truck plowed into her and is still terrified. 33 He said: “A truck hit the corner and then went on a rampage, like a movie scene, throwing people into the air. It hit her and threw her at least 30 feet away. I’m lucky to be alive.” 33

• Reggie Hunter, 37, a father of two from Prairieville, Louisiana, died while celebrating New Year’s Eve with his cousin. 8 His cousin, Shirell Robinson Jackson, said Hunter was always full of energy and loved to joke, and his passing has brought great sadness to the family. 8 She said: “He loved his children, his sisters, his dad, all of us. He didn’t deserve to die like this.” 8This terrorist attack shocked American society, and people from all walks of life expressed condolences and condemnation. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry called it a “horrible act of violence” and said he and his wife were “praying for all the victims and first responders on the scene.” New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said New Orleans will not be intimidated by terrorism and will continue to host major events. U.S. President Joe Biden said the people of New Orleans sent a clear message: They will not let this attack or the attacker’s delusional ideology overcome us. He also said that the United States will continue to pursue ISIS and other terrorist organizations relentlessly, and they will not find any safe harbor here. However, tragedy has occurred and the lives lost cannot be restored. This incident has once again sounded the alarm for American social security.

Alarm bells ringing

In recent years, extremism has risen in American society, political polarization has intensified, and social divisions have become severe. These are all breeding grounds for terrorism. The COVID-19 epidemic, racial inequality, political elections and other factors have led to a surge in demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in some urban areas in the United States. Individuals and groups with opposing ideologies have confronted each other, leading to a spiral of radicalization, extreme speech and violence. This phenomenon is often referred to as mutual radicalization. The popularity of the Internet has also facilitated the spread of terrorism. Some extremist organizations, such as the “digital caliphate”, use online platforms to recruit members, spread extremist ideas, and incite hatred and violence. In addition, problems such as racial discrimination and religious conflicts in American society have also intensified social conflicts and provided soil for the occurrence of terrorism. The United States’ counterterrorism strategy must keep pace with the times in order to effectively deal with emerging threats such as the “digital caliphate”.

The New Year’s Eve terrorist attacks in New Orleans not only claimed 14 innocent lives, but also caused deep pain to American society and raised concerns about American national security and social cohesion. This incident once again reminds us that terrorism is the common enemy of mankind and requires the international community to work together to deal with it. At the same time, we also need to reflect on how we can eliminate the breeding ground for terrorism, such as online extremism and social polarization, and build a more peaceful and secure world. This requires the joint efforts of the government, society and individuals to strengthen supervision, promote dialogue, eliminate barriers and enhance understanding, so as to effectively prevent similar tragedies from happening again.

Source Links

1. Bourbon Street - Wikipedia

2. Bourbon Street - 64 Parishes

3. New Orleans mourns as Bourbon Street reopens after truck-ramming attack | In Pictures News | Al Jazeera 4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_New_Orleans_truck_attack

4. New Orleans New Year’s Day ramming is the latest attack to use a vehicle as a deadly weapon | PBS News

5. Victims of Bourbon Street attack in New Orleans include former Princeton football star, aspiring nurse, loving dad - CBS News

6. New Orleans: What we know about the attack and suspect Shamsud-Din Jabbar

7. At least 14 killed, dozens hurt on Bourbon Street in New Orleans as driver intentionally slams truck into crowd; attacker dead - CBS News

8. New Orleans attacker acted alone, FBI now believes

9. LIVE: Latest on deadly New Orleans terror attack investigation 5. What is the Islamic State group, and what attacks has it inspired? | AP News

10. Islamic State - Wikipedia

11. War against the Islamic State - Wikipedia

12. Destroyed neighborhood in Raqqa - Islamic State - Wikipedia

13. FBI suspects soldier behind Las Vegas Cybertruck blast suffered from PTSD | Crime News | Al Jazeera

14. Investigation into Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas shows driver shot himself before the blast, officials say - CBS News

15. Las Vegas Cybertruck bombing outside Trump hotel appears to be suicide of veteran who had PTSD, FBI says - CBS News 12. Shocking connection between Tesla truck that exploded and pickup truck used in New Orleans massacre revealed - Hindustan Times

16. Why the United States is Targeted by Terrorism | START.umd.edu

Accident background

The incident took place in Aktau, located in western Kazakhstan and on the coast of the Caspian Sea. The city’s name means “white mountains” in Kazakh because Aktau’s landscape and cityscape appear pale in hue when viewed from the Caspian Sea. According to 2019 statistics, Aktau has a permanent population of only 180,000 people. Initially, this area developed due to oil exploration, and even today, it still has a strong industrial atmosphere. However, it was in this small lakeside town that a sudden disaster broke the tranquility.

The J2-8243 flight that caused the accident was an international flight of Azerbaijan Airlines, flying from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to Grozny International Airport in Russia. The aircraft type of the flight is an E190AR passenger aircraft produced by Embraer, which is a short- to medium-range narrow-body passenger aircraft. The aircraft is 36 meters long and can accommodate 98 to 114 people. In the early morning of December 25, at Baku International Airport, the flight departure time was approaching, and passengers were boarding the plane one after another. Following the tower’s instructions, the aircraft began to taxi onto the runway. At this time, the passengers may not realize that this supposedly ordinary flight is flying in a direction full of unknowns and crises.

What happened after the accident

A quick look at the map reveals that the flight took off from Baku, Azerbaijan, and was destined for Grozny in the northwest. However, the plane finally crossed the entire Caspian Sea and flew to Aktau on the other side of the lake, which was obviously inconsistent with common sense**. Flight tracking website Flightrader24 showed that the GPS signal of the flight from Baku to Grozny was abnormally interfered when it crossed the Russian border. Immediately afterwards, the flight began to deviate from its original route, first heading west, and then turning 180 degrees and flying east towards the Caspian Sea. Finally, he arrived at Aktau on the other side of the Caspian Sea and requested an emergency landing from the local control tower. According to a New York Times interview with a crash survivor, everything on the flight started out as normal. However, as the flight continued, some passengers began to notice strange vibrations—at first it was a slight bump that was almost unnoticed; then it became a more violent tremor, the clouds outside the window rolled, and there was a small noise in the cabin. Then, a violent vibration almost threw everyone from their seats. Oxygen masks fell from overhead, and chaotic shouts erupted in the cabin. Passengers scrambled to grab their masks, trying to regain their composure. The crew’s voices also became raspy now, but not entirely clear. At this moment, they realized that this was not a simple air turbulence, but some kind of more deadly threat.

It is not difficult to see from the video shot by local residents that during the emergency landing of the plane, although the pilot tried his best to control the landing posture of the plane, the huge impact and instantaneous stall had caused the aircraft fuselage to lose balance. In the end, the plane dived to the ground at an excessive angle. The right wing touched the ground first, then rolled and exploded, splitting the body into two parts. The nose section was destroyed by the explosion the moment it touched the ground, and the tail section was upside down outside the main wreckage.

Public data shows that there were 67 people on the accident flight, of which 37 were from Azerbaijan, accounting for more than half; followed by 16 people from Russia, 6 people from Kazakhstan, and 3 people from Kyrgyzstan. Moments before the accident, a passenger filmed the situation inside the cabin with his mobile phone. This was an extremely serious air crash. 38 of the 67 people on board were killed. Among the last survivors, there are also patients with serious injuries such as brain injuries, concussions, chest injuries, and traumatic shock. The day after the accident, the president of Azerbaijan declared national mourning.

Analysis of accident causes

After the accident, the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency issued a statement stating that it was initially believed that the plane was hit by a flock of birds. Due to an emergency on board, the captain decided to divert to Aktau Airport. But is this really the case?

It is not difficult to see from the video taken at the accident scene that there are many traces similar to single holes on the wreckage of the plane involved. Combined with the abnormal GPS interference information displayed on the Flightrader24 website, we have to wonder whether the accident is related to the air defense system in Russia.

Since the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out in February 2022, Russia has been full of gunpowder near its borders in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Just before the accident occurred on December 21, Ukraine launched a drone air strike on the city of Kazan in Russia, causing damage to two high-rise residential buildings in the city. This was the rare time Ukraine launched an air strike on a city in Russia since the outbreak of the war. In this case, Russia’s air defense system has been on high alert.

Therefore, Emirates Flight 8243 was probably shot down by the Russian air defense system. When the aircraft flew near the Russian border, it was misidentified by the Russian air defense system, resulting in GPS interference and anti-aircraft shooting. And because the nearby airport was unable to land due to heavy fog, the captain had to change direction and control the damaged fuselage to fly toward the Caspian Sea in the east. Finally, the emergency landing failed in Kazakhstan on the coast of the Caspian Sea, causing the plane to crash.

