Friends,
Going into the weekend, I had assumed that the top story would be the same thing that has seemingly consumed all the oxygen in the room: DeepSeek.
In just one of my email accounts, I have 126 emails from just the past week with the word “DeepSeek” in the subject line.
That is insane.
Heads seem to be exploding with DeepSeek-mania.
That inspired me to ask an AI to make me an image of technology experts freaking out about DeepSeek.
I started with Claude, but its image was so lame I won’t even bother showing it to you.
Here is what ChatGPT generated:
I know this is just a quirk of AI generated images, but some of their faces appear to be melting, which strikes me as kind of appropriate given the heat surrounding this topic.
While I’ll cover the DeepSeek topic at some point, Saturday night helped reconfirm the predictions I made about a second Trump Administration and its China policy: it is all about trade.
See my post on November 10, 2024, titled “What's Next? It's all about trade policy” where I argued that Trade Policy would be the sun around which everything else would orbit.
The Presidential Memorandum signed on January 20, titled America First Trade Policy seemed to confirm this prediction and the actions last night only reinforced that belief. I was out to dinner with the family when the news broke, so I figured I’d read about the details Sunday morning and provide you with some commentary.
But when I read what’s published on the White House website, I became more confused.
[NOTE: it is always better to read the primary source yourself, rather than consume second and third hand interpretations… and yes I understand the irony of me telling you this, as I give you my second hand analysis, as well as links to over one hundred articles providing second and third hand analysis… its why my opinions are free!]
We now live in an age where watching what gets posted to the White House website is pretty darn important.
All the reporting we got last night is that the President signed an Executive Order (or more than one Executive Order?) imposing tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and the PRC to halt the flow of illegal immigration and illicit drugs crossing U.S. borders. The White House posted a “Fact Sheet” to their website explaining the Executive Orders.
Take notice of the time stamps of my screenshots below.
[NOTE: Here is a screenshot I took at 10:43am ET on February 2, 2025, highlighting is mine]
The highlighted text says:
“President Trump is taking bold action to hold Mexico, Canada, and China accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.”
So, I decided to dig into the actual Executive Order (or Orders) to better understand what the Administration is trying to do and how they are doing it. Presumably, there is an explanation of what the United States Government expects these three countries to do with respect to these two important problems (illegal immigration and illicit drug flows).
On the same White House website there was just one action for February 1, 2025 titled “Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our National Border.” Which led me to believe there is just a single mega-Executive Order covering all three countries.
[NOTE: this screenshot is from 10:37am on February 2, 2025, highlighting in mine]
So, I clicked on the first, and only, Presidential Action, expecting to see an Executive Order with the same title and covering Canada, Mexico, and the PRC.
But that’s not what I found.
[NOTE: Here is a screenshot taken at 10:39am ET on February 2, 2025 of the page that is linked to the “Presidential Action” titled “Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our National Border”]
What I found was a different Presidential Action, an Executive Order titled “Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our Northern Border.” There is one mention of the word “Mexico,” one mention of the word “Mexican” (in conjunction with the phrase “Mexican cartels”), and zero mention of China. There is nothing about tariffs on Mexico and China or how either of those countries are involved with illegal immigration and illicit drugs.
So, now I’m scratching my head.
Did the President only sign one Executive Order titled “Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our Northern Border”?
Or did he sign two others that they just forgot to post them to the website?
Why haven’t others noticed this discrepancy? Am I really the only person who bothered to try to read the actual Executive Orders from the official website?
This does not inspire confidence.
Until that’s resolved, it will be hard to comment on what’s happening. Perhaps by the time this gets published and is in your email inboxes, this will be fixed (I hope so).
I suspect there is an Executive Order titled “Imposing Duties to Address the Synthetic Opioid Supply Chain in the People’s Republic of China”… a Google search shows a version of that EO posted today to the University of California, Santa Barbara website… and the PRC Government is responding as though there is an EO.
But I’d really like to see it on the actual USG website.
When it is, I’ll comment more on what I think is happening.
In no way should this diminish from what I think is the main issue here:
the Chinese Communist Party is complicit in the export of fentanyl precursors;
that the Party is intentionally pushing these poisons into the United States through Canada and Mexico (as well as using de minimis loopholes to send them directly into the United States);
that the Party’s acts of omission and commission have killed hundreds of thousands of Americans;
that the Party provides assistance (including money laundering) to criminal organizations in both Mexico and Canada; and
that we should no longer sit idly by and accept foot-dragging by Beijing given their enormous capacity to surveil and control what happens inside their own borders.
I’ve covered this topic in detail on at least two occasions over the past year that are worth reviewing:
My biggest disappointment today is that it appears that the Trump Administration screwed up the roll-out of what I think is an absolutely critical issue that justifies Presidential emergency actions.
It muddied the topic and left even close watchers of this issue confused. It appears that the Trump Administration thinks this issue is more about Ottawa than Beijing.
I’m certain our neighbors to the north can make some improvements (and they certainly should be fulfilling their defense commitments to the alliance), but it is absolutely wrong to hold them more responsible for the fentanyl scourge than the Chinese Communist Party.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
P.S. If you find this newsletter helpful, please subscribe and consider donating with a paid subscription. I will continue to provide this content and material for all to read, but your support would be appreciated.
MUST READ
David Wallace-Wells, New York Times, January 22, 2025
How will we know when a new Cold War has truly begun?
There are, lately, plenty of signs to choose from. In the past few months, China undertook the largest military exercises in the waters around Taiwan in almost three decades, and Americans learned about major recent hacks of the Treasury Department and several of the country’s largest telecommunications companies. President Trump announced the nominations of China hawks for secretary of state, ambassador to Beijing and under secretary of defense for policy, among other positions in the new government, having made an escalating tariff war with China as central to his third campaign as a border wall had been to his first. This month in Foreign Affairs, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson suggested America’s second Cold War was already at least five years old.
But if we are working through a strict comparison with the first Cold War, one big echo is conspicuously missing. For decades, part of how Americans made sense of their rivalry with the Soviet Union was through popular culture — movies and television and novels that dramatized and personalized the conflict, typically simplifying and mythologizing it as well. This time, there has been essentially none of that — no real effort in Hollywood to make use of high-stakes global conflict even as a narrative crutch or by more auteurish creators to explore the layered human complexity of such conflicts.
Not only is there no “Hunt for Red October”; there is also no “Dr. Strangelove” or real heir to John le Carré. That the United States is now engaged in some form of conflict with China has become a kind of commonplace among policy analysts and one of the few areas of consensus between the two political parties. But if there is a Cold War on, you wouldn’t know it from simply streaming movies or television, even if you left your favorite platform on auto-play forever. It’s not just that you can’t yet find a good movie about American rivalry with China on Netflix or Apple TV+. Outside of “3 Body Problem” and some historical documentaries, it’s hard to find anything new about China at all.
