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[@RnaudBertrand](/creator/twitter/RnaudBertrand)
"The best description of Palantir that I've ever read is "the Salesforce for killing people""
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1942128926958240135) 2025-07-07 07:49:53 UTC 339.1K followers, 110.3K engagements
"This might be one of the most insane reports ever produced by a U.S. Think Tank and thats saying something. The Hudson Institute just published a 128-page blueprint titled China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China edited by Miles Yu (director of the Institutes China Center) which provides detailed operational plans for inducing Chinese regime collapse followed by detailed protocols for U.S. post-collapse management including military occupation and the installation of a political and cultural system vassalized to the U.S. I genuinely dont know whether I should laugh or cry. Cry at"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947690222101402049) 2025-07-22 16:08:29 UTC 339.1K followers, 192.7K engagements
"This is beyond shameful and a terrifying sign. Albanese is as close to a political saint as we're likely to see and watching her be persecuted for her very virtues reveals just how morally collapsed the West has become. She literally personifies the highest ideals of public service: profound integrity intelligence graceful eloquence and an almost sacred commitment to the voiceless and defenseless. The fact that we're in an era where we persecute figures like her who advocate for murdered children and civilians in order to protect (and keep arming) their killers proves we've abandoned any"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1943210988846878737) 2025-07-10 07:29:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 428.2K engagements
"China just approved yet another project of an unfathomable scale: a mega dam that will generate X times more power than the Three Gorges enough to meet the annual needs of over 300m people the equivalent of the entire US population. The project will cost an insane X trillion yuan (US$137 billion) to build and will be located on the Yarlung Tsangpo River inTibet autonomous region which carves out the deepest canyon on Earth"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1872086555944477138) 2024-12-26 01:06:31 UTC 339.1K followers, 933.6K engagements
"It's done: China just launched the construction of the Yarlung Tsangpo dam project It'll be by far the worlds largest hydroelectric facility generating X times more electricity than the Three Gorges dam XXX billion kilowatt-hours. This dam project alone could power almost a quarter (21.6%) of all US households since the average U.S. household consumes about 10500 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity per year and there are XXX million households in the US It could also power the entirety of France and Italy COMBINED since the average electricity consumption in France is X XXX kWh per person per"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1946854532043899326) 2025-07-20 08:47:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 321K engagements
"Thinking about it ironically maybe the biggest victims of the Trump tariffs may end up being American companies. Take Apple for instance. These guys have spent decades building incredibly complex global supply chains that span dozens of countries. They can't just flip a switch and move everything back to America. Their supply network represents tens of billions in investment thousands of supplier relationships and logistics systems perfected over decades. Dismantling this overnight is impossible and building a comparable domestic alternative - which is the stated goal of the Trump tariffs -"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1907827106337452168) 2025-04-03 16:06:42 UTC 339.1K followers, 205.6K engagements
"I double checked and @amasad is correct: the WaPo article that @shaunmmaguire refers to - and cropped the date of () - is more than one month old is about a completely unrelated massacre in Gaza. So we effectively have a guy who is a partner at @sequoia one of the most prestigious VCs in the US who is openly and shamelessly lying in order to justify the mass murder of civilians collecting aid and who slanders a startup CEO in the process"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1941701094423552040) 2025-07-06 03:29:50 UTC 339.1K followers, 366.2K engagements
"This is pretty insane. The US just withdrew from UNESCO because according to the official explanation on the State Dept website of "UNESCOs decision to admit the 'State of Palestine' as a Member" and because of its "outsized focus on the UNs Sustainable Development Goals." They write that neither are "in the national interest of the United States." At least it has the merit of being pretty clear: the US is officially opposed to Palestinians' existence and the sustainable development of the world which it says do not make America "stronger." But what's also pretty clear is that if the world"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947920095704953305) 2025-07-23 07:21:56 UTC 339.1K followers, 129.6K engagements
"The funniest part of this is that Wan Hai is a Taiwanese shipping company which goes to show they're starting to understand that acknowledging that Taiwan is part of China does come with its advantages 😏"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1937006266418901235) 2025-06-23 04:34:16 UTC 339.1K followers, 77.3K engagements
"Perfect example of what I wrote last week: the "China rose thanks to us" is the new coping mechanism to reconcile China's rise and American exceptionalism - "we didn't lose we just gave it all away." Setting aside the fact that this is zero-sum thinking that is wrong by definition - the world isn't black and white where one's "win" means another's "loss" - even within that framework this is just sore loser mentality: obviously ridiculous to claim that China which pulled off the fastest rise in human history much faster than the US's own rise did so with no merit of its own. If anything Deng"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947361295801393433) 2025-07-21 18:21:27 UTC 339.1K followers, 94.1K engagements
"@broniiiiiiichan @SeverinMeister No XXX isn't that bad especially if it's a maximum. In the past Beijing used to reach 1000. XXX is in the "unhealthy" category and there are X categories above: "Very unhealthy" (above 201) and "Hazardous" (above 300)"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1944332609359917241) 2025-07-13 09:46:32 UTC 339.1K followers, XXX engagements
"Link to my article entitled "France's Parliament Calls Europe to Break with America and Partner with China":"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1943599574788284463) 2025-07-11 09:13:43 UTC 339.1K followers, 54.4K engagements
"Just watched this Chinese movie called "successor" in the plane and I have to say one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. It's the story of billionaire parents who grew up poor (like most people of their generation in China) and don't want their second child to become spoiled so they decide to set up a "Truman show"-like environnement where he is raised in the same poor conditions they themselves grew up in. Some scenes are truly hilarious like when the boy unexpectedly finds himself in his parents' real mansion forcing them to quickly swap outfits with their staff so the"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945035006851911924) 2025-07-15 08:17:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 314.7K engagements
"The story around China issuing USD-denominated sovereign bonds in Saudi Arabia is generating an enormous amount of buzz in China and could potentially be immensely important. I strongly suspect it's a message to the upcoming Trump administration. Let me explain what seems to be going on. On the face of it it's not a major story: China issued $X billion in USD-denominated sovereign bonds in Saudi Arabia which means that investors lent USD to the Chinese government that they promised to pay back. That's what a bond is. So far relatively boring. The first somewhat interesting aspect of it is"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1859446480198828360) 2024-11-21 03:59:22 UTC 339K followers, 1.7M engagements
"There's no overstating how extraordinary this is. The West has now lost political support from the whole of Asia even Japan and South Korea"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1937126934309405148) 2025-06-23 12:33:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 1.8M engagements
"This is a nice feel-good story. A Japanese student decided to do a "social experiment" in China where he would hitchhike from Nanjing all the way to Urumqi the capital of Xinjiang more than 3000 kilometers away. The social experiment was: he would ask passing drivers if they were willing to give him a ride. If they said yes he would then tell them he was Japanese - and observe whether they would still agree to take him. The result: among XX drivers only X refused him after learning he was Japanese. That is to say XXXX% of drivers still chose kindness and offered him a ride. Link to the"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1943628004191883498) 2025-07-11 11:06:41 UTC 339.1K followers, 239.5K engagements
