Matt Turpin's China Articles - February 26, 2023
Friends,
This week marked the one year anniversary of Putin’s expanded invasion of Ukraine and the comprehensive diplomatic, informational and economic support that the Chinese Communist Party has provided to its Russian ally.
As Moscow withdrew from the last remaining arms treaty (New START), Beijing appears ready to start providing military support to Moscow and simultaneously offered a “peace plan” that would allow Moscow to hold on to its gains.
If the United States and other G7 members go ahead with sanctions on the PRC for its military support of Moscow, Beijing has a ready-made talking point: the US doesn’t want peace for Ukraine.
Some other major themes for the week:
After months of rumors, Canada’s The Globe and Mail broke the story two weeks ago that the CCP interfered extensively in the last two Canadian national elections in favor of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal Party… something that the Government in Ottawa has sought to downplay and appeared unwilling to investigate.
The disappearance of Chinese banker Bao Fan, founder and chair of the investment bank China Renaissance, has spooked investors who had believed that the crackdown on the private sector had come to an end. The Financial Times reports that he had been seeking to move portions of his own fortune out of the PRC and move it to Singapore… if insiders like Bao Fan are looking for the exits, it shouldn’t be surprising that others are as well.
While some continue to cheerlead investment into the PRC, there appears to be signs that venture capital firms, private equity firms and institutional investors are growing increasingly wary of further exposure to China. The combination of supply chain resiliency efforts, concern about further crackdowns by the CCP, and an increasingly hostile international environment for Beijing has forced boards and C-suites to examine many of the assumptions they have clung to for the past two decades.
Wang Yi’s diplomatic overtures to Europe flopped last week. Whatever positive momentum he might have built appears undone by his trip to Moscow immediately after the Munich Security Conference.
The Chinese Communist Party seems particularly fearful of two relatively new technologies: generative artificial intelligence (ChatGPT, etc.) and satellite-based internet connectivity (Starlink, etc.). Both emerging technologies pose challenges to the Party (the apparent difficulty of censoring an artificial intelligence that generates new content and internet connectivity that isn’t dependent on terrestrial infrastructure that the PRC can control, the Great Firewall, or that can be used by Taiwan to defend itself from an attack by the PRC, as Ukraine done with this technology).
The collapse of New START, the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia, highlights the fact that any new nuclear arms limitation agreement will have to account for the expanding PRC nuclear arsenal.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
MUST READ
1. Chinese Drones Still Support Russia’s War in Ukraine, Trade Data Show
Benoit Faucon and Ian Talley, Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2023
More than a year after Western authorities sought to shut down the pipeline supplying Russia in its war in Ukraine, exports of small, nimble Chinese drones are still providing the Kremlin with an effective way to target Ukrainian forces, according to Western officials, security analysts and customs data.
Some of the commercial drones are arriving on the front lines from Russian distributors supplied by Shenzhen, China-based Da-Jiang Innovations Science & Technology Co., known as DJI, according to customs records, while others are transported through the United Arab Emirates.
Russia’s continued deployment of Chinese drones on the Ukrainian battlefield shows how its military has been able to draw critical items for its military from abroad, despite a wide-ranging Western pressure campaign intended to restrain Moscow’s ability to continue the war. The Pentagon worries that these drones aren’t only fueling Russia’s war effort, but also are allowing China to gather crucial battlefield intelligence that might enhance Beijing’s war readiness.
“As DJI and China watch the use of drones in a combat environment, they’re just soaking up data, a senior U.S. security official said. “They’re able to see the TTPs, the tactics, techniques and procedures,” the person said, including how the drones respond to electronic-warfare attacks.
“Because China has the civil-military fusion, they’re able to then put that in the hands of the PLA and learn,” the official said, referring to the People’s Liberation Army.
Chinese quadcopters, small unmanned helicopters with four rotors, have been a concern for the Pentagon since early in the war in Ukraine. The drones, which are used for both civilian and military purposes, are often bought by third parties and then shipped from China.
The Wall Street Journal viewed Russian customs records provided by ImportGenius, a trade database firm, and C4ADS, a Washington-based nonprofit that specializes in identifying national-security threats.
In a statement, DJI said it opposes the use of civilian drones on the battlefield, pointing to its suspension of business in Russia and Ukraine in April last year.
“However, as consumer electronics, DJI products can be purchased in e-commerce stores and stores in many countries,” the firm said. “We cannot prevent users or organizations from purchasing in countries or regions other than Russia and Ukraine, and then transship or gift them to Russia and Ukraine.”
China’s Embassy in Washington, responding to a request for comment for this article, referred to its Foreign Ministry’s position on the war in Ukraine, which has called for de-escalation and negotiations. Russia’s ministries of defense and foreign affairs didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
In addition to the export data, dozens of videos and pictures viewed by the Journal show Russian fighters using DJI drones in Ukraine.
In a video posted in June, a group of gun-toting, khaki-clad, pro-Russian volunteers in southern Ukraine said they were about to receive “heroic shuttles”—a term for DJI drones—from the United Arab Emirates paid through the sanctioned state-bank Sberbank. The bank didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
2. China Misreads the Room in Munich
Noah Barkin, German Marshall Fund, February 20, 2023
China’s post-pandemic charm offensive with Europe was supposed to shift into overdrive this past week.
Instead, a visit by China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, showed just how challenging it will be for Beijing to get its relationship with Europe back on track, at a time when China’s ties with Russia appear to be deepening and those with Washington are sinking to new depths.
Wang’s appearance at the Munich Security Conference, sandwiched between trips to Paris, Rome, Budapest, and Moscow, was the clearest illustration to date of the diplomatic dilemma China faces as it emerges from three years of self-imposed COVID isolation, the last of which clouded by the war in Ukraine.
Wang was speaking to an audience in Munich that had spent the previous 24 hours celebrating transatlantic unity on Ukraine. And yet, in a misreading of the room, he went on the offensive against Washington, warning (in a thinly veiled reference to the Biden administration) that “some forces” were keen for the war to drag on and dismissing the White House response to the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon as “hysterical”.
As he spoke, China’s foreign ministry was cranking up the propaganda machine in response to a train derailment in the US state of Ohio and the publication of a dubious report from American journalist Seymour Hersh that claimed the Biden administration and the Norwegian government conspired to blow up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea last year.
The Europeans have their own doubts about the US handling of the Chinese balloon incident. The decision to shoot several unidentified objects out of the sky with missiles in the days that followed the downing of the balloon off the coast of South Carolina was not a good look for the administration.
European capitals are also uncomfortable with some of the more hawkish rhetoric toward China that is coming out of Washington these days, notably in relation to Taiwan. European officials view the new House of Representatives' Select Committee on China with trepidation and Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s planned trip to Taipei as an ill-timed provocation.
But China should know better than to try to woo Europe by bashing the United States. And Beijing should be aware that the torrent of disinformation spread by official Chinese channels in recent weeks—a phenomenon that a recent European External Action Service report described in detail—will only deepen the divide between Europe and China.
3. China’s top diplomat visits Moscow ahead of anniversary of Russia’s Ukraine invasion
Simone McCarthy, CNN, February 22, 2023
China’s top diplomat Wang Yi arrived in Moscow on Tuesday, in the first visit to Russia by a Chinese official in that role since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began nearly a year ago.
Wang, who was named Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s top foreign policy adviser last month, is making the high-profile visit as the final stop in an eight-day international tour that included visits to France, Italy, and Hungary, as well as Germany for a security conference.
4. Star Banker’s Disappearance Surprises Even China’s State Lenders
Bloomberg, February 20, 2023
The disappearance of Chinese banker Bao Fan has surprised even some of his state-owned lenders, several of which are asking his firm for more information as they assess their exposure, according to people familiar with the matter.
The development underscores how opaque the country’s business and regulatory landscape can be, even for players like state-owned banks with strong links to Chinese officialdom.
COMMENT – Rumors of the end of the crackdown on the private sector in the PRC have been greatly exaggerated.
5. China’s Newest Weapon to Nab Western Technology—Its Courts
Stu Woo and Daniel Michaels, Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2023
Rulings nullify patents in industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals.
The growing conflict between China and the U.S. extends from computer-chip factories to a suspected spy balloon over American skies. Running through it all is a struggle for technological superiority.
China has striven for years to develop cutting-edge technologies, in part through heavy spending on research. Now, according to Western officials and executives, it also has mobilized its legal system to pry technology from other nations.
Officials in the U.S. and European Union accuse China of using its courts and patent panels to undermine foreign intellectual-property rights and help Chinese businesses. They say China is focusing such efforts on industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals.
A U.S. manufacturer of X-ray equipment had a decade-old patent invalidated by a Chinese legal panel. A Spanish mobile-antenna designer lost a similar fight in a Shanghai court. Another Chinese court ruled that a Japanese conglomerate broke antitrust law by refusing to license its technology to a Chinese rival.
At China’s Communist Party congress in October, when Xi Jinping secured a third term as party leader, he praised the country for becoming a global innovator and pledged to help it prosper further. “We will increase investment in science and technology through diverse channels and strengthen legal protection of intellectual property rights, in order to establish a foundational system for all-around innovation,” he told Chinese lawmakers.
