Biden administration announces plan after meeting between US national security adviser and China’s top diplomat
The US president, Joe Biden, and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, are planning to meet by video link before the end of the year, a senior US official said on Wednesday.
There is an “agreement in principle” for the “virtual bilateral”, the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Continue reading...Analysis: Joe Biden has cleared the decks to focus on China. But how imminent is the danger?
It may have been an inelegantly, even ineptly, executed pivot, gratuitously alienating key allies, but by leaving Afghanistan and forming the Australian, US and UK security pact in the Indo-Pacific, Joe Biden has at least cleared the decks to focus on his great foreign policy challenge – the systemic rivalry with China.
Yet the concern now is how quickly this rivalry could escalate, especially in Taiwan. The linchpin of the US alliance system in south-east Asia, Taiwan is the biggest island in the “first island chain”, the group of islands that keeps China blocked in. It is China’s next target, and as the former British prime minister Theresa May pointed out, no one quite knows if the west is prepared to fight to save Taiwan or whether the new tripartite pact in some way places a new obligation on the UK to come to the country’s defence.
Continue reading...Chinese president Xi Jinping said on Tuesday that China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy, and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad.
Xi made the announcement in his statement delivered via video at the general debate of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Continue reading...If Chinese property company Evergrande sinks under its $300bn debt its failure would resound across the global economy
Evergrande Real Estate – or Heng Da Group in Chinese – owns more than 1,300 building projects in more than 280 cities across China.
Continue reading...The combat capability of the People’s Liberation Army may still be a ‘work in progress’ but it is catching up through influence and training
When Covid-19 swept across Iran last March, killing more than 1,000 people including the senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, it was the Chinese military that Tehran turned to for help. On 19 March 2020, batch loads of testing kits, PPE and face masks arrived in the Iranian capital.
In February this year, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began to donate Covid-19 vaccines to counterparts overseas. The Cambodia armed forces have received two batches of 300,000 vaccines; Sierra Leone’s army was given 40,000 doses; United Nations peacekeeping forces secured 300,000.
Continue reading...A wide-ranging crackdown and leftist rhetoric have stirred fears of a return to the apogee of Maoism
Fifty-five years ago, China was in turmoil. Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution to eradicate opposition in the party and cleanse the country’s political soul, using the power of the masses. It would last a decade and claim well over a million lives; 36 million people were hounded, including Xi Jinping’s father, who had previously been a senior leader. The current president was himself denounced and spent years living in bleak rural poverty.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Xi has spoken scathingly of the Cultural Revolution in the past. Yet many now see growing echoes of the era. The Communist elders who survived the disaster sought to cage the power of the leader through consensus and new conventions. Under those, Mr Xi would be expected to step down as general secretary of the party – the role that gives him real power – next autumn, after 10 years. But putative successors have been sidelined or ousted, and dismantling term limits for the presidency, his other position, was a clear sign he plans to continue. The overt hostility to foreign influences is growing. A personality cult is flourishing; new textbooks on Xi Jinping Thought tell young schoolchildren that “Grandpa Xi Jinping has always cared for us … ”
Continue reading...White House says leaders agree to engage ‘openly and straightforwardly’ amid US frustration at lack of progress in advancing countries’ relations
US president Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have spoken in their first phone call for seven months, amid continuing frustrations over attempts to find common ground.
During the 90-minute call, which was initiated by Biden, the two leaders discussed their shared responsibility to ensure competition does not “veer into conflict”, according to a transcript of the conversation from the White House.
Continue reading...President wants to spread ‘common prosperity’ but Covid and material shortages could spell trouble
For decades the aim in China has been the pursuit of growth, building the world’s second-largest economy from a relative backwater on the international stage. Now, the promise from Beijing is to enlarge the economic pie and divide it well.
President Xi Jinping announced plans this month to spread “common prosperity” in what is one of the world’s most unequal major economies, signalling a shift from his predecessors’ pursuit of growth and heralding a tough crackdown on wealthy elites – including China’s burgeoning group of technology billionaires.
