Category Archives: China

US stocks plunge amid coronavirus variant fears – as it happened

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That’s all from me today. Here’s a rundown of the day’s biggest politics stories:

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer will file cloture on a placeholder bill for the bipartisan infrastructure plan tonight, setting up a vote on Wednesday.

Schumer NOW on Senate floor updates the timing of infrastructure legislation: "Tonight in a few minutes, I will file cloture on a shell bill which will act as the legislative vehicle for the bipartisan infrastructure framework. That vote on cloture will take place on Wednesday." pic.twitter.com/FRGPFkeh8d

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US condemns China for ‘malicious’ cyberattacks, including Microsoft hack

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Justice department charged four Chinese nationals with hacking as Washington accused Beijing of threatening national security

The US has led allies in a sharp condemnation of China for “malicious” cyberattacks, including a hack of Microsoft Exchange email server software that compromised tens of thousands of computers around the world earlier this year.

Related: UK and allies accuse Chinese state-backed group of Microsoft hack

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Chinese Unesco official defends plan to list Great Barrier Reef as ‘in danger’

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Tian Xuejun rejects Australia’s ‘groundless accusations’ that China influenced the finding to score political points

The Chinese host of a United Nations world heritage committee has defended a proposal to label the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger”, and rejected Australian government suspicion that China influenced the finding for political reasons.

It came as the Morrison government sought to use a new report by Australia’s marine science agency to argue there had been widespread coral recovery on the reef.

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Tensions remain high as hopes dashed for breakthrough in China and India stalemate

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Military build-up continues ‘like never before’ on both sides of 2,100-mile border despite high-level talks

It was described as a dialogue, the first high-level meeting in months between the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers to address the ongoing border aggressions that have pushed the two nuclear-armed countries to the brink of war.

But those hoping Wednesday’s meeting would help break a year-long stalemate during which 200,000 troops have built up on both sides of the Himalayan frontier were to be left unsatisfied.

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Syria’s President Assad sworn in for fourth term with 95% of vote

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Inauguration follows election dismissed by US, UK and other countries as ‘neither free nor fair’

President Bashar al-Assad took the oath of office for a fourth term in war-ravaged Syria on Saturday, after officially winning 95% of the vote in an election dismissed abroad.

It was the second presidential poll since the start of a decade-long civil war that has killed almost half a million people and battered the country’s infrastructure.

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Reasons to be fearful of China’s data-gathering | Letters

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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.

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Thailand bans public gatherings as Covid cases hit record high

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More restrictions are being considered as the country battles its worst outbreak yet

Thailand has imposed a nationwide ban on public gatherings and was considering more restrictions on movement as authorities reported record numbers of new cases and deaths on Saturday.

Despite partial lockdowns in Bangkok and nine other provinces this week, the country’s Covid-19 task force reported 10,082 new coronavirus cases and 141 new deaths, bringing the total number of infections to 391,989 cases and 3,240 fatalities since the pandemic started.

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WHO chief says push to discount Covid-19 lab leak theory was ‘premature’

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Tedros says ‘accidents happen’ in labs and calls on China to be more transparent

The head of the World Health Organization has acknowledged it was premature to rule out a potential link between the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak, and said he was asking China to be more transparent as scientists search for the origins of the coronavirus.

In a rare departure from his usual deference to powerful member countries, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that travelled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of Covid-19. The first human cases were identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

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Self-censorship hits Hong Kong book fair in wake of national security law

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Far fewer politically sensitive titles are on display in the first such event since Beijing imposed sweeping new regulations

Booksellers at Hong Kong’s annual book fair are offering a reduced selection of books deemed politically sensitive, as they try to avoid violating a sweeping national security law imposed on the city last year.

The fair was postponed twice last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. It usually draws hundreds of thousands of people looking for everything from the latest bestsellers to works by political figures.

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No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world

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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.)

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Man in China reunited with son abducted 24 years ago

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Guo Gangtang finally reunited with his son, Guo Xinzhen, who was snatched by human traffickers when he was two

A Chinese father has been reunited with his son 24 years after he was abducted by human traffickers in front of their home in Shandong at the age of two in 1997.

Guo Gangtang spent 24 years crisscrossing the country, travelling more than 300,000 miles on a motorbike, with two banners each showing a photo of his son, Guo Xinzhen.

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A love from beyond the grave – Kurt Tong on his ‘ghost marriage’ photographs

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His latest project, piecing together the story of a bereaved Hong Kong man who wed his dead fiancé, has won an award. The photogapher reveals how it began with the discovery of a trunk of keepsakes

At the centre of Kurt Tong’s elaborate visual narrative Dear Franklin, there is a doomed love story that is also a ghost story. It traces the intertwined lives of Franklin Lung, a man who rose from poor beginnings to become part of Hong Kong’s social elite in the 1940s, and a young woman known only as Dongyu, the daughter of a high-ranking Chinese general.