Several Reuters reports echoed the same sentiment. The agency quoted some survivors of the accident as saying that they heard several loud bangs as the plane approached its original destination of Grozny; four sources familiar with the preliminary results of the accident investigation said that the accident plane was hit by a Russian Pantsir-S surface-to-air missile system. As the plane approached Grozny, the aircraft’s communication system was disabled by the electronic warfare system.

Although the final investigation report of the accident has not been released so far, we cannot 100% conclude that the accident was related to Russia. But in history, Russia has been linked to civil aviation disasters more than once.

Similar accidents

As early as 10 years ago, it was during the Crimean crisis in Ukraine. On July 17, 2014, at 12:15 noon, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 took off from Amsterdam Airport in the Netherlands and flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At 16:20 p.m., the Boeing 777-200ER passenger plane flying the flight suddenly crashed while cruising in the airspace of eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board were killed. The accident investigation report shows that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was destroyed by a Buk missile launched by the Russian military. However, Russian officials have so far denied that the crash was caused by a Russian attack, and claimed that the Ukrainian Air Force was the real culprit of the accident. Since the invention of civil aviation, air crashes, large and small, have never stopped. Whether it is the Emirates Airline 8243 crash or the Malaysian Airlines MH17 crash ten years ago, it is a profound warning. Whether it is due to technical failure, bad weather, or human error, the occurrence of air crashes always brings profound pain and reflection. However, behind some air disasters, there are heavier costs hidden - wars, terrorist attacks, and political struggles. These innocent lives were taken away due to global strife and conflicts. They were not only passengers on the flight, but also ordinary people like you and me. They also had dreams, families, and life trajectories of their own.

Our memory of the deceased is also a memory of ourselves. The death knell is tolling alone for everyone. In the future, we must appeal to the voices of peace and seek a more rational and tolerant world order. Let the departed souls find peace, and let all families no longer suffer innocent destruction due to disputes.

Source Links

1. [Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 crash - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%98%BF%E5%A1%9E%E6%8B%9C%E7 %96%86%E8%88%AA%E7%A9%BA8243%E5%8F%B7%E7%8F%AD%E6%9C%BA%E7%A9%BA%E9%9A%BE)

2. Aktau - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

3. Embraer E Series - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

4. Flight history for Azerbaijan Airlines flight J28243

5. Kazakhstan Plane Crash Survivors Describe Chaos on Azerbaijan Airlines Flight - The New York Times

6. Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane crashed; Russian regulators believe there was an emergency after colliding with a flock of birds - RTHK 7. [Ukrainian drones penetrate deep into Russian territory Hitting high-floor apartments in Kazan](https://www.rfi.fr/cn/%E5%9B%BD%E9%99%85%E6%8A%A5%E9%81%93/20241222-%E4%B9%8C%E5%85%8B%E5%85%B0%E6%97%A0%E4%BA%BA%E6%9C %BA%E6%B7%B1%E5%85%A5%E4%BF%84%E5%A2%83-%E5%87%BB%E4%B8%AD%E5%96% 80%E5%B1%B1%E5%B8%82%E9%AB%98%E6%A5%BC%E5%B1%82%E5%85%AC%E5%AF%93)

7. Exclusive: Survivors on Azerbaijani plane say they heard bangs before it went down | Reuters

8. Russian air-defense system downed Azerbaijan plane, sources say | Reuters

9. [Preliminary investigation shows that the Azerbaijan Airlines flight was shot down by Russian air defense forces](https://www.rfi.fr/cn/%E5%9B%BD%E9%99%85/20241226 -%E5%88%9D%E6%AD%A5%E8%B0%83%E6%9F%A5%E6%98%BE%E7%A4%BA%E9%98%BF%E5%A1%9E%E6%8B %9C%E7%96%86%E8%88%AA%E7%A9%BA%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E8%88%AA%E7%8F%AD%E8%A2%AB%E4 %BF%84%E7%BD%97%E6%96%AF%E9%98%B2%E7%A9%BA%E9%83%A8%E9%98%9F%E5%87%BB%E8%90%BD)

10. Pantsir-S1 missile - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 12. Investigation by the Dutch Safety Board | MH17 incident | Government.nl

Today, a [news] about Huawei suddenly spread on the Internet (https://tech.163.com/20/0804/13/FJ6L182N00097U7S.html ). “Kechuangban Daily” reported that Huawei has launched the “Nanniwan” project to accelerate the development of its laptops, smart TVs and other products, aiming to avoid products containing American technology. This marks that under increasingly severe external pressure, Huawei has to shift its attention away from areas with higher technology density such as 5g and chips, and instead invest in areas with lower technology density such as consumer electronics. Because compared to the former, investment in consumer electronics can not only circumvent technological blockades and sanctions from Western countries, but also enable Huawei to obtain higher sales profits with less research and development costs. As a company with shareholders at the top and employees at the bottom, this strategic shift is completely in line with Huawei’s interests and can be said to achieve multiple goals with one stone.

But what is very regrettable is that as a company famous for its high technology, Huawei, which was once regarded as the “national pride” by many patriots, cannot escape the fate of “involution”. Personally, I believe that Huawei, which was forced to launch the “Nanniwan” project, and ByteDance, which was forced to sell Tiktok, together constitute the epitome of the embarrassing situation of my country’s national enterprises in this era. They also have extraordinary innovation capabilities, are also trying to go out of China and into the world, and they once truly had world-class influence. However, under the influence of a series of untimely strategies or policies by the government, they had to give up their martial arts skills, turn their long-term vision of targeting the international market to the domestic market, and become one of the participants in the domestic competition that has been fought like the Red Sea**.

Some people will blame the embarrassing situation of Huawei and ByteDance on the exclusion and suppression of Western countries led by the United States. They believe that in order to maintain its hegemony, the United States has to use various means to suppress China’s outstanding companies. Others blame the Chinese government’s strategic misjudgments and policy mistakes for the unfavorable situation of Chinese enterprises. They believe that the government’s reduced credibility and a series of excessive diplomatic words and deeds are the real reasons that hinder national enterprises from “going global” and plunge Chinese society into involution. No matter which view you take, there is no denying the fact that almost all social entities, including national enterprises, have inevitably stepped out of the golden age of China’s development. What follows will be a “cold winter” that will not be too short.

The involution crisis of Chinese society

The concept of “involution” was mentioned earlier. The so-called involution refers to the phenomenon that a certain society stagnates after developing to a certain stage, and extremely fierce but meaningless competition occurs among its internal members, resulting in the inability of the society as a whole to move to a more advanced stage. Although it is still doubtful whether the development of human society must follow the law of “from lower to higher”, it is undeniable that, as a purely empirical induction, the phenomenon of involution does occur from time to time in human history. For example, the mainstream view in academic circles believes that without the intervention of Western civilization, the Qing Empire would not have been able to develop modern capitalism by relying on its own strength alone, nor would it have been able to modernize politically or ideologically. It can be said that compared with Western European countries, China in the 19th century or even earlier had actually fallen into the quagmire of involution.Similar to the idea of ​​involution, there is also the concept of the so-called “middle-income trap”. It refers to a situation where a country has reached a certain level of income due to certain advantages, but remains at that economic level and cannot develop further**. So far, countries recognized by the world as having fallen into the middle-income trap include Brazil and South Africa. They have all experienced a period of rapid growth, but as labor costs continue to increase, these countries have lost their original competitive advantages. At the same time, industrial transformation and technological progress did not arrive in time. Therefore, after these countries reached the middle-income level, they fell into a long period of stagnation until today.

Chinese society is currently on the verge of involution or the middle-income trap. With the successive failures of institutional reform and industrial transformation, China’s economic development has gradually lost momentum. Coupled with the impact of many “black swan” events such as the COVID-19 epidemic and nationwide floods, it is no longer possible to return to the past high-speed growth state. Under such circumstances, large-scale salary cuts and even unemployment are inevitable. The extension of working hours and the reduction of employee benefits are nothing more than a few waves in this historical trend. A more turbulent reality is still to come in the near future.

Since 2018, the anxiety permeating the urban middle class has been increasing day by day. The huge tension between sluggish income growth and rising housing prices is eroding the lives of the middle class. Especially the younger generation who have just entered society are already facing huge competitive pressure due to excessive enrollment expansion in colleges and universities and the disconnect between the teaching system and social needs. The overall deterioration of the economic situation has made the already fierce competition even more severe. In recent years, the trend of candidates for non-professional skills positions becoming more highly educated has become increasingly apparent. Jobs that only required a college degree to get an interview ten years ago now require a bachelor’s degree or above as a stepping stone. This phenomenon is not a manifestation of the increase in the popularity of higher education in our country, but a manifestation of social involution. In an involutional society, individual competition that was supposed to promote the overall development of society has become meaningless internal friction.

