US tariffs and the Board of Trade; Gaokao; SOEs

It is a quiet day so today’s newsletter is a bit thin. Xi is on another of his long absences from official media, with his last appearance on May 26 with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. The General Secretary of Laos is in China and should meet with Xi in the next few days.

Today is the 37th anniversary of the June 4th crackdown on the Tiananmen. We talked about it bit on this week’s episode of Sharp China we recorded today, and especially about how well the PRC has memory-holed the events of 1989. I have nothing much new to add to what I have written before, so instead I will report what I wrote two years ago on the 35th anniversary:

Today is the 35th anniversary of June 4th. The security services are still paranoid about and cracking down on any expressions of memory of the events 35 years ago, and now in Hong Kong too. I was a student at Peking University for the 1989 Spring semester, and when classes stopped in April I got a job as a fixer for CBS News, even though my Chinese wa…