The battle over China’s acquisition of technology has raged for years. Counterfeit products and logo look-alikes are pervasive in China. Recently, Beijing has tried to crack down on domestic companies violating the intellectual-property rights of some foreign firms. In July, luxury shoemaker Manolo Blahnik said it won a long-running trademark dispute against a Chinese businessman accused of improperly selling shoes under a similar name.
Officials in the U.S. and EU and executives at some Western companies, however, say Beijing is going the opposite route in some industries. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation, the government body that oversees all intellectual-property matters, and the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The conflict is central to the growing competition between the U.S. and China for technological and economic superiority. The U.S. has slapped restrictions on chip-related exports to China. Beijing has accused the U.S. of politicizing science and technology to try to protect American leadership in those fields.
In December, the EU sued China in the World Trade Organization on behalf of Swedish telecom-equipment maker Ericsson AB and other companies, complaining that China has barred EU companies from suing to protect their patents in courts outside China. The EU called China’s policy “extremely damaging,” saying Chinese companies requested the intervention “to pressure patent right holders to grant them cheaper access to European technology.”
Canada, Japan and the U.S. had asked to join an initial version of the European complaint, which the EU said could now take about 18 months to adjudicate.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said it regretted the EU’s decision, would comply with WTO dispute-settlement procedures and would “resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”
In a 2021 EU survey about global intellectual-property protection, responding companies and people expressed concerns about “a tendency of court rulings to favor Chinese stakeholders when strategic sectors or companies, in particular state-owned enterprises, are concerned,” according to the survey. Respondents called patent invalidation a serious problem in China.
Beijing’s stance on intellectual property has global implications because so many products are made in China.
“Intellectual property is a core factor for competitiveness on the international stage, as well a focal point of international dispute,” Mr. Xi said in a November 2020 speech to a committee of leading Communist Party members, according to an excerpt in a party publication. “We need to have the courage and the capacity to stand up for ourselves in this regard.” After Mr. Xi’s address, leading party members concluded China must “shift from being a major absorber to a major producer of IP and establish itself as a global IP leader,” the publication said.
COMMENT – As the new cold war takes shape, this is how economic decoupling will happen… as the Chinese Communist Party ignores “laws” and “norms” around contracts, trademarks, and patents, companies and investors will pull back from their exposure.
6. Booked a flight out of China? Police are likely to knock on your door
Gu Ting, Radio Free Asia, February 20, 2023
Police and neighborhood committees now get to decide who can travel and who can't, although group tours continue.
Chinese police are calling up people who have booked flights to leave the country and interrogating them about where they are going and when they plan to be back, sources in the country tell Radio Free Asia.
A passenger who recently left China who gave only the surname Su said people she knows are all reporting the same phenomenon.
"If you are due to get on a plane [leaving China], you will get a call from the local police station the day before, asking in great detail where you are going and when you are coming back," Su said.
"I inquired among my friends today, and they said they had all gotten calls from police stations where their household registration is, and asking them when they're coming back," she said.
"If you don't pick up the phone ... they won't let you go through immigration the next day."
COMMENT – Countries that feel confident about their future and create conditions for their citizens to thrive don’t do this.
Carmen Paun, Politico, February 15, 2023
The Biden administration should impose sanctions on China if it doesn’t crack down on the chemical industry that feeds the fentanyl trade, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and ranking member Jim Risch (R-Idaho) said on Wednesday.
During a hearing on the fentanyl trade, the bipartisan duo also called out Mexico for not doing enough to curtail the drug’s trafficking.
“I doubt [Chinese President] Xi Jinping cares about his chemical and pharmaceutical industries supplying the Mexican cartels that are flooding the United States with fentanyl, but let’s be clear: His government’s negligence is helping unleash a deadly wave of fentanyl-related deaths,” Menendez said.
Remedies proposed: Chinese chemical manufacturers should implement know-your-customer standards to protect against fraud, corruption and money laundering, Menendez said, or face sanctions.
China could monitor the labeling of chemicals leaving the country, exchange more information with the U.S. and follow the trail to ensure Chinese companies exporting chemicals know where their products end up, said Todd Robinson, the assistant secretary of State in the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
COMMENT – Tens of thousands of Americans die each year due to the willful negligence of the Chinese Communist Party and their refusal to staunch the flow of fentanyl pre-cursor chemicals. For Beijing, this is a reverse-‘Opium War’ which in their narrative undermined the Qing Dynasty from the inside by rapacious European imperialists 150-years ago.
8. China aims to launch nearly 13,000 satellites to ‘suppress’ Elon Musk’s Starlink, researchers say
Stephen Chen, South China Morning Post, February 24, 2023
The satellite constellation is likely to be launched quickly to prevent SpaceX from hogging ‘low-orbit resources’, according to PLA space scientists. The project, code-named ‘GW’, would provide internet services and could be used to spy on rival networks and carry out anti-Starlink missions, paper says.
Researchers say China plans to build a huge satellite network in near-Earth orbit to provide internet services to users around the world – and to stifle Elon Musk’s Starlink.
The project has the code name “GW”, according to a team led by associate professor Xu Can with the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Space Engineering University in Beijing. But what these letters stand for is unclear.
The GW constellation will include 12,992 satellites owned by the newly established China Satellite Network Group Co, Xu and his colleagues said in a paper about anti-Starlink measures published in the Chinese journal Command Control and Simulation on February 15.
COMMENT – As I’ve pointed out in earlier issues, the Chinese Communist Party views the capability provided by Starlink to Ukraine as a significant threat to its plans for annexing Taiwan. Expect to see even more activity in this space as the PRC seeks to undermine Starlink and firms like it that could assist Taiwan, while simultaneously building their own alternative system.
AUTHORITARIANISM
9. Chinese Visit to Moscow Showcases Deepening Ties with Russia
Austin Ramzy, Keith Zhai, and Ann M. Simmons, Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2023
This week’s visit to Moscow by China’s top diplomat signals the importance Beijing and Moscow place on a relationship that has grown deeper in the face of growing animosity to the West and geopolitical realignments driven by the conflict in Ukraine.
Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, arrives in Moscow on Monday at the end of a European tour where he presented Beijing as committed to peace in Ukraine and eager to strengthen diplomatic ties with the outside world following three years of pandemic isolation.
Mr. Wang’s visit to Moscow marks a contrast to the fresh strains in U.S.-China relations in the wake of Washington’s decision to shoot down what it called a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.
On Saturday, Mr. Wang and Secretary of State Antony Blinken met on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in an effort to stabilize relations. The unscheduled meeting was held in a tense atmosphere, with Mr. Wang using a speech earlier in the day to describe the U.S. reaction to the appearance of a Chinese balloon in U.S. airspace as “nearly hysterical.”
COMMENT – Moscow would have an extremely difficult time waging its war in Ukraine without the full backing of the Chinese Communist Party.
10. Ukraine Says China Did Not Consult It When Preparing Peace Plan
Eastern Herald, February 23, 2023
The Chinese government did not consult Kiev when preparing its peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official said on condition of anonymity.
“China did not consult us,” the official told reporters.
Beijing has promised to publish its plan for a “political settlement” of the conflict in Ukraine this week, which marks the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of the neighboring country.
11. U.N. resolution to end Ukraine war: How countries voted and who abstained
Niha Masih, Washington Post, February 24, 2023
The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Thursday, the eve of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion, in favor of a resolution calling for an end to the war and demanding that Russia leave Ukrainian territory. The nonbinding resolution advocates for peace, reaffirms support to Ukraine’s sovereignty and highlights the need for accountability for war crimes.
A large majority — 141 countries — voted in favor of the resolution, while 32 countries, including Asian heavyweights China and India, abstained from voting. Seven countries, including Russia, voted against the resolution. [Voted Against: Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria; Abstained: Algeria, Angola, Armenia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, China, Congo, Cuba, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Gabon, Guinea, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Mozambique, Namibia, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tajikistan, Togo, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.]
Nearly a year ago, in March 2022, a similar resolution was adopted by the United Nations. The number of supporters of an end to the war was the same, at 141. However, 35 abstained and five backed Russia.
12. China is helping to prop up the Russian economy. Here’s how
Laura He, CNN, February 26, 2023
13. China Seeks to Water Down G20 Statement on Ukraine: Sources
Kyiv Post, February 25, 2023
China, revealing its colors again, is reported to be blocking reference to Russia's 'war' against Ukraine in a joint G20 statement.
G20 finance ministers struggled Saturday, Feb. 25, to agree on a joint statement on the global economy at talks in India, with China seeking to water down any reference to the Ukraine war, officials said.
Spain's representative Nadia Calvino said that because of "less constructive" approaches by some unspecified countries at talks among the world's top 20 economies in Bengaluru, agreeing on a statement was proving "difficult".
China wanted to water down the language of a G20 leaders' statement from November that had said that "most members strongly condemned the war" in Ukraine, officials told AFP.
One delegate said on condition of anonymity that China wanted to remove the word "war".
Others said a joint statement was now unlikely, as has happened in several other such gatherings since Russia's invasion of Ukraine a year ago.