Just as striking is that we all know the reason — and know how craven it is. Simply put, the stuff we watch these days is overwhelmingly produced by large corporations far too dependent on China, in one form or another, to risk offending its audiences or its leaders by even broaching the subject.
COMMENT – I think this is a really interesting essay.
2. Former Senior Adviser for the Federal Reserve Indicted on Charges of Economic Espionage
U.S. Department of Justice, January 31, 2025
John Harold Rogers, 63, of Vienna, Virginia, a former Senior Adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB), was arrested today on charges that he conspired to steal Federal Reserve trade secrets for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
In furtherance of the conspiracy, Rogers allegedly made false statements to the Federal Reserve Board Office of Inspector General, and those false statements had a material impact on its investigation.
…
According to the indictment, Rogers, a U.S. citizen with a Ph.D. in Economics, worked as a Senior Adviser in the Division of International Finance of the FRB from 2010 until 2021, where he was entrusted with confidential FRB information. The confidential information that Rogers allegedly shared with his Chinese co-conspirators, who worked for the intelligence and security apparatus of China and who posed as graduate students at a PRC university, is economically valuable when secret.
China holds a large amount of U.S. foreign debt (approximately $816 billion as of October 2024). The data Rogers shared with his co-conspirators could allow China to manipulate the U.S. market, in a manner similar to insider trading. Gaining advance knowledge of U.S. economic policy, including advance knowledge of changes to the federal funds rate, could provide China with an advantage when selling or buying U.S. bonds or securities.
The indictment alleges that from at least 2018, Rogers allegedly exploited his employment with the FRB by soliciting trade-secret information regarding proprietary economic data sets, deliberations about tariffs targeting China, briefing books for designated governors, and sensitive information about Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) deliberations and forthcoming announcements. He passed that information electronically to his personal email account, in violation of FRB policy, or printed it prior to traveling to China, in preparation for meetings with his co-conspirators. Under the guise of teaching “classes,” Rogers met with his co-conspirators in hotel rooms in China where he conveyed sensitive, trade-secret information that belonged to the FRB and the FOMC.
In 2023, Rogers was paid approximately $450,000 USD as a part-time professor at a Chinese university.
On February 4, 2020, in response to questioning by the Office of the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve Board, Rogers lied about his accessing and passage of sensitive information and his associations with his co-conspirators.
Rogers is charged with conspiracy to commit economic espionage and with making false statements. Conspiracy to commit economic espionage carries a maximum statutory penalty of 15 years in prison, and a maximum fine of $5 million. Making false statements carries a maximum statutory penalty of five years in prison.
COMMENT – According to this press release, the U.S. Government has been investigating this case for at least 5 years (“On February 4, 2020, in response to questioning by the Office of the Inspector General for the Federal Reserve Board, Rogers lied…”).
I’m glad they are bringing it now, but it seems we should be able to investigate and bring charges much quicker.
If a U.S. Government employee, with access to sensitive material, is being paid by a PRC university to “teach classes” in the PRC, that should be a huge red flag. Perhaps at the very least, U.S. Government employees should have their access revoked if they are taking on these secondary positions.
3. As Washington Unveils Pandas, China Cracks Down on Their Biggest Fans
Mara Hvistendahl, New York Times, January 24, 2025
Panda fan culture once flourished in China. But Beijing is tightening control of discussion of a national symbol.
Visitors descended on Washington’s National Zoo on Friday to witness the cheery unveiling of two pandas on loan from China. Fans posted photos and videos to social media, as did the zoo under the hashtag #DCPandas.
But in China, the government has sent a chilling message to panda fans to watch what they say online. Some online influencers have been arrested or questioned over what the authorities called “rumors” and “radical fan culture.”
The police have targeted people who have advocated for animal welfare or criticized overseas exchanges like the one that brought pandas to Washington. But state media has also published warnings about broader panda fandom. The moves come amid Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s crackdown on internet fan culture.
China has millions of panda fans, many of whom have taken up the cause of animal welfare in a country where aggressive breeding tactics have injured bears and led to cubs being prematurely separated from their mothers. For years, the authorities tolerated their online activism and criticism, which targeted both Chinese and foreign zoos.
COMMENT – This is probably the sixth article that Mara Hvistendahl and the Times has done on the PRC’s malign use of pandas to achieve geopolitical goals. So glad she is doing this hard work.
4. The Rise of Nitazenes: Chinese Suppliers Behind Ads for Deadly Opioids Targeting Europe
Jonathan Moens, Margus Hanno Murakas, Connor Plunkett, Katherine de Tolly and Ilvija Bruge, Bellingcat, January 20, 2025
A young woman dressed in a school uniform poses in front of a bag resembling breadcrumbs. A phone number, an email, and two QR codes are listed above her head. At the center of the image, in large yellow-and-red font, is the word “Isotonitazene”.
The description says “delivery is guaranteed” and that the brown powder can be shipped safely to Europe, the US, the UK and beyond: “If you are interested,” it says, “kindly contact with me.”
The advertisement appears harmless, but it is far from it: isotonitazene is a type of nitazene, a class of synthetic opioids up to 40 times stronger than fentanyl and up to 500 times more powerful than heroin.
Nitazenes were developed in the 1950s by a Swiss chemical company as a new type of painkiller, but the drug was so potent that it was never approved as a medicine. Even trace quantities can cause an overdose.
Decades later, nitazenes have re-emerged in the underground drug market: they have been detected in counterfeit prescription medicines, including fake oxycodone and benzodiazepines pills, and in street drugs, including cocaine, heroin and ketamine.
The UN drugs agency and countries around the world have warned of the major health risks posed by nitazenes. The super-strength opioid has already caused hundreds of deaths in Europe, the UK and North America.
A months-long open source investigation by Bellingcat and publishing partner Postimees has identified a trove of more than 1,000 online adverts selling six of the most common types of nitazenes and offering worldwide delivery.
The investigation team analysed the websites, social media accounts and contact details related to the ads, and searched business registries for information on companies associated with the drug sales.
It established that a series of entities linked to the advertisements match listings for companies on China’s corporate register — including one registered company that is advertising scores of nitazenes online.
Requests for public information, including court files and customs records, uncovered additional evidence linking nitazenes shipments seized in Europe back to China.
COMMENT – As I’ve covered before (here and here), I think the CCP’s complicity in enabling the export of these poisons is an incredibly important story. Now this is spreading to Europe.
5. DeepSeek Won’t Sink U.S. AI Titans
Dan Gallagher, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2025
Panic fueling the selloff of Nvidia, Broadcom and other tech giants is overblown.
Necessity might be the mother of all invention, but sparking the mother of all selloffs seemed like a stretch.