"If confirmed this is one of the most significant developments in space technology in a long time and could fundamentally change satellite economics. Satellite refueling in geostationary orbit has been a holy grail for decades but it's an extraordinarily complex technical challenge. NASA tried during X years with its OSAM-1 program but ultimately threw in the towel. The reason why it could change satellite economics is simply because it could dramatically extend satellite lifespans which is quite impactful when replacing a geostationary satellite can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1944417649624248490) 2025-07-13 15:24:27 UTC 339K followers, 79.1K engagements
"To be expected the U.S. is now issued open threats against this "Hague group" of countries seeking to put in place concreate measures against Israel. A U.S. State Department spokesperson said that they strongly opposes efforts by so-called multilateral blocs to weaponize international law as a tool to advance radical anti-Western agendas. The Hague Group seeks to undermine the sovereignty of democratic nations by isolating and attempting to delegitimize Israel transparently laying the groundwork for targeting the United States our military and our allies. Adding that the U.S. government will"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945074287871697063) 2025-07-15 10:53:42 UTC 339.1K followers, 122.6K engagements
"That's probably one of least known yet coolest facts about China: in almost all large cities (that I've seen) people swim or fish in the rivers. This is Liangma river in Beijing 👇"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1944282827123790019) 2025-07-13 06:28:43 UTC 339.1K followers, 102.8K engagements
"Ha yes the extraordinarily complex science of early-stage investing where you need to a) look at startup pitches b) decide if you give them money. How could the Chinese have possibly cracked that code without American help 🤦 After IP theft this "we taught the Chinese everything" is the new coping mechanism to reconcile China's rise and American exceptionalism - "we didn't lose we were just super generous and gave it all away." Because we all know that American capitalists are famously all about selflessness and altruism"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945414470060081172) 2025-07-16 09:25:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 126K engagements
"AFP reports that its reporters (one text freelancer three photographers and six video freelancers) still on-site in Gaza are currently dying from hunger. They write: "Since AFP was founded in August 1944 we have lost journalists in conflicts we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks but none of us has the memory of having seen a collaborator die of hunger." _________________________ Translation of the full text: "AFP works with one text freelancer three photographers and six video freelancers in the Gaza Strip since the departure of its staff journalists during 2024. Along with a few"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947760255552905369) 2025-07-22 20:46:47 UTC 339.1K followers, 116.5K engagements
"I had an AI research this and there has never been a single documented case of a foreigner detained at the border in China for negative content about China. In fact I broadened the search and contrary to popular belief I couldn't find a single documented case of a foreign tourist or student ever being detained in China over their speech or over content they posted or possessed. By contrast I've seen dozens of cases such as this one 👇 in the U.S. in the past few weeks alone. You draw your own conclusions"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1937720341952102414) 2025-06-25 03:51:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 130.6K engagements
"Wow game changer. Given that they seem to announce a new "alternative to the BRI" at just about all international summits 😅 So far we've had B3W ("Build Back Better World") the PGII (Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment) the AAGC ("Asia-Africa Growth Corridor") the Blue Dot Network the Global Gateway initiative etc. Has any of those gained any momentum 🤔"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1700694182686544049) 2023-09-10 02:14:25 UTC 339.1K followers, 82.6K engagements
"That's a key point by Luke 👇 It's an implicit admission by Trump that they have lost the Western hemisphere: if you treat the largest other country in your own hemisphere like a hostile adversary by definition it implies that you believe that the traditional "Monroe doctrine" US-led hemispheric order has already collapsed"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1943194343650791796) 2025-07-10 06:23:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 60.8K engagements
"This letter is batshit crazy no other way to describe it. For one imposing XX% tariffs on Brazil so that they drop charges against former president Bolsonaro is pure foreign interference. Even if you do support Bolsonaro you don't want to establish a precedent where the US can dictate the Brazilian judicial process. Also longer-term this can only encourage Brazil to de-risk itself as much as possible from the US and minimize trade with them so that such hostile actions have less impact. Which means reinforcing BRICS and all initiatives aimed at establishing an alternative order in which the"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1943125210473074774) 2025-07-10 01:48:46 UTC 339K followers, 445.8K engagements
"This is yet another move that doesn't make any sense whatsoever from an economic or strategic perspective. As per the FT article the EDA firms that will now be banned from selling to China - Synopsys Cadence Design Systems and Siemens EDA - have an XX% market share there and their revenue in the Chinese market account for between XX% and XX% of their global sales. At the same time there are some domestic Chinese companies in this sector like Huada Empyrean Software (HES). This is essentially saying "let's take the XX% market share our companies have in this sector and hand it over to Chinese"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1927901624586096923) 2025-05-29 01:35:40 UTC 339.1K followers, 62.4K engagements
"@Anc_Aesthetics Let's see if these tariffs will end up being the success you seem to posit; I highly suspect you'll want to delete the tweets where you defend them in a few months"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1913157386225041890) 2025-04-18 09:07:20 UTC 339.1K followers, 222.5K engagements
"I have to say there's something immensely ironic about the Dalai Lama arguing his reincarnation should be determined by a tax-exempt Swiss foundation incorporated in Zurich while Beijing insists on maintaining the traditional centuries-old Golden Urn selection process. And the even bigger irony is that everyone will doubtlessly denounce China for "destroying Tibetan traditions and culture" for doing so"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1940574901901185080) 2025-07-03 00:54:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 334.2K engagements
"Back in my childhood home in Provence like every summer. And now with my daughters who at least for a few weeks a year get to live French countryside style the way their father grew up. Every year when I come back the house has been invaded by vegetation so I end up spending a significant part of my holidays just cutting the growth all to redo it all over again the year after 😅 With my daughters reliving my childhood and me cutting the same vegetation year after year it probably makes the cycles of nature the major theme of this house. Which is what a childhood home is all about: a place"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1948124402681598391) 2025-07-23 20:53:46 UTC 339.1K followers, 121.1K engagements
"That was our boat. We rented it together with X other families (we were a total of X adults and X kids). Relatively affordable: XX million Indonesian rupiah ($3400) for X nights and X days with a crew of X and full board"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1917856579870941405) 2025-05-01 08:20:15 UTC 339.1K followers, 12.5K engagements
"I just read this 👇 and I have to say probably one of the best and most nuanced articles I've read on China's evolving stance on Palestine and Israel. The concluding quote hits hard from Zhang Chengzhi a Chinese Hui Muslim writer who invented the term Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in his middle-school years and later devoted his entire life to writing about Palestine and the Islamic World for Chinese audiences (he is probably the most influential Muslim writer in China). In a 2009 article in which he commemorated a group of Japanese Maoists who participated in armed struggles in"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1942616284572836199) 2025-07-08 16:06:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 69K engagements
"This is the U.S. starting to recognize it made an absurdly stupid mistake by banning the sale of A.I. chips to China depriving its own companies of their largest market (China used to import more semiconductors than oil) and boosting the rise of major domestic competition in China. And given that their strategy backfired they're pivoting from trying to prevent China from competing in AI to a strategy of acknowledging that they will but they'd rather they do so under a Western tech stack effectively trying to contain the adoption of Chinese chips"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945086811681824954) 2025-07-15 11:43:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 76.3K engagements