14. Missing Chinese banker was working to set up Singapore family office
Mercedes Ruehl, Tabby Kinderin, and Leo Lewis, Financial Times, February 21, 2023
China Renaissance chief Bao Fan was establishing a fund to safeguard wealth before disappearance.
Missing Chinese investment banker Bao Fan was preparing to move some of his fortune from China and Hong Kong to Singapore in the months leading up to his disappearance, according to four people with knowledge of his plans.
The billionaire founder and chair of investment bank China Renaissance, who brokered some of China’s biggest tech deals, was establishing a family office in the city-state to manage his personal wealth in the final months of 2022, the people said.
A growing number of Chinese executives have set up family offices, a privately held company that manages investments, in Singapore after Beijing launched a regulatory assault on the tech sector and an anti-corruption crackdown. They increasingly view the city-state, dubbed the “Switzerland of Asia”, as a haven to park their money.
“Like many wealthy Chinese since the tech crackdown in China and during the pandemic lockdown, he was trying to diversify his wealth in Singapore,” said one of the people.
15. This Isn't a Cold War, But It's Getting Close
Reid Standish, China in Eurasia Newsletter, February 22, 2023
Top foreign policy officials from the United States and China spent most of the last weekend at the Munich Security Conference stressing that their governments were not seeking a new Cold War, but amid tense rhetoric and accusations, a chill across much of the world is already being felt.
Finding Perspective: The Munich gathering is Europe's premier foreign policy conference and has long been a mainstay for leading officials from the West and elsewhere to hobnob and take the pulse of the current world order.
This year's diagnosis was far from optimistic. While the West showed that it is perhaps more united now than in recent years and that support for Ukraine is entrenched -- a message reinforced by U.S. President Joe Biden's unannounced visit to Kyiv -- it's hard to shake the sense that the West remains more out of step than ever with the rest of the world and that the damage done by Russia's invasion of Ukraine can't be undone.
Rightly or wrongly, Beijing clearly believes the West is in decline and is now sensing an opportunity to shore up its rising global status.
In Munich, China was represented by top foreign policy official Wang Yi who projected a message of self-confidence and swagger to Western officials as he took aim at the United States and accused it of fueling the war in Ukraine.
Wang also said China would launch its own peace plan for ending the war and that it would underscore the need to uphold the principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the UN Charter.
Those calls came as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said China may be preparing to give weapons and ammunition to Russia, which would mark a significant escalation in the war and Beijing's relationship with Moscow.
China has brushed the accusations aside but not denied them, saying Beijing "will never accept U.S. finger-pointing or coercion on China-Russia relations."
In interviews with German and Italian newspapers following the accusations from Washington, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that China supplying weapons would result in a "world war," and that he hoped Beijing would refrain from doing so after making a "practical assessment."
16. Thousands of retirees protest in Wuhan and Dalian over medical payout cuts
Gu Ting, Radio Free Asia, February 15, 2023
Thousands of people took to the streets of two Chinese cities – Wuhan and Dalian – on Wednesday in an ongoing protest over major cuts to their medical benefits, according to local residents and video footage posted to social media.
Video clips uploaded to social media showed crowds singing the communist anthem "The Internationale" under a traffic overpass in Zhongshan Park and along Jiefang Avenue in the central city of Wuhan.
Similar scenes unfolded in the People’s Square in the northeastern port city of Dalian, according to the Twitter account "Mr. Li is not your teacher" using the handle @whyyoutouzhele.
Other clips showed a crowd of older people facing off with ranks of uniformed police officers three or four deep who linked arms and started shoving the crowd slowly to make it pull back.
In one clip, an elderly man is seen lying on the ground with his head and legs propped up while people boo and shout at the police.
17. China's top diplomat blasts US over 'hysterical and absurd' balloon claim
France 24, February 18, 2023
China's top diplomat Wang Yi on Saturday blasted the US reaction to what Washington has called a Chinese spy balloon as "hysterical and absurd", in uncharacteristically strong remarks against the top Western power.
Addressing a gathering of world leaders at the Munich Security Conference, Wang said President Joe Biden's administration has a "misguided" perception of Beijing.
COMMENT – Speaking of “hysterical” reactions… Reuters, August 4, 2022 – Furious China fires missiles near Taiwan in drills after Pelosi visit and South China Morning Post, August 4, 2023 – PLA sends in 100+ warplanes on day 1 of military drills near Taiwan
Nicholas Gordon, Fortune, February 22, 2023
19. Pfizer slashed price of Paxlovid, but China wouldn't take it: industry insider
Gu Ting, Radio Free Asia, February 13, 2023
The allegations come amid concern that officials want to push sales of a homegrown antiviral instead.
Chinese negotiators tried to get Pfizer to lower the price of its antiviral Paxlovid -- a front-line treatment in the ongoing wave of COVID-19 infections sweeping the country -- to just 200 yuan per box, an industry insider told Radio Free Asia.
Negotiations between China's National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA) and Pfizer "failed because of the drug's high price," China’s state-backed media newspaper reported last week.
The nationalistic tabloid Global Times accused U.S. "capital forces" of profiteering from the current wave of COVID-19, amid an ongoing shortage of antivirals and widespread reports of pneumonia since the lifting of restrictions last month.
The financial magazine Caixin quoted unnamed sources as saying that Pfizer hadn't lowered its price significantly beyond the 1,890 yuan (U.S. $280) it currently charges Chinese hospitals, while the Global Times said the drug hadn't been included in China's national medical insurance program due to the high price.
That claim was judged to be "misleading" following an investigation by the Asia Fact Check Lab, which is affiliated with Radio Free Asia.
20. Russia and China Have a Stranglehold on the World’s Food Security
Alan Crawford, Frank Jomo, Elizabeth Elkin, and Matthew Bristow, Bloomberg, February 20, 2023
The cargo trapped for months at the Dutch port of Rotterdam was so precious that the United Nations intervened to mediate its release. The World Food Programme chartered a ship to transport it to Mozambique, from where it’s being taken by truck through the interior to its end destination, Malawi.
It’s not grain or maize, but 20,000 metric tons of Russian fertilizer, and it can’t come soon enough.
About 20% of Malawi’s population is projected to face acute food insecurity during the “lean season” through March, making the use of fertilizers to grow crops all the more vital. It’s one of 48 nations in Africa, Asia and Latin America identified by the International Monetary Fund as most at risk from the shock to food and fertilizer costs fanned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One year on, the upheaval caused to world fertilizer markets is seen by the UN as a key risk to food availability in 2023.
Yet alongside humanitarian considerations, it’s the realization that much of the world relies on just a few nations for most of its fertilizers — notably Russia, its ally Belarus and China — that’s ringing alarm bells in global capitals. Just as semiconductors have become a lightning rod for geopolitical friction, so the race for fertilizers has alerted the US and its allies to a strategic dependency for an agricultural input that is a key determinant of food security.
21. China's Xi calls for tech self-reliance amid U.S. tension
Eduardo Baptista, Reuters, February 22, 2023
President Xi Jinping said China must resolve issues in key technological fields from the bottom up, state media reported, as the country deals with a growing number of mainly U.S. export controls on advanced technology.
Xi said on Tuesday during a study session of the 24-person Politburo, one of the top decision-making bodies of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, that China needed to strengthen basic research in science and technology if it is to achieve self-reliance and become a global tech power, state news agency Xinhua reported.
"To cope with international science and technology competition, achieve a high level of self-reliance and self-improvement ... we urgently need to strengthen basic research and solve key technology problems from the source," Xinhua quoted Xi as saying.
The call comes as China faces growing headwind in its years-long effort to close the gap with the United States and its allies in advanced semiconductor technology.
In January, Japan and the Netherlands agreed to comply with export restrictions against China's chip sector that the U.S. government had announced in October 2022, media reported.
Initial U.S. sanctions took aim at Chinese purchases of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) computing chips, as well as equipment that chip factories could use to produce leading-edge computing chips.
Xi also on Tuesday said it was necessary to grow China's pool of top-notch tech talent, Xinhua reported, echoing a speech in 2021 where he said that by 2035 China "should rank among the leading countries in the world with respect to our strategic and technological strength and our army of high-quality talent".
22. China has its eye on overseas listings
Craig Coben, Financial Times, February 21, 2023
“Don’t forget it’s me who put you where you are now,” sings Philip Oakey in Human League’s 1981 hit Don’t You Want Me. “And I can put you back down too.”
The lyrics occurred to me when I read last Friday about the long-awaited new rules issued by the Chinese Security Regulatory Commission. These relate to overseas listings of companies incorporated outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) but whose main operations are on the mainland.
Heralded as “reopening the avenue of fundraising after a 20-month obstruction,” the package of measures starkly reminds companies and banks just who the ultimate gatekeeper is. The CSRC announcement gives multiple government watchdogs much leeway to decide which companies can access foreign markets and under what conditions. And it piles on extra procedures and approvals that hadn’t been required before. Unlike China’s December pivot from zero Covid, the CSRC is not letting overseas IPOs “rip” without tight control and surveillance.
In other words, this is less a U-turn and more a reassertion of state power.