That wasn’t the case Monday morning, though, as U.S. markets opened to fresh fears about DeepSeek. The Chinese artificial-intelligence startup announced a significant breakthrough late last week with AI models that perform nearly on par with advanced U.S.-born technology. The rub is that DeepSeek claims to have trained one of its latest models for $5.6 million in computing costs—a fraction of what is currently spent on this side of the Pacific on the same activity. OpenAI’s GPT-4 model that was launched in late 2023 cost more than $100 million to train, according to Chief Executive Sam Altman. In a podcast last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the cost to train some models is approaching $1 billion.
6. WAY BACK MACHINE – Pole Position
Eyck Freymann, The China Wire, August 14, 2022
Greenland has become one of the first arenas for the new game of climate geopolitics.
At a conference in Reykjavik in October 2017, Yu Yong, deputy director of the state-controlled Polar Research Institute of China, approached the Greenlandic delegation with a surprising question: Would they be willing to let China establish a scientific research station in Greenland, and man it year-round with a crew of 15 to 20 Chinese researchers?
The Chinese government, Yu explained, had taken a great interest in Arctic climate change.
Models suggested that atmospheric changes in the Arctic were distorting rainfall patterns in China, disrupting agricultural production and flooding major cities. Chinese scientists had a purely scholarly interest in researching Arctic climate change, Yu said, including its effects on “animals and plants.”
If Greenland was willing, Yu said, construction on the new 20,000 square foot facility could start “as soon as possible.”
Without the Greenlandic government’s knowledge, China had already begun preparations. Five months earlier, more than a hundred Chinese scientists and businessmen had flown to Greenland for an initiation ceremony. Chen Yan, a rear admiral in the PLA Navy, was also in attendance. Traveling on tourist visas, ostensibly for a luxury cruise, they convened at midday at a restaurant in the southern settlement of Kangerlussuaq. Programs distributed at the event celebrated the “official launch” of a project to establish a satellite ground station in Greenland.
While the event was immediately reported in Chinese media, the Greenlandic government claimed it was not informed until Miguel Martin, an independent researcher and blogger, broke the story almost a year later. The facility was never built, but the gathering was revealing of China’s plans for the Arctic.
Cheng Xiao, director of the prestigious Global Change and Earth System Science Research Institute at Beijing Normal University, delivered a keynote address at the Kangerlussuaq ceremony. A geographer by training, Cheng had been a prominent figure in Chinese polar circles for decades.
Climate change presented both “future development opportunities” and potential “major military threats” to China, Cheng later explained to the nationalist tabloid Global Times. As the Arctic’s sea ice melted, new shipping routes were opening up, alongside vast resources of oil, gas, minerals, and fisheries, which presented potential opportunities for Chinese companies. Climate change and “geopolitics” (diyuanzhengzhi) had therefore become inextricably connected, in ways that touch on Chinese interests.
China faces a “complex geopolitical situation” in the Arctic, Cheng believes, because the United States, Russia, and other regional powers want to control its ability to access resources. In this context, the best strategy for China is to find backdoor ways to get access to the region by “using its aerospace, high-speed rail, and other advanced technologies for the well-being of local indigenous people.”
In other words, to get a foothold in the Arctic, China should pursue seemingly innocuous civilian projects like scientific research stations in out-of-the-way locations. Greenland, where 88 percent of the population identifies as Kalaallit Inuit, neatly fit the bill.
Since the early 2010s, China has worked assiduously to expand its presence in the polar regions. Scholars and policy analysts at some of China’s top universities and think tanks have written about the strategy. Meanwhile, Chinese universities, state-owned enterprises, nominally private firms, and individual investors have started to implement it, hoping to help their country gain a foothold in the sparsely populated and resource-rich Arctic before it is completely transformed by climate change.
To unpack China’s methods and goals, The Wire analyzed every open-source document on Chinese Arctic policy published during the past decade and available on Chinese search engines, government websites, and the academic database CNKI. Then we visited Nuuk and Copenhagen and interviewed key politicians who had interacted directly with Chinese representatives.
In public, Chinese diplomats and climate negotiators stridently deny that they see any link between climate change and geopolitics. But within China’s academic and policy communities, we found a deeply cynical consensus that climate change creates geopolitical opportunities that China can exploit — and must exploit before its rivals do. Greenland, it seems, was the proof of concept for this strategy.
Across party lines, analysts in the U.S. military, State Department, and intelligence community recognize China’s plan and are determined not to let Beijing succeed.
COMMENT – This article from 2022 details PRC interests in Greenland and the broader arctic. It provides insight into some of the dynamics driving the debates about the Danish colony that is nearly double the size of Alaska.
Jeffrey Stoff, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 30, 2025
…
This testimony catalogs various ways the PRC exploits our R&D ecosystem, acquiring and diverting knowledge for purposes that undermine our national and economic security, and how the PRC violates norms and values of transparency, integrity, and reciprocity regarding scientific research and international research collaborations. I provide specific case examples from my research as well as observations and trends derived from my support to various civil, criminal, and national security investigations when I served in the government; some of this material lacks detail on specific entities as that information is not approved for public release.
…
Sampling of Challenges and Failures of the US Government
I founded a 501(c)(3) organization, the Center for Research Security & Integrity, in part to address government failures and the structural impediments to knowledge building and threat mitigation. A non-exhaustive list of these failures include:
A focus on pursuing criminal cases to mitigate threats that overlook most of the threats to -- and malign influence over -- our research and innovation ecosystem (especially at earlier research stages) that is subject to minimal regulatory oversight. China’s predations often do not involve espionage or intellectual property (IP) theft as defined by the US criminal code within fundamental research domains. Messaging by the US government that China is stealing secrets from academia is misleading and misguided.
A dearth of Chinese language-capable analysts and subject matter experts in the US government has led to a fundamental lack of understanding of the magnitude and complexity of China’s state-supported technology acquisition and transfer apparatus.
Failure of the counterintelligence community to sufficiently adapt to post-Cold War realities. A myopic focus on chasing PRC spies leaves most of our research unprotected as the PRC deploys a range of tactics, infrastructures, and human capital to acquire US technology and knowhow that rarely involve its security services. While I was in the government, my support to counterintelligence elements in the FBI and DoD showed that those offices prioritized criminal investigations over leveraging operational approaches to deny and disrupt PRC state-directed technology transfer activities.
Failure of the Intelligence Community (IC) to understand, track, analyze, and respond to significant components of PRC’s “united front” influence operations that support technology transfer efforts. The US government holds a prevailing view that the Chinese Communist Party’s united front is strictly a political influence apparatus.
A multi-decade descoping and devaluation of open-source intelligence within the IC has led to unaddressed and yawning knowledge gaps, a lack of expertise, and an inability to share information with public and private sectors.
Similarly, persistent knowledge gaps on PRC academic and commercial entities conducting R&D tied to defense and public security apparatuses limit our ability to identify risks, especially in critical and emerging technology fields.