Causes and solutions for involution

Fundamentally speaking, the reason why a society will become involution is because its own development model is too radical and its industrial structure lacks stamina, not because of the exploitation or ulterior motives of so-called developed countries. A famous conspiracy theory related to the latter attribution method believes that the reason why Japan quickly slid from the rapid growth stage in the 1980s to collapse and decline, leading to the “lost 30 years (1990-2020)”, is because it signed the “Plaza Accord” with Western countries headed by the United States. This agreement was considered by many Chinese people as evidence that the United States suppressed the development of Japan, then the world’s second largest economy, in order to maintain its world hegemony.But the truth is not that simple. The Plaza Accord was originally intended to devalue the U.S. dollar in order to promote U.S. product exports. However, with the help of a series of fiscal and monetary policies by Japan’s Ministry of Finance, the yen appreciated rapidly. A large amount of hot money poured into the Japanese market, causing Japan’s stock market and housing prices to soar since the signing of the Agreement in 1985 until the bubble burst in the early 1990s. In this process, Japan’s Ministry of Finance’s decision-making errors and improper handling were the real reasons for the expansion and bursting of the bubble. The Plaza Accord, which many Chinese people talk about, was at best a trigger. Therefore, it is useless to blame the stagnation or decline of a country’s economy on the suppression of external forces. To avoid the decline and involution of society as a whole, we must face the shortcomings of our own development model, reflect on policy mistakes and lessons, and constantly seek industrial transformation methods that suit our national conditions.

In the mainstream political theory of modernization, the government should assume the function of safeguarding the development of individuals and enterprises. As for the direction and path of development, even if it does not appear in the economic blueprint of public opinion organs (such as Congress), it should be left to the people themselves to decide. Empty plans without scrutiny will only become a shackles for the development of individuals and enterprises, restricting their own progress. As for the implementation of “wolf warrior diplomacy” to arouse the resentment of the international community and then backfire on one’s own national enterprises, it is far from the responsibilities of a modern government. If we ignore this and fail to examine any mistakes, no matter how many “strategies” or “initiatives” we launch to increase production capacity, it will not help. The arrival of involution will not be delayed by the rejection of personal will, and the fate of the Chinese people must be in their own hands.

Critics believe that both plagues and floods are natural disasters that cannot be controlled by humans. Everyone is equal before natural disasters, and disasters and losses are inevitable. Those refugees who are financially bankrupt or homeless can only say that they are unlucky and have no one to blame. Besides, the government has done its best to fight floods and provide disaster relief. It has worked very hard. Why do you blame it?

Mencius had already given a powerful response to this voice more than two thousand years ago. There is a famous exposition in “Mencius: King Hui of Liang”, which is considered by later generations to be the basis of Mencius’ thought of “benevolent government”.

King Hui of Liang said: “I only care about my country with all my heart and ears. If there is trouble in the river, move the people to the east of the river, and move the millet to the river. The same is true for the trouble in the east of the river. If you look at the government of neighboring countries, you can’t compare with the intentions of the few. If the people of the neighboring countries don’t increase the number, and the people of the neighbors don’t increase the number, why not?”

King Hui of Liang said [to Mencius]: “I have put all my efforts into this country. When there was a famine in Hanoi, I moved the people there to the east of the river, and then transported the grain from the east of the river to Hanoi. I will do the same when there is a disaster in the east of the river. I have also inspected the internal affairs of neighboring countries, and none of them can be as attentive as me. But the people of those countries have not decreased, and my people have not increased. What is the reason?

There is a background that needs to be explained here. ** Mencius, as an advocate of the idea of ​​benevolent government, would tell him every time he met a monarch: A country that implements benevolent government will continue to attract people from other countries to settle there; a country that does not implement benevolent government will not be able to retain people, and the people there will vote with their feet and continue to immigrate to countries that implement benevolent government**. In this case, since the population is the foundation of a country’s prosperity, “benevolent government” is an excellent way to make the country prosperous and ultimately make the country rich and powerful.

Mencius tried to use this set of rhetoric to induce the monarchs of various countries to implement benevolent policies driven by the dream of a great nation. Because in Mencius’ theory, benevolent government is a necessary condition for a strong country. The reason why King Hui of Liang asked the question mentioned above was precisely because he heard Mencius’s rhetoric about benevolent government. We don’t know whether King Hui of Liang asked the question sincerely or deliberately made things difficult for Mencius. But in any case, this passage from King Hui of Liang is a powerful challenge to Mencius’ theory of benevolent government. So how did Mencius respond to such a challenge?

Mencius said to him: “The king likes war, please use the metaphor of war. After filling up the drum, the weapon was connected, abandoning the armor and dragging the soldiers away. It may take a hundred steps and then stop, or it may take fifty steps and then stop. What if you take fifty steps and laugh at a hundred steps? Said: “No; if it is not straight for a hundred paces, it is also walking.” “If the king knows this,” he said, “there is no hope that the people will be more numerous than those of neighboring countries.” “Mencius replied: “Your Majesty, you like to fight, so let me use war as an analogy. If some people abandon their armor and drag their weapons and run away at the beginning of the war. Some people run a hundred steps before stopping, and some people stop after running fifty steps. Under such circumstances, can those who ran fifty steps laugh at those who ran a hundred steps?” King Hui of Liang said: “Of course not, although he did not run to one hundred steps. A hundred steps, but this is also an escape. “Isn’t this a fool’s errand?” Yes, that’s right! The idiom “laughing at fifty steps and laughing at a hundred steps” comes from here.

After hearing King Hui of Liang’s answer, Mencius secretly rejoiced, thinking that you had finally fallen into my trap. Mencius said: “Since your Majesty understands this truth, then stop hoping that your people will be more numerous than those of your neighboring countries.” Next, Mencius used a long and rigorous discussion to demonstrate why King Hui of Liang tried his best to provide disaster relief, but he was still the same as those countries that did not implement benevolent governance, unable to obtain the dividends of benevolent governance. King Hui of Liang laughed at the lack of benevolent government in other countries, but he was actually “laughing at fifty steps and laughing at a hundred steps”. His policies were not essentially different from those of other countries.

Grain, fish and turtles cannot be eaten, and wood cannot be used. This is to make the people live and die without regret. Maintaining one’s health and losing one’s life without regrets is the beginning of the king’s way.

There is so much food, fish and meat that they can’t eat it all, and there is so much wood that they can’t use it up. This makes the people have no dissatisfaction with life, death and burial. The people no longer had any dissatisfaction with life, care, death, and burial, and the royal way began.

If you don’t take away a hundred acres of land, then a family of several people will not be hungry. I sincerely follow the teachings of Xiangxu⒂, apply the meaning of filial piety and brotherhood, and award the white ones to live up to the road. Those who are seventy years old can wear silk and eat meat, and the people are neither hungry nor cold. However, there is no king who is not king.

If a family has hundreds of acres of arable land and does not hinder their production, then the family can have enough to eat. If you run some good schools and educate them in the principles of filial piety and brotherhood, then the gray-haired old people will no longer have to carry heavy loads on their backs. Even the elderly over seventy years old have clothes to wear and meat to eat, and the people of Li are neither hungry nor cold. It is impossible for such a country not to make the world submit.

A dog eats human food but does not know how to check it; when a person dies, he says, “It’s not me, it’s Sui.” ’ How is this different from stabbing someone and killing them, saying, ‘It’s not me, it’s a soldier. ’ When the king was innocent, all the people in the world were here.

[This is not the case now] The pigs and dogs of the rich eat the people’s food without checking or stopping it. In ordinary years, there are corpses of people who died of starvation on the road, but they never thought that the granary should be opened for rescue. When he kills someone, he says, “It’s not my fault, it’s just a bad year.” ’ This statement is equivalent to stabbing someone to death with a knife, but saying, I didn’t kill the person, but a weapon. Your Majesty, if you do not shift the responsibility to natural disasters [but carry out fundamental reforms to the system], then people from other countries will naturally come to seek refuge.

