Top all-time · #3585
Bill Bishop
Personal blog · sinocism.compoliticseconomics
Bill Bishop writes Sinocism, a personal blog at sinocism.com about politics and economics. Since 2010, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers value Bill Bishop's Sinocism newsletter for collecting the day's top, mostly political, China stories. It is often cited as a fair US source and for its posts on Xi's ideology and Garnaut's 'Engineers of the Soul' talk.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Get smarter about China.
Most-linked posts?
- Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-09-27
- /3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-10-19
What Hacker News says?
https://sinocism.com/ is one of the better US sources.
Comment linking /
on “China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report”Submitted Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIt's extremely difficult to get unbiased information on China. However, there are some good sources. If you have the money, Sinocism[0] is a great newsletter that collects the top (mostly political) stories of the day. Some other good (free) Substacks are Chinarrative[1], which publishes translated human interest stories, and Chinese Journal Review[2], which translates abstracts of a selection of academic papers. If…
Comment linking /
on “China CCP to Nationalize Jack Ma's Alibaba and Ant Group – Report”Submitted Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China by John Garnaut as a story · 4 points
HN discussion>>>It was the "CPC" and the communists who liberated china. You do realize that right? Depends on what you mean by "liberated". The bulk of the fighting against the Imperial Japanese military was done by the KMT Nationalists, under Chiang Kai-Shek. The KMT lost the civil war afterwards due to still being a shitty unpopular government, and then the CPC went on to "liberate" tens of millions of Chinese from their corp…
Comment linking /p/welcome-to-the-xi-era-sinocism-weekly-102117
on “Former U.S. officials describe details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange”Submitted China’s Political Discourse June 2021: Analysis of Keywords as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you're talking about getting Substack publications into your RSS reader, you can add /feed to the end of the relevant URL and then add that into your reader (e.g. https://sinocism.com/feed ). For adding non-Substack publications into the Substack app via RSS, go to reader.substack.com (make sure you're logged in) and click on "Add RSS feed" in the left sidebar.
Comment linking /feed
on “We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA”Submitted Excerpt from the Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis link was included in the article: https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in While China has certainly strayed pretty far from its state-controlled economy in recent years, it also seems pretty clear that Xi is more ideologically "hardcore" than his predecessors.
Comment linking /p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
on “The TikTok War”Submitted The Sinocism China Newsletter 06.15.13 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI am just going to repeat the best link here: https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in Wow.
Comment linking /p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
on “The TikTok War”Submitted US-China AI strategic planning as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNot a book but a talk given at an internal government seminar by a China policy advisor to the Australian government and recommended by Bill Bishop, one of the bigger names in China related news. Talk given in 2017. https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
Comment linking /p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
on “Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet”Submitted Recent developments in the US-China trade war [video] as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I don't think the evil caricature is an accurate description of the CCP Have a read of a summary of John Garnaut's talk to the Australian Parliament on "Engineers of the Human Soul": https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in He posits that Stalin -> Mao -> Xi consider that everything must serve the State: culture, the arts, etc. Obviously that would include people. So Xi Jinping Thought (recently wr…
Comment linking /p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
on “Public Opinion in Authoritarian States”Submitted Engineers of the Soul: Ideology in Xi Jinping's China (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe core of the communist party follows an unambiguous agenda. John Garnaut described this very well in his speech "Engineers of the Soul" https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
Comment linking /p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
on “China has passed a national security law for Hong Kong”Submitted Can China Successfully Build Soft Power Without A Global Internet Strategy? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf you think that’s chilling, read the essay “Engineering the Human Soul” ( https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in ), by a long-time Australian China-watcher. He asserts that Xi Jinping though follows in a direct line from Stalin and Mao.
Comment linking /p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
on “Translation of Xi Jinping's "To Firmly Drive Common Prosperity" Essay”I don't know about FDD in particular. They certainly have their own agenda. Wikipedia suggests neoconservative thought and proponents of hawkish US foreign policy [1]. So it's not surprising them supporting the publication. FDD may be the landing page but the authors were the actual reason I thought this could be interesting to other people. I've read some of their publications before, skimmed through the report its…
Comment linking /
on “Made in Germany, Co-Opted by China”I have a few - Bill Bishop's Sinocism is probably the first that comes to mind - https://sinocism.com/about More cynical towards China - Sinocism is a word-play. (But I think he is mostly fair in his critique) https://supchina.com/ is a good website on this topic. I discovered them through a podcast call Sinica https://supchina.com/series/sinica/ (the podcast is extremely good) Dan Wang https://danwang.co/ - some of…
Comment linking /about
on “Ask HN: Good Independent Blogs for News about China”Watched the four speeches by the US State Department on Chine yesterday. - Ambassador O'Brian - FBI Director Wray - AG Barr - Pompeo at the Nixon Library Now that we've (the US and a growing number of allies) have made it clear that we know what they are doing and will no longer stand for it, China seems to be doubling down. https://www.asiatimesfinancial.com/ccp-announces-plan-to-tak... https://sinocism.com/p/xi-we…
Comment linking /p/xi-weighs-in-on-united-front-work
on “Bloomberg New Economy: China Is Winning the Trade War with Trump”As a long-time reader of blogs (eg. slatestarcodex.com, kalzumeus.com, etc) I've sometimes struggled to keep up with all the posts that I'd like to read. I often don't make the time to sit down and plough through some of the longer ones. I noticed that I listened to a lot of podcasts when commuting, so I made this website to convert interesting blog posts into a podcast. The tech component is mostly glue: the trafil…
Comment linking /p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
on “Show HN: Blog Reader – Listen to blogs that you don't have time to read”