A lack of any significant or material support to US research institutions regarding research security and integrity; the burden of conducting due diligence and risk assessments is placed almost entirely on individual institutions. To date, the US government has been unable to provide a knowledge base, data, or other resources to aid US universities in their risk assessments related to their foreign partners. This situation will hopefully improve with the newly created SECURE Center funded by NSF, but there will be limits to the ways it can support all research institutions.
Inadequate resources and personnel in Offices of Inspectors General severely constrain their ability to investigate fraud or malign foreign influence or interference in federally sponsored research.
A lack of understanding of how China has built a massive apparatus to recruit experts globally and exploit US (especially federally funded) research. Experts are primarily targeted by the PRC after gaining knowledge and experience overseas. The argument that high percentages of PRC nationals stay in the US after post-graduate education and thus benefit the US is too simplistic; much of China’s strategy is to tap into overseas-based experts who “serve in place.” Creating incentives to stay with no corresponding protections has allowed the PRC to exploit and influence our research to its benefit with impunity.
COMMENT – Jeff Stoff’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week is a treasury trove of details and explanation of how the PRC takes advantage of the relatively open system that the United States maintains in its research ecosystem. To address this exploitation and manipulation, both the U.S. Government and private entities will need to cooperate.
8. China’s E-Commerce Exports and U.S. De Minimis Policies
Karen Sutter and Michael Sutherland, Congressional Research Service, January 31, 2025
The People’s Republic of China (PRC or China) has expanded its global e-commerce exports by more than tenfold over the past five years; PRC exports of low-value single packages expanded from $5.3 billion in 2018 to $66 billion in 2023. (Figure 1). A key part of China’s global ecommerce growth has been the expansion of PRC and PRC-tied e-commerce firms into the U.S. market. The U.S. retail e-commerce market constitutes over half of all global e-commerce sales; U.S. e-commerce sales reached $275.5 billion in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. PRC e-commerce policies have promoted PRC exports while limiting the scope of PRC e-commerce imports.
Imports under Section 321 of the Tariff Act of 1930 have been the primary path for PRC e-commerce imports into the U.S. market. Section 321 allows for U.S. imports under a de minimis threshold to enter free of tariffs, fees, and taxes. In 2016, Congress raised the threshold from $200 to $800 per shipment, thereby allowing shipments valued at $800 or less to be eligible for duty-free de minimis exemption.
The 118th Congress considered a range of legislation to address a surge in U.S. imports from China via e-commerce and related concerns. (See Options for Congress). The executive branch also acted. In September 2024, the Biden Administration said it would issue rules to crack down on “[f]oreign corporate giants who exploit the de minimis exemption,” and said that the majority of shipments qualifying for de minimis originate from e-commerce platforms founded in the PRC. Relatedly, in January 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued two proposed rules 1) to strengthen information requirements for de minimis shipments; and 2) to exclude goods from de minimis duty-free import treatment if such goods are subject to other U.S. trade or national security actions. Such action would affect U.S. imports from China that are subject to other U.S. trade actions and related tariffs and duties. On January 20, 2025 incoming President Donald J. Trump directed an assessment of “the loss of tariff revenues and the risks from importing counterfeit products and contraband drugs, e.g., fentanyl,” that result from current U.S. de minimis trade policies.
Options for Congress
The 119th Congress may consider issues raised in the 118th Congress regarding U.S. de minimis qualification of imports from China, including whether or not to:
Exclude China from Section 321 exemptions. The Import Security and Fairness Act, introduced in the 118th and 117th Congress, would have excluded articles from “nonmarket economies” or imports subject to other U.S. trade actions from Section 321 exemptions.
Increase reporting requirements and establish country-specific de minimis thresholds. Some legislation would have broadened de minimis reporting requirements and required the Department of Treasury to establish country-specific de minimis thresholds that consider a country’s de minimis thresholds.
Exercise oversight over U.S. import procedures: Asserting that China was a top exporter of fentanyl precursors, counterfeit goods, and items produced with forced labor, some Members sought to prohibit any packages subject to U.S. tariffs imposed under other authorities from de minimis exemption. Congress could consider whether to enhance CBP’s capacity to inspect de minimis shipments and oversee existing programs, such as those established by the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (P.L. 117-78).
Restrict “foreign-adversary” owned e-commerce applications (apps): Congress may consider whether to exercise provisions in the Protecting Americans from the Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (P.L. 118-50, Division H) which may apply to PRC and PRC-tied e-commerce firms using apps to operate in the U.S. market.
COMMENT – An incredibly well-timed report from the Congressional Research Service to help explain why folks have been focused on de minimis rules and why the Trump Administration took action last night in its Executive Order.
Authoritarianism
9. The Dalai Lama Shares Thoughts on China and the Future in a New Book
Alexandra Alter, New York Times, January 23, 2025
10. How (un)popular is China’s Communist Party?
The Economist, January 23, 2025
11. China’s anti-spy agency urges travellers to protect state secrets during holiday trips
William Zheng, South China Morning Post, January 23, 2025
12. In China, Government Data on Drugs Blocked from Public After Backlash
Alexandra Stevenson and Zixu Wang, New York Times, January 27, 2025
13. MERICS China Forecast 2025: Economic stress increases risk of domestic instability
Claus Soong and Andreas Mischer, Mercator Institute for China Studies, January 15, 2025
14. Chinese films dodging censors have no place to go. Can they crack into Taiwan?
Stephanie Yang and Xin-yun Wu, Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2025
15. C.I.A. Now Favors Lab Leak Theory to Explain Covid’s Origins
Julian E. Barnes, New York Times, January 25, 2025
A new analysis that began under the Biden administration is released by the C.I.A.’s new director, John Ratcliffe, who wants the agency to get “off the sidelines” in the debate.
The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment last week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory.
There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said. Rather it is based on the same evidence it has been chewing over for months.
The analysis, however, is based in part on a closer look at the conditions in the high security labs in Wuhan province before the pandemic outbreak, according to people familiar with the agency’s work.
COMMENT - The timing of this change just adds to the suspicion that intelligence analysis has been politicized.
16. CIA Now Favors Lab Leak Theory on Origins of Covid-19
Michael R. Gordon and Dustin Volz, Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2025
17. China FDI trends point to world split by superpowers as Trump comes in
Stella Yifan Xie, Nikkei Asia, January 20, 2025
18. China Is Helping Supply Chemicals for Iran’s Ballistic-Missile Program
Laurence Norman and Benoit Faucon, Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2025
Tehran’s weapons programs got pummeled last year. Now it’s relying on Beijing to rebuild.
Two Iranian ships docked in China have been loaded with a critical ingredient to produce propellant for ballistic missiles, people familiar with the matter said—a demonstration of the challenge the Trump administration will have in pressing China to reduce its cooperation with Iran.
The two vessels are loaded with around 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a material that Iran could turn into 960 tons of ammonium perchlorate, one of the main ingredients for producing solid propellant for ballistic missiles, the people said. That could be enough to produce 260 midrange Iranian missiles, one of the people, a Western official, said.