Compared with remedial measures after natural disasters, Mencius obviously paid more attention to the overall welfare of society. As long as the government no longer imposes excessive taxes and uses heavy taxes and rising housing prices to drain the people’s economy, then even if plagues and floods come, the people themselves will have a strong ability to resist and will not go bankrupt or cut off their supply as soon as they lose their jobs. Therefore, in Mencius’ view, free markets and social welfare are safety nets that help people resist natural disasters. Only with these can it be called the true “kingly way”, attract the people of other countries to yearn for it, and finally make the world return to its heart. And those who readily shift the blame to natural disasters, no matter how hard they try to provide disaster relief and rescue operations, are still far from the right path. These people laugh at other countries, just like taking fifty steps to laugh at a hundred steps.

Similar to the traditional audio and video industry, the piracy era of Chinese video games has ended with the end of the physical era**. In the physical era when audio and video products are still distributed in physical discs or tapes, a country with lax enforcement of intellectual property rights will inevitably see widespread piracy. A pirated disc like this costs 2 yuan a piece, and there is almost no technical threshold for production. However, with the popularization of the Internet, digital copyright has gradually replaced physical channels and become the most important distribution method for audio and video products. People’s usage habits of audio-visual products have also gradually changed during this process. Traditional DVD players and tape players have been gradually eliminated, and mobile phones, computers, and a series of portable digital media players have become mainstream. By this time, physical pirated discs were on their way out.

The Tao is one foot high and the devil is one foot high. Early online digital distribution, due to many limitations of network bandwidth and traffic, could only be carried out in the form of digital copies. This provides new opportunities for piracy. Although the traditional physical piracy industry has declined at this time, because digital copies are easy to copy and spread, the spread of piracy in the form of BT and eDonkey has become increasingly rampant. Even though publishers are racking their brains to technically protect digital copy services, such as encrypting the file format of digital copies, or requiring buyers to use their own playback software for playback, etc. But these efforts were in vain. Cracking or reverse engineering has been the main technical weapon of online piracy channels for a long time.

Today, digital streaming services, or online streaming services, have brought this dispute to a complete end**. Different from the previous methods of selling or distributing through downloading or copying, digital streaming services provide consumers with a convenient experience of clicking and playing without downloading. For example, Spotify and Netflix, although the latter also started out as a physical disc rental business, their main businesses today are subscription-based digital streaming services. The improvement of network infrastructure and the reduction of traffic rates have made it possible to enjoy streaming services through the network anytime and anywhere. In this tug-of-war over intellectual property rights, technological progress has undoubtedly given copyright owners a good chance of victory.

Electronic games have also experienced a similar development process, but compared to the traditional audio and video industry, games occupy larger data capacity, and their interactive consumption methods also require more specific environments and hardware. Therefore, digital copy services represented by Steam became popular later than the music or movie industry. Nowadays, as long as we connect a network cable, we can download digital games at high speed without purchasing physical game discs. Those “tomato plates” and “banana plates” full of memories have gradually appeared on the stage of history.As I said before, the consumption method of video games is interactive, which has extremely high requirements on the timeliness of operation and feedback. This is the real reason why the game industry has been slow to move from the digital copy era to the streaming era. The so-called digital streaming service of electronic games refers to a new consumption method in which players do not need to download game data locally, but only accept the game screen and send operation instructions through the network to complete the playing process. It is also called “cloud gaming” by some people because game data will always be stored on the service provider’s cloud server.

In 2019, Google launched its game streaming service Stadia at its annual game developers conference, GDC 2019. Google said that through Stadia, players do not need to download any game data locally, and can play the latest video games with 4K60 frames on devices on different platforms through the Chrome browser. This is what digital streaming services like Netflix have achieved in the field of video games.

At present, it seems that the only obstacle facing ** game streaming services is network latency**. When we usually play online games, a delay of about 100ms can bring an excellent gaming experience. But the network delay here only occurs when we interact with other players. In other words, there is no delay problem for the characters controlled by our players. Because all the game resources we see have been downloaded locally in advance. Game streaming is completely different. It requires our network to not only transmit a large amount of game resource data in real time, but also to be able to transmit our control instructions back to the cloud in a timely manner, and then the cloud calculates the feedback corresponding to our control instructions and the game screens corresponding to these feedbacks. This entire process must be completed within 10ms so that players will not feel obvious operational lag.

Traditional optical fiber networks or cellular mobile networks are of course unable to meet the stringent network latency requirements of game streaming. But in the not-too-distant future, with the popularization of 5G standards, high-bandwidth, low-latency networks are almost within sight. With the support of these new technologies, game streaming services that people once thought were impossible will actually come to people.

On June 12, Sony finally announced PlayStation’s next-generation game console: PS5. Microsoft also announced details of its next-generation console, Xbox Series X, a few months ago. Compared with the previous generation, the performance improvement of these two new consoles is actually very limited, far less than the progress from PS2 to PS3. This is why these two new consoles caused controversy as soon as they were announced. As the biggest highlight of PS5, the high-speed solid-state drive is derided by many people as a gimmick.

It is foreseeable that as the price of PC hardware continues to decrease and game streaming services become more popular in the future, the living space of game consoles will become smaller and smaller**. Video games will always exist, but the carrier carrying them will shift from physical to online. Just like we no longer need to buy special MP3 players to listen to music, one day we will no longer need special game consoles. PS5 may be the last generation, game consoles will eventually die, and the trend of game streaming is unstoppable.I am actually a loyal Sony and Nintendo player, and console games have brought me a lot of happy times. Just like when I was in middle school, I took out my Sony music player and put on my headphones to listen to Pink Floyd during my lazy lunch break. It will eventually become a beautiful past along with my youth.

My name is Gu Yue. Thank you for listening to “Ge Wu Zhi”. I will try my best to learn more about history and society in this program. If you like this episode, please subscribe to my channel, or give my video a like, and leave your thoughts in the comment area. See you next time.

The main reason why players are so disappointed and even angry about “The Last of Us 2” is the game’s script. As the male protagonist of the previous generation and the most important controllable character in the previous generation, Joel got the benefit of the doubt in the prologue of this game. Just imagine, a game character with whom you have spent dozens of hours, a tough guy father who was portrayed extremely plump in the previous generation story, was brutally murdered by a woman you didn’t know at all with a golf club in less than 2 hours after the game started. And just ten minutes before this woman tortured Joel, she was saved by Joel from a group of zombies. This is truly a textbook-level “Farmer and Snake” story.

After that, the heroine Ellie and her little girlfriend embarked on the long road of “avenging their father”. Do you think this is over? Do you think the next story is about how the heroine overcame all kinds of difficulties and dangers, finally came to Seattle, killed her enemies with her own hands, and then left in style, living a life of poverty and determination in the apocalypse? You are still too simple! The most disgusting thing about the script of this game is that it not only forces you to accept the fact that the protagonist of the previous generation was killed at the beginning, but also forces you to personally control the woman who will take revenge on Jorn, forcing you to experience her mental journey. In the end, when Ellie finally went through all kinds of hardships and came to the enemy who killed her father, after a fierce hand-to-hand fight, Ellie actually let her go! Yes, when I watched the boat of the enemy who killed my father slowly sailing away, and Ellie was crying alone in the water, I almost dropped the controller.

A AAA game that has also experienced this kind of “player’s Waterloo” experience is the famous FPS game “Battlefield 5” released by EA in 2018. Compared with the situation of “The Last of Us 2” that failed immediately after its release, “Battlefield 5” is much worse. Its first trailer before the official release of the game has already caused an uproar among players. Criticisms of this promotional video mainly came from traditional players of the “Battlefield” series, namely the majority of first-person shooter game fans. They believe that the images in the “Battlefield 5” promotional video are seriously out of touch with the real history of World War II. Whether it is a female soldier with mechanical prosthetics or a game scene that does not belong to any classic World War II battle, most players have doubted whether this is a game about World War II.

The response of Patrick Soderlund, CEO of DICE Studio and Chief Design Officer of EA, who is responsible for the development of “Battlefield 5”, when faced with players’ questions caused even more widespread anger and dissatisfaction. He said in an interview: “These people lack education, and they don’t know that this is a reasonable scenario.” He also said: “Players have only two choices about this matter: either accept this setting, or don’t buy our game.” You know, uneducated is a very ugly word in English. Many core players of the “Battlefield” series were completely offended, and their anger caused “Battlefield 5” to cool down before it was released.Whether it is the polarization in the evaluation of “The Last of Us 2” by the media and players, or the debate between authors and players about “Battlefield 5”, they all reflect a fundamental contradiction in video games, that is, the contradiction between artworks and commodities. Many people like to call video games the “ninth art” because games, like movies, can use various techniques to express certain points of view or tell certain stories, thereby arousing emotional reactions from the audience or players. But just like movies rely on box office to make profits, the essence of games is just products used by manufacturers to make profits. Once something has the dual missions of artistic expression and commercial profit, it will inevitably fall into the contradiction between art and commodities.