Until 2021 China had enjoyed an active period of blockbuster IPOs in the US and Hong Kong. In July 2021, however, Chinese authorities clamped down on foreign listings purportedly to strengthen data security and ordered ride-hailing firm Didi to take down its app just days after its $4.4bn Nasdaq IPO, eventually forcing it to delist from the NYSE. Overseas IPOs screeched to a halt, with amounts raised by Chinese companies from US listings collapsing by 98 per cent from 2021 to 2022. Hong Kong IPOs from mainland-operating companies tumbled by over 70 per cent in the same period.
But recently China has shown signs of opening up again to foreign capital. In a major concession aimed at avoiding delistings, China agreed last December to allow the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board “complete access” to the audit papers of US-listed Chinese companies. And now the CSRC has created a road map for listing abroad.
Under the new rules, non-PRC companies operating primarily in China must file with the CSRC to list offshore. The rules apply to so-called “red chip” offerings in Hong Kong and the “variable interest entities” (VIEs) that have been widely used to list tech companies in the US and Hong Kong. Foreign listings will also need the approval of other supervisory agencies, such as the Cybersecurity Administration of China, especially if they implicate such areas as national security or data management. Companies already listed abroad now have to register with the CSRC, too.
This marks a change from earlier practice. Before the government froze foreign listings in mid-2021, only PRC-incorporated companies had been required to file with the Chinese regulator CSRC to list overseas (known as “H shares” on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange). If a mainland company created an overseas entity, it was largely free to list abroad without needing to apply for domestic approvals.
The CSRC announcement now means that Xi Jinping’s China has gone from turning a blind eye to foreign listings to placing them “under his eye”.
The new regime means stricter scrutiny for bankers as well. Underwriters will now be required to report every year to the CSRC their activities on Chinese overseas listings.
23. China Urges State Firms to Drop Big Four Auditors on Data Risk
Bloomberg, February 22, 2023
SOEs encouraged to use local auditors when contracts expire Guidance reiterated even after China reached US audit deal.
Chinese authorities have urged state-owned firms to phase out using the four biggest international accounting firms, signaling continued concerns about data security even after Beijing reached a landmark deal to allow US audit inspections on hundreds of Chinese firms listed in New York.
China’s Ministry of Finance is among government entities that gave the so-called window guidance to some state-owned enterprises as recently as last month, urging them to let contracts with the Big Four auditing firms expire, according to people familiar with the matter. While offshore subsidiaries can still use US auditors, the parent firms were urged to hire local Chinese or Hong Kong accountants when contracts come up, one of the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.
COMMENT – This makes Gary Gensler and the rest of the crowd at the SEC (and the U.S. Treasury) look very foolish. After two years of negotiations and efforts to resist carrying out the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, the Chinese Communist Party is instructing its companies, many of whom still gain access to enormous amounts of capital on SEC-regulated markets, to NOT use auditors that would make those companies financials transparent for investors.
I hate to say, “I told you so,” but this yet another example that the SEC and Treasury are playing Charlie Brown to the CCP’s Lucy.
ENVIRONMENTAL HARMS
24. China’s illegal fishing worldwide is under scrutiny
The Print, February 24, 2023
China has been ranked number one on various parameters of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) rankings. Over 60 per cent of its vessels are involved in IUU fishing worldwide, according to the IUU rankings report 2021, reported Investigative Journalism Reportika (IJK).
25. China’s Coal Mining Boom Is Running on Fumes
David Fickling, Bloomberg, February 20, 2023
Something strange is happening in the world’s most polluting industry. China’s coal industry accounts for nearly a fifth of the world’s emissions, a greater volume of greenhouse pollution than every car, train, ship and aircraft in the world. It’s oddly unclear, however, whether that cloud of carbon is growing, or shrinking.
Looking at the tonnage of coal mined during the course of the year, you’d think there was a clear answer — by the government’s numbers, output rose 10.4% compared to 2021. And yet the major consuming sectors don’t seem to be following suit. Thermal power (which in China is almost entirely coal-fueled) increased just 1.4%. Steel and cement production fell by 1.9% and 10.4% respectively. So where’s all that coal going?
Quite a bit of it appears to be heading to stockpiles at power plants and industrial sites, which have soared from levels of about 23 million metric tons to more than 300 million tons since August 2021. But that can’t account for all of the discrepancy — and the gap matters.
That’s because China’s emissions may have increased by 1.3% or decreased by 1% depending on how you interpret the data, according to a recent study by Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a climate non-profit. The world’s largest emitter is either starting to turn the corner on pollution, or charging ahead.
Myllyvirta and Yan Qin, a carbon analyst for data provider Refinitiv, have offered an intriguing explanation for the conundrum — it’s possible that the quality of China’s coal is declining. That would mean that energy content (and thus emissions) are holding more or less steady, even as tonnage increases.
FOREIGN INTERFERENCE AND COERCION
26. Canada needs an inquiry into Chinese election interference: ex-spymaster
Rachel Gilmore, Global News, February 25, 2023
Canada needs a public inquiry into allegations of Chinese election interference, Canada former spymaster says.
Speaking in an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, airing Sunday, Richard Fadden, the former head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and former national security advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, said he “can’t see any compelling reason not to” hold a public inquiry.
“I think in this case, the allegations are so serious they need to be looked into,” Fadden told Stephenson.
“I think a public inquiry is really the route to go.”
27. Canada must be on guard against Chinese election interference, Trudeau says
Ismail Shakil, Reuters, February 22, 2023
Foreign interference in elections is a very serious issue and Canada must be on guard against it, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday, following a media report saying that China sought to influence the outcome of the 2021 election.
Already tense Sino-Canadian relations have become more strained since the shooting down of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over North American airspace earlier this month and a recent Canadian media report about what it said were Beijing's attempts to influence the last vote.
28. CSIS found specific Chinese interference in Canada’s election. What happened next?
Campbell Clark, The Globe and Mail, February 22, 2023
Rachel Aiello, CTV News, February 22, 2023
A Conservative politician who says he was targeted by Chinese efforts to defeat Conservatives during the 2021 federal campaign is accusing the Liberal government of "dragging their feet" and is calling for more than "talking points" when it comes to addressing foreign interference.
"The government doesn't seem to have the urgency and understanding of how pressing the matter is," said former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu, in an interview on CTV News Channel's Power Play with Vassy Kapelos.
Citing recent examples beyond election meddling such as the recent Chinese spy balloon and installation of so-called Chinese police stations, Chiu accused the Liberals of doing little more than vowing studies.
"This government doesn't seem to be willing to take any substantial solid action," he said.
Last week, the Globe and Mail reported that China used a “sophisticated strategy” to sway Canada’s 2021 general election results.
The newspaper referenced CSIS documents it had viewed, and reported China worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered unfriendly to Beijing while attempting to get the Liberals re-elected specifically to a minority government.
Chiu's name was mentioned specifically in the article, with an unnamed source telling the Globe that he was targeted in part for his retaliation for his parliamentary push to see Canada create a foreign agent registry.
30. 1st EEAS Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats
European External Action Service, February 7, 2023
This first edition of the report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference threats is informed by the work of the European External Action Service’s (EEAS) Stratcom division8 in 2022. It is the first of its kind and can be seen as a pilot project. It applies a novel framework developed by the EEAS, based on best case practices of the FIMI defender community, to a first sample of 100 FIMI incidents detected and analysed between October and December 2022. It therefore does not intend to give a comprehensive
overview of FIMI in general or of a specific actor, but highlight how the existing analysis can be enhanced through this approach. In this report the EEAS uses best case practice methodology to allow for informed judgements of ongoing FIMI activities, actors and threat levels. It is therefore a useful tool to support informed and analysis based policy choices. The main findings of this report, based on the samples used, are:
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine dominates observed FIMI activity. Ukraine and its representatives have been the direct target of 33 incidents. In 60 out of 100 incidents, supporting the invasion was the main motivation behind the attack.
Diplomatic channels are an integral part of FIMI incidents. Russia’s diplomatic channels regularly serve as enablers of FIMI operations. They are deployed across wide range of topics. China also uses diplomatic channels, mostly targeting the US.
Impersonation techniques become more sophisticated. Impersonations of international and trusted organisations and individuals are used by Russian actors particularly to target Ukraine. Print and TV media are most often impersonated, with magazines seeing their entire style copied.
FIMI actor collusion exists but is limited. Official Russian actors were involved in 88 analysed FIMI incidents. Chinese actors were involved in 17. In at least 5 cases, both actors engaged jointly.
FIMI is multilingual. Incidents do not occur in just one language; content is translated and amplified in multiple languages. Incidents featured at least 30 languages, 16 of which are EU-languages. Russia used a larger variety of languages than Chinese actors but 44% of Russian content targeted a Russian-speaking populations, while 36% targeted English-speaking populations.
FIMI is mostly intended to distract and distort. Russia (42%) and China (56%) mostly intend to direct attention to a different actor or narrative or to shift blame (“distract”). Russia attempts to change the framing and narrative (“distort”) relatively more often (35%) than China (18%).
FIMI remains mostly image and video based. The cheap and easy production and distribution of image and video material online makes these formats still the most commonly used.