Tehran’s growing reliance on Beijing is partly a result of Israel’s battering of Iran’s missile program and network of militants in recent months, but it also points to a larger challenge for Washington. Iran and China have become increasingly aligned with Russia and North Korea, a bloc of authoritarian nations that are united by their interests in undermining the U.S.-led world order.
COMMENT - Not exactly the right behavior of a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council.
19. India and China Agree to Resume Direct Flights After Nearly Five Years
Mujib Mashal, New York Times, January 28, 2025
20. Behind the Exodus of U.S. Law Firms from China
Donald Clarke, Margaret Lewis, Katherine Wilhelm, Mark Cohen and Rachel Stern, ChinaFile, January 23, 2025
In early December, U.S. law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison announced plans to close its office in Beijing.
In 1981, Paul Weiss became one of the earliest foreign law firms to open an office in Beijing, but it is one of the latest of a growing number of American and global firms to leave China or shrink China operations. In early December, Mayer Brown spun off its Hong Kong office. In October, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr said it would close its Beijing office, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom announced it would close its Shanghai office. Reed Smith, Perkins Coie, Dechert, Morrison & Foerster and Sidley Austin are other firms that have announced downsizing of their China operations.
What do these closings and departures mean for foreign law firms and their clients in China? Why the rush for the door? And does the exodus concern the Chinese government, or is it welcome news for a party-state increasingly focused on centralized control?
21. Insurers to ramp up A-share investments
Trivium China, January 24, 2025
22. Beijing tells insurers to buy more Chinese stocks
Cheng Leng, Arjun Neil Alim and William Sandlund, and Thomas Hale, Financial Times, January 22, 2025
Equities rally as authorities set explicit investment targets for mutual funds and state-owned insurance companies.
Chinese authorities have sought to boost the stock market and restore confidence in the world’s second-largest economy by telling local insurance companies and mutual funds to invest more in domestic stocks.
Regulators have told state insurers to invest a minimum of 30 per cent of their new policy premiums in local shares, while mutual funds have been told to increase these shareholdings by 10 per cent annually for the next three years. This is the first time regulators have set an explicit target for investments.
The policy shift could mean that up to Rmb500bn ($68bn) could flow into the market from China’s three biggest state-owned insurers alone, according to a Financial Times analysis of last year’s policy premiums. Insurers already hold shares worth Rmb4.4tn, said regulators.
The mainland’s CSI 300 index rose as much as 1.8 per cent on Thursday, almost erasing losses incurred on Wednesday after the new US administration threatened tariffs on Chinese exports.
Geopolitical tensions, a cooling economy and a property market crisis have in recent years hit demand for Chinese equities.
The latest move, first announced on Wednesday evening by regulators including the China Securities Regulatory Commission and the People’s Bank of China, aims to “stabilise the stock market and clear the bottlenecks for the entry of medium- and long-term funds into the market”.
The announcement comes days ahead of China’s Lunar New Year holiday, a closely-watched period for retail spending and consumer sentiment.
Analysts at Bank of America estimate that the additional inflows into the equity market could be Rmb470-530bn in 2025.
“Clearly regulators do care about the stock market. They want to adopt a supportive stance and keep injecting confidence into the market right before the Lunar New Year,” said Winnie Wu, chief China equity strategist at Bank of America.
“Judging from today’s share price reaction, it appears that the incremental impact of pure financial and stock market related stimulus [is] no longer as powerful as it was during the last move in September 2024”, she added.
Chi Lo, senior Asia-Pacific market strategist at BNP Paribas Asset Management, said the announcement was a “stabilising” move because of a “lack of confidence in the private sector” and “weak demand for stocks”.
The CSI 300 index soared in late September after the government announced support measures, including funding for stock buybacks and mortgage cuts. But it has since fallen 15 per cent from a peak in early October.
In September, authorities also announced a pool of $100bn to lend to companies to enact share buybacks and to lend to asset managers, insurers and brokers to buy local equities.
The index closed up 1 per cent on Thursday while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng benchmark was down 0.4 per cent.
Chinese insurance companies listed in Hong Kong, such as China Life Insurance and Ping An Insurance, rose 2.3 per cent and 1.9 per cent, respectively.
The latest announcement included further fee cuts to some mutual fund products and a crackdown on speculative trading of Chinese shares.
It also included measures to give state-owned insurance companies incentives to focus more on long-term returns, the latest attempt from Beijing to improve the efficiency of state-run enterprises, amid concerns over capital allocation.
Investors are watching for more signs of stimulus from Beijing this year after the September package, especially measures to support domestic consumption.
Authorities this month expanded a scheme to trade in old consumer goods, such as household appliances, for new ones.
“The government has to do something to turn around confidence, and nobody knows exactly what this something is,” said Lo. “Beijing is doing different things, asking state-owned companies to buy the stock market, buy up property, and hopefully some of these things will help to turn around confidence.”
COMMENT - It seems really unwise to invest in PRC capital markets given the blatant manipulation by the Chinese Communist Party.
23. German election frontrunner warns of ‘great risk’ for companies investing in China
Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, Financial Times, January 23, 2025
24. In Depth: Beijing’s Ban on Mineral Exports to U.S. Leaves Traders Scrambling
Lu Yutong, Du Zhihang, Qin Min and Wang Xintong, Caixin Global, January 24, 2025
Environmental Harms
25. China’s Surging Power Demand Creates a Climate Conundrum
Bloomberg News, January 25, 2025
China’s electricity demand is becoming a key focal point in the global fight against climate change.
As the world’s largest polluter, China holds outsized sway over whether emissions can be reduced fast enough to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. The country’s breakneck adoption of clean energy technology has created hope that it will peak and start reducing greenhouse gases far earlier than its stated goal of 2030.
But that hasn’t happened so far, in large part because the nation’s energy demand is growing unprecedentedly fast, requiring ever more coal to be burned. Electricity use grew 6.8% last year, outpacing overall economic growth at the highest clip in at least 15 years. And as China faces a slowing economy and trade tensions that are likely to be exacerbated by new US President Donald Trump, the future of power demand growth remains a huge question mark in China’s efforts to decarbonize.
26. Beijing-backed lending boosts China’s dominance in clean energy minerals
Edward White and Haohsiang Ko, Financial Times, January 28, 2025
27. China's $137bn Tibet dam plan triggers backlash: 5 things to know
Kiran Sharma, Nikkei Asia, January 23, 2025
28. India voices alarm over China’s plans to build world’s largest dam in Tibet
Andres Schipani, Joe Leahy and Rachel Millard, Financial Times, January 26, 2025
Foreign Interference and Coercion
29. Ex-Federal Reserve adviser indicted on charge of economic espionage
Tom Jackman, Washington Post, January 31, 2025
A former senior adviser to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested Friday and accused of leaking inside information from the Fed to the Chinese government over a period of several years, at one point receiving a $450,000 payment, and then lying about it to Fed investigators.