The construction of artwork is highly personal. It is more of a private expression of the values, aesthetics and techniques of the individual author or the creative team. Since it is a private expression, it will naturally arouse the approval of some people and the disapproval of others. But in the field of pure art, there is an unequal relationship between the expresser and the appreciator, that is, the expresser does not need to care about the appreciator’s feelings, he just expresses himself to his heart’s content. In this sense, artists should be proud.

However, on the other hand, the construction of high-end products is highly public. Only by catering to its own audience as much as possible can it maximize commercial interests. Therefore, businessmen often do not care about what they want to express, but more about what the audience wants. Because in the commercial field, producers and consumers are in a relatively equal relationship, and only when they reach a consensus can economic benefits be generated. If a product is not recognized by the market, it is a failure and there is no room for maneuver.

Commercial movies and video games happen to straddle the two fields of art and commerce. Since their birth, they have struggled between self-expression and public demand, seeking to survive in the constant tug of war between the two parties. The production team of “The Last of Us 2” may indeed have great ideas. They want the game to go beyond the scope of a commodity and carry some noble values. But this is obviously not to the players’ liking. As a Sony first-party game team with a heavy responsibility, Naughty Dog should not act like a condescension and forcefully instill its own values ​​​​into players without considering the players’ feelings at all. Doing so is neither commercially logical nor will it cast an unknowable shadow on the future development of the studio.

After all, “The Last of Us” is not an independent game for self-entertainment, nor is it a work of art placed in a game museum for future generations to admire. It is a real commodity. It was born with only one purpose, and that is to make money**. Of course, it is better to be able to express yourself while making profits, but when the two conflict and it is obvious that you can only choose one of them, as a manufacturer with investor money, you can only choose the logic of business, not the logic of art. This may not sound romantic, but it is the basic way our society works.

I still remember the beautiful scene of Joel and Ellie riding horses and walking past the giraffe. Naughty Dog is a studio that has brought us so many wonderful memories. I hope they can learn from this lesson and make more popular and popular games in the future.

My name is Gu Yue. Thank you for listening to “Ge Wu Zhi”. I will try my best to learn more about history and society in this program. If you like this episode, don’t forget to subscribe to my channel, give my video a like, and leave your thoughts in the comment area. See you next time.

I mainly want to discuss two issues today. First of all, regarding the issue of “transmitting positive energy” that many people are criticizing, my personal views on this may be different from the mainstream views. Maybe for us adults, blindly “delivering positive energy” is indeed a kind of self-paralyzing spiritual opium. It only whitewashes the peace and is not helpful in solving any real problems. But for children like Miao Kexin, who is about ten years old, under normal circumstances, should we focus on “delivering positive energy”? At least in my personal opinion, it is an extremely cruel thing to let a child of around ten years old know the complexity and ugliness of the adult world in advance. So** in a normal society, no matter how intense the intrigue among adults is, we should strive to let the next generation grow up in an environment full of kindness and warmth**. This is why I support “passing positive energy” to children.

However, what I said above can only be established in a normal and ideal society. In our current social reality, people like Miao Kexin’s generation have lived in cram schools, exams and competitions of all sizes since childhood. The cruel competition and huge pressure they face may be something that even us adults cannot understand. In such an environment, children have actually entered adulthood early. For them, there is no such thing as a warm and innocent childhood. This is why Miao Kexin was able to write an article like “Three Strikes of White Bone Demons”. Because it’s not that they don’t want to “deliver positive energy”, but that from a very young age, they have already tasted the bitterness of the adult world that should only belong to adults. In this case, your teacher still insists on asking the children to “deliver positive energy”. This is not forcing the children to lie, what is it?

In the final analysis, when it comes to “positive energy”, it is not the children who are wrong, but the entire society. It was the incompetence of us adults, our failure to do our part, and our failure to create a childhood world full of innocence and warmth for our next generation, that ultimately led to such a tragedy.

The second question I want to discuss today is about the role that teachers, as a group, play in the growth of each of us. I think many of you are like me and have experienced inhumane treatment by your head teacher or classroom teacher. I don’t know about first-tier developed areas like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. I grew up in a shantytown in a third-tier city. I experienced corporal punishment and beatings when I was in kindergarten. At that time, I was young and full of energy, so I always couldn’t sleep during lunch break, so the teacher asked us, who were not sleeping, to do squats in the corner. I was only 5 years old at that time. It got even worse when I was in elementary school. Those who didn’t turn in their homework would be queued up and slapped on the back of their hands. Note, it’s not the palm of your hand, but the back of your hand. Our teacher said personally that the back of the hand hurts more than the hand, and he wanted us to “long memory”. As for the verbal insults and abuses, there are countless. If you fail to answer a question in class, you will be said to have “granite in your head.” If you repeatedly get the same question wrong, you will be said to be “mentally retarded,” “incurable,” and so on. Students whose families do not give them red envelopes will be placed in the row behind the teacher, and class cadres will give them to students whose families have money and are willing to give them red envelopes.I won’t continue to list them here. What I want to say today is that no matter which country you are in, teachers are an inherently authoritarian profession. Because they are facing a group of children who are absolutely disadvantaged, they hold huge power** in their hands over the students. We all say that the power of the government and the state should be restricted, but should teachers’ power over students also be supervised and restricted? If you have ever joined the so-called class group or parent group, you should have experienced that parents nowadays are even more humble in front of teachers than in front of unit leaders. What are the reasons that led to today’s situation? I think this issue is worthy of reflection by all of us.

It has been some time since Miao Kexin passed away. I would like to end today’s program by quoting John Donne’s sermon:

No one is self-contained, An isolated island, Everyone is part of a vast continent. If a wave washes away a rock, Europe will decrease. Like a promontory that loses its tip, Like losing a piece of your friend’s or your own territory. Every death is my sorrow, Because I am a member of the human race. So, Ask not for whom the bell tolls, It chirps for you!

When we face these 24-word core values, we may not realize that “freedom” and “equality” are actually a pair of contradictory concepts. Because in a free competitive market, inequality will inevitably arise due to differences in background, family education, social opportunities and other aspects between people. And this kind of inequality will continue to intensify over time. This is the so-called “Matthew effect.” And if we want to artificially suppress this natural trend of inequality and promote the formation of a situation of “equality for everyone,” we must restrict the freedom of society as a whole. Although this does not mean that a society can never balance freedom and equality, there is indeed an inherent contradiction between these two values.

Therefore, in the pair of contradictory values ​​​​of freedom and equality, those who believe that freedom is higher than equality can be generally classified as right-wing; and those who believe that equality is higher than freedom can be roughly classified as left-wing**. For example, on a one-dimensional coordinate axis from left to right, Obama, who promotes “Medicare for All,” will definitely be to the left of Trump, who announced the repeal of the bill as soon as he took office.

After entering the 20th century, with the rapid development of modern economics, the traditional one-dimensional coordinate axis can no longer accurately reflect people’s political stance. For example, people usually place Stalin on the left end of the axis and Hitler on the right end. However, the two men are very similar in their views on many policies. This reflects the shortcomings of the traditional one-dimensional political coordinate system. Because it is entirely possible for a person to be on the left economically but on the right politically. Stalin is a good example. He and Hitler were both far right politically, and the main difference between the two was economic.

In order to make up for the shortcomings of the traditional one-dimensional coordinate axis, people introduced a longitudinal coordinate axis, extending the political coordinate system to two dimensions. In this two-dimensional coordinate system, the horizontal axis represents the economy and the vertical axis represents politics. The left side of the horizontal axis represents economic egalitarianism, advocating the redistribution of social wealth through state intervention to narrow the gap between rich and poor in society as a whole; the right side represents economic liberalism, believing that a free competitive market is the solution to most problems, and opposing excessive state intervention in the economy. Preliminary; the upper part of the vertical axis represents political authoritarianism, which advocates the use of stricter legal systems to restrict the behavior of individuals and enterprises, and puts the interests of the country above all else; the lower part represents political liberalism, which advocates that individual value is the ultimate goal, and the state is only a means to realize personal value.In the two-dimensional political spectrum, everyone will have a point consisting of an abscissa and an ordinate. The closer this point is to which direction, the stronger the person’s identification with which doctrine is. In this way, Comrade Stalin found his rightful position, that is, the extreme left economically and the extreme right politically; while the head of state is here, the economic center is right and the political extreme right. From this picture, we can easily see that it is actually inaccurate to blindly judge the head of state as “extreme right”.