COMMENT – This report from the EU’s External Action Service (essentially the State Department or Foreign Ministry of the European Union) examines just a three month period last year and demonstrates the alignment of Russian and Chinese efforts to manipulate the information environment in their favor and discredit democracies (the report contends this collusion is “limited” but their evidence suggests the opposite).
31. AUDIO – China’s Ambitions and the Baltic Response
Ben Gardner-Gill and Una Aleksandra Bērzina-Čerenkova, Baltic Ways Podcast, February 21, 2023
Do Russia and China really have a “friendship without limits?” How are the Baltic states positioning themselves in the shifting sands of global security? What sort of role could they have as multilateral coalitions seek to address China as both a strategic competitor and critical trade partner? Dr. Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, head of the China Studies Centre at Riga Stradiņš University, provides expert insight into this rapidly changing set of relationships and how they might develop.
32. Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement with China
Mara Hvistendahl and Alexey Kovalev, The Intercept, December 30, 2022
In 2021, government officials and media executives from Russia and China discussed the exchange of news and social content.
Russian officials pushed the lies first.
Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian defense ministry spokesperson resuscitated debunked claims about a U.S.-funded bioweapons program in the region, accusing Ukrainian labs of experimenting with bat coronaviruses in an attempt to spark “the covert spread of deadliest pathogens.”
Disinformation is an old Russian government tactic. But this time Russia had help. Within days, Chinese officials and media outlets had picked up the lies and were amplifying and expanding on the biolabs yarn. The Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times created two splashy spreads, one sourced in part to Sputnik News, the other featuring a quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin. “What is the U.S. hiding in the biolabs discovered in Ukraine?” it screamed.
“China jumped on the biolabs conspiracy theory,” said Katja Drinhausen, an analyst with the Mercator Institute of China Studies in Berlin. Chinese officials and media outlets had spent the preceding months pushing the notion that the pandemic might have originated in a lab accident outside China. “It was like, here’s the perfect conspiracy theory coming out of Russia to support our ‘everywhere but China’ main talking point of the last year,” she said.
COMMENT – I’ve highlighted this article from The Intercept before, but I’m doing so again to draw attention to the ways in which Moscow and Beijing collaborate in their information warfare campaigns.
Another good example of this collaboration, similar to the debunked “Ukrainian bio-labs” that both Moscow and Beijing peddle on a semi-regular basis, is the “story” that the U.S. sabotaged the Nord Stream 2 pipelines in September 2022. The fantastical story by an 85 year-old Seymour Hersh about how the US blew up the pipeline has been picked up and amplified by various Chinese and Russian media outlets (and here and here). This is the same Seymour Hersh who wrote an elaborate conspiracy theory that the Obama Administration staged the killing of Osama bin Laden (… I suspect Hersh also believes the U.S. faked the moon landings).
33. US Hegemony and Its Perils
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, February 20, 2023
COMMENT – I don’t usually highlight Chinese Communist Party propaganda, but thought this one was worth pointing out… it repeats a theme that the Party is committed to: American hegemony harms the world, and that hegemony manifests in the political, military, economic, technological, and cultural domains.
Of course, reading this reveals that the Party believes that it is fully engaged in a robust ‘cold war’ with the United States across these domains.
At its core, the Chinese Communist Party, like Putin’s regime in Moscow, is most fearful of America’s ability “to stage "color revolutions,"”… as if the desires of individuals around the world to have a say in their own governments is a “plot” by the United States.
What Beijing and Moscow find so “threatening” is that their own citizens stubbornly want to have a government that serves them and has limits of its power. So-called “US hegemony” is just a manifestation of the deepest fears that authoritarians have about being driven from power by their own citizens.
34. China is carrying out ‘blatant’ influence operations in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull says
Daniel Hurst and Caitlin Cassidy, The Guardian, February 20, 2023
Former prime minister likens covert operations to famous scene in Casablanca and warns influence register should be more than ‘box ticking’.
Australian security agencies know China is carrying out “blatant” influence operations despite the lack of listings on the country’s transparency register, the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has told an inquiry.
Turnbull said on Tuesday he was “puzzled” the legislation his government introduced was not more rigorously enforced and that officials should not treat it as a “robotic box-ticking exercise”.
Under the foreign influence transparency scheme (Fits) that took effect in late 2018, people must register activities they carry out in Australia on behalf of a foreign principal to shape political or government affairs.
“It is noteworthy that … according to the transparency register there is apparently no organisation in Australia that has any association with the united front work department of the Communist party of China,” Turnbull told the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security.
“I would love to think that was true, but regrettably I can say absolutely that it is not true. If in fact it were true, there would be terrible repercussions in Beijing for those responsible for the united front work department.”
Turnbull told the committee the “most active state and political party seeking to influence public affairs in Australia is that of China and the Communist party of China – we know that”.
“The intelligence agencies, security agencies have a very good idea of who’s doing what. I wouldn’t even describe it as covert – it’s pretty blatant operations,” he said.
“It does remind me of that scene in Casablanca when the French police captain runs into Rick’s bar and says, ‘I’m shocked, shocked to see that there is gambling in this establishment’. I mean, is this [the] same sort of pretence that’s going on? We know what’s happening and we just want people to be open about it – that’s all.”
35. China dials up propaganda over Turkish rescue effort; Taiwan also sends team
Hwang Chun-mei and Jane Tang, Radio Free Asia, February 17, 2023
China's consul general in Belfast, Zhang Meifang, tweeted a photo of the Chinese-built Canakkale suspension bridge on Feb. 13, boasting that it had "withstood the earthquake."
The tweet was deleted after people pointed out that the bridge is more than 1,000 kilometers from the epicenter of the quake, and that it was built by a multinational team including Korean, Turkish and Danish companies.
China's Sichuan Road and Bridge Co. only installed the steel box girders in December 2020.
Çağdaş Üngör, an academic who studies Sino-Turkish relations and the Chinese Communist Party's influence operations in Istanbul, said the tweet was "outrageous."
"I feel that this kind of political propaganda is really too much right now," she said. "It goes far beyond the scope of public relations or advertising. What's even more outrageous is that [that bridge] is nowhere near the quake zone."
Turkish news anchor Nevsin Mengu also hit out at Beijing's boasting.
"China is busy with political propaganda," he said of a video clip of the Canakkale bridge also posted by Zhang Meifang. "Authoritarian countries like China and Turkey seem to have similarly bad taste in music," he quipped about the music used as a soundtrack to the video.
Zhang eventually deleted her post some 10 hours after posting, but with no explanation, and not before it had been viewed more than 200,000 times and retweeted by the Chinese Embassy in Paris.
36. VIDEO – Inside China’s espionage war: How the communist superpower is spying on the West
Sky News Australia, February 17, 2023
Ann Cao, South China Morning Post, February 21, 2023
Chinese fintech giant Ant Group is joining hands with the US National Basketball Association (NBA) to launch a “comprehensive strategic collaboration” in China in the latest move to elevate the sport in one of its biggest markets outside the US.
The marketing partnership, which was jointly announced by Ant Group and NBA China on Tuesday, will see the two parties create original online content and a customised consumer experience on Ant’s mobile payments platform Alipay through technologies such as blockchain, according to a press release on Ant’s official website.
Ant Group is an affiliate of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, which also owns the South China Morning Post.
COMMENT – It is disturbing that the NBA seems to have learned nothing from the past few years.
I guess it shouldn’t been surprising given the ways in which NBA owners are highly exposed to influence by the Chinese Communist Party: NBA owners, mum on China relationship, have more than $10 billion invested there, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, ESPN, May 19, 2022
38. China’s Alibaba Spends Big on DC Lobbying, Campaign Contributions
Wenhao Ma, Voice of America, February 17, 2023
Deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing have done little to disrupt a multimillion-dollar lobbying and influence campaign in the United States by one of China’s biggest companies, Alibaba Group, according to figures provided by a U.S. monitoring organization.
Publicly available information accumulated by OpenSecrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, shows the Chinese e-commerce giant spent more than $2.5 million on U.S. lobbying last year, down from about $3 million in 2021 and a peak of more than $3.1 million in 2020 – a presidential election year.
The available data show that lobbyists hired by the company spend millions millions of dollars on political donations to members of the U.S. Congress and various government departments with responsibilities in the areas of U.S.-China trade, finance and technology.
OpenSecrets noted that Alibaba itself “did not donate, rather the money came from the organization's individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate family members.” VOA reached out to Alibaba, but it declined to comment on its lobbying activities.
Alibaba, whose diverse range of business interests includes e-commerce, technology, electronic payment services and cloud computing, is ranked as the world’s 29th-largest corporation with a market capitalization of $281.8 billion.
Ten of the 39 issues Alibaba lobbied on in 2022 were related to trade, while another eight were related to copyrights, patents and trademarks, according to the OpenSecrets analysis.
39. Hungary Extends Warm Welcome to Top Chinese Diplomat
Thomas Grove and Drew Hinshaw, Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2023
China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, visited Hungary, one of Beijing’s staunchest European partners, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban signaled Budapest’s determination to strengthen ties with Beijing despite U.S. concern over growing Chinese investment in the country.
