No, I Don't Work for the CCP
Let's get that out of the way.
I get it. Most of what appears on this site comes from Chinese sources, and I seem suspiciously unbothered by Beijing. But the real explanation is a lot less sinister: I spent over a decade living in Shanghai, built a company there, and came to understand China from the inside before I ever had strong opinions about its government.
I graduated from the University of Tennessee in 2012 with a degree in Economics, a one-way ticket to Shanghai, and $1,000 in my pocket. No job lined up. Tourist visa. I figured I'd sort it out when I landed.
A few months in, I went on a trip that permanently changed how I see the world.
In January 2013, I joined a two-week delegation to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories organized by Sabeel, a Christian Palestinian solidarity organization. We met civil rights lawyers, academics, Bedouin village leaders, refugee camp residents, former prisoners, and activists. I walked Hebron's Shuhada Street with Youth Against Settlements. I toured the separation wall with Jamal Juma of Stop the Wall Campaign. I sat in on a presentation by historian Ilan Pappé in Jerusalem, toured Aida refugee camp, and visited villages in the Negev that had been demolished and rebuilt multiple times. I heard directly from people living inside one of the most reported-on conflicts in the world, and realized how little the coverage I'd grown up with had prepared me to understand it.
I came away with a permanent skepticism of media narratives and a hunger to understand the full reality of conflict zones, not the made-for-TV version.
West Bank, January 2013
From Palestine, I returned to Shanghai, where my education continued. I taught English and macroeconomics at WLSA Fudan Academy, watched a city of 25 million people move faster than anything I'd seen, and made friends from every corner of the world. I also watched the English-speaking expat community try to navigate one of the most complex economies on the planet with almost no tools. That's where everything else started.
What I Build
Baopals
Shopping Taobao, Tmall, JD, and 1688 as a foreigner is genuinely painful. Everything is in Mandarin, payment methods are locked behind Chinese apps, and the sheer volume is overwhelming. In 2015 I started Baopals with two of my best friends to fix that: English interface, your payment methods, all the major Chinese platforms in one place. We launched in 2016, built a real expat following across China, survived COVID and the mass exodus of the expat community, rebuilt from the ground up, and relaunched in March 2026 with international shipping. Now anyone in the world can shop Chinese e-commerce directly.
GPTChina.io
I hate monthly subscriptions. And I especially hate juggling four of them: one for OpenAI, one for Anthropic, one for Google, and whatever's launched this week. GPTChina is one platform with access to all the top AI models as they're released: no monthly fees, no rate limits, no restrictions, no VPN required, and you can pay with WeChat or Alipay. Especially useful if you're in China, where registering with OpenAI or Anthropic requires a non-Chinese phone number. GPTChina has none of those barriers. Built on LibreChat, an open source project I discovered early and contributed to.
Conversations Among the Ruins Podcast
My dad got me into geopolitics, particularly The Duran and Judging Freedom. We'd talk after every episode, and I kept realizing how much I didn't know. He'd spent 35 years as a Chinese-English translator, and has a daughter living in Russia. The man's knowledge is impressive, and he has this ability to lay it all out calmly and rationally in a way that actually makes sense. So I started the podcast because I genuinely needed to learn, and figured some people might want to learn alongside us. Three episodes a week. I'm still figuring it out in real time. YouTube ↗ · Substack ↗
The Expat Edit WeChat · Substack
It started as a marketing exercise for Baopals. I went looking for English-language media to advertise on in China and found almost nothing worth reading. So I built it instead. Zhihu is where Chinese people actually discuss things: geopolitics, military strategy, culture, current events, their own government. Millions of thoughtful, unfiltered opinions that almost no Western outlet is paying attention to. The Expat Edit translates and curates the most interesting threads on geopolitics and great power competition. A real pulse on how Chinese people see the world. (Published on Substack as Silk & Steel ↗) ·
Ruins Report This site
The logical conclusion of all of it. There's a loose community of analysts who've been right about things the mainstream got catastrophically wrong: the Iraq War, Libya, Syria, Ukraine. They share a few traits. They're specific. Their analyses hold up over time, and when they get something wrong, they say so. People like Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern, Douglas Macgregor, Larry Johnson, Glenn Diesen, Pascal Lottaz, Garland Nixon, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Mearsheimer. If you know who these people are, you know why they matter.
Ruins Report is built for that community. Live conflict trackers, a daily article feed, community reads from analysts we actually follow, and economic indicators that tell the real story underneath the headlines. One source that most people in that world are missing: Zhihu. It's where Chinese people actually discuss geopolitics, military strategy, and global events in real depth. When you're looking at a conflict the US is directly involved in, the Chinese consensus tends to reflect reality more accurately than most Western coverage. The Expat Edit translates and curates the best of it.
Independent. No investors. No editorial line. No agenda beyond trying to understand what's actually happening.
A Word of Thanks
As I write this, my wife is seven weeks away from bringing our third son into the world. I'm overjoyed, but I'm also feeling the weight of it: three boys; a mortgage; a rebuilt Baopals; a podcast; a newsletter; this site. Sleep is the thing I sacrifice to keep it all moving, because I genuinely believe in what I'm building, and I don't know how to stop.
So if you made it this far, thank you. Every page view, every listen, every Baopals order, every GPTChina user tells me the work matters and that I'm building things people actually want. That the late nights are worth it.
If you want to support the work directly, you can buy me a coffee. The goal is simple: to get to a point where I can get some help, get some sleep, and keep building things I'm proud of.
— Charles Erickson, Tennessee (formerly Shanghai)