This two-dimensional political coordinate system is often called the “political spectrum”. It is a quantitative tool in political science used to scale everyone’s tendency in political and economic positions. Nowadays, you only need to take ten minutes and take a test questionnaire to roughly find your position in this coordinate system and which historical celebrities will be your close friends.

Historically, there have been several interesting phenomena regarding the political spectrum. As we all know, the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States today bring together elites from all walks of life on the left and right of the country respectively, that is, the Democratic Party is on the left and the Republican Party is on the right. But this situation was exactly the opposite a hundred years ago. When it was first established, the Democratic Party was actually a conservative right-wing party that mainly represented the interests of American farmers. Therefore, the Democratic Party passed a bill in the mid-19th century to forcibly expel Indians, launched the Mexican-American War, and obtained large amounts of land for farming. During the Civil War, they supported slavery to maintain the established agricultural system. For a long time, the Democratic Party gained support from southern states. However, since the 1930s, President Roosevelt Jr., as the candidate of the Democratic Party, implemented the “New Deal” to restore the U.S. economy after the Great Depression. These practices, which seemed very left-leaning at the time, became the main policy direction of the Democratic Party in the future. As a result, the Democratic Party gradually changed from a conservative right-wing party to a radical left-wing party until today.

When it was first established, today’s Republican Party was a left-wing party that advocated economic reform and opposed slavery. The first Republican president was Abraham Lincoln, and his taking office was the direct cause of the outbreak of the Civil War. It was not until President Reagan took office in the 1980s that the political stance of the modern Republican Party was finally finalized. But a hundred years later, the Republican Party has transformed into a conservative right-wing party representing whites, men, middle-aged and older people, farmers and people with low education. In other words, over the past hundred years or so, the positions of the two major political parties in the United States have had interesting exchanges. This also reflects some of the essence of modern capitalist party politics.

There is another interesting phenomenon. Whenever we think of the Nazis these days, we automatically categorize them as being on the far right. But if we take a look at the full name of the Nazis - the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, we will be surprised to find that it was also a left-wing party representing the interests of workers at the beginning. As for the history of the Nazis, and how Hitler transformed from an unknown Austrian art student to a head of state with blood on his hands, that is another story.

This episode of our program mainly introduces some common sense about political science. If you are still interested in this type of topic, you can search for relevant information and read it yourself.

My name is Gu Yue. Thank you for listening to “Gewu Zhi”. I will do my best to clarify history and society in this program. If you like this episode, please subscribe to my channel, give me a like, and leave your thoughts in the comment area. See you next time.

On May 25, 2020, in Minnesota, the United States, an African American named George Floyd was negligently killed by a local white police officer during his arrest. This incident became the trigger for a nationwide riot, with large and small protests breaking out in various states across the United States. These protests have developed from initially peaceful demonstrations to violent incidents of smashing, looting, and burning. There have been vicious incidents in various places where shops were smashed and looted by thugs.

The story begins with the “Floyd incident” 20 days ago. At 8 pm on May 25, in Minneapolis, the capital of Minnesota in the northern United States (yes, the place where Dong Ge was exposed as a “sexual assault scandal”), a convenience store clerk dialed 911. According to call records released by the police, the clerk said when calling the police that an African-American man used counterfeit money when checking out in the store, but he was discovered by the clerk. The clerk asked him to return the cigarettes he purchased, but he refused.

The African American who used counterfeit money is the protagonist of the story-George Floyd. He was born in Texas, USA, and is 46 years old. In 2009, 11 years ago, Floyd was sentenced to prison for armed robbery and served 5 years in a Texas prison. After he was released from prison, he moved to Minnesota and worked as a security guard at a Minneapolis restaurant for five years. Until recently, I lost my job due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

After receiving the alarm, the local police rushed to the scene quickly. When police arrived, Floyd was still near the convenience store where the incident occurred. According to the description of the clerk who called the police, Floyd was “drunk and unconscious” at the time and was sitting in his car. The police body camera shows that in addition to Floyd, there were two other people sitting in the car at the time, a man and a woman. A police officer pointed a gun at Floyd and ordered him to put his hands on the steering wheel, and Floyd complied. Afterwards, another police officer at the scene pulled Floyd out of the car and handcuffed him. During this period, Floyd resisted several times. Afterwards, Floyd sat on the side of the road. The police briefly questioned him and told him that he was arrested for using counterfeit money.

The next scene was filmed by passers-by on their mobile phones: Floyd suddenly fell down while being led to the police car by the police, and said he had claustrophobia. At this time, the other protagonist in this case, the 44-year-old white police officer Derek Michael Chauvin, arrived at the scene in another police car. According to the prosecutor’s subsequent indictment against Chauvin, four police officers tried several times to put Floyd into the back seat of a police car, but Floyd deliberately fell down, stood crookedly, and kept saying he couldn’t breathe. Chauvin then pulled Floyd into a police car with the help of two colleagues.At 8:19 p.m., Chauvin pulled Floyd out of the right back seat of the police car. Three police officers pushed him to the ground at the same time. Chauvin put his left knee on Floyd’s neck. Colleagues around him once asked whether Floyd should be turned over, but Chauvin refused. In this way, Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes. The law enforcement recorder shows that Floyd was struggling and calling for help during this period, but Xiao Wan ignored it. According to the complaint, Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for a total of 8 minutes and 46 seconds. After Floyd became unresponsive, he continued for 2 minutes and 53 seconds, and did not remove his knee until 8:27. After the ambulance arrived, police put Floyd on a stretcher. Unfortunately, the rescue was not successful, and at 9:25 that night, the hospital announced Floyd’s death.

Because Xiao Wan behaved extremely coldly in this incident, and the entire incident was filmed by onlookers on their mobile phones, the incident quickly spread on social media. On May 26, the day after Floyd’s death, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, clashing with the police and turning into nationwide riots. In addition to the United States, protests have also swept across other countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Australia, and New Zealand. People carried signs saying “I can’t breathe” to express their sympathy for Floyd and their dissatisfaction with issues such as racial discrimination and police brutality that have been rooted in the United States for many years.

Although the riots are also related to the nationwide unemployment wave caused by the new crown epidemic and the presidential campaigns of the two parties, the problem of racial discrimination is indeed a chronic disease in American society. To understand why the United States has such severe racial problems, we must start with the colonial history before American independence.

#America’s Tradition of Racial Discrimination

In 1492, when Columbus’s fleet first arrived on the North American continent, racial conflicts on this land had already begun. Conflict first broke out between European colonists and Native Americans. Due to the huge disparity in technological levels and physical conditions between the two sides, the vast majority of the indigenous people in North America were either killed by Europeans, died of diseases brought by Europeans, or were driven away from the land where they lived in their own time. This is also one of the “black histories” of the United States that many people talk about.

However, what we call racial discrimination in the United States today actually does not refer to the discrimination of Europeans against indigenous peoples, but the discrimination of white people against people of color. The people of color here are actually just like white people, they are also foreign ethnic groups. The time they arrived in North America was different from that of white Europeans, that is, the front and rear feet. Besides skin color and culture, the only difference between these races is the order of immigration. Here is an idea. If the first colonists arriving in North America were not white Europeans, but yellow people from East Asia, then the order of racial discrimination in the United States today might be reversed. Of course, there are no what-ifs in history. My purpose in making this analogy is just to let you understand the nature of racial discrimination in the United States.

Although other people of color, including Chinese, are also victims of racial discrimination in the United States, we have to admit that the main and most acute targets of racial discrimination in the United States are black people, what we call African Americans, such as this one. If you come to the United States in the future, it is best not to habitually call these people “Black”, but strictly call them “African American”, otherwise you may be mercilessly attacked by the iron fist of “political correctness”.Unlike other ethnic groups who actively immigrated to the North American continent, the ancestors of the vast majority of African Americans today immigrated to the Americas passively. While the Europeans were busy opening up new routes, the African continent was still in a state of fragmentation. Tribes or ethnic groups often engage in life-and-death struggles. This was precisely exploited by the Europeans, who usually took an empty ship to Africa and spent a small amount of money to buy some slaves from some local tribes and stuff them into the cabin. These slaves were usually prisoners of the losing side in tribal wars. Europeans transported black slaves to the “New World” by ship, in exchange for a shipload of agricultural and sideline products from the “New World” (such as tea, coffee, or tobacco), and then shipped these products back to Europe and sold them at high prices. This is a complete closed loop of trade, which is the “triangular trade” mentioned in our middle school history books.