The visit stood in contrast to other meetings during Mr. Wang’s weeklong visit to Europe, where he aims to strengthen ties on the continent at a time of growing tension with the U.S.
In Budapest, Mr. Orban held talks with Mr. Wang over dinner, and on Monday he met Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó.
“When we have faced crises in recent years, Hungary has always come out of them stronger than it went into them, but Hungarian-Chinese cooperation has played an absolutely indispensable role in this,” Mr. Szijjártó said. Hungary is a prime destination for Chinese investment, and Chinese-Hungarian trade now exceeds $10 billion, he added.
COMMENT – This won’t help the CCP in Berlin, Brussels, The Hague, Warsaw, Stockholm, Madrid, or Rome.
40. YouTube shuts down satirical spoof video channel targeting Chinese leader Xi Jinping
Yitong Wu, Radio Free Asia, February 21, 2023
Chinese censors are likely exploiting YouTube's copyright infringement reporting system to erase political content.
A YouTube channel that once churned out satirical spoof videos featuring ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has been deleted from the platform, sparking concerns over whether the Chinese government is exploiting the social media giant’s copyright rules.
The RutersXiaoFanQi channel, whose name amalgamates the Chinese word "to humiliate" with that of the news agency Reuters, was unavailable on YouTube at 1300 GMT on Monday.
The takedown comes as Chinese censors grow increasingly concerned about satirical content about Xi Jinping coming from overseas, where students and activists recently demonstrated in solidarity with the "white paper" protests that swept China at the end of 2022, and where social media accounts often post content that would be banned or blocked in China.
It suggests Chinese censors are using YouTube's copyright infringement reporting system to shut down content they find politically unacceptable, according to a fellow satirist.
An Internet Archive snapshot of the page captured on Feb. 10 showed the most recent upload was a spoof video featuring manipulated news footage of Xi and a satirical song questioning the Chinese leader's booksmarts, among other satirical comments.
"The new era is here. We're changing gear and reversing," the song goes, alongside footage of Xi at the Communist Party's 20th National Congress in October.
"How long will it take to get from amending the constitution to flat out calling him emperor?" it says, in a reference to the abolition of presidential term limits in 2018 that paved the way for Xi to take an unprecedented third term in office beginning at the party congress.
"A PhD from Tsinghua University, but still at elementary school level," the lyrics say. "There's nobody else like Xi Jinping in this world."
41. China is losing Taiwanese hearts and minds
The Economist, February 16, 2023
A Buddhist master’s death robs China of a champion in Taiwan.
When china’s Communist Party detects a chance to woo hearts and minds, it is ready to send its cadres to incongruous places. On February 12th such a mission brought dozens of senior officials to the mist-shrouded Dajue Temple, on a wooded hilltop in rural Jiangsu province. Despite the vows of atheism that bind all party members, the officials bowed their heads alongside dark-robed monks and nuns in joint homage to Master Hsing Yun, the founder of a Buddhist order with many followers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. He died this month, aged 95.
Once, Hsing Yun’s faith made him an enemy of the Chinese revolution. With other monks and millions of fellow mainland refugees, he fled to Taiwan after the defeat of the American-backed Nationalist regime in 1949 by Chairman Mao Zedong’s Red Army. Later, the Cultural Revolution saw fanatical Red Guards ransack the Dajue Temple, where Hsing Yun began his monastic life. From his place of exile in Taiwan, the monk began to amass followers, eventually recruiting millions with a vision of Buddhism that emphasises practical acts of charity over esoteric theories. By the late 1980s his fame brought invitations to the mainland and meetings with leaders in Beijing. Soon afterwards, though, he was banned from China for several more years for helping a high-ranking official defect to the West after the student protests of June 1989.
HUMAN RIGHTS AND RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION
42. Xinjiang state security police detain outspoken ethnic Kazakh musician
Gu Ting and Hsia Hsiao-hwa, Radio Free Asia, February 13, 2023
Police forcibly remove Zhanargul Zhumatai from her mother's home in the regional capital Urumqi, activists say.
43. Xinjiang Governor Erkin Tuniyaz: Slave to Beijing, Tyrant to the Uyghurs
Kok Bayraq, Bitter Winter, February 24, 2023
The other day, I spoke with a compatriot who lives in a province of China: “Come on, guys! Why are you speaking badly of actor Tuniyaz?” he asked jokingly. When I did not understand, he continued his rant: “Aren’t the British art-loving? What would happen with one more show in London? Don’t British MPs appreciate actors?”
I then learned that he was talking about the puppet governor of the Uyghur Autonomous Region, Erkin Tuniyaz, and his canceled visit to the UK.
Tuniyaz starred in a “theatre” at the United Nations in 2019, in a show that China orchestrated. As the keynote speaker, he announced the closure of the transformation through education camps, which China had long denied even existed, and later presented as “vocational training centers.”
He also claimed at that time, “All trainees of these facilities will have graduated by October 2019.”
In fact, the camps were not closed; they were turned into prisons. More than three million Uyghurs who had been detained indefinitely were sentenced to various lengths of imprisonment without trial. Thus, China protected itself from the international criticism it was exposed to at that time by changing the Uyghurs’ illegal detention to “legal” detention. The name of the camps had changed, not the situation.
Erkin Tuniyaz described this process further during his staged production: “Now, all the trainees have stable jobs and live normal lives.”
In reality, millions of families were torn apart by incarcerations in the camps. Families were driven out of the labor force, and widowed women were indirectly and directly forced to marry Han Chinese immigrants. More than 500,000 “orphans” were sent to orphanages. To hide this situation, information and communication restrictions doubled in the region, and as a result, thousands of Uyghurs abroad were unable to communicate with their relatives in the motherland.
For three years, an entire nation was held hostage. The birth rate of Uyghur population declined vertically in Hotan and Kashgar. Erkin Tuniyaz proclaimed this situation a portion of heaven: “People of all ethnic groups in the XUAR are united as closely as the seeds of a pomegranate.”
Ten Human Rights Organizations, February 15, 2023
As announced during the visit to China by Council President Charles Michel and reported by media, we understand that the European Union (EU) and its member states are considering the resumption of the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue as part of their re-engagement with their Chinese counterparts over the coming months. We once again urge the EU and its member states to suspend the EU-China human rights dialogue and to prioritize strong and concrete human rights outcomes across all areas of their relations with China.
Our concerns are all the more urgent given the August 2022 report by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) finding that China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim groups “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity” and the deepening repression faced by activists and perceived critics in China in the lead up to, and in the wake of, the confirmation of Xi Jinping’s third term as Chinese Communist Party leader.
Our organizations believe that human rights must lie at the heart of a robust, strategic approach to the EU and its member states’ relations with China. The 2019 Strategic Outlook on EU-China relations declares that “[t]he ability of EU and China to engage effectively on human rights will be an important measure of the quality of the bilateral relationship.”
Amid recent steps some characterize as a “charm offensive”, China has expressed “readiness to resume the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue”, sending “an important signal” in an exchange with Council President Michel in December 2022. Since 2017, our organizations have repeatedly called for the suspension of the EU-China human rights dialogue until the meetings can bring genuine human rights improvements. Regrettably, there is no indication that this will be the case should the human rights dialogue resume. In the absence of indications that the human rights dialogue may be linked to concrete benchmarks and deliverables for improvement – which was not the case in the previous 37 rounds – we reiterate our concerns about its resumption.
45. EU: Suspend Meaningless ‘Human Rights Dialogues’ with Beijing
Human Rights Watch, February 16, 2023
The European Union should suspend its upcoming human rights dialogue with the Chinese government, given the magnitude of China’s rights crisis, including its potential responsibility for crimes against humanity in the Xinjiang region, 10 human rights groups said today.
“The EU’s human rights dialogues with China have become increasingly meaningless because both sides know that Beijing can make no commitment and get away with it,” said Dolkun Isa, from the World Uyghur Congress. “The EU had gained momentum holding the Chinese government accountable for growing abuses in recent years; it should not dial back by returning to these tick-the-box exercises.”
In a February 15, 2023 letter, ten human rights groups urged the EU to continue to suspend the human rights dialogues with China until conditions are met for tangible outcomes and progress. Instead, any forthcoming bilateral meeting should be used by the EU to commit to follow up the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights report on Xinjiang and set up an independent, international investigative mechanism into crimes against humanity targeting Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim communities and a wider, regular monitoring and reporting process at the UN Human Rights Council on Chinese government’s human rights violations.
INDUSTRIAL POLICIES AND ECONOMIC ESPIONAGE
46. Dollar funding for Chinese start-ups dries up
Ryan McMorrow and Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times, February 18, 2023
International funding for Chinese start-ups dried up last year, pushing many fledgling technology companies to raise capital and list at home instead of on Wall Street.
Dollar investments in the country’s new companies fell by nearly three-quarters last year, declining to 19 per cent of the total capital put into start-ups from 39 per cent in 2021, according to new data from research group ITJuzi.
47. Foreign Investors Pulled $91 Billion From China’s Bond Market Last Year
Rebecca Feng, Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2023
Sales marked the only annual outflow on record, despite buying in December.