Continue reading...The year 2020 exposed the risks and weaknesses of the market-driven global system like never before. It’s hard to avoid the sense that a turning point has been reached
If one word could sum up the experience of 2020, it would be disbelief. Between Xi Jinping’s public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak on 20 January 2020, and Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th president of the United States precisely a year later, the world was shaken by a disease that in the space of 12 months killed more than 2.2 million people and rendered tens of millions severely ill. Today the official death tolls stands at 4.51 million. The likely figure for excess deaths is more than twice that number. The virus disrupted the daily routine of virtually everyone on the planet, stopped much of public life, closed schools, separated families, interrupted travel and upended the world economy.
To contain the fallout, government support for households, businesses and markets took on dimensions not seen outside wartime. It was not just by far the sharpest economic recession experienced since the second world war, it was qualitatively unique. Never before had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down. It was, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) put it, “a crisis like no other”.
Continue reading...Chinese Communist party to crack down on almost weekly creation of billionaire company bosses
China’s president has vowed to “adjust excessive incomes” in a warning to the country’s super-rich that the state plans to redistribute wealth to tackle widening inequality.
According to reports in state media, Xi Jinping told officials at a meeting of the Chinese Communist party’s central financial and economic affairs commission on Tuesday, that the government should “regulate excessively high incomes and encourage high-income groups and enterprises to return more to society”.
Continue reading...Political liberty has been overturned – with majority support. That will delight authoritarians everywhere
Implicit in US and western support for pro-democracy movements and transitions around the world is an assumption that, given a free choice, a system of elected, representative government is what people will always naturally prefer. But what if this assumption is wrong? What if a majority believes democracy doesn’t work for them?
Emerging testimony from Tunisia, the latest country to face a crisis over how it is run, suggests many citizens welcomed the forceful suspension of a democratically elected parliament that had failed to address people’s problems and was widely reviled as a self-serving oligarchy.
Mohammed Ali, 33, from Ben Guerdane, seems to typify this view. “I think what happened is good. I think that’s what all the people want,” he told the Guardian after last week’s surprise move by Kais Saied, Tunisia’s president, to seize power and impose a state of emergency. Local politicians and western critics called it a coup.
Analysis: Xi Jinping wants his country to appear more lovable, but critics say Beijing’s efforts are too superficial
China’s appointment of a new ambassador to the US has shone a light on the ongoing debate among analysts about how Beijing communicates with its biggest competitor, the future of its “wolf warrior” diplomacy and how Xi Jinping’s call to “tell a good China story” might work in practice.
The debate over the “wolf warrior” style – under which, as the Chinese ambassador to Sweden said on Swedish public radio in 2019, “we treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns” – comes amid a burst of positive publicity that delighted Beijing’s propaganda officials: the foreign coverage of the herd of 15 wandering Asian elephants in southern China that captured the country’s imagination and led Chinese vloggers to travel hundreds of miles to take selfies with them.
Continue reading...US president is being much tougher than expected on Beijing, but a lack of solidarity will undermine his policy’s success
It’s generally accepted in Washington that once-buoyant hopes for the emergence of a free, democratic China, initially sparked by Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking 1972 visit, have sunk without trace. President Xi Jinping’s regime is now described as a “systemic rival”, “strategic competitor” or outright “threat”. The EU, Nato, the UK, and regional allies broadly agree: the era of engagement is over.
What’s lacking is agreement over what comes next. The hole where common policy and joint action should be gapes ever more dangerously amid almost daily collisions on multiple fronts with Xi’s aggressive, authoritarian one-party state. If it’s not about human rights abuses, cyberhacking, or trade, it’s Taiwan, visas, spying, maritime disputes, the Indian border, or alleged hostage-taking.
Continue reading...Visit comes as China tightens control over region’s Buddhist culture and invests heavily in infrastructure
The Chinese leader has made his first visit to Tibet as president as authorities tighten controls over the Himalayan region’s traditional Buddhist culture, accompanied by an accelerated drive for economic development and modernised infrastructure.