The reason why the “triangular trade” was established was that the early economic model of the North American colonies was highly dependent on labor. Industries such as crop cultivation and agricultural and sideline product processing require a large amount of labor. Since the number of European immigrants was small and their wages were high, black slaves transported from Africa became the only choice for colonial plantation owners. After all, they are strong, eat less, and are cheap. The key is a one-time investment. As a means of production, they are extremely cost-effective.

This is a good explanation of why there is such a serious problem of racial discrimination in the United States. Because for those colonial planters and their descendants, black people were not human beings, but just working machines that they paid for and part of the means of production for the estate’s economy. Do you feel empathy for the computers in your company’s office? Of course not. Then you might say, after all, black slaves are not machines. At least they don’t look much different from us. We are all human beings. Why are those manor owners so cruel? Of course these issues are valid today, but in ancient times hundreds of years ago, China’s senior officials at the provincial and ministerial levels would be beaten to death with wooden sticks by eunuchs. Times are different, and of course people’s concepts and the level of civilization in society are also different.

This manorial economy of intensive agricultural production based on slaveholding existed until the 19th century. Especially in the southern states with developed agriculture, the manor economy has become a pillar industry almost everywhere. In our current terms, the South of the United States was a “large rural area” at that time. Opposite to the “large rural areas” in the south is the rising urban industry in the north. From ancient times to the present, cities have always been the areas where advanced ideas first sprouted and spread. Therefore, in the 19th century North of the United States, cruel slavery had almost become a “street rat”. This was an ideological aspect. On the economic side, the North also had reasons to oppose slavery. As we all know, urban industry and plantation agriculture have one thing in common, that is, they both have a huge demand for labor. The northerners were definitely not willing to use slave labor like the south, so they began to advocate the liberation of black slaves, because once the black slaves in the south were released, northern factories would receive a large amount of cheap labor.In this way, at that time, the northern states of the United States became increasingly wealthy through the development of modern industry, and at the same time they always criticized slavery in the South from the moral high ground. In this way, the economic and ideological gap between the North and the South grew wider. You know, at the beginning of the founding of the United States, the North and the South had differences on the organizational form of the federal government. At that time, the South favored conservative liberalism and advocated the establishment of a “small government” to minimize government interference in private rights; while the North favored radical federalism and advocated the establishment of a “big government” to better safeguard the well-being of the people. In the eyes of southerners, northerners are just a group of upstarts who regard themselves as aloof. They were not satisfied with the content of the Constitution in the first place, and now they even want to fly away.

In 1860, the newly formed Republican Party won a majority in the general election, and its candidate Abraham Lincoln was also successfully elected president. The South completely lost its voice in the new federal government. As a result, seven states known as the “Deep South” declared their separation from the Union of America and formed their own Confederate States of America. The Civil War was about to break out.

Although the reasons that led to the outbreak of the Civil War are extremely complicated, it is undeniable that the debate about the liberation of black slaves was the direct cause of the outbreak of the Civil War. Although the war ultimately ended in victory for the North, the black slaves on the southern plantations were finally liberated. But both the South and the North paid a heavy price for this. It can be said that the black civil rights movement in the 1960s and the current nationwide riots had their roots laid as early as the Civil War era. The century-long history of racial discrimination in the United States does not end here. Although black people have obtained the same rights as other races at the national level, systemic discrimination still exists and continues to this day.

My program today is mainly about the origins of racial discrimination in the United States. With the progress of the times, the specific situations and methods of discrimination are constantly changing in one way or another. The United States has never been able to escape the shadow of racial discrimination and its derivative problems. From today’s national riots to the Civil War, they are all inextricably linked to racial issues. As for how the racial issue evolves and agitates, until it triggers riots again and again, and how black people rise up to resist in this process, that is the content of our subsequent program.

Follow-up

After listening to the above, many people may start to criticize the United States as “rotten capitalism” and “the American people live in water and fire” and use these clichés. But what I want to say is that you may only see one side of the matter and ignore (or selectively ignore) the other side of the matter.

The political system of the United States has been operating relatively smoothly for more than two hundred years. Over the past two hundred years, Americans have constantly stepped on pitfalls, corrected them, and stepped on them again. Their political system has also been continuously polished and improved in the process, and they have many error-correction mechanisms that other countries do not have. On May 26, the Minneapolis Police Department announced the suspension of the officers involved; on May 27, the FBI began an investigation into the Floyd incident; on May 29, Derek Chauvin was arrested by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Investigation; on June 3, Derek Chauvin was formally charged with second-degree murder. The trial is still continuing.In the past 20 days, some police officers across the United States have knelt down to express support for the peaceful demonstration movement. I have also mentioned before that George Floyd is actually a “social delinquent” with multiple criminal records, and his behavior of using counterfeit money is indeed a crime in the United States. However, these are not enough to whitewash police brutality, nor are they enough to erase the fact that serious racial discrimination still exists in the United States. The vast majority of those who took to the streets to protest peacefully did not want to defend a criminal. What they wanted was to change the current situation of serious police brutality and racial discrimination in the United States.

I am Gu Yue, thank you for watching “Ge Wu Zhi”, I will do my best to clarify history and society in this program. If you think this video is interesting, please give me a like or leave your own thoughts in the comment area. See you next time.

#Video material- CBS Evening News - Derek Chauvin charged with third degree murder in death of George Floyd

• CBS Evening News - New video shows Minneapolis police arrest of George Floyd before death
• CBS News - 4 Minneapolis officers fired after arrest of man who later died
• CNBC Television - Scenes from protests, riots across the U.S. after killing of George Floyd
• Sky News Australia - The Left has tried to define deadly US riots as ‘peaceful’ protests
• The New York Times - How George Floyd was killed in police custody_visual Investigations
• The New York Times - Thousands March to the White House _ George Floyd Protests
• TODAY - 4 Minneapolis Officers Fired After Death Of George Floyd In Police Custody
• VICE News - Cops Are Taking a Knee. Not Everyone Is Convinced
• VICE News - George Floyd Protests Around the World Are Calling for Racial Justice
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• act.tv - Systemic Racism Explained
• CCTV Records - “The Turning Point of History: The Voyage to the West” Episode 1 - Dreaming of the Ming Dynasty
• Mrs. Martinez - life of a plantation slave
• Newsy - Remembering Chinese railroad workers
• Shotgun BomBom - French Defensive from American Natives Attack
• Anthony Hazard - The Atlantic slave trade What too few textbooks told you
• Vox - Why the US celebrates Columbus Day
• WatchMojo.com - History of the Civil Rights Movement
• Yesterday Today - 43 Haunting Photos Of The American Civil War
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As soon as the article appeared, public opinion exploded. People criticized the Wuhan government for spending precious energy on such trivial work when the epidemic had not yet been effectively controlled. Under broad public condemnation, the media outlet quietly withdrew the article.

But withdrawing the article does not mean the end of “gratitude education.” Or rather, the retreat of this particular instance does not mean such education will disappear. On the contrary, throughout China’s long history since the Qin and Han, the culture of being grateful to power or grateful to the state has always been the greatest form of “positive energy.” As long as this culture and the soil that supports it remain, countless forms of “gratitude education” will not truly vanish.

During China’s modernization, many people have mistakenly blamed this “gratitude culture” on Chinese tradition or so-called Confucian thought, and then launched a broad attack on Chinese tradition. In my view, however, these people seem to have chosen the wrong enemy at the very beginning of the revolution.

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is the first question of revolution. The basic reason why all past revolutionary struggles in China achieved so little is that they failed to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies.

Mao Zedong, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”

First, there is a real problem in what exactly people mean by the “Confucian thought” they criticize. Mencius of the Warring States period, whom modern people almost treat as a contemporary of Confucius, already differed sharply from Confucius on many issues. Confucianism then evolved over more than two thousand years, to the point that it resembles the Ship of Theseus . To treat “Confucian thought” as one unified thing and attack it under the label of “feudal ethics” is to pick the wrong enemy.

Those who attack Confucianism seem able to see only “the body, hair, and skin are received from the parents and must not be damaged, which is the beginning of filial piety,” while ignoring “the people are most important, the state comes next, and the ruler is least.” The richness of Confucian thought and the variety of its schools are flattened by these “progressive” attackers into one backward and rotten image.

Second, the reason Confucianism came to appear backward and rotten in modern times is partly its own richness and partly the deliberate summaries of its attackers, but more importantly the domineering nature of imperial rule. China’s imperial system was highly practical. For Chinese emperors, anything useful for maintaining rule could be taken and used. In that environment, no matter how different schools of thought were at the beginning, they would eventually become highly homogenized under pressure from power.

In other words, even if the intellectual winner under Emperor Wu of Han had not been Dong Zhongshu’s Confucianism, but Huang-Lao thought, Yin-Yang thought, or some other school, later history would not have changed much. In fact, Dong Zhongshu’s Confucianism was already far removed from the Confucianism of Confucius and Mencius. To meet the needs of power, it had shed many of its inconvenient edges.

So who is the real enemy we should attack? Or to put it another way, where does China’s long-running “gratitude culture” really come from?

That is the topic I want to discuss today. As mentioned above, if ancient Chinese imperial rule played the game of “Confucianism on the outside, Legalism on the inside,” meaning it used Confucian morality on the surface to add legitimacy to rule while constantly practicing Legalist techniques of controlling the people, then the culprit behind “gratitude culture” should be the inner Legalism, not the outer Confucianism.

At this point, the answer is clear: when we oppose “gratitude culture,” what we should truly oppose is imperial rule and its Legalist methods, not the innocent Confucian thought worn as its outer garment.

“Gratitude education” and the “gratitude culture” behind it are enduring parts of imperial rule. They will not naturally disappear just because the times move forward. If we never identify what we are truly opposing, gratitude education will continue. Today, when Article 1 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China states clearly that all power belongs to the people, there should be no more “gratitude education.”

After all, history is only an abbreviated record of past events, and it easily creates the illusion of a heroic view of history. The more a nation likes to “take history as a mirror,” the more likely it is to look eagerly for the arrival of a hero when facing a historical crisis it cannot handle. Napoleon for France and Hitler for Germany are examples, though the legacies they left were completely different. The former left the great French Civil Code and spread the spirit of French freedom and democracy across Europe; the latter left war, massacre, and a Germany reduced to ruins. Yet both were personally lifted onto the heroic throne by their own people.

Every heroic epic, whether tragedy or comedy, requires two elements: lazy people and ambitious men. People naturally tend to hand complicated problems in front of them to an exceptionally capable hero. Public affairs are complex and changeable. Handling them involves tedious calculation. Compared with participating and spending their own time and energy, people would rather throw themselves into brief and exciting public trials or movements of idolization. As for boring public affairs, let the hero deal with them.

The ones who fill this lazy demand are ambitious men. They always enter public view with unrealistic plans for salvation and promise people a beautiful new world flowing with milk and honey. Among many such figures, a few outstanding ones are chosen by the public and become “leaders” who will deal with the crisis and lead the people to the new world.

Open any history book, and the partnership between lazy people and ambitious men almost always ends in tragedy. Complex public issues do not have once-and-for-all solutions. Even if they did, they would not be imagined by a small group of leaders sitting high above everyone else. Solving public affairs requires the participation of all citizens. Attention, discussion, voting, and petitioning are all forms of participation. These are basic obligations that citizens should fulfill while enjoying their rights.

Lazy people ignore all civic duties except paying taxes and place their hopes in the appearance of heroes and leaders. In the end, they only attract ambitious men and create irreversible tragedy.

As members of an ancient nation that has not yet fully escaped such tragedy, we should remember the lessons of history: refuse to become lazy people who suffer the consequences of their own choices, refuse to become ambitious men full of beautiful visions, and work with other citizens to truly fulfill our civic duties. That is what taking history as a mirror really means.

Public trials and movements of idolization may be exciting, but citizens cannot immerse themselves in that false sense of participation and stop at the satisfaction of appetite. A great nation requires great citizens. Lazy people will never achieve “national rejuvenation.”

2019 was a year of many troubles. I faintly smelled the cyclical decline of human civilization. In this unavoidable decline, which nations will sink, and which will make it through? That is a question worth thinking about.

Without doubt, the diligence and courage of the Chinese people are worth taking pride in. They have created the world’s second-largest economy despite layers of institutional obstacles. But as former Premier Wen Jiabao said, without successful political reform, economic reform cannot be carried through to the end. The gunshots thirty years ago silenced the whole people and pushed China’s reform into the awkward state of having nowhere left to reform.

But people’s silence does not mean they have chosen to be lazy. The world never needs heroes. What it needs is for everyone to abandon “isms,” study real problems, work together, and take responsibility for this ancient nation.

My phone ringtone is “Hero,” a song written by the American band Family of the Year for a yearly TV series. Its lyrics express the spirit of a younger generation that rejects grand narratives while still warmly welcoming the life ahead:

Let me go, I don’t wanna be your hero. I don’t wanna be your big man, I just wanna fight with everyone else. You’re a masquerade, I don’t wanna be a part of your parade. Everyone deserves a chance to, Walk with everyone else.

Today, China’s younger generation bears survival pressure far beyond what it should have to carry: sky-high housing prices, corporate exploitation, poisonous food, environmental pollution, a worsening aging population, and the social security gap that follows. None of these burdens can be easily solved by a “hero.”

We have had enough of grand narratives such as “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” or “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” In the complex era ahead, these slogans seem painfully pale. In such difficult circumstances, we cannot place our hopes in the appearance of heroes. Or rather, only we can be our own heroes.

In fact, public opinion is not free of wrongdoing, and snowflakes are not entirely just. China has old sayings such as “three people make a tiger” and “the mouths of the crowd can melt metal.” With the spread of mobile internet, the original sin of public opinion has been amplified as never before. The “three people” and “many mouths” that once operated only in communities of acquaintances have turned into a destructive avalanche.

But we must recognize that the injustice of a snowflake can only be established within a specific case. To discuss whether snowflakes are just on a more general level, we must break free from the limits of individual cases and discover the deeper reasons why public opinion commits wrongdoing.

Looking across repeated storms of public opinion on Chinese social media, it is not hard to see three inborn “original sins” of mass opinion: plurality, volatility, and destructiveness.

Plurality means the natural diversity of mass opinion caused by differences in social background, values, and individual experience. But public opinion that is merely plural is not destructive like an avalanche. On the contrary, it can promote public discussion of social events, deepen people’s understanding through confrontation with different views, and ease conflicts caused by individual differences. In this sense, the plurality of mass opinion is the basis of its neutrality. It is not an original sin, but rather an original good.

Therefore, avalanches mainly arise from the other two original sins: volatility and destructiveness. Volatility refers to the way the mainstream position of public opinion swings back and forth as information about an event is disclosed. Because the public often invests emotion in its positions and views, whether that emotion comes from empathy for the parties involved or identification with a shared public understanding, every reversal of the mainstream position intensifies anger toward the perceived villain. In this process of emotional accumulation, the destructiveness of public opinion grows.

If the final target of public opinion is the correct villain, then public opinion has done a satisfying good deed. If the target is the wrong villain, then the tragedy of “three people make a tiger” unfolds and the avalanche occurs.

Judging whether an outcome meets the standard of justice requires a long passage of time. That conflicts with the naturally short attention span of the public. In addition, the standard of justice itself is plural. So abstractly discussing whether a snowflake is just is meaningless. To reduce the chance that public opinion causes avalanches, we must start with its volatility and destructiveness. Without expecting public opinion to do good, we should at least make it do less harm.

The volatility of public opinion comes from delays or falsehoods in information disclosure. Therefore, improving the speed and credibility of information disclosure is the best way to reduce reversals. A healthy society cannot function without independent and free news media. Such media can provide an effective channel for vulnerable groups to speak, relieving accumulated resentment caused by blocked information flow. They can also disclose timely and accurate information about public events, preventing public opinion from swinging back and forth because of asymmetry of information.

In other words, credible news media can act as a lubricant for mass opinion, reducing its volatility and destructiveness as much as possible and dissolving avalanches before they form.

Today, there are two opposite views of the social role of mass opinion. One view holds that its three original sins mean it can only lead to avalanche-like verbal violence and is therefore unjust. The other view holds that when public remedies fail, public opinion can spontaneously uphold justice and is therefore just.

The former demonizes mass opinion while ignoring the deeper causes that lead to or intensify its wrongdoing. The latter is too idealistic and gives public opinion a mission it should not bear. Both views ignore, or selectively ignore, the importance of news media: the former ignores the media’s role in guiding and restraining public opinion; the latter ignores the media’s role in supervising and checking public power.

The Chinese internet is full of low-quality rumors and online violence against all kinds of groups. People seem to have gradually drifted away from the internet’s original purpose of connecting people. One reason for this is the loss of credibility and independence among formal media. Vulnerable groups have lost effective channels to speak. The public has lost reliable sources of information. People live constantly in fear and anxiety. Anger and hostility spread, and the villains who repeatedly appear in social events, whether they are truly villains or not, become outlets for release.

So arguing over “whether snowflakes are just” is only scratching an itch through a boot. The real problem is like the elephant in the room. Smart people all know it is there; they simply refuse to say it aloud.