"Stealth easing" and "targeted" stimuli; Huawei smackdowns; Karl Marx emojis

Happy Thursday, I hope you enjoyed last night’s special issue Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China by John Garnaut. His 2017 speech has already sparked some interesting commentary, and provoking thought and questioning conventional wisdom is one the things we like to do here at Sinocism. I wholeheartedly agree with his conclusion:

The challenge for us is that Xi’s project of total ideological control does not stop at China’s borders. It is packaged to travel with Chinese students, tourists, migrants and especially money.  It flows through the channels of the Chinese language internet, pushes into all the world’s major media and cultural spaces and generally keeps pace with and even anticipates China’s increasingly global interests. 

In my opinion, if you’re in the business of intelligence, defence or international relations; or trade, economic policy or market regulation; or arts, higher education or preserving the integrity of our democratic system - in other words, ju…