"It is dying as an empire. In fact I'd even argue it's already largely dead they don't and can't even have regional hegemony in their own hemisphere anymore if you look for instance at the recent moves back and forth with Brazil. The Republic the US will of course remain as a major great power. I didn't suggest they are harmless not sure where I did"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947752437005111661) 2025-07-22 20:15:43 UTC 339.1K followers, 4927 engagements
"Just spent the last X days on a sailboat exploring the Flores and Komodo islands in Indonesia and I have to say undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places in the world"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1917855375094866340) 2025-05-01 08:15:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 148K engagements
"Drafting Danish women to "meet U.S. expectations" when the U.S. is a country that's presently threatening to annex XX% of Denmark's territory (i.e. Greenland). Hardly gets more peak vassal than this"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1940385935738503421) 2025-07-02 12:23:52 UTC 339.1K followers, 135.3K engagements
"Remember: ultimately the price of AI will converge to the price of electricity. And in general tomorrow's economy will be powered by electricity to an even far greater extent than today. The whole economy ultimately is energy transformed and more and more electricity transformed. Electricity prices rising so dramatically (35% over the past X years) in the US is an immensely consequential competitive disadvantage in the technology race one that'll only worsen with time. Which is exactly why I argued in my recent article that America's energy strategy may prove to be the greatest strategic"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945925974199005267) 2025-07-17 19:18:00 UTC 339.1K followers, 42.7K engagements
"Remember this This was April 9th the day of the announcement of the 90-day pause for "liberation day" tariffs and Trump was saying that countries were "dying to make a deal" and would do anything for it "kissing his ass" to make deals. Basically the narrative was that countries were so desperate to avoid the tariffs that deals would be easy. We're now July 7th the eve - literally - of the 90-day deadline. So where are we 1) Not a single actual trade "deal" was achieved. The US has reached X "framework" agreements with respectively China the UK and Vietnam but even with those the US wasn't"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1942081421151252789) 2025-07-07 04:41:07 UTC 339.1K followers, 125.8K engagements
"This is so illustrative of the fundamentally self-destructive nature of Trump's tariffs: copper a base material critical to thousands of manufacturing & infrastructure applications now costs XX% more in the U.S. than it does in the rest of the world. How on earth do you want to revive manufacturing if the basic building blocks of industry cost way more for American companies than for anyone else on the planet On the contrary this makes U.S. producers uncompetitive before they even start production"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1942791960122778041) 2025-07-09 03:44:33 UTC 339K followers, 55.5K engagements
"Yup we're at the stage where Canada's leading newspaper is calling for the country to "free ourselves of the U.S. and forge closer ties with China" and to "break free from the made-in-Washington narrative that China is an unreliable trading partner.""
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945023759179489345) 2025-07-15 07:32:55 UTC 339.1K followers, 86.3K engagements
"This is a good piece by @stephenwertheim making the point - which I agree with and should reassure us all - that a cold war between the US and China is becoming "less warranted and less feasible" because it would certainly be much more detrimental to the US than China. This is because as per the piece "70% of countriesnow conduct more trade with China than with America" and "more than three-quarters of the world's countries judge China more favourably than the US"; meaning that if a cold war were to break out it'd likely be China containing the US instead of the reverse. Wertheim argues that"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945950822807789880) 2025-07-17 20:56:44 UTC 339.1K followers, 44.9K engagements
"Almost every day now I see a massively viral tweet with a quote Xi never said and would never say: top Chinese leaders express themselves in a very particular language and would never be so direct and insulting. People wishing this was real should be careful what they wish for: it's already bad enough that we have one great power whose leadership keeps making unhinged public rants. And China is winning for the very reason that it remains diplomatically disciplined. When you spread these fake quotes you actually undermine this"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945789214605643788) 2025-07-17 10:14:34 UTC 339.1K followers, 287K engagements
"When you take actions that obviously cede ground to your competitor there are X possible explanations for it: either you're making an error out of incompetence or you're cutting your losses in recognition that the game is unwinnable. Virtually all commentators - like here 👇- look at the US's recent actions on the global stage and assume the former: "they're so stupid don't they realize this will cause America's decline and accelerate China's rise" The Trump administration meanwhile is muddying the waters by framing this as a purge of "radical ideologues" house-cleaning DEI and "woke""
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947599893305909686) 2025-07-22 10:09:33 UTC 339.1K followers, 27.2K engagements
"That's pretty insane: Grok X decides what it thinks about Israel/Palestine by searching for Elon's thoughts on the topic"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1943486407651266730) 2025-07-11 01:44:02 UTC 339.1K followers, 60.3K engagements
"As a big river swimming fan and being in Paris today I had to try it: swimming in the Seine river which is now possible since the 5th of July. Honestly pretty cool experience in all meanings of the word since the water is a refreshing 23C. They have X sites and we tried the "Grenelle" one very close to the Eiffel tower. The water quality is frankly not bad I saw many fishes in the water and it feels quite clean I even put my head under the water as you can see on the video"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1946187799230558318) 2025-07-18 12:38:24 UTC 339.1K followers, 52K engagements
"Looks like another instance of persecution of an iconic Chinese company might be developing in the US with Homeland Security raiding Fuyao Glass America: Fuyao Glass America is especially famous because it was the company featured in Barack Obama's Netflix documentary "American factory". As such it'd be immensely symbolic if they were to become - after Huawei TikTok DJI etc. - yet another victim of the US's crusade against anything related to China"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1817113451354898715) 2024-07-27 08:23:01 UTC 339K followers, 57.9K engagements
"Interestingly on our drive down from Paris today we had dinner in Lyon and we witnessed a pro-Palestine protest in the city center. Good to see at least some people care around here"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1948128631634497944) 2025-07-23 21:10:34 UTC 339.1K followers, 18.7K engagements
"Wow looks like Xi was extremely straightforward during his meeting with Biden probably the most he's ever officially been in a meeting with a US president. According to the Chinese readout here's what he told Biden were the X "lessons of the past X years that need to be remembered": 1) "There must be correct strategic understanding. The 'Thucydides Trap' is not historical destiny a 'new Cold War' cannot and should not be fought containment of China is unwise undesirable and will not succeed." 2) "Words must be trustworthy and actions must be fruitful. A person cannot stand without"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1858019192370507904) 2024-11-17 05:27:50 UTC 339K followers, 717.8K engagements
"Status update: just arrived in beautiful Indonesia on Flores island which many people believe is one of the most scenic places in Asia. We're about to go sailing during four days on a boat and this is the moment👇 where we get a first look at our boat from afar"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1916049446955348285) 2025-04-26 08:39:21 UTC 339.1K followers, 56.1K engagements
"We're definitely witnessing quite the tone shift from Australia with regards to China if one looks at PM Albanese's tweets over the past few days. He says that "free and open trade is good for both Australia and China" an obvious coded criticism of American policies around trade: quite ironically being "free and open" is now siding with Beijing over Washington. He emphasizes several times the importance of stability in the relationship with China again probably a reference to Trump's characteristic instability and also likely a jab at his predecessor's confrontational approach to China."