Economist John Harold Rogers, 63, of Vienna, Virginia, worked in the Division of International Finance of the Fed from 2010 until 2021, according to an indictment unsealed Friday in federal court in the District. Last year, he told a podcaster that he had retired from the Fed in May 2021, approximately a year after he had been questioned by investigators for the Fed’s inspector general and allegedly lied about how he accessed and transmitted sensitive information to two unnamed Chinese co-conspirators.
After leaving the Fed, Rogers moved his family to Shanghai and began working as a professor at Fudan University, according to comments he made to the EconVue podcast last year and posted in online biographies. Court records indicated he was arrested in Vienna on Friday and arraigned downtown before U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew J. Sharbaugh, who ordered him held without bond pending a detention hearing Tuesday. A federal public defender who represented Rogers at the arraignment did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the indictment, prosecutors said that Rogers had access to various trade secrets of the Fed, such as briefing books for its governors and spreadsheets that contained proprietary board information. The confidential information could “allow China to manipulate the U.S. market, in a manner similar to insider trading,” the indictment states. Because of the large amount of U.S. debt held by China, prosecutors argued, gaining advance knowledge of U.S. economic policy, such as knowing of changes to the federal funds rate, “could provide China with an advantage when selling or buying U.S. bonds or securities,” the indictment states.
Rogers, who has a Ph.D. in economics, reportedly received his first email from a Chinese operative in May 2013, and by the following year Rogers was preparing for an all-expense paid trip to China, according to the indictment. In subsequent years Rogers allegedly made more trips to China, paid by the host, and in 2018 he appeared to begin providing information directly to two people there, prosecutors claim.
Rogers made the trips to China under the guise of teaching economic classes there, the indictment alleges. Meetings in hotels were portrayed as classes, though only one or two people would attend, prosecutors said. The two Chinese co-conspirators “worked for the intelligence and security apparatus of China,” the indictment states, but posed as graduate students at Shandong University.
Sometimes one of the Chinese conspirators would ask specific questions, and Rogers allegedly would ask his colleagues at the Fed to provide him with data or documents to support his answers. One of the colleagues sent two files to Rogers in 2018 marked “INTERNAL FR/OFFICIAL USE” that had confidential designations, according to the indictment. Prosecutors said some of the sensitive information came from the Federal Open Market Committee, which determines “the appropriate stance of monetary policy” in the United States.
In November 2018, Rogers allegedly asked colleagues for a confidential briefing book for Fed governors. One of the colleagues asked that Rogers not use his personal email, but the indictment claims that Rogers then forwarded the book to his personal email account. The book was marked in large type, “Nonpublic Information FOR YOUR USE ONLY DO NOT DISSEMINATE.”
The exchanges, and Rogers’ free trips to China continued into 2019, according to the indictment. Then the inspector general’s office interviewed Rogers in February 2020. When an investigator asked Rogers if he ever provided any restricted information to anyone outside the Fed, he replied, “Never,” according to the indictment.
COMMENT – This does beg the question of whether the Federal Reserve is capable of policing itself and its employees in this new geopolitical environment.
30. Deadline looms for EU’s WTO case against China alleging coercion of Lithuania
Finbarr Bermingham, South China Morning Post, January 22, 2025
31. Canada Is Becoming a Fentanyl Exporter, and a Target for Trump
Vipal Monga, Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2025
32. Detained tycoon She Zhijiang, who says he spied for China, alleges abuse in Thai jail
Poppy Mcpherson, Reuters, January 24, 2025
33. Chinese Ships May Have Severed Taiwan's Island Internet Cables, Again
Elisabeth Braw, Foreign Policy, January 24, 2025
34. AI Videos from China Are Coming for the World
Catherine Thorbecke, Bloomberg, January 23, 2025
35. Rubio Slams Beijing Over South China Sea, Sparking Rebuke
Cliff Harvey Venzon and Andreo Calonzo, Bloomberg, January 22, 2025
36. CSIS Officer Alleged “Interference” In Warrant Targeting Trudeau Party Powerbroker
Sam Cooper, The Bureau, January 28, 2025
37. Final Report on Foreign Interference
Foreign Interference Commission, January 28, 2025
38. Trudeau Government Left Canada Vulnerable to Foreign Interference
Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times, January 28, 2025
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should have acted quicker to protect Canadian elections from outside meddling, a government commission said, shaking trust in democratic institutions.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government was “insufficiently transparent” about foreign interference in Canadian politics and sometimes took “too long to act” against attempts to meddle in the country’s past two general elections by foreign powers including China and India, a government commission said on Tuesday.
“Trust in Canada’s democratic institutions has been shaken, and it is imperative to restore it,” the commission said in its final report, which summarized 18 months of hearings, testimony and examination of classified intelligence documents.
The government’s efforts to rebuild trust have been “piecemeal and underwhelming,” said Marie-Josée Hogue, a Court of Appeal justice from Quebec, who led the commission.
The final report included 51 recommendations by the commission to strengthen Canada’s electoral system, ranging from stricter rules for the country’s political parties and third-party financing to better sharing of intelligence and oversight of disinformation during campaigns.
Justice Hogue said about half the recommendations “should be implemented promptly, perhaps even before the next election.”
The Trudeau government had no immediate response to the report.
But the recent announcement by Mr. Trudeau, who is deeply unpopular, that he will step down as Liberal Party leader and prime minister makes it unlikely that the commission’s recommendations can be put in place before upcoming elections, experts said. Members of the Liberal Party are expected to elect Mr. Trudeau’s successor by early March, and a general election is likely to take place a couple of months later.
“It seems lamentable that the timeline makes it impossible to implement any of these recommended safeguards,” said Ryan Alford, an associate law professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. “Sadly and perhaps paradoxically, it’s going to reinforce the notion that the same attempts that occurred in the last two federal elections are inevitably going to take place in this election.”
The report’s release capped a yearlong public inquiry into foreign interference, which Mr. Trudeau’s government had fiercely opposed. It finally relented only after an extraordinary series of leaks to Canadian news outlets of intelligence reports that revealed Chinese meddling in the past two general elections, in 2021 and 2019.
Months of public hearings, as well as the sworn testimonies of witnesses and the release of intelligence reports, revealed how rising foreign powers — especially China and India — had tried to further their interests in Canada by backing or opposing certain candidates in the elections.
While the elections’ overall outcome was not affected, the interference could have affected a handful of individual races, according to the inquiry commission.
China and India focused their activities in electoral districts in Toronto and Vancouver, where large and well-organized Chinese and Indian diasporas are populated by some of the voters highly sought after by Canada’s political parties. The public hearings showed that China and its proxies tried to undermine candidates of the main opposition Conservative Party, which has adopted a tough line on China’s record on human rights and its control over Hong Kong.