They met, fell in love, but shortly after their engagement, Dongyu was one of several thousand refugees fleeing the Chinese communist army on board the SS Kiangya when it struck an old Japanese sea mine. “Their love story should have ended with this terrible tragedy,” says Tong, “but it continued after her death because Franklin agreed to a ‘ghost marriage’, an elaborate traditional ceremony in which he became eternally wedded to Dongyu in the spirit world.”

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Taiwan tech companies buy 10m Covid vaccine doses in deal that sidesteps China

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Beijing had offered Taiwan the vaccines, amid a major shortage on the island, but Taiwan’s ruling party did not want to deal with China directly

Major Taiwanese tech companies have inked a deal to buy 10m vaccine doses for Taiwan, sidestepping months of complicated geopolitical wrangling between Beijing and Taipei.

The US$350m purchase from German manufacturer BioNTech, is split between TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, and Foxconn, one of the world’s largest contract electronics makers, and its charity foundation. The two companies will donate the vaccines to Taiwan’s central epidemic command centre for distribution.

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‘Growing risks’: Hong Kong pro-democracy group scales down

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Organisation known for annual Tiananmen vigil lets go of all paid staff and halves its steering committee

One of Hong Kong’s most established pro-democracy civic organisations has said it is letting go its paid staff and halving the size of its steering committee after Beijing stepped up its crackdown on opposition activity.

The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China is best known for its annual rally and candlelight vigil remembering those killed in the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

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Vancouver judge’s decision over Huawei finance chief may deepen US-China row

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Judge refuses to admit new evidence that might have helped Meng Wanzhou avoid extradition to US

The prospect of a deepening diplomatic row between the US and China has grown after a Canadian judge refused to admit new evidence that might have helped the Huawei chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, avoid extradition to the US.

The arrest of Meng, the daughter of the Chinese telecommunication company’s billionaire founder, has prompted a sharp deterioration in relations between Canada, the US and China. Soon after Meng’s detention in Vancouver in December 2018, China arrested two Canadians in China: Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.

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Data, not arms, the key driver in emerging US-China cold war | Robert Reich

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Cybersecurity comes down to which side has access to more information about the other and can utilize it best

This week, shares in China’s giant ride-hailing app Didi crashed by more than 20%. A few days before, Didi had raised $4.4bn in a massive IPO in New York – the biggest initial public offering by a Chinese company since Alibaba’s debut in 2014.

The proximate cause of Didi’s crash was an announcement by China’s Cyberspace Administration that it suspected Didi of illegally collecting and using personal information. Pending an investigation, it had ordered Didi to stop registering new users and removed Didi’s app from China’s app stores.

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China is far from alone in taking advantage of Australian universities’ self-inflicted wounds | David Brophy

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Having long encouraged universities to find funding elsewhere, politicians now home in on their ties to China to argue that they’ve lost their way

Outside the political sphere, much of Australia’s China panic centres on university campuses. This is hardly surprising, given the deep connections of the Australian higher-­education sector to China.

In 2019, before the Covid-­19 pandemic hit, higher education brought in some A$12bn in export revenue, most of it from China. With more than 150,000 Chinese international students enrolled, some institutions relied on that single revenue stream to make up a quarter of their total budget before the current drop-­off. Mandarin is the second language of campus life in most universities these days; Confucius Institutes have been established at 13 universities; partnerships and MOUs with Chinese universities proliferate in many fields. Australian academics now collaborate more with colleagues in China than in any other foreign country: one report found that an incredible 16.2% of scientific papers by Australian researchers – almost one in six – were co-­authored with researchers in China, with papers in the fields of materials science, chemical engineering and energy topping the list.

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Giant pandas no longer endangered in the wild, China announces

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Authorities reclassify animal as vulnerable with a population outside captivity of 1,800

Giant pandas are no longer endangered in the wild, but they are still vulnerable with a population outside captivity of 1,800, Chinese officials have said after years of conservation efforts.

The head of the environment ministry’s department of nature and ecology conservation, Cui Shuhong, said the reclassification was the result of “improved living conditions and China’s efforts in keeping their habitats integrated”.

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EU votes for diplomats to boycott China Winter Olympics over rights abuses

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Non-binding resolution also calls for governments to impose further sanctions on China as tensions rise

The European parliament has overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling on diplomatic officials to boycott the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics in response to continuing human rights abuses by the Chinese government.

In escalating tensions between the EU and China, the non-binding resolution also called for governments to impose further sanctions, provide emergency visas to Hong Kong journalists and further support Hongkongers to move to Europe.

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Currency and control: why China wants to undermine bitcoin

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Beijing’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies has captured headlines, while behind the scenes its reserve bank set up its own digital currency

Few would dispute that China’s recent crackdown on cryptocurrency trading and mining has contributed to the recent plunge in the value of bitcoin and other cryptos.

But while the argument rages about whether the volatility of cryptos is a sign of fundamental weakness or merely a bump along the road, the initiatives coming out of Beijing are being seen by experts as a sign of China’s attempts to incubate its own fledgling e-currency and reboot the international financial system.

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