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945567240189088003) 2025-07-16 19:32:31 UTC 339.1K followers, 130.9K engagements
""U.S. lawmakers are trying to bar Chinese biotech companies over fears about Americas failure to compete with China in the industry" Practical: if your competitor is better than you ban them from the race. But also very short-sighted"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1760552882397643002) 2024-02-22 06:31:31 UTC 339K followers, 27.4K engagements
"Wow XX countries - including China () - are meeting in Bogota this coming week to declare concrete measures against Israels violations of international law. The states due to take part in the summit include Algeria Bangladesh Bolivia Brazil Chile China Colombia Cuba Djibouti Honduras Indonesia Ireland Lebanon Malaysia Namibia Nicaragua Oman Portugal Spain Qatar Senegal South Africa Turkey Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Uruguay and Palestine. Src:"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1944516124718297193) 2025-07-13 21:55:46 UTC 339.1K followers, 802.2K engagements
"I'm an extremely fast eater myself (I've literally won speed-eating contests) and since the eating style in China is to all share dishes my wife's common saying is: "since I'm married with Arnaud if I don't eat fast I don't eat" 😅"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947008681905688863) 2025-07-20 19:00:18 UTC 339.1K followers, 49.2K engagements
"Most people interpret this as the US preparing for war but I think that on the contrary this is but the latest sign of strategic retreat - the US trying to outsource the costs and risks of a competition it knows it has already lost. Think about it: what the US is doing here is asking its "allies" to write blank checks that it itself refuses to sign (Trump is adamant it won't commit to anything wrt Taiwan). Ultimately this leads to a situation whereby "allies" will eventually ask themselves "wait a minute the whole point of our alliance with the U.S. was THEM defending US but now we're"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1944246767798956306) 2025-07-13 04:05:26 UTC 339.1K followers, 109.5K engagements
"This movie says a lot about Chinas current anxieties: how does a society that has conquered poverty in just one generation ensure that prosperity doesn't destroy the very qualities - hunger resilience determination - that made that prosperity possible in the first place It also says a lot about China's recent history: in some way Mao's cultural revolution was this movie's plot on a civilizational scale - Mao scared that China's revolutionary fervor would be corrupted by comfort and bureaucratic privilege orchestrated a massive national experiment in manufactured hardship to maintain what he"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945143865578570040) 2025-07-15 15:30:11 UTC 339.1K followers, 139.3K engagements
"5.2% GDP growth is pretty impressive given that exports to the US dropped by XX% that quarter compared to the year before due to the tariffs. Shows once again that China really doesn't rely on exports to the US for its economy"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945228667681972466) 2025-07-15 21:07:09 UTC 339.1K followers, 244.7K engagements
"This absolutely stunning chart comparison by the NYT might prove to be the most important geopolitical visualization of the 21st century. The two major superpowers are each cornering a competing energy platform. China bets everything on clean energy the US on fossil fuels. It's incredibly rare probably even unprecedented in history to see X superpowers making completely opposite trillion-dollar bets on the underlying technology that literally powers the world. Let's see how it plays out. One interesting related statistic: XX% of the Global South's new energy investments go to clean tech so"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1940310878307655965) 2025-07-02 07:25:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 524.4K engagements
"I just read this WSJ article on why Europe's tech scene is so much smaller than the US's and China's. I'm afraid that like most articles on this topic it largely misses the mark. Which in itself illustrates a key reason why Europe is lagging behind: when you fail to understand the root causes of an issue you have zero chance to solve it. What makes me competent to speak on this topic Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s I founded and led HouseTrip which at the time was one of Europe's top startups. We were the first historical startup in which all top X VC investors in Europe invested. So I"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1925029185052917791) 2025-05-21 03:21:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 819.8K engagements
"Trump blinked first. Below the full list of the items that are now exempt from tariffs XX categories of products in total organized by HS code (sourced from here: - 8471: Automatic data processing machines and units thereof (e.g. computers such as laptops desktops and servers) - 8473.30: Parts and accessories for automatic data processing machines and their units (e.g. computer components and peripheral parts) - 8486: Machines and apparatus for the manufacture of semiconductor devices or electronic integrated circuits - 8517.13.00 Smartphones and other telecommunication apparatus for cellular"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1911068764067750066) 2025-04-12 14:47:53 UTC 339.1K followers, 326.9K engagements
"This is fascinating: China is virtually unique in the Islamic world for having an established centuries-old tradition of female imams (n ahong - ) in women-only mosques (known as nsi literally "womens temple"). In these mosques the female imams lead women-only prayers usually standing shoulder to shoulder with the other women (as opposed to in front for male imams). They also teach women and girls how to recite the Quran basic Islamic doctrine and offer guidance on daily life from a religious perspective. The origins of this tradition date to the late Ming and early Qing period (17th18th"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1948358496040137134) 2025-07-24 12:23:58 UTC 339.1K followers, 40.7K engagements
"This might be the most remarkable geopolitical document I've seen come out of a major European institution so far this century. Frances Parliament has just produced an extraordinary 153-page report that calls for nothing less than a complete strategic realignment of Europe. The document systematically dismantles the EU's current geopolitical positioning - "vassalized" to the U.S. in the report's words - as a catastrophic failure that has led to the EU seeing "its influence diminish and its interests poorly protected." The report details XX recommendations from the "creation of a common world"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1943599430227357732) 2025-07-11 09:13:09 UTC 339.1K followers, 630.4K engagements
"@BvGroat It's a pretty universal truth about rich kids"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1945071411267010562) 2025-07-15 10:42:16 UTC 339.1K followers, 6653 engagements
"You need to be a special kind of psychopath to think these images somehow reflect well on you: a large group of emaciated and obviously desperate civilians in a landscape of total desolation that you caused scrambling towards a rare aid truck while your soldiers have to be repeatedly instructed not to shoot them from afar which means it isn't the norm"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1947605368097354204) 2025-07-22 10:31:19 UTC 339.1K followers, 317.8K engagements
"Beyond all the rhetoric the facts are pretty telling: this week the Australian Prime Minister will meet Xi Jinping for the 3rd time (the other two times were November 2023 and November 2024) and he hasn't met Trump once yet. Another sign of the underlying reality that I wrote about in my article "Has America in fact already withdrawn from Asia" (link in next tweet): when you look at facts beyond the "pivot to Asia" rhetoric the US-China contest in the region is already over"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1942106455676690746) 2025-07-07 06:20:36 UTC 339K followers, 67.8K engagements
"@fairer4scoring @thinking_panda Someone is obviously unfamiliar with the North China phenotype 😅"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1944337802474484104) 2025-07-13 10:07:10 UTC 339.1K followers, XXX engagements
"Congrats @guardian this is easily one of the most dishonest articles I've read in a long time just pure ideological propaganda. In short the article's main thesis is that climate change is a "democracy" vs "autocracies" issue whereby virtuous "democracies" are struggling valiantly against climate change while evil "autocracies" are the primary obstacle to progress. And the central question being: how can we the good guys force these bad "autocracies" to behave responsibly on climate As the article puts it "democracies" apparently have attributes like popular pressure and transparency that"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1946131640671199482) 2025-07-18 08:55:15 UTC 339.1K followers, 95.4K engagements
"Yet another perfect illustration why it'd be so potentially devastating to sever links between U.S. and Chinese science as the Trump administration is trying to do. A Chinese biotech company found what Dr Norman Sharpless former director of the National Cancer Institute says is the first "potential cure" he's seen in his XX years in oncology for myeloma a common and extremely painful blood cancer that doctors thought incurable. A group of XX patients who had longstanding multiple myeloma underwent a clinical trial funded by Johnson & Johnson which has an exclusive licensing agreement with"
 [@RnaudBertrand](/creator/x/RnaudBertrand) on [X](/post/tweet/1930490752095982025) 2025-06-05 05:03:56 UTC 339.1K followers, 61.3K engagements
[GUEST ACCESS MODE: Data is scrambled or limited to provide examples. Make requests using your API key to unlock full data. Check https://lunarcrush.ai/auth for authentication information.]