Foreign investors reduced their exposure to China’s domestic bond market last year, the first time they have become net sellers since the central bank started releasing data a decade ago.
Foreigners cut their holdings of yuan-denominated bonds by the net equivalent of $91 billion in 2022. It was the only net annual outflow since China’s central bank began publishing foreign ownership figures in 2013, according to data from two of China’s clearinghouses.
That took total foreign holdings of Chinese bonds down to the equivalent of $500 billion, from $591 billion at the end of 2021.
48. Sequoia Turns to Outside National-Security Experts to Vet New China Tech Investments
Aruna Viswanatha, Jing Yang, and Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2023
Sequoia Capital, one of the world’s largest venture-capital firms, is consulting independent U.S. national-security experts to vet some of its China arm’s potential investments, people familiar with the matter say, as Washington steps up efforts to stop American money from funding Beijing’s development of sensitive technologies.
The Biden administration is expected to soon unveil investment restrictions that would prevent U.S. capital from flowing to companies and startups in China that are developing cutting-edge technologies in sectors including advanced semiconductors.
Sequoia’s China arm, Sequoia Capital China, raised a record $8.5 billion last year, including from large U.S. institutional investors, drawing scrutiny from the White House and U.S. lawmakers. In response, Sequoia, based in Menlo Park, Calif., briefed U.S. officials in late 2022 about its plans to screen certain investments those funds make, the people said. The screening for national-security concerns, a first for the firm, is being conducted by outside American policy experts and applies specifically to new investments in Chinese semiconductor or quantum-computing companies, though it isn’t meant to be binding.
Between 2021 and 2022, Sequoia China made at least 20 investments in Chinese semiconductor and related companies. Since the screening process was implemented in the autumn of 2022, the firm hasn’t made any investments in Chinese semiconductor or quantum-computing startups from its new funds, which were raised in July 2022.
49. Global firms are eyeing Asian alternatives to Chinese manufacturing
The Economist, February 20, 2023
In 1987 panasonic made an adventurous bet on China. At the time the electronics giant’s home country, Japan, was a global manufacturing powerhouse and the Chinese economy was no larger than Canada’s. So when the company entered a Chinese joint venture to make cathode-ray tubes for its televisions in Beijing, eyebrows were raised. Before long other titans of consumer electronics, from Japan and elsewhere, were also piling into China to take advantage of its abundant and cheap labour. Three-and-a-half decades on, China is the linchpin of the multitrillion-dollar consumer-electronics industry. Its exports of electronic goods and components amounted to $1trn in 2021, out of a global total of $3.3trn. These days, it takes a brave firm to avoid China.
Increasingly, however, under a weighty combination of commercial and political pressure, foreign companies are beginning to pluck up the courage if not to leave China entirely, then at least to look beyond it for growth. Chinese labour is no longer that cheap: between 2013 and 2022 manufacturing wages doubled, to an average of $8.27 per hour. More important, the deepening techno-decoupling between Beijing and Washington is forcing manufacturers of high-tech products, especially those involving advanced semiconductors, to reconsider their reliance on China.
50. China no longer viable as world’s factory, says Kyocera
Eri Sugiura, Financial Times, February 20, 2023
Japanese component maker is investing at home with first new plant in nearly two decades.
51. China’s Leading Electric Carmaker Has Arrived in Germany
Melissa Eddy, New York Times, February 21, 2023
BYD is a powerhouse in China and sells the most electric vehicles of any company in the world. Now it has a plan to attract buyers in Europe’s largest economy.
Germans take huge pride in their automotive industry, and have never been eager to abandon their Audis, BMWs or Mercedes-Benzes for foreign makes. But with a goal to change that, a Chinese automaker that sells the most electric cars in the world has begun offering three of its models in Germany.
BYD, founded in 1995 under the name Build Your Dreams, has become a behemoth in China, the world’s largest auto market, by focusing on electric vehicles. Last year it sold 1.86 million battery-powered cars, including plug-in hybrids, which have both an electric motor and a gas-powered engine.
That topped Tesla’s sales total of 1.3 million cars in 2022, all of them battery-powered.
So far, the vast majority of BYD cars are sold in China. But the company, based in Shenzhen, is looking to expand in other parts of the world, including Europe and, in particular, Germany.
Buoyed by the surging demand for electric vehicles, coupled with the supply chain struggles still troubling European automakers, BYD introduced three models in Germany at the start of the year: the Atto-3, a compact sport utility vehicle; the Han, a sedan; and the Tang, a full-size S.U.V. In the coming months, the company plans to introduce several more. There have been reports that it is considering opening an assembly plant in Germany, which has Europe’s largest economy.
COMMENT – When Germany dreamed about the future trajectory of the automobile industry, this was probably not the outcome they expected.
52. Parameters of New US Outbound Investment Regime Begin to Emerge
Jake A. Laband, Marik A. String, Wilmer Hale, February 21, 2023
Following a series of public reports, the United States appears close to announcing a new regulatory process to scrutinize US “outbound” investment to countries presenting national security challenges. Although the precise scope of such a new regime remains unclear and initial reports may not reflect the final regime that could emerge, this new regulatory process could have dramatic implications for multinational firms and funds—including foreign firms or funds with US operations—engaged in cross-border trade and investment.
The new regulatory review process for outbound investment would subject certain types of outbound flows of capital, goods and/or services from the United States or by US persons to new restrictions and/or disclosure requirements. Over the past several years, the US Congress has considered various competing legislative proposals to create such a process, which we previously analyzed. Recent reports suggest that the Biden Administration is prepared to release an executive order that would create this review regime within two months and without new legislation—likely directing key federal agencies to promulgate regulations to give effect to the concept.
Often referred to as a “reverse-CFIUS process”—in reference to the current national security review process for inbound US investment used by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS—the new outbound review regime would likely reflect certain hallmarks of US economic sanctions and export control restrictions, which already limit to varying degrees the export of categories of US capital, goods or services to specially restricted foreign persons, industrial sectors or countries.
As details of this reported executive order continue to be developed over the next weeks, US and multinational firms and funds should take account of how this new regime could affect their trade and investment activities in China and other foreign countries that could be included within the scope of the regime.
CYBER AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
53. ChatGPT Fever Sweeps China as Tech Firms Seek Growth
Karen Hao and Shen Lu, Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2023
As companies play catch-up in AI race, they face hurdles including securing advanced chips and China’s tight censorship rules.
Search engine owner Baidu Inc., e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and social-media conglomerate Tencent Holdings Ltd. are among those that have announced investments to develop their own equivalents to the artificial-intelligence chatbot, which isn’t available in China. Stocks of other Chinese companies have surged in recent weeks as they have jumped on the bandwagon, triggering state media to issue a warning about the speculative rally.
Chinese companies that invested early in the generative AI technologies—which produce writing, images and art much like humans do—will now be best poised to build their own ChatGPT, AI and Chinese tech industry experts say. But many others are scrambling to catch up to U.S. counterparts in the latest technology developments and commercial applications.
54. China tells big tech companies not to offer ChatGPT services
Cissy Zhou, Nikkei Asia, February 22, 2023
55. Ernie, what is censorship? China’s chatbots face additional challenges.
Meaghan Tobin and Lyric li, Washington Post, February 24, 2023
…
The OpenAI discussion bot caused this much uproar even though people technically weren’t allowed to access it from inside China. But so many figured out how to use proxy servers to access it anyway that this week the government blocked access to them, Chinese media reported.
Beaten to the punch by American-made chatbots such as ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing, China’s biggest tech companies, top universities and even city governments have rushed to say they will come out with their own versions. Search giant Baidu this week said it would release its ChatGPT competitor, Ernie Bot, in March.
While they’ve only just announced these efforts, these companies — including Baidu, e-commerce giant Alibaba and Tencent, the maker of popular messaging app WeChat — have spent the better part of a decade developing their in-house AI capabilities.
Baidu, which makes the country’s most popular search engine, is the closest to winning the race. But despite years of investment and weeks of hype, the company has not yet released Ernie Bot.
AI experts suggest that the Chinese government’s tight control over the country’s internet is partly to blame.
“With a generative chatbot, there is no way to know beforehand what it will say,” said Zhao Yuanyuan, a former member of the natural language processing team at Baidu. “That is a huge concern.”
Baidu did not respond to request for comment.
In China, regulators require that anything posted online, down to the shortest comment, be reviewed first to ensure it does not contravene a lengthening list of banned topics. For example, a Baidu search for Xinjiang will simply return geographic information about the western region, with no mention of the system of reeducation camps that its Uyghur population was subjected to for years.
56. Tencent in Talks to Sell Meta’s Quest 2 VR Headset in China
Raffaele Huang and Newley Purnell, Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2023
Deal could be a boon for Meta in China, where Facebook has been blocked since 2009.
57. TikTok Really Is Becoming Gen Z’s Google, and More on How Gen Z Gets Its News
Kevin Tran, Morning Consult, February 21, 2023
Google Search is the go-to news discovery platform for U.S. adults, but that’s less the case for Gen Z, which prefers TikTok and Instagram more than older generations.
In February, 14% of Gen Z adults reported using TikTok to start researching a major news event, significantly higher than the share of all adults (2%) saying the same.