State media reported on Friday that Xi Jinping had visited sites in the capital, Lhasa, including the Drepung monastery, Barkhor Street and the public square at the base of the Potala Palace that was home to the Dalai Lamas, Tibet’s traditional spiritual and temporal leaders.
Continue reading...We should be suspicious of the role of the Chinese Communist party in the harvesting of genetic data from unborn babies, argues William Matthews
In her column (What does the Chinese military want with your unborn baby’s genetic data?, 10 July), Arwa Mahdawi suggested that the alleged involvement of the People’s Liberation Army (which is directly answerable to the Chinese Communist party) with BGI’s data-gathering (likewise answerable as a China-based company) is essentially equivalent to data-gathering by western companies. To suggest that the former case is worse, she argued, “smacks of Sinophobia”.
As a scholar of China, I cannot agree. While the harvesting of genetic data by any company is frightening and fraught with ethical issues, it should be obvious that this is a false equivalence. It is undoubtedly worse if genetic data is gathered by a company which must also comply with the rule of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and its military-industrial complex, a regime which harvests and aggregates data on its citizens on a massive scale and uses it directly to implement the most repressive system of social control on earth in Xinjiang.
Continue reading...China’s video game market is the world’s biggest. International developers want in on it – but its rules on what is acceptable are growing increasingly harsh. Is it worth the compromise?
In the years after it was founded in 1999, the Swedish video game company Paradox Interactive quietly built a reputation for developing some of the best, and most hardcore, strategy games on the market. “Deep, endless, complex, unyielding games,” is how Shams Jorjani, the company’s chief business development officer, describes Paradox’s offerings. Most of its biggest hits, such as the middle ages-themed Crusader Kings, or Sengoku, in which you play as a 16th-century Japanese noble, were loosely based on history.
But in 2016, Paradox decided to try something a little different. Its new game, Stellaris, was a work of sprawling science fiction, set 200 years in the future. In this virtual universe, players could explore richly detailed galaxies, command their own fusion-powered starship fleets and fight with extraterrestrials to expand their space empires. Gamers could choose to play as the human race, or one of many alien species. (My personal favourite dresses in a lavish golden cape and has a head like an otter’s, with soft reddish-brown fur, dark eyes and a black snout. Another type of alien is a sentient crystal that eats rocks.)
Continue reading...Chinese president Xi Jinping has warned 'foreign forces' who attempt to bully China will ‘get their heads bashed’. In an hour-long televised address from Tiananmen Square marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi pledged to build up China's military, committed to the ‘reunification’ of Taiwan with China and stressed the autonomy held by Hong Kong and Macau. Beijing faces external criticism over its clampdown in Hong Kong and treatment of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Xi said that anyone who tries to 'bully, subjugate or enslave' the people of China 'will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of Steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.'
Tight security in Tiananmen Square as country marks CCP centenary and China’s president delivers ‘important’ address
He is pledging to “root out any elements who would harm the party’s purity... or viruses which would erode its health”.
Now to Hong Kong and Macau, which he says both retain a “high degree of autonomy”.
Some images from the scene at Tiananmen Square:
Continue reading...Beijing lodges diplomatic protest with Japan after defence minister calls island a ‘democratic country’
China and Japan are once again embroiled in a diplomatic row over Taiwan, in the latest example of Beijing’s extreme sensitivity over the status of the self-ruled island and Tokyo’s changing attitude towards Beijing.
Speaking to the US conservative thinktank Hudson Institute on Monday, Japan’s state minister of defence, Yasuhide Nakayama, spoke of a growing threat posed by Chinese and Russian collaboration, and said it was necessary to “wake up” to Beijing’s pressure on Taiwan and protect the island “as a democratic country”.
Continue reading...As China marks the centenary of its ruling party, we examine key episodes in its tempestuous history, including the Long March, Mao’s purges and Xi Jinping’s rise to the top of an emerging superpower
Anyone visiting First Meeting Hall in Shanghai, the museum recreating the site of the first conclave of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) in 1921, will also find themselves in one of the city’s fanciest districts.
Continue reading...