@RnaudBertrand
"The best description of Palantir that I've ever read is "the Salesforce for killing people""
@RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-07 07:49:53 UTC 339.1K followers, 110.3K engagements
"This might be one of the most insane reports ever produced by a U.S. Think Tank and thats saying something. The Hudson Institute just published a 128-page blueprint titled China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China edited by Miles Yu (director of the Institutes China Center) which provides detailed operational plans for inducing Chinese regime collapse followed by detailed protocols for U.S. post-collapse management including military occupation and the installation of a political and cultural system vassalized to the U.S. I genuinely dont know whether I should laugh or cry. Cry at" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-22 16:08:29 UTC 339.1K followers, 192.7K engagements
"This is beyond shameful and a terrifying sign. Albanese is as close to a political saint as we're likely to see and watching her be persecuted for her very virtues reveals just how morally collapsed the West has become. She literally personifies the highest ideals of public service: profound integrity intelligence graceful eloquence and an almost sacred commitment to the voiceless and defenseless. The fact that we're in an era where we persecute figures like her who advocate for murdered children and civilians in order to protect (and keep arming) their killers proves we've abandoned any" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-10 07:29:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 428.2K engagements
"China just approved yet another project of an unfathomable scale: a mega dam that will generate X times more power than the Three Gorges enough to meet the annual needs of over 300m people the equivalent of the entire US population. The project will cost an insane X trillion yuan (US$137 billion) to build and will be located on the Yarlung Tsangpo River inTibet autonomous region which carves out the deepest canyon on Earth" @RnaudBertrand on X 2024-12-26 01:06:31 UTC 339.1K followers, 933.6K engagements
"It's done: China just launched the construction of the Yarlung Tsangpo dam project It'll be by far the worlds largest hydroelectric facility generating X times more electricity than the Three Gorges dam XXX billion kilowatt-hours. This dam project alone could power almost a quarter (21.6%) of all US households since the average U.S. household consumes about 10500 kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity per year and there are XXX million households in the US It could also power the entirety of France and Italy COMBINED since the average electricity consumption in France is X XXX kWh per person per" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-20 08:47:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 321K engagements
"Thinking about it ironically maybe the biggest victims of the Trump tariffs may end up being American companies. Take Apple for instance. These guys have spent decades building incredibly complex global supply chains that span dozens of countries. They can't just flip a switch and move everything back to America. Their supply network represents tens of billions in investment thousands of supplier relationships and logistics systems perfected over decades. Dismantling this overnight is impossible and building a comparable domestic alternative - which is the stated goal of the Trump tariffs -" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-04-03 16:06:42 UTC 339.1K followers, 205.6K engagements
"I double checked and @amasad is correct: the WaPo article that @shaunmmaguire refers to - and cropped the date of () - is more than one month old is about a completely unrelated massacre in Gaza. So we effectively have a guy who is a partner at @sequoia one of the most prestigious VCs in the US who is openly and shamelessly lying in order to justify the mass murder of civilians collecting aid and who slanders a startup CEO in the process" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-06 03:29:50 UTC 339.1K followers, 366.2K engagements
"This is pretty insane. The US just withdrew from UNESCO because according to the official explanation on the State Dept website of "UNESCOs decision to admit the 'State of Palestine' as a Member" and because of its "outsized focus on the UNs Sustainable Development Goals." They write that neither are "in the national interest of the United States." At least it has the merit of being pretty clear: the US is officially opposed to Palestinians' existence and the sustainable development of the world which it says do not make America "stronger." But what's also pretty clear is that if the world" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-23 07:21:56 UTC 339.1K followers, 129.6K engagements
"The funniest part of this is that Wan Hai is a Taiwanese shipping company which goes to show they're starting to understand that acknowledging that Taiwan is part of China does come with its advantages 😏" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-06-23 04:34:16 UTC 339.1K followers, 77.3K engagements
"Perfect example of what I wrote last week: the "China rose thanks to us" is the new coping mechanism to reconcile China's rise and American exceptionalism - "we didn't lose we just gave it all away." Setting aside the fact that this is zero-sum thinking that is wrong by definition - the world isn't black and white where one's "win" means another's "loss" - even within that framework this is just sore loser mentality: obviously ridiculous to claim that China which pulled off the fastest rise in human history much faster than the US's own rise did so with no merit of its own. If anything Deng" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-21 18:21:27 UTC 339.1K followers, 94.1K engagements
"@broniiiiiiichan @SeverinMeister No XXX isn't that bad especially if it's a maximum. In the past Beijing used to reach 1000. XXX is in the "unhealthy" category and there are X categories above: "Very unhealthy" (above 201) and "Hazardous" (above 300)" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-13 09:46:32 UTC 339.1K followers, XXX engagements
"Link to my article entitled "France's Parliament Calls Europe to Break with America and Partner with China":" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-11 09:13:43 UTC 339.1K followers, 54.4K engagements
"Just watched this Chinese movie called "successor" in the plane and I have to say one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. It's the story of billionaire parents who grew up poor (like most people of their generation in China) and don't want their second child to become spoiled so they decide to set up a "Truman show"-like environnement where he is raised in the same poor conditions they themselves grew up in. Some scenes are truly hilarious like when the boy unexpectedly finds himself in his parents' real mansion forcing them to quickly swap outfits with their staff so the" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-15 08:17:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 314.7K engagements
"The story around China issuing USD-denominated sovereign bonds in Saudi Arabia is generating an enormous amount of buzz in China and could potentially be immensely important. I strongly suspect it's a message to the upcoming Trump administration. Let me explain what seems to be going on. On the face of it it's not a major story: China issued $X billion in USD-denominated sovereign bonds in Saudi Arabia which means that investors lent USD to the Chinese government that they promised to pay back. That's what a bond is. So far relatively boring. The first somewhat interesting aspect of it is" @RnaudBertrand on X 2024-11-21 03:59:22 UTC 339K followers, 1.7M engagements
"There's no overstating how extraordinary this is. The West has now lost political support from the whole of Asia even Japan and South Korea" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-06-23 12:33:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 1.8M engagements
"This is a nice feel-good story. A Japanese student decided to do a "social experiment" in China where he would hitchhike from Nanjing all the way to Urumqi the capital of Xinjiang more than 3000 kilometers away. The social experiment was: he would ask passing drivers if they were willing to give him a ride. If they said yes he would then tell them he was Japanese - and observe whether they would still agree to take him. The result: among XX drivers only X refused him after learning he was Japanese. That is to say XXXX% of drivers still chose kindness and offered him a ride. Link to the" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-11 11:06:41 UTC 339.1K followers, 239.5K engagements
