The final months of 2024 witnessed a new wave of purges in Xi Jinping’s China. On November 28, the Defense Ministry announced the suspension from his duties of Admiral Miao Hua, the number four military leader below Xi, who oversaw the political and organizational work of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Jenny Huang is practicing cleaning water from the creek near her apartment in Linkou, northwest of Taipei. She pours the water through pantyhouse to filter out sediment, then coffee filters for smaller particles, and finally adds iodine to kill bacteria and any microorganisms in the water. The 48-year-old mother of one believes someday it might be a necessity. She doesn’t bother learning how to gather rainwater, she says, because it is too polluted in the city, but for the most part the creek water runs down from the mountains.
Grace Marion is a Platforms Editor at the Los Angeles Times. She was previously a Wire Editor at the Bay City News Group, and a photojournalist and reporter covering government issues and crime for the Mississippi Free Press and, previously, Mississippi Today.
Marion holds a Master’s of Journalism degree from UC Berkeley alongside a bachelor’s degree in editorial and broadcast journalism from the University of Mississippi, where she was a Stamps Foundation Scholar. She focused her education on investigative and international conflict reporting at both universities.
Marion also worked as a researcher on police misconduct accusations for the California Reporting Project and as a graduate teaching assistant for the San Quentin Prison News Project. She also volunteered as a researcher at a Spanish Sociolinguistics lab and as an OSINT researcher covering paramilitary conflicts in South America.
At first glance, J and Q were stereotypical highly-educated Democrats. They resided in Lexington, Virginia, a small liberal college town of 7,000 where they each worked at historic institutions of higher education. J, a business professor, taught rich Republicans at a private liberal arts school. Q, a historian, taught the less affluent Republicans at a state-supported military college. J’s eight-year-old daughter, already fluent in the subtleties of American class distinctions, once proudly announced her upper-middle-class status, citing her father’s achievement of tenure.
