 Rojak is a colloquial Malay word for “eclectic mix,” and is the name for a popular Javanese dish that typically combines sliced fruit and vegetables with a spicy dressing. Going abroad China rose as an economic superpower without creating global brands and cultural products like its East Asian neighbors. K-pop, Nintendo, and anime are sources of soft power for South Korea and Japan, but Chinese goods are still often regarded as cheap and poorly made. A new wave of Chinese brands is trying to overcome that reputation, and if you want to see their efforts, look no further than the cosmetics industry. Japan imported 125% more Chinese makeup in 2023 than the year prior, influenced in part by TikTok trends, write Rongrong Zhuge and Yaling Jiang in a post for Following the Yuan, Jiang’s fascinating newsletter about consumer culture in China. TikTok is perhaps Beijing’s most successful media export ever, and its users have helped popularize beauty styles like “Douyin makeup” — named after the Chinese version of the app. Cool beans Soybean plants have a symbiotic relationship with a bacterium called Bradyrhizobium. In exchange for energy, the bacteria capture nitrogen from the air and affix it to the legume’s roots, making the plant more bountiful. For thousands of years, Chinese peasant farmers were totally unaware of this microbiological process, but understood that soybean roots ought to be left in the ground after harvest to fertilize the next crop. In 1909, an agricultural scientist from the U.S. named Franklin Hiram King spent eight months studying farming techniques in China, Japan, and Korea, and came back “brimming with the fervor of a freshly converted evangelist,” writes journalist Andrew Leonard in a brilliant series about soybeans. King was convinced the world needed to adopt Asian farming practices, particularly the principle of never wasting natural fertilizer. His writings influenced the Western organic farming movement. But in an “unbearably huge and tragic contradiction,” China is now one of the world’s largest consumers of synthetic fertilizer, and it imports some 100 million tons a year of largely unsustainably farmed soybeans from the Americas annually. The new establishment Taiwan’s presidential election this month briefly turned the island’s politics into front-page global news. A Broad and Ample Road, the Taiwan-focused newsletter written by historian Albert Wu and lawyer and author Michelle Kuo, makes two insightful points about the results: First, newly elected President Lai Ching-te isn’t as anti-China as his Democratic Progressive Party is often portrayed abroad. And second, people in Taiwan appreciate democracy because of the island’s own history of authoritarian rule, not exclusively because of how it contrasts with China’s increasingly autocratic system. Indeed, on election day, Wu took a moment to marvel at how smooth and transparent the voting process was, demonstrating “how far we had come” since the early, turbulent days of Taiwan’s democracy in the ‘90s and 2000s. |