"If confirmed this is one of the most significant developments in space technology in a long time and could fundamentally change satellite economics. Satellite refueling in geostationary orbit has been a holy grail for decades but it's an extraordinarily complex technical challenge. NASA tried during X years with its OSAM-1 program but ultimately threw in the towel. The reason why it could change satellite economics is simply because it could dramatically extend satellite lifespans which is quite impactful when replacing a geostationary satellite can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-13 15:24:27 UTC 339K followers, 79.1K engagements
"To be expected the U.S. is now issued open threats against this "Hague group" of countries seeking to put in place concreate measures against Israel. A U.S. State Department spokesperson said that they strongly opposes efforts by so-called multilateral blocs to weaponize international law as a tool to advance radical anti-Western agendas. The Hague Group seeks to undermine the sovereignty of democratic nations by isolating and attempting to delegitimize Israel transparently laying the groundwork for targeting the United States our military and our allies. Adding that the U.S. government will" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-15 10:53:42 UTC 339.1K followers, 122.6K engagements
"That's probably one of least known yet coolest facts about China: in almost all large cities (that I've seen) people swim or fish in the rivers. This is Liangma river in Beijing 👇" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-13 06:28:43 UTC 339.1K followers, 102.8K engagements
"Ha yes the extraordinarily complex science of early-stage investing where you need to a) look at startup pitches b) decide if you give them money. How could the Chinese have possibly cracked that code without American help 🤦 After IP theft this "we taught the Chinese everything" is the new coping mechanism to reconcile China's rise and American exceptionalism - "we didn't lose we were just super generous and gave it all away." Because we all know that American capitalists are famously all about selflessness and altruism" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-16 09:25:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 126K engagements
"AFP reports that its reporters (one text freelancer three photographers and six video freelancers) still on-site in Gaza are currently dying from hunger. They write: "Since AFP was founded in August 1944 we have lost journalists in conflicts we have had wounded and prisoners in our ranks but none of us has the memory of having seen a collaborator die of hunger." _________________________ Translation of the full text: "AFP works with one text freelancer three photographers and six video freelancers in the Gaza Strip since the departure of its staff journalists during 2024. Along with a few" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-22 20:46:47 UTC 339.1K followers, 116.5K engagements
"I had an AI research this and there has never been a single documented case of a foreigner detained at the border in China for negative content about China. In fact I broadened the search and contrary to popular belief I couldn't find a single documented case of a foreign tourist or student ever being detained in China over their speech or over content they posted or possessed. By contrast I've seen dozens of cases such as this one 👇 in the U.S. in the past few weeks alone. You draw your own conclusions" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-06-25 03:51:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 130.6K engagements
"Wow game changer. Given that they seem to announce a new "alternative to the BRI" at just about all international summits 😅 So far we've had B3W ("Build Back Better World") the PGII (Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment) the AAGC ("Asia-Africa Growth Corridor") the Blue Dot Network the Global Gateway initiative etc. Has any of those gained any momentum 🤔" @RnaudBertrand on X 2023-09-10 02:14:25 UTC 339.1K followers, 82.6K engagements
"That's a key point by Luke 👇 It's an implicit admission by Trump that they have lost the Western hemisphere: if you treat the largest other country in your own hemisphere like a hostile adversary by definition it implies that you believe that the traditional "Monroe doctrine" US-led hemispheric order has already collapsed" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-10 06:23:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 60.8K engagements
"This letter is batshit crazy no other way to describe it. For one imposing XX% tariffs on Brazil so that they drop charges against former president Bolsonaro is pure foreign interference. Even if you do support Bolsonaro you don't want to establish a precedent where the US can dictate the Brazilian judicial process. Also longer-term this can only encourage Brazil to de-risk itself as much as possible from the US and minimize trade with them so that such hostile actions have less impact. Which means reinforcing BRICS and all initiatives aimed at establishing an alternative order in which the" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-10 01:48:46 UTC 339K followers, 445.8K engagements
"This is yet another move that doesn't make any sense whatsoever from an economic or strategic perspective. As per the FT article the EDA firms that will now be banned from selling to China - Synopsys Cadence Design Systems and Siemens EDA - have an XX% market share there and their revenue in the Chinese market account for between XX% and XX% of their global sales. At the same time there are some domestic Chinese companies in this sector like Huada Empyrean Software (HES). This is essentially saying "let's take the XX% market share our companies have in this sector and hand it over to Chinese" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-05-29 01:35:40 UTC 339.1K followers, 62.4K engagements
"@Anc_Aesthetics Let's see if these tariffs will end up being the success you seem to posit; I highly suspect you'll want to delete the tweets where you defend them in a few months" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-04-18 09:07:20 UTC 339.1K followers, 222.5K engagements
"I have to say there's something immensely ironic about the Dalai Lama arguing his reincarnation should be determined by a tax-exempt Swiss foundation incorporated in Zurich while Beijing insists on maintaining the traditional centuries-old Golden Urn selection process. And the even bigger irony is that everyone will doubtlessly denounce China for "destroying Tibetan traditions and culture" for doing so" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-03 00:54:45 UTC 339.1K followers, 334.2K engagements
"Back in my childhood home in Provence like every summer. And now with my daughters who at least for a few weeks a year get to live French countryside style the way their father grew up. Every year when I come back the house has been invaded by vegetation so I end up spending a significant part of my holidays just cutting the growth all to redo it all over again the year after 😅 With my daughters reliving my childhood and me cutting the same vegetation year after year it probably makes the cycles of nature the major theme of this house. Which is what a childhood home is all about: a place" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-23 20:53:46 UTC 339.1K followers, 121.1K engagements
"That was our boat. We rented it together with X other families (we were a total of X adults and X kids). Relatively affordable: XX million Indonesian rupiah ($3400) for X nights and X days with a crew of X and full board" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-05-01 08:20:15 UTC 339.1K followers, 12.5K engagements
"I just read this 👇 and I have to say probably one of the best and most nuanced articles I've read on China's evolving stance on Palestine and Israel. The concluding quote hits hard from Zhang Chengzhi a Chinese Hui Muslim writer who invented the term Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in his middle-school years and later devoted his entire life to writing about Palestine and the Islamic World for Chinese audiences (he is probably the most influential Muslim writer in China). In a 2009 article in which he commemorated a group of Japanese Maoists who participated in armed struggles in" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-08 16:06:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 69K engagements
"This is the U.S. starting to recognize it made an absurdly stupid mistake by banning the sale of A.I. chips to China depriving its own companies of their largest market (China used to import more semiconductors than oil) and boosting the rise of major domestic competition in China. And given that their strategy backfired they're pivoting from trying to prevent China from competing in AI to a strategy of acknowledging that they will but they'd rather they do so under a Western tech stack effectively trying to contain the adoption of Chinese chips" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-15 11:43:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 76.3K engagements
