TikTok toast?; PRC-Russia; China Development Forum; National security rectification; Taiwan; Knowledge decoupling

Housekeeping note: Our kids are now on Spring Break. The newsletter will not publish next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday as we will be driving them around New England looking at colleges. There will be a weekly discussion thread tomorrow, plus this week’s episode of the Sharp China podcast as well as the monthly report from the China Media Project. And of course our online chat space. I will be at Dartmouth Monday and Middlebury Tuesday if anyone wants to try to meet up.

Today’s newsletter is thin, a bit in “vacation mode”, plus I watched several hours of the very ugly TikTok hearing earlier today. Today’s hearing is the public, oftentimes grandstanding crystallization of the multi-month process of TikTok and its advisers trying to influence views on Capitol Hill. Their efforts clearly failed, and while I do not think many people expected the hearings to go well for TikTok and its charismatic CEO, they were much worse than I expected. As a reporter from PunchBowl News tweeted: