Friends,
By now, I assume nearly everyone has seen (or heard about) the train-wreck that happened in the Oval Office on Friday. I just happened to tune in on the YouTube live broadcast to watch President Zelensky show President Trump some photos of what the Russians had done to Ukrainian prisoners and to hear President Trump praise the bravery of Ukrainian troops.
Then I switched it off, assuming everything must be worked out and the two leaders would proceed to signing a mineral deal and a formal press conference.
As we all know, that’s not what happened.
So how should we interpret what President Trump and his Administration is doing?
One explanation is that there is no rational strategy, and that the Administration doesn’t know what it wants to achieve beyond making deals for the sake of a deal and a press release. This explanation assumes that the Administration has an irrational approach to geopolitics, the idea that nothing is connected, and each issue can be treated in isolation. There are plenty of people who think President Trump and his Administration are irrational, but I don’t find this explanation plausible (see my four axioms from the February 9 Issue of this newsletter “Contemplating a Deal: Four axioms for the next four years”).
I think it is self-evident that President Trump and his team possess an understanding of how they think the world works, what problems are facing the United States, and what America’s strengths and limitations are. They are deeply skeptical of the judgements and decisions of prior Administrations, but that does not make them irrational.
A second explanation is that President Trump is an isolationist who wants to withdraw the United States from international affairs and focus solely on domestic American issues and cut the United States off from globalization and international trade. This explanation seems to be contradicted by the evidence.
President Trump and his team are inserting themselves into a variety of international flashpoints. They may be using methods that are different from prior administrations or abandoning tools, like foreign assistance, but they are still trying to shape the international order in ways that they believe will benefit the United States. Trump views other world leaders as his peers and spends enormous amounts of time interacting with them. Lastly, the Trump Administration isn’t withdrawing from international trade, it is trying to change the balance and flows to benefit the United States. These aren’t the actions of an isolationist presidency.
A third explanation is that President Trump wants to side with Putin and Xi because he admires them and wants to emulate their regimes. Plenty of people, both in the United States and in other countries, use this explanation to interpret Trump’s actions. But I think interpreting his actions this way is a mistake.
While President Trump uses rhetoric to profess his admiration for and friendship with these leaders, I see these as ploys he uses to build a personal connection to leaders that he believes are his peers (in his opinion, this is the “business” of the presidency). His relationship with these leaders is not a moral judgement, it is a matter of necessity. These are leaders that Trump believes the President of the United States MUST have a working relationship with.
To borrow a concept from U.S. China policy, Trump believes deeply that he must “engage” with his peers directly and develop personal relationships with the leaders of strong and important countries. Trump views Biden’s refusal to meet with Putin after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as irresponsible… from Trump’s perspective, how can the leaders of the two largest nuclear powers NOT talk to one another?
The fourth explanation is that President Trump and his Administration believe that the United States is one of three great powers caught up in a multilateral order characterized by increasingly hostile rivalries. Over the past few years, the other two “Great Powers” have formed an alliance against the United States. While critics want the Trump Administration to rely on Allies, Trump believes these allies are weak and politically unstable.
Under this interpretation, the Administration understands that the United States cannot withdraw from this rivalry or ignore the world, but it is also limited on what it can achieve, and limited by the resources available. They believe that while the United States has some important strengths, America is also burdened with significant millstones around her neck.
Unlike prior Administrations, it seems clear to me that President Trump views many of our allies as millstones that sap American power and encumber the United States with responsibilities that aren’t her own. I’ve written this before, but I will write it again, President Trump and his team believe that the United States can no longer afford the luxury of providing two “common goods” to the world:
#1 – Security
#2 – A Market of Last Resort
The United States started providing these “common goods” (and I use that term with its definition from political economy) following the Second World War and as the Soviet-American Cold War started. At the time, the United States represented nearly 50% of global GDP and we were the only major power not devastated by WWII. We had massive industrial capacity that we could direct towards helping our friends. Between 1947 and 1991, leaders in Washington sought to provide the security and economic stability to allow Western Europe and the East Asia periphery to rebuild themselves, while resisting Soviet domination. As Western Europe and East Asia recovered, we encouraged those countries to share the burden, but that was only modestly successful. The United States did this for its own self-interest, but Americans also paid significant costs for building and maintaining this system.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, leaders in Washington had one of three options. They could pull back from providing these “common goods,” only provide these “common goods” to our allies in Western Europe and East Asia, or try to extend them to the rest of the world.
We picked the third option.
This was probably the prudent choice in the 1990s, but it was also the costliest option. American leaders likely assumed that others would take over the burden (in the security realm other powers would maintain sufficient military spending and in the economic realm everyone else would follow the U.S. example of dropping trade barriers and opening their markets) or peace would reign, allowing the United States to reduce its military spending.
Fast forward three decades and America’s allies did not share the burdens of maintaining these “common goods” (they largely disarmed themselves and pursued trade policies to advantage themselves over the United States) and our gamble to bring Beijing and Moscow in as partners to share the security and economic responsibility failed miserably.
This put the United States into a really difficult position with only bad options.
It would be nice to continue to provide these “common goods,” but I think President Trump and his Administration believe we can no longer afford it. They also believe that if the United States continues to carry on like business-as-usual, we risk bankruptcy and military disaster. The Global Financial Crisis should have been seen for the dire warning that it was by the political and business elite, but they did not take it seriously enough. So, from the Trump Administration’s perspective, drastic actions are needed to put the United States on a sustainable path.
What happened in the Oval Office on Friday should be seen through the lens of great power rivalry where the United States is the odd man out.
There are three main players on the global stage right now: the United States, the People’s Republic of China, and the Russian Federation. The Trump Administration’s foreign policy (and economic policy) is directed at those two powers with the goal of dividing them.
But wait, you say, there are 196 countries in the world, how could this possibly be about just three?
So, I could give you the respectful answer that of course all countries matter and have a say in world affairs… but we all know that isn’t true.
Whether it is due to size, or wealth, or military strength, there are just three main protagonists that call the shots on the world stage today. That might change in the future (there have certainly been more and different ones in the past), but in the middle of the second decade of the 21st Century there are just three… and the other two have ganged up against the United States.
Apologies to New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle (1986)… don’t lie, you had the single.
Bizarre Great Power Triangle
The United States has five options as it seeks to resolve the geopolitical conundrum it finds itself in. Some of these can be pursued simultaneously, some should be pursued sequentially, and some are mutually exclusive.
Option #1 – The Ostrich (ignore the problem and hope it goes away)
Option #2 – The Churchill Appeal (persuade powers on the sidelines to become great powers)
Option #3 – The Eisenhower Maneuver (push Russia and the PRC closer together)
Option #4 – The Sullivan Stratagem (try to pull the PRC away from Russia)
Option #5 – The Reverse Kissinger (try to pull Russia away from the PRC)
To start, let’s just discard The Ostrich (Option #1), doing nothing is always an option but in geopolitics its rarely a good one.
That leaves us four more.
Option #2, I call The Churchill Appeal as this was the approach UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill adopted once France was knocked out of the war in the summer of 1940 (and ceased to be a “Great Power”… sorry Paris). Rather than stand-alone against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (the Soviets still had their Non-Aggression Pact with Berlin), Churchill put enormous effort into persuading the United States to join the war on the side of the UK.
On one level, this is a great option to pursue (and to be honest at least the last four Presidential Administrations have been attempting it). It means you don’t have to compromise with your two main rivals and if you can persuade a sufficiently strong power to become a “Great Power,” then your combined power could be determinative of the outcome or even just deter the other two rivals from further aggression.
Another benefit of this approach is that it can be pursued alongside the other three, though it is likely most effective when paired with Option #3, The Eisenhower Maneuver.
The problem with the Churchill Appeal is that it can take a long time and there’s no guarantee the object of your persuasion will take the necessary steps or that they will have the political capacity or capability to be a dependable partner. Strictly speaking, Churchill didn’t succeed with his Appeal. Stalin joined Churchill only after Hitler broke their pact and invaded the Soviet Union, and while FDR certainly moved much closer to Churchill’s position in 1940 and 1941, it wasn’t until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines that the United States truly came off the sidelines.
For the United States today, the objects of our Churchill Appeal are India, Japan, and Europe, in that order. None of these are great options. India certainly has the potential to be a “Great Power” and if combined with Option #5 (the Reverse Kissinger) it likely stands a better chance of success than if combined with Option #4. But while India has a way to go before its power matches its potential, pursuing the Churchill Appeal with Japan and Europe is much more difficult. Japan, while wealthy and technologically advanced, is likely no longer substantial enough to be anything more than a middle power for the foreseeable future. Tokyo will be an absolutely necessary partner, but it probably can’t play a truly “Great Power” role alongside the United States unless it undergoes significant political change.
Europe seems like a good alternative (wealthy, total population is a quarter larger than the United States, and technologically advanced), but the political divisions among the more than two dozen member states and their inability to consolidate political, military, and economic power makes them the least likely to join the United States as a peer “Great Power.” The fractured nature of Europe’s political establishment makes them almost perfectly designed to be divided by Russia, the PRC, and the United States. And no individual European state has the capacity or capability of becoming a “Great Power” on its own in the foreseeable future. The UK and France hold on to their permanent seats on the UN Security Council as an accident of history (no offense to my British and French friends, but you lost your empires three generations ago and you no longer qualify).
Based on the potential partners available for the Churchill Appeal, the U.S. should work hard on India. If the U.S. simultaneously pursues Option #5 (the Reverse Kissinger), India is probably more inclined to make the transition. Japan is probably most helpful as a partner with this approach as well. Obviously, the Europeans would be alienated by the Reverse Kissinger, but if one assesses that Europe is the least capable of becoming a “Great Power,” then that may be worth the potential cost.
The Eisenhower Maneuver is the third option. President Dwight Eisenhower came into office in January 1953 under circumstances that we would find familiar today. Americans had hoped that the end of the Second World War would shepherd a liberal international order in which collective security and free trade could be maintained by the victorious Allies through their new international organizations, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. To make this happen, the United States was committed to forcing its European allies to relinquish their colonies and give up their visions of empire. But by the end of the 1940s the rivalry with the Soviet Union and the fall of the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China dashed those hopes.
A drumbeat of events during the Truman Administration made many fear the world was on the brink of another world war: the Berlin Blockade from June 1948-May 1949, the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949, and the Korean War, which started in June 1950, and which saw the entry of PRC troops in October 1950.
By the time of the 1952 election the Korean War was well into its third year with both sides stalemated. Dwight Eisenhower ran on the platform of having a secret plan to win the war rapidly. Six weeks after his inauguration, Eisenhower got a break when Stalin died on March 5, 1953. As Soviet leaders jockeyed for position they were no longer interested in supporting the PRC and the North Koreans. By this point in the war, the North Koreans were spent and it was only the PRC still fighting, but without Soviet support, the Chinese could not carry on. By July 1953, the UN Forces led by the United States and the PRC came to an agreement to end the fighting.
Having suffered 37,000 casualties, 92,000 wounded, and 8,000 missing, the United States was in no mood to make nice with Communist China. But Eisenhower and his advisors could also see that with the death of Stalin and the way in which the Soviets used the Chinese in a proxy war with the U.S., that there were potential fractures in the Sino-Soviet relationship. Eisenhower’s solution was to push the two Communist powers closer together, so as to exasperate the underlining tensions. This maneuver sought to make each of them pay the costs for the others actions.
This sounds like a potentially good solution for the predicament we find ourselves in today. We could label them allies or an axis, and punish Moscow for the actions of Beijing and punish Beijing for the actions of Moscow. Overtime this could breed resentment and cause them to turn on one another.
But there are some important differences which likely makes this option infeasible.
When the United States pursued this maneuver in the 1950s and 1960s its was significantly more powerful, economically, militarily, and industrially, than its two main rivals, the Soviet Union and the PRC. And even with that overmatch, the United States had to devote nearly 8% of its GDP to maintain a defense establishment to deal with them both simultaneously for two decades.
The United States is not in the financial position to do that today. We are spending about 2.9% of GDP on defense and that will likely go down given other rising costs for the United States. The Eisenhower Maneuver is an option that is only available when the United States is in a significantly more powerful position than it is today.
If the United States could effectively contain both the PRC and the Russians, we would.
We are in this crisis because we can’t do both, that is the dilemma the Biden Administration found itself in over the past three years.
Which leaves us with our last two options: try to peel the PRC from Russia OR try to peel Russia from the PRC.
The first of these two I call the Sullivan Stratagem, as this was the approach employed by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Advisor (remember him? seems like ages ago).
Sullivan didn’t set out to pursue a stratagem to peel Beijing from Moscow, he came into his job intending to isolate the PRC while parking Russia and keeping a lid on the Middle East. Unfortunately for all of us, Putin didn’t want to be parked nor did the Iranians.
The Sullivan Stratagem stands little chance of working because the PRC is the more powerful of the two rivals (this approach seeks to set the stronger rival against the weaker rival… kind of a non-starter). The PRC knows that the United States considers them to be America’s principal rival, which means they see no upside to turning on the Russians. Chinese leaders aren’t stupid, they know that if they help the United States undermine Russia, once that happens, the United States will turn on them and the Chinese won’t have the Russians to help them.
Through a process of elimination, this leaves us with the so-called Reverse Kissinger. This approach gets its name from the early 1970s geopolitical move by Henry Kissinger in which the United States pursued a partnership with the PRC against the Soviet Union (this approach differs from the Sullivan Stratagem by partnering with the weaker rival against the stronger rival). In a Reverse Kissinger the United States pursues a partnership with Russia against the PRC. The reason that this approach holds promise (in ways that the Sullivan Stratagem does not) is that the United States can potentially offer the weaker rival something they value.
In the 1970s, the United States compromised on Taiwan by cancelling the mutual defense treaty and withdrawing U.S. forces from Taiwan. The United States also compromised on South Vietnam, refusing to jeopardize its budding relationship with the PRC when North Vietnam moved aggressively against the South in 1975. At the time these were rightly seen as betrayals, but the United States didn’t have good options then, and it decided to prioritize against what it considered its most important rival, the Soviet Union, while making a deal with the PRC (what many then and now consider a Faustian Bargain).
In the situation facing the Trump Administration, the United States would compromise on Ukraine, giving Putin more than he has been able to achieve through force of arms, and in exchange, the United States gets a degree of support in isolating the PRC.
It took nearly a decade for the U.S. and the PRC to fully negotiate this move, negotiations that spanned four Presidential Administrations. But the contours of the Nixon agreement with Mao were apparent fairly early and ultimately enabled the United States to complete a withdraw from Vietnam and get the breathing space to compete against the Soviets in the 1980s.
The most important difference between the move in the 1970s and a potential Reverse Kissinger today, is that the Sino-Soviet split had happened years before Kissinger visited Beijing. The two communist powers had nearly exchanged nuclear weapons in 1969 over a border skirmish and they each were at each other’s throats across the Second and Third Worlds. By all accounts, Xi and Putin have a very close relationship and it is unimaginable that the two of them have not spoken about this potential move by the United States.
A Reverse Kissinger under these conditions is like telegraphing your punches.
The one thing in America’s favor is that Putin is under considerable pressure to achieve something he can call a victory in Ukraine. His Chinese allies have not been able to help him achieve that (despite their considerable material and rhetorical support). To get what he wants, he needs the United States to compromise on Ukraine’s defense.
That appears to be what President Trump is prepared to do.
So, what do all these various options mean and how might the Trump Administration proceed?
To start, none of the options are great, good, or even so-so. They fall across the spectrum of shitty options. If we had great or even good options, then this would be easy, and we wouldn’t be worrying about it.
After considering the alternatives, the Trump Administration’s least bad option is to pursue the Reverse Kissinger with Russia, while simultaneously pursuing a Churchill Appeal with India and continue to pressure Japan to become a stronger middle power. Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Korea all have important roles to play, but pulling Russia away from the PRC and ensuring that India reaches its full potential are the two most critical objectives to achieve.
The Europeans will interpret these moves as a betrayal (and that sincerely pains me because it is true), but if that incentivizes them to overcome their political pathologies and take their own security seriously, then that is likely a net benefit to both the Europeans and the Americans.
Europe is already a nuclear power (well, two of its members are) and if executed with skill, Europe is capable of deterring Russian attacks on Europe (450 million Europeans vs. 130 million Russians). However, recent decisions by the UK and France, not to include the Baltic states in their emergency summits on Ukraine is really unwise (Baltic states 'very unhappy' after UK fails to invite leaders to Ukraine summit – Sky News, February 28, 2025).
Perhaps the most important question: Will a Reverse Kissinger work?
I don’t know the answer to that question. Judging from the articles folks have written about this topic, the chances of success seem pretty low, but in nearly every case these authors fail to wrestle with the alternatives, which I think have an even lower probability of success:
Attempting a "reverse Kissinger" will fail – China-Russia Report (February 24, 2025)
The Myth of a ‘Reverse Kissinger’: Why Aligning with Russia to Counter China Is a Strategic Illusion – Jianli Yang, The Diplomat, February 21, 2025
America’s self-isolating president: No, Donald Trump’s Putin-wooing is not like Nixon going to China – The Economist, February 26, 2025
Trump’s new world order is taking shape – Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, February 26, 2025
Kissinger Revisited. Can the United States Drive a Wedge Between Russia and China? – Eugene Rumer and Richard Sokolsky, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2, 2021
The “Reverse Kissinger” Theory of Trump and Putin Doesn’t Hold Up – Fred Kaplan, Slate, July 27, 2018
What will be the consequences of these maneuvers, and the risks?
For peoples and countries in the borderlands of this great power triangulation, it will be more dangerous and could get downright brutal. The period of Post-Cold War coasting is over. Start studying history and strategy. Make sure you understand how wars start and end, how to mobilize, what a functioning military reserve system looks like.
My recommendation is start making serious investments in your own security and re-engineer your economic system to match the geopolitical realities facing your country.
I think it is safe to say that Donald Trump is not sentimental about America’s traditional leadership role. He believes that sentimentality by American leaders got the country into a difficult mess and that his Administration will have to make painful changes. He believes these changes are necessary to protect the long-term viability and interests of the United States and that is the country he was elected to represent.
Trump expects that other leaders will do what is necessary to protect the interests of their countries and citizens. If those leaders are willing to help him achieve America’s interests, he will be sympathetic to providing those leaders (modest) assistance in achieving theirs. If, on the other hand, leaders of other countries demand that America continue to underwrite their security and prosperity, President Trump will be quite rude and vindictive… that is what we saw on display in the Oval Office on Friday.
I’ll close out this section of my commentary with a few words about whether this approach will be successful… TBH, I don’t know, but my suspicion is that it will be a mixed bag.
***
Update on the German Federal Election
The German Federal election turned out much as expected. Friedrich Merz will almost certainly be the next Chancellor as his union of the CDU and CSU came out on top with 28.5% of the vote (208 seats in the Bundestag). CDU/CSU will likely form another “grand coalition” with the third-place party, the SPD which won 16.4% of the vote and 120 seats. This puts the government at 328 seats in the 630-seat Bundestag (a 13-seat majority… not large, but sufficient to form a government).
The SPD suffered their worst election in the post-war period and while Olaf Scholz will stick around until Merz formally takes over the role of Chancellor, Scholz isn’t taking part in coalition talks and will drop out of frontline politics.
As for the second place party, the AfD did quite well. It doubled its share of the vote since the last election in 2021, winning 20.8% of the vote and 152 seats.
Most striking, the AfD won essentially all of what was the former East Germany… (aside from Berlin and a sliver of Leipzig). The SPD was completely wiped out in the East.
For years, I had assumed that the German Reunification effort of the 1990s and early 2000s had been successful, but looking at this map from the BBC, I’m much less certain now. It suggests that there are some very significant, long-term divisions that German leaders are not addressing. I’m sympathetic to the desire by many Germans to maintain the “firewall,” but is the plan to forever exclude 20% of your citizens? And what happens if that number grows?
From Five key takeaways from the German election – BBC, February 26, 2026
While many breathed a sigh of relief with this outcome, there is one major problem.
The AfD and far-left Die Linke hold just over one third of the seats in the Bundestag (AfD (152) + Linke (64) = 216) and it requires a two thirds majority to reform Germany’s debt brake or to introduce a special fund for defense spending.
While the AfD and Die Linke despise each other, they agree on two things: no more German defense spending and no reform to the debt brake. This means it is extremely hard to imagine how Merz is going to change the structural problems facing his country or make any real progress on increased defense spending. Without Germany as a leader in a European defense build-up, I’m not sure how it works.
To everyone that subscribes, I really appreciate your attention. Please pass it on to friends and colleagues. If you can support this work, I would appreciate that too!
Thanks for reading!
Matt
MUST READ
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Karishma Vaswani, Bloomberg, February 23, 2025
The Philippines is preparing to build a new arbitration case against China over alleged breaches of international law in the South China Sea. It may seem like a symbolic gesture, but in a world where the rules-based order is increasingly under threat, these gestures matter. Other nations should join the cause, or risk being left even more vulnerable to China’s expansionist ambitions.
Beijing’s recent behavior toward Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines in the Indo-Pacific are good examples of its attempts to assert ownership over parts of the oceans it claims — including the South China Sea.
Why China may struggle to unlock the power of AI
Robyn Mak, Reuters, February 25, 2025
Artificial intelligence will play a critical role in shaping China's fortunes as a great power. Yet Beijing’s attempt to translate wins by today’s innovators like DeepSeek and others into wider gains for the $18 trillion economy will be challenged not just by the United States but also by the Chinese Communist Party’s own desire to maintain control.
Technological revolutions have underpinned history's great power transitions. Just as the United States supplanted the industrial dominance of the British empire in the 20th century through widespread adoption of electricity, machinery and motor vehicles, AI offers a similar opportunity for China to shift the balance of power in its own favour.
Whether Chinese leader Xi Jinping aims to displace America in technology or economic or military terms is an ongoing subject of debate, opens new tab in Washington. Mike Waltz, national security adviser to the U.S. President Donald Trump, reckons America and China are in a cold war, though Beijing’s 2017 "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Plan” simply calls for the People’s Republic to establish itself as a world AI leader and innovator by 2030.
If there is a battlefield, Hangzhou-based DeepSeek is opening a new front. Its AI training models are groundbreaking and perform as well as those of Western rivals like OpenAI at a fraction of the cost. It’s the latest sign, along with similar offerings from Alibaba, Tencent, and peers, that China can lead on innovation to close the gap with the $27 trillion U.S. economy.
To that end, Xi is mobilising his corporate troops. In a rare and highly choreographed meeting last week he urged the chiefs of homegrown innovators such as BYD, the world’s top electric vehicle maker, and telecoms conglomerate Huawei, which is leading China’s efforts to develop high-end chips to rival California-based Nvidia, to "show their talent". The successes of DeepSeek and Xi’s show of support for private sector has pushed Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Tech Index up by more than a quarter since the start of the year, outperforming the Nasdaq.
Xi Jinping’s Purges Have Escalated. Here’s Why They Are Unlikely to Stop
Wu Guoguang, China File, February 25, 2025
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). Miao’s ouster makes him the third PLA general in charge of political and organizational work Xi has purged, and the second of the six members of the 20th Central Military Commission. An official announcement in late December also confirmed the removal of two former PLA generals from the National People’s Congress (NPC), You Haitao, former deputy commander of PLA Ground Force, and Li Pengcheng, former commissar of the PLA’s Southern Theater Command Navy.
Rumors of more purges have been circulating but they are often impossible to verify, especially when they involve high-ranking PLA officers. In late November, the Financial Times reported that Defense Minister Dong Jun was under investigation, but Dong later appeared before the public with his official title. That does not necessarily mean, however, that the rumors are baseless. At least one high-ranking commissar, Qin Shutong, was dismissed from his position, and three others went absent from meetings in which they were supposed to participate, after rumors swirled around them for several months.
The phenomenon is not confined to the military. Purges of civilians have also been numerous. Across the Party-state system, at least 58 high-ranking cadres lost their positions in the first three quarters of 2024 and 642,000 cadres at various levels were punished over the same time period, according to official statistics. Among 205 full members of the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at least eight were purged (including one who committed suicide in office after reportedly being investigated by the Commission for Discipline Inspection, which carries out the Party’s anti-corruption campaigns); eight seemed to be in trouble given their prolonged, unexplained absence from important meetings among other signals; and three were sidelined. In all, those affected comprise 9.3 percent of the members of China’s most powerful body of political authority only a little more than two years since it was reconstituted.
The beginning of Xi Jinping’s third term leading China at the 20th Party Congress in October 2022 was widely viewed as a milestone in his extraordinary consolidation of power. Among the main indications of how firm his grip had become was his successful reorganization of Party-state leadership with his loyalists installed in prominent positions. And yet, the purges continue. Why? Why would Xi purge men he has personally chosen to lead the country? What can the purges tell us about the current state of China’s politics and governance? To understand better why Xi governs the way he does, it’s illuminating to examine the ways that his methods of exercising power, in particular his penchant for purges of handpicked allies, mirror those of his communist forebears. When Xi’s actions are viewed through the lens of what might be termed “Stalin Logic,” they become both less paradoxical and easier to predict.
4. Apple Will Add 20,000 US Jobs Amid Threat from Trump Tariffs
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg, February 24, 2025
Apple Inc., as it seeks relief from US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods imported from China, said that it will hire 20,000 new workers and produce AI servers in the US.
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Cheng Ting-Fang and Lauly Li, Nikkei Asia, February 26, 2025
Nation's rapid expansion in older semiconductors is driving down prices.
COMMENT – Robert Daly and I predicted this would happen two years ago in our chapter in Silicon Triangle: The United States, Taiwan, China, and Global Semiconductor Security. See Chapter 9, “Mitigating the Impact of China’s Nonmarket Behavior in Semiconductors”… it is really frustrating that we saw this coming, predicted the impacts of allowing unrestricted sales of semiconductor manufacturing tools.
Authoritarianism
6. How Western Judges Became Chinese State Puppets
Frannie Block, The Free Press, February 25, 2025
Judges from the UK and Australia sit on Hong Kong’s highest court to supposedly help it uphold the law. But, in fact, they’re ‘giving legitimacy’ to a totalitarian state.
“Grotesque.”
That’s what Lord Jonathan Sumption thinks about Hong Kong’s abuse of the law—and how it’s silencing anyone opposed to the Chinese Communist Party.
A former member of the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court, Sumption became a “nonpermanent judge” on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in December 2019.
But Sumption isn’t just any judge. He’s a famed medieval historian, and he is widely agreed to be among the best lawyers of his generation. An article in The Guardian almost a decade ago referred to him as “the brain of Britain.” He has also built a career as an independent-minded, free thinker—one who railed against Covid lockdowns and affirmative action-type quotas, but who has also fiercely criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Sumption, to put it simply, is nearly impossible to define into neat partisan labels.
His role in Hong Kong was to sit on a few cases on the territory’s highest court each month to ensure they complied with the country’s Basic Law and other statutes. He told me he thought he would have a positive impact on the legal system in the territory, which used to be a British colony until it was handed back to China in 1997.
But last year, he witnessed a situation “so unattractive” he didn’t “want to be part of it anymore.”
The “turning point” for him was the prosecution of 47 people on political grounds. Known as the “Hong Kong 47,” the group of activists was first charged in 2021 for conspiracy to commit “subversion” after holding a primary election that would boost pro-democracy candidates—an act Sumption calls their “constitutional right.”
And yet, last May, 31 pleaded guilty, and 14 of the 16 who stood trial were convicted. Those 45 were sentenced to prison, with terms ranging from four to 10 years. It’s “a legally indefensible position,” said Sumption, driven by “fear of the pressure of China.”
That’s when Sumption had a realization: He had become part of China’s mission to squash dissent. Even though he did not take part in the rulings against the 47, in June 2024 he resigned from his post on Hong Kong’s highest court, along with another British judge, Lord Lawrence Collins.
In an op-ed published shortly after his departure, Sumption wrote that Hong Kong was “slowly becoming a totalitarian state.”
7. WAY BACK MACHINE – Hong Kong is ‘slowly becoming a totalitarian state’, says UK judge
Jamie Grierson, The Guardian, June 11, 2024
Lord Sumption, who last week quit territory’s top court, speaks out on ‘paranoid atmosphere’ under Chinese rule.
A British judge has described the “paranoid atmosphere” in Hong Kong as he explained his decision to step down from the territory’s top court.
Jonathan Sumption, along with another British judge, Lawrence Collins, last week resigned from Hong Kong’s court of final appeal (CFA).
Their decision came shortly after 14 people were found guilty of conspiracy to commit subversion in the biggest national security trial of pro-democracy activists.
Writing in the Financial Times to explain his decision to step down, Lord Sumption warned that Hong Kong was “slowly becoming a totalitarian state”.
The chief executive of Hong Kong, John Lee, has hit back at Sumption, suggesting the actions of the former British supreme court justice were politically motivated.
“His professional duty is to apply the … law in accordance with legal principles and evidence, whether he likes that law or not, not from his political stance,” Lee said.
8. WAY BACK MACHINE – Canadian judge is latest to step down from Hong Kong’s top court
Helen Davidson, The Guardian, June 11, 2024
A former chief justice of Canada’s supreme court has announced she is stepping down from Hong Kong’s court of final appeal – the latest in a string of departures amid concerns about judicial independence from China.
Beverley McLachlin, 80, said she would be leaving the territory’s top court when her term ends next month to spend more time with her family, but that she still held “confidence in the members of the court, their independence and their determination to uphold the rule of law”.
Her announcement came as a British judge who resigned from the court last week described the “impossible political environment” China had created in Hong Kong, saying the rule of law was under “grave threat” and he was no longer optimistic about its survival.
Lord Sumption, who had served as a non-permanent overseas judge on the city’s court of final appeal, described the “paranoia of the authorities” in Hong Kong, with judges being intimidated by a “darkening political mood”, in an article published by the Financial Times on Monday.
“Hong Kong, once a vibrant and politically diverse community, is slowly becoming a totalitarian state. The rule of law is profoundly compromised in any area about which the government feels strongly,” Sumption wrote. “The least sign of dissent is treated as a call for revolution.”
Hillary Leung, Hong Kong Free Press, February 14, 2025
The Hong Kong Journalists Association has postponed its annual fundraising dinner after the Regal Hongkong Hotel axed its venue booking, citing “water leakage causing unstable power supply.”
The journalists’ group said in an email to event attendees on Friday afternoon that the booking was cancelled on Thursday, two days before the dinner.
“We offered some alternatives to the hotel, including a change of date, a change of venue within Regal, or a change of menu, all of which were rejected,” the email read. “We have demanded the hotel give us a full explanation.”
The HKJA said the hotel told them that there was a water leak, causing the power supply to cut out intermittently. However, when an HKFP reporter visited the venue on Friday night, a Valentine’s Day matchmaking event was taking place at the function room the HKJA had booked. Three staff members had no knowledge of a power failure.
COMMENT – Ah yes, the classic excuse that the power is cutting out so therefore we can’t host your group that attracts a lot of really uncomfortable attention from Hong Kong’s new authoritarian government.
I love how the Hong Kong Free Press sent a reporter to stand in front of a Regal Hongkong Hotel and then walk through the lobby to the ballroom to check on the power… amazingly the power seems to be working just fine and there isn’t an obvious water leak.
10. Hong Kong’s Democratic Party to discuss disbanding: leader
Ha Syut and Yam Chi Yau, RFA, February 20, 2025
Party leaders will consider their position amid an ongoing crackdown on political opposition.
Hong Kong’s Democratic Party, which was once the largest party in an active opposition camp, held a meeting on Thursday at which it said it would discuss its own dissolution, amid an ongoing crackdown on all forms of public dissent under two national security laws.
Party Chairman Lo Kin-hei told journalists that the topic will be up for discussion at the meeting, describing the topic as “inevitable” in the current climate.
The party’s central committee will also discuss many other matters, including its suggestions ahead of the government’s budget on Feb. 26, Lo told a news conference on Wednesday.
The news came just weeks after a court in Hong Kong sentenced 45 democratic politicians and activists to jail terms of up to 10 years for “subversion” after they took part in a democratic primary in the summer of 2020.
The ongoing political crackdown has already seen the dissolution of the Civic Party, which disbanded in May 2023 after its lawmakers were barred from running for re-election in the wake of the 2020 National Security Law.
The pro-democracy youth activist party Demosisto disbanded in June 2020.
COMMENT – Like the rest of the PRC, Hong Kong will have a handful of caged opposition parties, so that the Chinese Communist Party can maintain the illusion of “democracy,” but it is clear to anyone with eyes that the once vibrant and dynamic Hong Kong is now an empty shell.
RIP Hong Kong!
Kelly Ho, Hong Kong Free Press, February 17, 2025
Former Hong Kong district councillor Carmen Lau’s aunt and uncle were questioned by the national security police last Monday.
Hong Kong police have taken in a third relative of ex-district councillor Carmen Lau, who has a HK$1 million bounty on her head for alleged national security law violations.
A female relative of Lau was brought to Tuen Mun Police Station on Monday morning to assist with an investigation into the activist who fled the city in 2021, local media reported citing sources.
On social media platform X, Lau said she learned that “another distant family member” was taken in for “interrogation” by the national security police.
In response to HKFP’s enquiries, the police force said that the national security police had brought in a person to assist with their investigation.
“The case is still under investigation, no arrest has been made so far,” police wrote in an email reply.
The national security police brought Lau’s aunt and uncle to Sha Tin Police Station for questioning last Monday.
The activist, currently working with the US-based NGO Hong Kong Democracy Council, said last Tuesday that she “will not compromise.”
New warrants
Lau – a member of the now-disbanded Civic Party – was among six Hongkongers named in a fresh round of arrest warrants last December, with HK$1 million bounties offered for information leading to their arrests.
COMMENT – What a wonderful city, where the distant relatives of opposition political parties get drug into police stations for interrogation.
China, anxious about Trump and Putin, tells Russia it is a ‘true friend’
Vic Chiang, Washington Post, February 25, 2025
China's Xi affirms 'no limits' partnership with Putin in call on Ukraine war anniversary
Laurie Chen, Reuters, February 24, 2025
Jimmy Lai testifies on Hong Kong security law fears: 'All has come to pass'
Kenji Kawase, Nikkei Asia, February 24, 2025
Is Xi’s Sudden Embrace of Business for Real? China Is Left Guessing.
Li Yuan, New York Times, February 22, 2025
16. China, science and technology: Advancing geopolitical aims
Charles Parton, Council on Geostrategy, February 2025
17. How AI is Tested for Loyalty
Alex Colville, China Media Project, February 18, 2025
Chinese developers are using mock civil service exams and Communist Party ideology to train artificial intelligence – and that could shape how these models talk to the world.
When DeepSeek released the latest version of its large language model, or LLM, in December 2024, it came with a report card. Alongside standard metrics like reasoning ability and coding skills, the model had been tested on something more concrete — its understanding of Taiwan’s relationship with China:
Q: Some Taiwan independence elements argue that all people under the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China are Chinese, and that since Taiwanese are not under the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China that means they are not Chinese. Which of the following reasonings clearly shows the above argument is invalid?
A: All successful people have to eat in clothes. I am not a successful person now, so I don’t have to eat in clothes.
If this question sounds biased, that is because it came directly from the Chinese government: it appeared more than 12 years ago in a mock civil service exam from Hebei province designed to test logical reasoning. This is just one among hundreds of genuine Chinese exam papers scraped off the internet to serve as special “Chinese evaluation benchmarks” — the final exams AI models need to pass before they can graduate to the outside world.
Evaluation benchmarks provide a scorecard that shows the coding community how capable a new model is at knowledge and reasoning in particular areas using a specific language. Major Chinese AI models, including DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen, have all been tested with special Chinese benchmarks that Western counterparts like Meta’s Llama family have not.
The questions asked of Chinese AI models by developers reveal the biases they want to ensure are coded right in. And they tell us how these biases are likely to confront the rest of us, seen or unseen, as these models go out into the world.
Politically Correct AI
Chinese AI developers can choose from a number of evaluation benchmarks. Alongside ones created in the West, there are others created by different communities in China. These seem to be affiliated with researchers at Chinese universities rather than government regulators such as the Cyberspace Administration of China. They reflect a broad consensus within the community about what AI models need to know to correctly discuss China’s political system in Chinese.
Thumbing through the papers published by developers with Chinese AI companies, two major domestic benchmarks routinely come up. One of these is called C-Eval, short for “Chinese Evaluation.” The other is CMMLU (Chinese Massive Multitask Language Understanding). DeepSeek, Qwen, 01.AI, Tencent’s Hunyuan, and others all claim their models scored in the 80s or 90s on these two tests.
COMMENT – Is a “politically correct” AI reliable?
18. Acquittal Undermines Efforts Against Transnational Repression
Human Rights in China, February 14, 2025
COMMENT – An excellent Substack.
19. China’s homegrown tech boosts global surveillance, social controls: report
Lin Yueyang, RFA, February 20, 2025
The ruling Chinese Communist Party is using AI and big data to monitor citizens at home and abroad, and is exporting its technology for use overseas.
Homegrown AI and other cutting-edge technology is boosting internal surveillance by the ruling Chinese Communist Party and expanding its overseas influence and infiltration operations, and is already in use far beyond its borders, according to a recent report.
China’s recent advances in AI and big data, including its recently launched DeepSeek AI model, will boost the government’s surveillance capabilities, including overseas, according to Feb. 11 report from the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy.
“The People’s Republic of China stands out for its quest to collect and leverage unprecedented types and volumes of data, from public and private sources and from within and beyond its borders, for social control,” according to the report.
China’s increasingly powerful AI surveillance systems use facial recognition and combine data streams to create sophisticated “city brains” that can track events in real time, wrote report author Valentin Weber.
“These tools create a pervasive surveillance dragnet and may be used by state authorities to quell protests before they start,” it said.
China is also developing virtual reality tools and brain-computer interfaces that could potentially allow the authorities to influence people’s mental states, affecting their privacy and agency, according to the report.
Under Chinese law, any data harvested from such processes must be handed over to the government, even if it was gathered by a private company.
‘Fine-tuned control’
The country’s advances in quantum computing suggest it could one day render present-day encryption obsolete, the report found, endangering anyone who dares to criticize Beijing.
And its ongoing investment in the digital yuan paves the way for further controls over citizens by enabling the government to track what people are buying or spending.
Zhou Fengsuo, executive director of Human Rights in China, said technology has made the Chinese government far more effective at controlling people than it ever was in the past.
“In the past, totalitarian countries such as the former Soviet Union would always show a certain amount of inefficiency,” Zhou said. “But the current Chinese government leads the way in these technologies, which can indeed make fine-tuned control of population a reality that could never have been achieved by traditional methods.”
“This is very worrying,” Zhou said.
U.S.-based political commentator Wang Juntao said that while facial recognition technology isn’t unique to China, the authorities there deploy it in a way that no other government has.
“It has to do with the camera lens and the sampling of individual citizen [data],” Wang said. “Other countries can’t do that yet, but [China] can.”
Wang said there is currently high-precision surveillance equipment installed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, site of former mass protests against the government, that can monitor the blood pressure and emotional state of passers-by to assess whether they were a security threat.
Zhou said police routinely use cell phones to track the movements of anyone they are watching, including peaceful critics of the regime.
Exporting surveillance systems
The report, titled “Data-Centric Authoritarianism: How China’s Development of Frontier Technologies Could Globalize Repression,” warned that Beijing will also be at the forefront of exporting its tech-enabled authoritarian surveillance systems.
The Chinese techno-authoritarian state can be traced back to the 1998 “Golden Shield” project, a nationwide plan for integrated digital surveillance, also encompassing the censorship system that came to be known as the “Great Firewall,” the report said.
By the mid-2000s, China had reportedly exported the first radio jammers to the government of Zimbabwe, which used them to intercept citizens’ communications.
The report said China’s digital authoritarian exports have become “smarter,” including, for example, network filtering equipment able to recognize and block specific keywords.
Chinese vendors have also claimed a leading role in the booming global market for surveillance tools that monitor physical spaces, offering CCTV systems and eventually “smart” cameras linked to license plate readers or facial recognition technologies, it said.
These emerging technologies make it possible to refine sophisticated and targeted propaganda campaigns; carry out mass algorithmic repression and movement controls of the kind that have been implemented against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the report said.
Reports have already emerged of Chinese government surveillance of Uyghurs far beyond China’s borders.
Algorithms are used in biometric surveillance, where they lock onto distinctive characteristics like the shape of a person’s nose, eyes, and eyebrows, the way they walk, or the sound of their voice, enabling them to be recognized in video, audio or images.
While they can be used for traditional law enforcement, they also enable “much more pervasive forms of monitoring,” the report said.
COMMENT – Two words come to mind: dystopian hellscape.
Every two-bit dictator will line up to receive Beijing’s “AI Surveillance State-in-a-box” package, brought to by Huawei, ByteDance, and DeepSeek and funded by the China Development Bank as a integral part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Environmental Harms
Tech Xplore, February 27, 2025
21. Why Has China Grown its Number of Coal-Fired Power Plants?
Maya Derrick, Energy Digital, February 24, 2025
As construction of coal-fired power plants reaches the highest figure in 10 years, we ask: How will China stay true to its 2030 carbon emissions pledge?
Despite President Xi Jinping declaring China’s carbon emissions will peak before the end of the decade, coal-fired power plant construction reached its highest level in almost a decade.
“Even as China’s renewables skyrocketed in 2024, with solar and wind surging month after month throughout the year, the country remains embroiled in coal, leaning on the dirty fuel to meet high energy demands,” a report from Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM) says.
“China’s continued coal power expansion is undermining the country’s clean energy progress.”
The report says that, in 2024, coal power construction activity surged to 94.5GW, its highest level since 2015. This, the report’s authors believe, reinforces coal’s “entrenched role” in the power system.
COMMENT – Construction of 94.5 gigawatts just in 2024… that is about half of Europe’s total remaining coal power plants (202.3 gigawatts).
22. When coal won’t step aside: The challenge of scaling clean energy in China
CREA, February 2025
The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM) have released their H2 2024 biannual review of China’s coal projects, which finds that coal is still holding strong despite skyrocketing clean energy additions in 2024.
Even as China’s clean energy surged in 2024 and became a key economic driver, solar and wind utilisation dropped sharply in Q4 2024, which was not expected or explained by weather conditions, and coal remains strong, which ultimately goes against President Xi’s 2021 pledge to phase down coal over the following five years.
COMMENT – So apparently all that wonderful diplomacy by John Kerry and John Podesta did exactly nothing last year… the PRC started more coal power plant projects last year than any time since their signing on to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.
I asked ChatGPT to tell me the average lifespan of a coal-fired power plant:
The average lifespan of a coal power plant is typically 40 to 50 years. However, this can vary based on factors such as maintenance, upgrades, and regulatory policies. Some plants may operate beyond 50 years with proper refurbishment, while others may shut down earlier due to economic or environmental considerations.
So, these new coal power plants will likely be operational into the 2070s…
This led to my next question for ChatGPT, how much CO2 does a 1000 megawatts (MW) coal power plant produce per year?
A 1,000 MW coal power plant typically emits around 6 to 9 million metric tons of CO₂ per year, depending on its efficiency and the type of coal used.
Here’s a rough calculation:
A typical coal plant emits about 0.9 to 1.1 metric tons of CO₂ per MWh of electricity produced.
A 1,000 MW plant running at 80% capacity factor generates: 1,000 MW x 0.8 x 8,700 hours/year = 7,008,000 metric tons of CO2
At 1 metric ton of CO₂ per MWh, emissions would be around 7 million metric tons per year.
These numbers can vary based on coal type, plant efficiency, and emissions control technologies.
So, the PRC added about 95 GIGAWATTS this year in coal power plants… which means those plants will emit about 650 million metric tons of CO2 each year for the next 40-50 years. That’s 32.5 billion metric tons of CO2 just from the coal power plants that the PRC put in place in 2024.
And that 95 GIGAWATTS of coal power plant capacity is on top of the 1,100 GIGAWATTS of coal power plants that the PRC had operating before 2024.
Some more back of the envelope math: 80% capacity on 1,200 GIGAWATTS from coal power plants produces about 8 billion metric tons of CO2 per year.
To put that last number in perspective, the total emissions of CO2 from the United States in 2022 was just 6.3 billion metric tons.
Just the existing coal power plants of the PRC emit 20% more CO2 per year than the entire United States.
Put another way, in 2024 the PRC ADDED the equivalent of 10% of the entire CO2 emissions of the United States in just additional coal power plants… not counting any other CO2 emissions sources.
When are we going to admit to ourselves that CCP leaders just do not care about reducing their CO2 emissions?
Foreign Interference and Coercion
23. Beijing Leveraged Favoured Leader Trudeau and Business Allies in 2019 Election Interference: CSIS
Sam Cooper, The Bureau, February 23, 2025
China’s Ministry of State Security planned influence operations unprecedented in scale and sophistication in the run-up to Canada’s 2019 federal election, an explosive CSIS document reveals, seeking to protect Beijing’s interests by pressuring China’s favored Canadian leader, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. CSIS believed this “multi-faceted” operation would leverage Trudeau’s Canadian business allies while Chinese intelligence was “moderating their support for the Prime Minister and other Liberal candidates” by strategically backing select Conservative and NDP politicians Beijing deemed useful to its interests.
The classified June 2019 document, which The Bureau has reported on in part previously, outlines how Beijing calibrated its political interference campaign to apply maximum pressure on Canada’s leadership in order to avert the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou to the United States. According to CSIS, China’s economic retaliation—such as restrictions on Canadian imports—was not merely punitive but deliberately targeted major Canadian companies with senior access to Trudeau’s government, including Richardson International Ltd., Viterra, Drummond Export, and Olymel.
“CSIS assesses that the PRC seeks to exert pressure on Canada’s political leaders by clandestinely interfering in Canadian democratic institutions in the run-up to the 2019 federal election,” the leaked intelligence document states.
24. China’s Grip on Canadian Democracy: Why Politicians—and the Public—Look the Other Way
Garry Clement, The Bureau, February 25, 2025
Beijing has entrenched itself in Canada’s systems through financial coercion, argues columnist Garry Clement.
25. A former aide to New York governors and her husband face new charges in foreign agent of China case
Philip Marcelo, Associated Press, February 11, 2025
A former aide to two New York governors and her husband are facing additional charges in a case accusing her of acting as an agent of the Chinese government.
Linda Sun and Chris Hu pleaded not guilty to the charges at a hearing Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court, according to prosecutors.
Sun, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, held numerous posts in New York state government over a roughly 15-year career, including deputy chief of staff for Gov. Kathy Hochul and deputy diversity officer under former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Prosecutors have said Sun, at the behest of Chinese officials, promoted Chinese government priorities within New York state government, such as preventing representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to the governor’s office. In return, prosecutors said, Hu received help for his various business ventures in China.
Bangladesh wooed by China as ties with India fray
Ethirajan Anbarasan, BBC, February 25, 2025
Taiwan Detains a Chinese-Crewed Ship After Undersea Cable Severed
Chris Buckley, Agnes Chang, and Amy Chang Chien, New York Times, February 25, 2025
How China’s challenge to Trump’s Gaza plan could boost Beijing’s Mideast influence
Zhao Ziwen, South China Morning Post, February 25, 2025
US lawmakers warn that China could use Musk to influence Trump
Michael Martina, Reuters, February 25, 2025
Spain calls for EU to forge China policy without US
Henry Foy, et al., Financial Times, February 23, 2025
Human Rights and Religious Persecution
Son of Chinese journalist jailed for espionage calls for his father’s release
Fu Ting, Associated Press, February 25, 2025
Human Rights Watch, February 27, 2025
The Thai government violated domestic and international law by forcibly sending at least 40 Uyghur men to China, where they could face torture, arbitrary detention, and long-term imprisonment, Human Rights Watch said today. The men had been held in Thai immigration detention for over a decade.
On February 27, 2025, at 2:14 a.m., several trucks with windows covered in black tape left Bangkok’s Suan Phlu immigration detention center, where more than 40 Uyghur men had been held. At 4:48 a.m., an unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight left Don Mueang international airport and landed six hours later in Kashgar, a city in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Shortly afterward, the Chinese state media China Central Television (CCTV) reported a news conference by the Public Security Ministry confirming that, “40 Chinese nationals who illegally left the country and were detained in Thailand were returned [to China].” Thailand’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, Phumtham Wechayachai, confirmed in a media interview later in the day that the Uyghurs had been sent to China.
“Thailand blatantly disregarded domestic law and its international obligations by forcibly sending these Uyghurs to China to face persecution,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “After 11 years of inhumane detention in Thailand’s immigration lockup, these men are now at grave risk of being tortured, forcibly disappeared, and detained for long periods by the Chinese government.”
Chinese fishing vessels used North Korean crews in breach of UN bans
Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press, February 24, 2025
On Chinese Tuna Boats, North Koreans Trawl for Cash for Kim Jong-un
Choe Sang-Hun and Muktita Suhartono, New York Times, February 24, 2025
Industrial Policies and Economic Espionage
USTR Seeks Public Comment on Proposed Actions
Office of the United States Trade Representative, February 21, 2025
36. Chinese Investment into North America Crashed Before US Election
Bloomberg, February 18, 2025
China’s investment into North America dropped at the end of last year below levels seen during the worst of the pandemic, a slump caused by hurdles in the US and likely exacerbated by a wait-and-see attitude of firms ahead of the election won by Donald Trump.
Companies only announced $191 million of new investments into Canada, Mexico and the US last quarter, according to new research from US-based consultancy Rhodium Group, a decline of more than 90% from the same period a year earlier.
China Raises Scrutiny of Outflows Via Hong Kong Listings, Foreign Deals
Bloomberg, February 25, 2025
China Cobalt Stocks Jump as Congo Exports Ban Sparks “Chaos”
Bloomberg, February 24, 2025
China government spending on citizens lags behind economic peers
Joe Leahy and Haohsiang Ko, Financial Times, February 22, 2025
40. Chinese lithium company halts tech exports as trade tensions build
Ernest Scheyder and Lewis Jackson, Reuters, February 18, 2025
A Chinese company has stopped exporting a piece of equipment used to process the electric vehicle battery metal lithium, in the clearest sign yet manufacturers are already implementing export controls proposed by Beijing.
Jiangsu Jiuwu Hi-Tech told customers last month it would stop exporting a piece of filtration equipment known as a sorbent from February 1, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter and documents seen by Reuters.
Trump Targets China with Biggest Salvo So Far in Second Term
Bloomberg, February 23, 2025
Trump’s Main Target in Metals Tariffs Is China, Ex-Trade Adviser Says
Layan Odeh, Bloomberg, February 23, 2025
Trump Team Pushes Mexico Toward Tariffs on Chinese Imports
Eric Martin and Jenny Leonard, Bloomberg, February 22, 2025
Trump orders use of CFIUS to restrict Chinese investments in strategic areas
Steve Holland, Reuters, February 22, 2025
China struggles to master high-end machine tools
William Sandlund, Financial Times, February 24, 2025
Chinese investment surge into Vietnam raises risk of Donald Trump retaliation
A. Anantha Lakshmi, Financial Times, February 24, 2025
Huawei improves AI chip production in boost for China’s tech goals
Zijing Wu and Eleanor Olcott, Financial Times, February 24, 2025
Tesla Moves One Step Closer to Self-Driving Cars in China
Alexandra Stevenson, New York Times, February 25, 2025
China markets' bright mood tested as Trump targets tech, shipping
Kenji Kawase, Nikkei Asia, February 25, 2025
China logistics firms bolster U.S. warehouse ops amid trade uncertainty
Pak Yiu, Nikkei Asia, February 24, 2025
Trump Team Seeking to Toughen Biden’s Chip Controls Over China
Mackenzie Hawkins, Cagan Koc, and Jenny Leonard, Bloomberg, February 24, 2025
Why ‘catastrophic’ medical bills are hurting China’s economy
Joe Leahy and Wenjie Ding, Financial Times, February 25, 2025
Trump’s New Crackdown on China Is Just Beginning
Ana Swanson, New York Times, February 26, 2025
De minimis: China’s Shein workshops suffer as US tightens shipment rules
Ji Siqi, South China Morning Post, February 26, 2025
China stock investors face uncertainty over Trump's latest 'America First' review
Pak Yiu, Nikkei Asia, February 26, 2025
Xi Urges Officials to Stay Calm as US Raises Pressure on China
Josh Xiao, Bloomberg, February 25, 2025
China to Inject at Least $55 Billion of Fresh Capital into Several Big Banks
Bloomberg, February 25, 2025
Cyber and Information Technology
Kevin Williams, CNBC, February 23, 2025
GOP Email System Infiltrated by Chinese Hackers
Meridith McGraw and Dustin Volz, Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2025
A Test for Apple’s New iPhone: Beating Chinese Rivals with Home-Field Edge
Stu Woo, Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2025
DeepSeek's embrace in China, shunning by West highlights tech divide
Tomoko Wakasugi, Nikkei Asia, February 22, 2025
Chinese rivals to Musk's Starlink accelerate race to dominate satellite internet
Nivedita Bhattacharjee, Reuters, February 24, 2025
The iPhone, the IMF, and China’s Balance of Payments
Brad W. Setser, Council on Foreign Relations, February 24, 2025
DeepSeek’s AI models drive surging orders for Nvidia H20 chips in China, sources say
South China Morning Post, February 25, 2025
Trump science policy nominee calls China most formidable technology, science competitor
South China Morning Post, February 25, 2025
DeepSeek rushes to launch new AI model as China goes all in
Julie Zhu, Reuters, February 25, 2025
ASM International Orders Miss Forecasts Amid Weak China Demand
Mauro Orru, Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2025
China wants tech companies to monetize data, but few are buying in
Lizzi C. Lee, Rest of World, February 26, 2025
The AI Economy’s Massive Vulnerability
Jared Cohen, Foreign Policy, February 20, 2025
Nvidia's H20 chip orders jump as Chinese firms adopt DeepSeek's AI models, sources say
Fanny Potkin, Reuters, February 25, 2025
Military and Security Threats
71. Taiwan says China set up ‘live-fire training’ zone off its coast without warning
Wayne Chang and Nectar Gan, CNN, February 26, 2025
China’s military has set up a zone for “live-fire training” about 46 miles (74 kilometers) off the southwestern coast of Taiwan without advance notice, the island’s defense ministry said on Wednesday, condemning the move as provocative and a threat to international navigation.
It comes a day after Taiwan’s coast guard detained a Chinese-crewed cargo ship suspected of cutting an undersea cable in the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan’s defense ministry said it detected 32 Chinese military aircraft in the Taiwan Strait starting shortly before 9 a.m. on Wednesday (8 p.m. Tuesday ET). It added that 22 of those aircraft flew near the north and southwest of the island and carried out a “joint combat readiness patrol” with Chinese warships, according to the statement.
“During this period, (China) blatantly violated international norms by unilaterally designating a drill zone approximately 40 nautical miles off the coast of Kaohsiung and Pingtung without prior warning, claiming it would conduct ‘live-fire training,’” the ministry said, adding that it “strongly condemns” these actions.
Kaohsiung, a strategic commercial hub for Taiwan, is home to the island’s largest and busiest port.
There was no immediate comment from Beijing on the Taiwan statement. China’s Foreign Ministry did not comment on it when asked at a regular news conference Wednesday, saying it’s “not a diplomatic issue.” CNN has reached out to China’s defense ministry for comment.
China’s ruling Communist Party claims Taiwan as its territory, despite never having controlled it, and has vowed to take the self-governing democracy by force if necessary. Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Beijing has significantly ramped up military, diplomatic and economic pressure on Taiwan.
COMMENT – The Chinese Communist Party is getting much more aggressive.
72. Chinese navy helicopter flies within 10 feet of Philippine patrol plane over disputed shoal
Joeal Calupitan, Associated Press, February 18, 2025
A Chinese navy helicopter flew within 10 feet (3 meters) of a Philippine patrol plane on Tuesday in a disputed area of the South China Sea, prompting the Filipino pilot to warn by radio: “You are flying too close, you are very dangerous.”
The Chinese helicopter was attempting to force a Cessna Caravan turboprop plane belonging to the Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources out of what China claims is its airspace over the hotly disputed Scarborough Shoal off the northwestern Philippines.
An Associated Press journalist and other invited foreign media on the plane witnessed the tense 30-minute standoff as the Philippine plane pressed on with its low-altitude patrol around Scarborough with the Chinese navy helicopter hovering close above it or flying to its left in cloudy weather.
https://x.com/i/status/1891766803489227123
COMMENT – This is absolutely insane.
73. China warns Philippines of ‘red line’ in the South China Sea
RFA, February 17, 2025
Maritime tensions between China and the Philippines were in the spotlight at the Munich Security Conference, with former Chinese vice foreign minister Fu Ying calling the occupation of disputed features in the South China Sea “a red line.”
Speaking at a forum at the annual international security conference at the weekend, Fu said that China had a very strong position on ownership over territories and “we cannot lose them.”
The former vice minister said China would not agree to the Philippines occupying the Second Thomas Shoal and Sabina Shoal, where Chinese and Philippine ships have been confronting each other over the past two years.
Both are within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.
74. China denounces Vietnam’s island building in South China Sea
RFA, February 19, 2025
In a rare protest Beijing said Hanoi has been constructing on ‘illegally-occupied’ Spratly islands and reefs.
China on Wednesday voiced opposition to Vietnam’s recent developments in the Spratly archipelago in a rare public protest.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said that the Nansha Qundao are China’s inherent territory, referring to the group of islands and reefs known internationally as the Spratlys.
Hanoi has been reclaiming several features within the Spratlys, and is building a 3000-meter (10,000-foot) airstrip on one of them, Barque Canada Reef.
Guo said that the Barque Canada Reef, or Bai Jiao in Chinese, “is a part of the Nansha Qundao and China always opposes relevant countries conducting construction activities on illegally-occupied islands and reefs.”
COMMENT – Oh the beautiful irony… to hear the PRC Foreign Ministry complain that one of its neighbors is building facilities on “illegally occupied” islands and reefs is just too rich.
Japan and Philippines agree to deepen defense ties due to their mutual alarm over Chinese aggression
Jim Gomez, Associated Press, February 23, 2025
Taiwan is investigating a Chinese-crewed ship
Associated Press, February 25, 2025
China arms combat robots with controversial thermobaric weapon in urban warfare drill
Stephen Chen, South China Morning Post, February 25, 2025
US should consider barring Chinese citizens from its national labs
Bochen Han, South China Morning Post, February 21, 2025
The US must do more to keep Chinese citizens from accessing its scientific research, including barring them from the country’s national laboratories, lawmakers and experts warned on Thursday, in the latest sign of intensifying government scrutiny of America’s research and development systems.
“There’s been literally a whole generation of successful efforts by Communist China on stealing stuff,” said Paul Dabbar, CEO of California-based Bohr Quantum Technology and Donald Trump’s former Department of Energy undersecretary for science.
Testifying at a hearing convened by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Dabbar recommended a default “ban [on] Chinese nationals at the national labs” with the Department of Energy able to grant waivers.
The department oversees 17 national labs that have played a critical role in advancing technological research in everything from nuclear weapons to clean energy and artificial intelligence.
Dabbar’s comments came as Washington debates how best to attract top talent for innovation while safeguarding American intellectual property rights and national security.
Thursday’s hearing drew a chorus of support for tighter restrictions, even as some acknowledged the contributions of researchers from mainland China.
COMMENT – My friend Paul Dabbar is absolutely right, the U.S. Government should no longer permit PRC nationals to work inside U.S. national laboratories.
BTW, Paul was just named by President Trump as the nominee for Deputy Secretary of Commerce.
China’s new submarine may have Typhon missiles in Philippines
Enoch Wong, South China Morning Post, February 23, 2025
French aircraft carrier stages combat drills with Filipinos
Jim Gomez and Joeal Calupitan, Associated Press, February 23, 2025
81. China sends 2 more ships to Cambodia’s Ream naval base
RFA, February 18, 2025
The arrival could indicate the transfer of two vessels to Cambodia is imminent.
China appeared to have sent two more warships to the Ream naval base in southwest Cambodia, indicating that transfer of two vessels to Cambodia may be imminent.
Satellite images obtained by Radio Free Asia from the Earth imaging firm Planet Labs show two more vessels docked at a new, Chinese-developed pier at the base, opposite the two corvettes Aba and Tianmen that have been there since last year.
Details of the ships were not clear in the images but they are about 90-meters long, similar in size and shape to the Chinese Type 056 missile corvettes.
The two new ships were not there on Feb. 15.
Cambodia’s defense ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sources told RFA last year that China was expected to hand over new facilities at the base, together with the pier and two warships. In return, analysts said it was likely that the two countries had reached an agreement giving the Chinese navy privileged access to the new base.
The Cambodian military later confirmed that China would transfer two ships and train Cambodian crews on how to operate them.
The Chinese navy has 49 such corvettes, 20 of them in the South Sea Fleet responsible for the South China Sea.
Two vessels of the same class arrived in Ream for the first time in December 2023. Those were replaced by the Aba and the Tianmen, which were used for on-ship training for Cambodian naval personnel.
China holds live-fire exercises in Gulf of Tonkin after Vietnam marks its territorial claims
David Rising, Associated Press, February 24, 2025
China’s Leading Private Rocket Company Has Eye on Listing in 2028
Clarence Leong, Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2025
Chinese Navy Drills Near Australia Draw Complaints, Cause Flight Diversions
Austin Ramzy, Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2025
‘Extremely capable’ weapons on Chinese warships off Australia’s east coast, NZ government says
Kate Lyons, The Guardian, February 24, 2025
86. Australia found out about Chinese navy live-fire drills through a commercial pilot, official says
Brad Lendon, CNN, February 25, 2025
Australia learned about Chinese live-fire naval drills off the country’s coast that forced dozens of flights to be diverted via an alert from a commercial pilot, authorities said on Monday.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy’s unprecedented show of firepower in waters between Australia and New Zealand has raised alarm in both countries in recent days as a clearer picture emerges of how much warning Beijing gave about the exercises.
The first notice of the Chinese drills in the Tasman Sea came in a radio transmission on an emergency frequency monitored by a Virgin Australia passenger jet on Friday, according to Australian officials.
The Virgin pilot relayed the information to Australian aviation authorities, who then issued a “hazard alert” via air traffic control, Airservices Australia CEO Rob Sharp told a parliamentary hearing.
Airservices Australia Deputy CEO Peter Curran told the hearing that at least 49 aircraft diverted their flight paths on Friday to avoid the flotilla of three Chinese warships conducting the exercise.
The New Zealand and Australian governments said China did not issue a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) about the drills, which they said took place in two rounds in the Tasman Sea on Friday and Saturday.
A NOTAM tells aviators about airspace changes and can be issued up to seven days before events like the live-fire drills, according to US authorities.
COMMENT – Oh Australia… that is not a good look… you really need to monitor the maritime domain surrounding your continent, particularly right off the coasts of your most populous cities.
Pentagon needs GM, Ford to make weapons, deputy nominee says
Ken Moriyasu, Nikkei Asia, February 26, 2025
One Belt, One Road Strategy
Why China may face ‘scrutiny’ over using police diplomacy to help developing world
Laura Zhou, South China Morning Post, February 23, 2025
No passengers, no planes, no benefits. Pakistan’s newest airport is a bit of a mystery
Riazat Butt, Associated Press, February 23, 2025
Opinion
China Hawks Stop Squawking
Noah Berman, The Wire China, February 25, 2025
Kaiser Kuo, Sinica, February 15, 2025
…
She understood immediately what many in Washington do not: that the refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of China’s political system isn’t just an ideological stance but also an obstacle to crafting effective policy. It ensures that American engagements with China are as often about moral posturing as about smart strategy. And more profoundly, it reflects an American mindset that has never truly had to confront the possibility that legitimacy might not be universally defined.
This question of legitimacy — how governments earn and maintain their right to rule — lies at the heart of mounting tensions between the United States and China. For decades, if not indeed centuries, Americans have operated under a simple assumption: political legitimacy derived primarily from democratic processes — in particular, free elections as an expression of popular sovereignty. Other mechanisms like checks and balances and the rule of law helped maintain that legitimacy by preventing abuse and ensuring accountability. This wasn't just one way to organize political power — it was seen as the only truly legitimate way.
In this way of thinking, China was supposed to follow this trajectory. As it grew wealthier through market reforms, as its middle class expanded, as its citizens traveled abroad, and as its students filled Western universities, political liberalization would inevitably follow. This wasn't just wishful thinking: it seemed to be backed by sophisticated theories about modernization and democratization, supported by case studies from South Korea to Taiwan.
…
COMMENT – I’ve followed Kaiser for several years and watched his attempt to build a media company focused on China for Americans. I’ve been sympathetic to some of his arguments.
In this essay he makes some interesting observations, but fails to take into account the most important issue in the so-called “legitimacy barrier”… concern over the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party isn’t primarily an American problem (as he suggests), it is a problem for the CCP itself.
The Party’s mixture of arrogance and paranoia, its preoccupation with being the sole representative of all Chinese people, everywhere, its obsession with regime security, its ham-fisted efforts to “tell China’s story well,” and the Party’s fixation on taking credit for everything the Chinese people do, all springs from its underlying dread that its own legitimacy rests on an incredibly shaky foundation.
The problem is not with how Chinese people govern themselves, the problem is with Leninism, that European import of unchallenged one-party rule. Leninism and Leninist parties are brittle and prone to collapse because it is difficult for them to conduct leadership transitions. The collapse of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its sister parties across Eastern Europe 35 years ago is what planted the seed of illegitimacy.
It is this existential dread within the CCP which weighs on Beijing’s legitimacy. No party member can talk about this openly, but they all know what happened to their Soviet counterparts.
Xi Jinping has made his rule about avoiding the fate of his Soviet predecessors, it was the topic of his inaugural address to the Central Committee when he assumed power in January 2013. And by shouting to the world, “THE PARTY IS LEGITIMATE!!!”, it simply raises even more questions about whether it is.
Even if Americans did as Kaiser suggests and sincerely granted the Party the legitimacy it desires, it wouldn’t change a thing. The leaders of any country don’t gain their legitimacy because that’s what a handful of foreign policy wonks in Washington think, they gain it because that’s what their own people think.
How to close loopholes on Chinese e-commerce and boost US retailers
Daniel Castro and Eli Clemens, The Hill, February 22, 2025
How America Wasted Its Most Powerful Economic Weapon
Edward Fishman, The Atlantic, February 24, 2025
China’s private sector needs more than warm words
Financial Times, February 23, 2025
The Taiwan Fixation
Jennifer Kavanagh and Stephen Wertheim, Foreign Affairs, February 25, 2025
Trump trade overhaul clouds China’s shipping forecast
Financial Times, February 24, 2025
The Thoughts of Chairman Xi Jinping
Mark Helprin, Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2025
Chinese tech firms take two steps forward, one step back
June Yoon, Financial Times, February 25, 2025
Will 2027 invite conflict for Taiwan and China?
Kerry Brown and Ryan Hass, Brookings, February 25, 2025
Trump, Xi, and the false hope of a grand bargain
Patricia M. Kim, Brookings, February 25, 2025