By contrast, the Chinese government and its proxies tended to support candidates of Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal Party, intelligence reports showed. After Mr. Trudeau was first elected in 2015, he pushed for friendly ties with Beijing, including through a free-trade agreement, and dismissed warnings about allowing the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei Technologies to work in Canada.
Witnesses and intelligence reports showed how foreign governments and their proxies tried to influence elections by targeting diaspora members, many of whom have relatives in their countries of origin and also business and other ties. Though diaspora communities were shown to be the focal point of foreign interference, the commission made no strong recommendations about how to protect those voters, said Dennis Molinaro, a former national security analyst for the Canadian government who now teaches legal studies at Ontario Tech University.
“Foreign interference is happening in diaspora communities,” Mr. Molinaro said. “If it didn’t happen in diaspora communities, you wouldn’t have foreign interference anywhere else, and the report was relatively quiet about that.”
Accused of benefiting from Chinese interference, Mr. Trudeau and his government downplayed its threat. But a series of leaks of intelligence reports to The Globe and Mail newspaper and the Global News television network, forced Mr. Trudeau to order the inquiry.
Canada also accused the Indian government of orchestrating the 2023 killing near Vancouver of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian leader of the Sikh independence movement in India.
The inquiry showed how foreign powers had exploited weaknesses in Canada’s democratic system, especially in its political parties’ opaque operations. Political parties select candidates for general elections in nomination races with loose rules and no outside oversight.
While party bosses used the system to flex their muscles, the nominations were what the inquiry commission described as “gateways for foreign states who wish to interfere in our democratic processes.”
In one Liberal Party nomination race in a Toronto district with a large Chinese diaspora, buses transported dozens of foreign students from China to back a candidate, Han Dong, who was favored by Beijing.
According to a special parliamentary committee report, the Chinese consulate told the students that they had to vote for Mr. Dong to keep their student visas. Mr. Dong won the nomination in the district, a Liberal stronghold, and then cruised to victory in the general election.
As details of foreign interference emerged in the public hearings, Parliament last summer passed legislation that created a registry of foreign agents and that made it easier to investigate and prosecute foreign meddling.
In the final report, Justice Hogue wrote that “isolated cases where foreign interference may have had some impact on the outcome of a nomination contest or the result of an election in a given” electoral district. But she added that she was “reassured by the minimal impact such efforts have had to date.”
Duff Conacher, a founder of Democracy Watch, an independent watchdog organization, said the final report underestimates foreign interference, about which much remains unknown.
“Just disinformation alone is having much more than a minimal impact,” Mr. Conacher said. “Add to that the documented cases, which are not minimal. And there’s the killing of a Canadian citizen, and the threat that the members of the diaspora of many countries feel. That’s not minimal.”
COMMENT - In my opinion, Prime Minister Trudeau and his Liberal Party successfully avoided responsibility for Beijing’s interference in the 2019 and 2021 national Canadian elections.
This whole experience, including the public inquiry, likely convinces the Chinese Communist Party that they will pay very few costs for helping a friendly political party gain and maintain power in a democracy.
So expect to see more of this political interference.
39. The Canada Con
Eliot Chen, The Wire China, January 29, 2025
40. Learning the Wrong Lessons at Harvard
Aaron Glasserman, China File, January 24, 2025
41. Man convicted of stalking Chinese ex-official by leaving him a dire note gets prison in US
Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press, January 22, 2025
42. China tests US commitment to South China Sea by pressuring Philippines
William Yang, VOA China News, January 28, 2025
43. China tests U.S. clout in South America as trade balloons 40-fold
Niki Mizuguchi, Nikkei Asia, January 24, 2025
Human Rights and Religious Persecution
44. I had anti-government views so they treated me for schizophrenia'
Nyima Pratten, BBC News, January 22, 2025
When Zhang Junjie was 17 he decided to protest outside his university about rules made by China's government. Within days he had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and treated for schizophrenia.
Junjie is one of dozens of people identified by the BBC who were hospitalised after protesting or complaining to the authorities.
Many people we spoke to were given anti-psychotic drugs, and in some cases electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), without their consent.
While there have been reports for decades that hospitalisation is used in China as a way of detaining dissenting citizens without involving the courts, a leading Chinese lawyer has told the BBC that the issue - which legislation sought to resolve - has recently seen a resurgence.
Junjie says he was restrained and beaten by hospital staff before being forced to take medication.
His ordeal began in 2022, after he protested against China's harsh lockdown policies. He says his professors spotted him after just five minutes and contacted his father, who took him back to the family home. He says his father called the police, and the next day - on his 18th birthday - two men drove him to what they claimed was a Covid test centre, but was actually a hospital.
"The doctors told me I had a very serious mental disease… Then they tied me to a bed. The nurses and doctors repeatedly told me, because of my views on the party and the government, then I must be mentally ill. It was terrifying," he told the BBC World Service. He was there for 12 days.
Junjie believes his father felt forced to hand him over to the authorities because he worked for the local government.
Just over a month after being discharged, Junjie was once again arrested. Defying a fireworks ban at Chinese New Year (a measure brought in to fight air pollution) he had made a video of himself setting them off. Someone uploaded it online and police managed to link it to Junjie.