"It is dying as an empire. In fact I'd even argue it's already largely dead they don't and can't even have regional hegemony in their own hemisphere anymore if you look for instance at the recent moves back and forth with Brazil. The Republic the US will of course remain as a major great power. I didn't suggest they are harmless not sure where I did" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-22 20:15:43 UTC 339.1K followers, 4927 engagements
"Just spent the last X days on a sailboat exploring the Flores and Komodo islands in Indonesia and I have to say undoubtedly one of the most beautiful places in the world" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-05-01 08:15:28 UTC 339.1K followers, 148K engagements
"Drafting Danish women to "meet U.S. expectations" when the U.S. is a country that's presently threatening to annex XX% of Denmark's territory (i.e. Greenland). Hardly gets more peak vassal than this" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-02 12:23:52 UTC 339.1K followers, 135.3K engagements
"Remember: ultimately the price of AI will converge to the price of electricity. And in general tomorrow's economy will be powered by electricity to an even far greater extent than today. The whole economy ultimately is energy transformed and more and more electricity transformed. Electricity prices rising so dramatically (35% over the past X years) in the US is an immensely consequential competitive disadvantage in the technology race one that'll only worsen with time. Which is exactly why I argued in my recent article that America's energy strategy may prove to be the greatest strategic" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-17 19:18:00 UTC 339.1K followers, 42.7K engagements
"Remember this This was April 9th the day of the announcement of the 90-day pause for "liberation day" tariffs and Trump was saying that countries were "dying to make a deal" and would do anything for it "kissing his ass" to make deals. Basically the narrative was that countries were so desperate to avoid the tariffs that deals would be easy. We're now July 7th the eve - literally - of the 90-day deadline. So where are we 1) Not a single actual trade "deal" was achieved. The US has reached X "framework" agreements with respectively China the UK and Vietnam but even with those the US wasn't" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-07 04:41:07 UTC 339.1K followers, 125.8K engagements
"This is so illustrative of the fundamentally self-destructive nature of Trump's tariffs: copper a base material critical to thousands of manufacturing & infrastructure applications now costs XX% more in the U.S. than it does in the rest of the world. How on earth do you want to revive manufacturing if the basic building blocks of industry cost way more for American companies than for anyone else on the planet On the contrary this makes U.S. producers uncompetitive before they even start production" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-09 03:44:33 UTC 339K followers, 55.5K engagements
"Yup we're at the stage where Canada's leading newspaper is calling for the country to "free ourselves of the U.S. and forge closer ties with China" and to "break free from the made-in-Washington narrative that China is an unreliable trading partner."" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-15 07:32:55 UTC 339.1K followers, 86.3K engagements
"This is a good piece by @stephenwertheim making the point - which I agree with and should reassure us all - that a cold war between the US and China is becoming "less warranted and less feasible" because it would certainly be much more detrimental to the US than China. This is because as per the piece "70% of countriesnow conduct more trade with China than with America" and "more than three-quarters of the world's countries judge China more favourably than the US"; meaning that if a cold war were to break out it'd likely be China containing the US instead of the reverse. Wertheim argues that" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-17 20:56:44 UTC 339.1K followers, 44.9K engagements
"Almost every day now I see a massively viral tweet with a quote Xi never said and would never say: top Chinese leaders express themselves in a very particular language and would never be so direct and insulting. People wishing this was real should be careful what they wish for: it's already bad enough that we have one great power whose leadership keeps making unhinged public rants. And China is winning for the very reason that it remains diplomatically disciplined. When you spread these fake quotes you actually undermine this" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-17 10:14:34 UTC 339.1K followers, 287K engagements
"When you take actions that obviously cede ground to your competitor there are X possible explanations for it: either you're making an error out of incompetence or you're cutting your losses in recognition that the game is unwinnable. Virtually all commentators - like here 👇- look at the US's recent actions on the global stage and assume the former: "they're so stupid don't they realize this will cause America's decline and accelerate China's rise" The Trump administration meanwhile is muddying the waters by framing this as a purge of "radical ideologues" house-cleaning DEI and "woke"" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-22 10:09:33 UTC 339.1K followers, 27.2K engagements
"That's pretty insane: Grok X decides what it thinks about Israel/Palestine by searching for Elon's thoughts on the topic" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-11 01:44:02 UTC 339.1K followers, 60.3K engagements
"As a big river swimming fan and being in Paris today I had to try it: swimming in the Seine river which is now possible since the 5th of July. Honestly pretty cool experience in all meanings of the word since the water is a refreshing 23C. They have X sites and we tried the "Grenelle" one very close to the Eiffel tower. The water quality is frankly not bad I saw many fishes in the water and it feels quite clean I even put my head under the water as you can see on the video" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-18 12:38:24 UTC 339.1K followers, 52K engagements
"Looks like another instance of persecution of an iconic Chinese company might be developing in the US with Homeland Security raiding Fuyao Glass America: Fuyao Glass America is especially famous because it was the company featured in Barack Obama's Netflix documentary "American factory". As such it'd be immensely symbolic if they were to become - after Huawei TikTok DJI etc. - yet another victim of the US's crusade against anything related to China" @RnaudBertrand on X 2024-07-27 08:23:01 UTC 339K followers, 57.9K engagements
"Interestingly on our drive down from Paris today we had dinner in Lyon and we witnessed a pro-Palestine protest in the city center. Good to see at least some people care around here" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-23 21:10:34 UTC 339.1K followers, 18.7K engagements
"Wow looks like Xi was extremely straightforward during his meeting with Biden probably the most he's ever officially been in a meeting with a US president. According to the Chinese readout here's what he told Biden were the X "lessons of the past X years that need to be remembered": 1) "There must be correct strategic understanding. The 'Thucydides Trap' is not historical destiny a 'new Cold War' cannot and should not be fought containment of China is unwise undesirable and will not succeed." 2) "Words must be trustworthy and actions must be fruitful. A person cannot stand without" @RnaudBertrand on X 2024-11-17 05:27:50 UTC 339K followers, 717.8K engagements
"Status update: just arrived in beautiful Indonesia on Flores island which many people believe is one of the most scenic places in Asia. We're about to go sailing during four days on a boat and this is the moment👇 where we get a first look at our boat from afar" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-04-26 08:39:21 UTC 339.1K followers, 56.1K engagements
"We're definitely witnessing quite the tone shift from Australia with regards to China if one looks at PM Albanese's tweets over the past few days. He says that "free and open trade is good for both Australia and China" an obvious coded criticism of American policies around trade: quite ironically being "free and open" is now siding with Beijing over Washington. He emphasizes several times the importance of stability in the relationship with China again probably a reference to Trump's characteristic instability and also likely a jab at his predecessor's confrontational approach to China." @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-16 19:32:31 UTC 339.1K followers, 130.9K engagements
""U.S. lawmakers are trying to bar Chinese biotech companies over fears about Americas failure to compete with China in the industry" Practical: if your competitor is better than you ban them from the race. But also very short-sighted" @RnaudBertrand on X 2024-02-22 06:31:31 UTC 339K followers, 27.4K engagements