45. Shein tells UK lawmakers it does not allow Chinese cotton in products sold in US
Helen Reid, Reuters, January 24, 2025
46. Analysts say China's mistreatment of detained writer, citizen journalist part of crackdown
William Yang, China News, January 25, 2025
47. 36-year-old Hong Kong man charged under Article 23 security law over ‘seditious’ online posts
Irene Chan, Hong Kong Free Press, January 22, 2025
Hillary Leung, Hong Kong Free Press, January 28, 2025
49. Guangdong, Shengja Church: Leaders Sentenced for “Illegal Business Operations”
Qi Junzao, Bitter Winter, January 22, 2025
Industrial Policies and Economic Espionage
50. Rebalancing China’s Economy: Stimulus, Confidence, and Self-Sufficiency
Zongyuan Zoe Liu, Council on Foreign Relations, January 24, 2025
51. In Depth: Chinese Auto Industry’s Mexico Odyssey Turns Gloomy as Trump Tariffs Loom
Li Rongqian, Yu Cong, Liu Peilin, Bao Yunhong and Ding Yi, Caixin Global, January 28, 2025
52. Europe Pushes for Sweeping Regulatory Reform to Compete with U.S., China
Edith Hancock, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2025
53. China’s WeRide Wants to Build Global Robotaxi Empire
Jiahui Huang, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2025
54. Shanghai issues more consumption vouchers after shock fall in retail sales
Mia Nulimaimaiti, South China Morning Post, January 24, 2025
55. EU Set to Play for Time in Economic Coercion Case Against China
Alberto Nardelli and Jenny Leonard, Bloomberg, January 23, 2025
56. China Starts Lowering Price Goals to Match Deflationary Reality
Bloomberg, January 24, 2025
57. Polestar seeks new suppliers after US ban on Chinese software in electric vehicles
Kana Inagaki, Financial Times, January 22, 2025
58. In Depth: Venture Capital in China Flounders as State Takes Over (Part 2)
Yue Yue, Caixin Global, January 23, 2025
59. China loses spot as Germany's top trade partner after 8 years
Takero Minami, Nikkei Asia, January 23, 2025
60. De minimis': the trade perk Trump may end as China tensions rise
Casey Hall, Reuters, January 23, 2025
61. China trapped in a cycle of deflation
Junhua Zhang, GIS Reports, January 27, 2025
62. China Factory Activity Shrinks Ahead of Lunar New Year
Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2025
63. Fizzling China Rally Has Stock Pickers Hunting for Bright Spots
John Cheng, Winnie Hsu, and Abhishek Vishnoi, Bloomberg, January 26, 2025
64. How ‘Sour Raspberry Gummy Bear’ — and Other Chinese Vapes — Made Fools of American Lawmakers
Marc Novicoff, Politico, January 26, 2025
65. Even China’s Property Stalwart Isn’t Immune from the Crisis
Rebecca Feng, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2025
66. China's desperate developers dangle quirky deals, from flights to iPhones
Stella Yifan Xie and Kenji Kawase, Nikkei Asia, January 28, 2025
67. Exclusive: Images show China building huge fusion research facility, analysts say
Gerry Doyle, Reuters, January 28, 2025
Cyber and Information Technology
68. China’s DeepSeek has close ties to Beijing
Alice Yam and Ha Syut, Radio Free Asia, January 28, 2025
69. Beijing tells insurers to buy more Chinese stocks
Cheng Leng, Arjun Neil Alim and William Sandlund, and Thomas Hale, Financial Times, January 22, 2025
70. The Race to Lead the Quantum Future
Charina Chou, James Manyika, Hartmut Neven, Foreign Affairs, January 7, 2025
71. TikTok, five other Chinese firms hit by EU privacy complaints
Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee, Reuters, January 17, 2025
72. China poised to expand AI infrastructure to keep pace with US Stargate project
Ben Jiang, South China Morning Post, January 23, 2025
73. Huawei's chip and display suppliers accelerate China's AI push
Lauly Li, Cheng Ting-fang And Shunsuke Tabeta, Nikkei Asia, January 24, 2025
74. Record number of US companies weigh China exit as Trump tensions rise
Joe Leahy, Financial Times, January 23, 2025
75. DeepSeek's 'Sputnik moment' prompts investors to sell big AI players
Amanda Cooper, Reuters, January 27, 2025
76. DeepSeek and the Strategic Limits of U.S. Sanctions
Lizzi C. Lee, The Wire China, January 26, 2025
77. Top Chinese memory chip maker YMTC makes another design breakthrough, defying US sanctions
Che Pan, South China Morning Post, January 26, 2025
78. Exclusive: White House in talks to have Oracle and U.S. investors take over TikTok
Bobby Allyn, National Public Radio, January 25, 2025
79. Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is already using DeepSeek instead of OpenAI at his startup, Gloo
Julie Bort, TechCrunch, November 27, 2022
80. DeepSeek shows Trump tariffs doomed to fail
Nigel Green, Asia Times, January 27, 2025
81. Do China’s A.I. Advances Mean U.S. Technology Controls Have Failed?
Ana Swanson and Meaghan Tobin, New York Times, January 28, 2025
82. SAP Could Use Chinese AI Models if They Pass Tests, CFO Says
Mauro Orru, Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2025
83. OpenAI says it has evidence China’s DeepSeek used its model to train competitor
Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott, Financial Times, January 28, 2025
84. How Does DeepSeek’s A.I. Chatbot Navigate China’s Censors? Awkwardly.
Vivian Wang, New York Times, January 29, 2025
85. Huawei’s Google-Free Phones Are Making Real Progress
Bloomberg, January 28, 2025
86. DeepSeek Is Coming for Sam Altman’s Other Company Too
Liam Denning, Bloomberg, January 29, 2025
Military and Security Threats
87. Philippines to pick venue soon for second South China Sea case against Beijin
Karen Lema, Reuters, January 23, 2025
88. AUDIO – Eric Chewning and Tom Moore on the Warship Production Crisis
Eric Chewning and Thomas Moore of HII, School of War, January 28, 2025
Sam Olsen, William Matthews, Dr. Melanie Garson and Daniel Sleat, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, January 26, 2025
90. VIDEO – Examining the Panama Canal and Its Impact on U.S. Trade and National Security
Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, January 28, 2025
Sharri Markson, Sky News, January 28, 2025
One Belt, One Road Strategy
Shah Meer Baloch and Hannah Ellis-Petersen, The Guardian, January 26, 2025
93. Winning the Narrative: How China and Russia Wield Strategic Communications to Advance Their Goals
Samantha Custer, Et al., AidData, November 26, 2022
94. The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway: China's Strategic Expansion in Russia's Backyard
Syed Fazl-e-Haider, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute's Substack, January 27, 2025
95. Chinese harassment claim shows growing frustration with Pakistan
Adnan Aamir, Nikkei Asia, January 29, 2025
96. The New Nicaragua Canal: Chinese Strategic Options Ever-Closer to US Shores
Legado a las Americas, January 27, 2025
Opinion
97. Memo to Trump: Beware the ‘Reverse Teddy’
Matt Pottinger, The Free Press, January 28, 2025
98. How Justice Hogue’s Report Failed to Hold People to Account: Former RCMP Investigator
Garry Clement, The Bureau, January 29, 2025
99. What China Got Right About Big Tech
Howard W. French, Foreign Policy, January 24, 2025
100. DeepSeek is a modern Sputnik moment for West
Justin Bassi and David Wroe, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, January 29, 2025
101. Elon, I love you. Signed, China
Tuvia Gering, Discourse Power, January 23, 2025
102. Delusion of de-escalation on the China-India border
Muhammad Burhan, Asia Times, January 22, 2025
103. The Great Power Threat Is Back: Why America Needs a National Security Reset
Andrew A. Michta, 19fortyfive, January 23, 2025
104. Beyond quick stimulus, China needs deeper, more fundamental reforms
Yuhan Zhang, South China Morning Post, January 24, 2025
105. What do Chinese analysts expect for China-US relations under Trump 2.0?
Xie Tao, Brookings, January 23, 2025
106. China Will Be Thrilled if Trump Kills America’s Green Economy
Jennifer Granholm, New York Times, January 23, 2025
107. China says its economy grew 5 percent last year. It probably didn’t.
Editorial Board, Washington Post, January 26, 2025
108. Why China’s supply chains face threats beyond Trump tariffs
Asma Khalid, South China Morning Post, January 27, 2025
109. What China’s New Fighter Jet Really Signals
Benjamin Jensen, Foreign Policy, January 16, 2025