"Wow XX countries - including China () - are meeting in Bogota this coming week to declare concrete measures against Israels violations of international law. The states due to take part in the summit include Algeria Bangladesh Bolivia Brazil Chile China Colombia Cuba Djibouti Honduras Indonesia Ireland Lebanon Malaysia Namibia Nicaragua Oman Portugal Spain Qatar Senegal South Africa Turkey Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Uruguay and Palestine. Src:" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-13 21:55:46 UTC 339.1K followers, 802.2K engagements
"I'm an extremely fast eater myself (I've literally won speed-eating contests) and since the eating style in China is to all share dishes my wife's common saying is: "since I'm married with Arnaud if I don't eat fast I don't eat" 😅" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-20 19:00:18 UTC 339.1K followers, 49.2K engagements
"Most people interpret this as the US preparing for war but I think that on the contrary this is but the latest sign of strategic retreat - the US trying to outsource the costs and risks of a competition it knows it has already lost. Think about it: what the US is doing here is asking its "allies" to write blank checks that it itself refuses to sign (Trump is adamant it won't commit to anything wrt Taiwan). Ultimately this leads to a situation whereby "allies" will eventually ask themselves "wait a minute the whole point of our alliance with the U.S. was THEM defending US but now we're" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-13 04:05:26 UTC 339.1K followers, 109.5K engagements
"This movie says a lot about Chinas current anxieties: how does a society that has conquered poverty in just one generation ensure that prosperity doesn't destroy the very qualities - hunger resilience determination - that made that prosperity possible in the first place It also says a lot about China's recent history: in some way Mao's cultural revolution was this movie's plot on a civilizational scale - Mao scared that China's revolutionary fervor would be corrupted by comfort and bureaucratic privilege orchestrated a massive national experiment in manufactured hardship to maintain what he" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-15 15:30:11 UTC 339.1K followers, 139.3K engagements
"5.2% GDP growth is pretty impressive given that exports to the US dropped by XX% that quarter compared to the year before due to the tariffs. Shows once again that China really doesn't rely on exports to the US for its economy" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-15 21:07:09 UTC 339.1K followers, 244.7K engagements
"This absolutely stunning chart comparison by the NYT might prove to be the most important geopolitical visualization of the 21st century. The two major superpowers are each cornering a competing energy platform. China bets everything on clean energy the US on fossil fuels. It's incredibly rare probably even unprecedented in history to see X superpowers making completely opposite trillion-dollar bets on the underlying technology that literally powers the world. Let's see how it plays out. One interesting related statistic: XX% of the Global South's new energy investments go to clean tech so" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-02 07:25:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 524.4K engagements
"I just read this WSJ article on why Europe's tech scene is so much smaller than the US's and China's. I'm afraid that like most articles on this topic it largely misses the mark. Which in itself illustrates a key reason why Europe is lagging behind: when you fail to understand the root causes of an issue you have zero chance to solve it. What makes me competent to speak on this topic Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s I founded and led HouseTrip which at the time was one of Europe's top startups. We were the first historical startup in which all top X VC investors in Europe invested. So I" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-05-21 03:21:37 UTC 339.1K followers, 819.8K engagements
"Trump blinked first. Below the full list of the items that are now exempt from tariffs XX categories of products in total organized by HS code (sourced from here: - 8471: Automatic data processing machines and units thereof (e.g. computers such as laptops desktops and servers) - 8473.30: Parts and accessories for automatic data processing machines and their units (e.g. computer components and peripheral parts) - 8486: Machines and apparatus for the manufacture of semiconductor devices or electronic integrated circuits - 8517.13.00 Smartphones and other telecommunication apparatus for cellular" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-04-12 14:47:53 UTC 339.1K followers, 326.9K engagements
"This is fascinating: China is virtually unique in the Islamic world for having an established centuries-old tradition of female imams (n ahong - ) in women-only mosques (known as nsi literally "womens temple"). In these mosques the female imams lead women-only prayers usually standing shoulder to shoulder with the other women (as opposed to in front for male imams). They also teach women and girls how to recite the Quran basic Islamic doctrine and offer guidance on daily life from a religious perspective. The origins of this tradition date to the late Ming and early Qing period (17th18th" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-24 12:23:58 UTC 339.1K followers, 40.7K engagements
"This might be the most remarkable geopolitical document I've seen come out of a major European institution so far this century. Frances Parliament has just produced an extraordinary 153-page report that calls for nothing less than a complete strategic realignment of Europe. The document systematically dismantles the EU's current geopolitical positioning - "vassalized" to the U.S. in the report's words - as a catastrophic failure that has led to the EU seeing "its influence diminish and its interests poorly protected." The report details XX recommendations from the "creation of a common world" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-11 09:13:09 UTC 339.1K followers, 630.4K engagements
"@BvGroat It's a pretty universal truth about rich kids" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-15 10:42:16 UTC 339.1K followers, 6653 engagements
"You need to be a special kind of psychopath to think these images somehow reflect well on you: a large group of emaciated and obviously desperate civilians in a landscape of total desolation that you caused scrambling towards a rare aid truck while your soldiers have to be repeatedly instructed not to shoot them from afar which means it isn't the norm" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-22 10:31:19 UTC 339.1K followers, 317.8K engagements
"Beyond all the rhetoric the facts are pretty telling: this week the Australian Prime Minister will meet Xi Jinping for the 3rd time (the other two times were November 2023 and November 2024) and he hasn't met Trump once yet. Another sign of the underlying reality that I wrote about in my article "Has America in fact already withdrawn from Asia" (link in next tweet): when you look at facts beyond the "pivot to Asia" rhetoric the US-China contest in the region is already over" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-07 06:20:36 UTC 339K followers, 67.8K engagements
"@fairer4scoring @thinking_panda Someone is obviously unfamiliar with the North China phenotype 😅" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-13 10:07:10 UTC 339.1K followers, XXX engagements
"Congrats @guardian this is easily one of the most dishonest articles I've read in a long time just pure ideological propaganda. In short the article's main thesis is that climate change is a "democracy" vs "autocracies" issue whereby virtuous "democracies" are struggling valiantly against climate change while evil "autocracies" are the primary obstacle to progress. And the central question being: how can we the good guys force these bad "autocracies" to behave responsibly on climate As the article puts it "democracies" apparently have attributes like popular pressure and transparency that" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-07-18 08:55:15 UTC 339.1K followers, 95.4K engagements
"Yet another perfect illustration why it'd be so potentially devastating to sever links between U.S. and Chinese science as the Trump administration is trying to do. A Chinese biotech company found what Dr Norman Sharpless former director of the National Cancer Institute says is the first "potential cure" he's seen in his XX years in oncology for myeloma a common and extremely painful blood cancer that doctors thought incurable. A group of XX patients who had longstanding multiple myeloma underwent a clinical trial funded by Johnson & Johnson which has an exclusive licensing agreement with" @RnaudBertrand on X 2025-06-05 05:03:56 UTC 339.1K followers, 61.3K engagements