To boost their chances of counting Gen Zers as paying subscribers, news publishers must distribute more compelling content that lives outside of their own websites.
Publishers’ paths to reaching Gen Zers are becoming notably less straightforward. Well before search giants announced plans to integrate generative artificial intelligence into their platforms, which could ding publisher referrals, Google acknowledged it was becoming a less-favored search platform for Gen Zers.
This was no flash in the pan: The latest Morning Consult data shows that the share of Gen Z adults who start researching major news events on Google Search is lower than that of the general population. A significant slice of Gen Z adults is instead heading to the platform that is de rigueur among its cohort — TikTok — for news.
This means that it’s far past the wait-and-see phase for publishers and their participation on TikTok. As Gen Zers come into their own financially, establishing a strong presence on the Bytedance-owned platform will greatly increase publishers’ chances of counting younger consumers as paying subscribers.
58. European Commission bans TikTok from corporate devices
Luca Bertuzzi, Euractiv, February 23, 2023
The EU executive’s IT service has asked all Commission employees to uninstall TikTok from their corporate devices, as well as the personal devices using corporate apps, citing data protection concerns.
The request to uninstall the Chinese-owned social media app was communicated via email to EU officials on Thursday morning (23 February).
“To protect the Commission’s data and increase its cybersecurity, the EC [European Commission] Corporate Management Board has decided to suspend the TikTok application on corporate devices and personal devices enrolled in the Commission mobile device services,” said the email, seen by EURACTIV.
Staffers were asked to do so as soon as possible and no later than 15 March. For those who do not comply by the set deadline, the corporate apps like the Commission email and Skype for Business will no longer be available.
The measure, justified on the grounds of data protection concerns related to the app, is aimed at protecting Commission data and systems from potential cybersecurity threats.
MILITARY AND SECURITY THREATS
59. VIDEO – Taiwan: Why the US & China are on collision course for war
Deutsche Welle, January 20, 2023
"The Chinese seem to be preparing for a war against Taiwan" says Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu. This puts the US and China on collision course for war – with potentially dramatic stakes for the world.
China's President Xi Jinping has vowed that Beijing will "reunify" with the island – if necessary, by force. A large majority of people in Taiwan say they don't want reunification. The United States is increasingly clear that it would intervene to defend Taiwan from any attack.
How did it come to this – and what happens next?
In this special analysis, DW's Richard Walker uncovers the roots of the dispute over Taiwan, in part 1 tracing how the diplomatic breakthroughs of the 1970s between the US and China left unfinished business that has festered ever since.
Part 2 tracks why these tensions have now burst into the open, with accusations of betrayal in all directions.
And part 3 projects trends in China, the United States and Taiwan forward into the future to assess where the dispute is heading – and if there is any way of avoiding war.
Leading US authority on Taiwan, Shelley Rigger warns: "I think the danger is greater today than it has ever been before. The US and China are in this spiral of threat and counter threat, and Taiwan is caught in the middle." Retired People’s Liberation Army Senior Colonel Zhou Bo explains the scenarios under which China would use force. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sets out ideas for a diplomatic solution that he admits both China and Taiwan would "hate." CNAS think tank Chair Michèle Flournoy sets out her bottom line: "The key thing is for Beijing to recognize that if you go to war to seize Taiwan, you lose."
60. Satellite photos show expansion of Chinese-funded naval base in Cambodia
Radio Free Asia, February 22, 2023
Recent satellite images taken of the coastal area around Sihanoukville, Cambodia, show a significant development of a China-funded naval base that would help Beijing boost its power projection not only in Southeast Asia but also the Taiwan Strait.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that Phnom Penh and Beijing had signed a secret deal to allow the Chinese military to use part of the base. Phnom Penh has repeatedly denied the deal, saying giving a foreign country exclusive military access to the base would be in contradiction to Cambodia’s constitution.
61. How the “nine-dash line” fuels tensions in the South China Sea
The Economist, February 10, 2023
China has co-opted a cartographic mistake to bully its neighbours.
Chart the course of Chinese coastguard ships in the South China Sea and a pattern emerges. The boats’ patrols often follow a U-shaped route that stretches over 700 nautical miles from China’s coastline, encircling most of a sea that plays an outsize role in global trade and security. This path is the “nine-dash line”. China claims everything inside it as its own, ignoring protests from neighbouring countries. Last year its coastguard spent longer patrolling key reefs along the line than ever before. China’s assertiveness in enforcing this claim is perhaps the biggest obstacle to calming tensions in the South China Sea. How did this line become so important?
The nine-dash line is partly the result of a cartographic mistake. Chinese officials had little interest in, or knowledge of, the South China Sea before the 20th century. But after a series of humiliations at the hands of imperialist powers, map-making became a way to reclaim national pride, at least on paper. In 1933 Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist government created a committee to give Chinese names to islands in the South China Sea. The committee copied names from Western maps into Chinese, mistranslating the James Shoal, an underwater bank far from China, as “Zengmu tan”. “Tan” means a sandbank above water.
62. Philippines sounds fresh China alarm over ships in EEZ
Jason Gutierrez, Radio Free Asia, February 23, 2023
The U.S. is “committed and focused” to conducting joint patrols with the Philippines in the South China Sea, its navy chief said, as Manila again accused China of keeping coast guard ships in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of U.S. naval operations, made a two-day visit to the American ally this week to discuss how to “improve our interoperability together in the South China Sea and across the region.”
As Gilday visited Manila, the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) issued a statement saying that one of its patrol aircraft had spotted a China Coast Guard ship and at least 26 suspected Chinese maritime militia vessels during a fly-over in the area around Ayungin (Second Thomas Shoal) and Sabina Shoals in the South China Sea.
The area is well within the Philippine EEZ where Manila has exclusive rights to the sea resources.
As the Philippine plane approached Sabina Shoal, in the Spratly Islands, “it received inaudible radio challenges, both in English and Chinese, from CCG-5304 [Chinese vessel] currently continuing to maintain presence in the area,” the statement said.
The same thing happened when the aircraft came within 10 nautical miles (18.5 kilometers) of Ayungin Shoal, less than 200 kilometers from Palawan, the largest province of the Philippines.
Ayungin Shoal is where the BRP Sierra Madre, an old naval ship, was deliberately run aground by the Philippine military to serve as an outpost since 1999.
Philippine reporters invited aboard the flight said they heard warnings that the plane was “entering the vicinity of Chinese territory” and it was requested to leave immediately.
They also received a text message that said “Welcome to China!”
The PCG responded by issuing its own radio challenge “directing the CCG-5304 to leave the area immediately.”
63. Chinese Jet Fighter Shadows U.S. Aircraft Over South China Sea
Alastair Gale, Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2023
A Chinese J-11 jet fighter, armed with four air-to-air missiles, appeared at the rear of an American P-8 patrol aircraft, passed above and settled a few hundred feet from the wing of the U.S. Navy plane.
“American aircraft, this is the PLA air force. You are approaching Chinese airspace. Keep a safe distance or you will be intercepted,” a Chinese military ground station broadcast to the P-8, using the abbreviation for the People’s Liberation Army.
Encounters such as the one on Friday over the South China Sea are now a near-daily occurrence, and they are becoming more dangerous, U.S. officials say.
In December, the U.S. accused a Chinese jet fighter of flying within 20 feet of a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea. Beijing said the U.S. plane veered suddenly toward the jet. China hasn’t responded to U.S. calls for talks about unsafe military encounters.
“The long-term trend is more and more aggression” by Chinese fighter pilots, said Capt. Will Toraason, the commander of U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean.
The U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon after it passed over the U.S. earlier this month, raising tensions. China said it was a civilian meteorological balloon that blew off course.
64. What Chris Coons tells world leaders about Biden
Alexander Ward, Politico, February 20, 2023
…
Back on Capitol Hill, aides like to joke that Coons is constantly hiding from his staff because he’s on the phone with the president so often. It’s a relationship he jealousy guards and curates. He has no problem telling reporters or anyone who will listen that he has the president’s ear.
As a member of a congressional delegation here, Coons gave everyone from NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to U.S. combatant commanders his reading of the president’s mindset entering the second year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The message was simple: Help Ukraine without risking America’s military readiness for future fights — namely should China invade Taiwan — and don’t plunge the U.S. into another foreign war.
65. Japan, South Korea and U.S. stage rare joint naval drill after North Korean launches
Jesse Johnson, Japan Times, February 22, 2023
The Japanese, South Korean and U.S. navies conducted a rare joint exercise Wednesday, Tokyo announced, just days after North Korea fired a powerful long-range missile into Japan’s exclusive economic zone off Hokkaido.
A Maritime Self-Defense Force Aegis destroyer joined U.S. and South Korean navy destroyers in the Sea of Japan for the exercises intended to promote growing trilateral cooperation between the three countries amid growing regional security challenges, Japan’s Joint Staff said in a statement.
Wednesday’s joint drill, which focused on ballistic missile information-sharing, was seen as highlighting unity among the three countries — despite Tokyo’s frosty ties with Seoul — after nuclear-armed North Korea fired what the Japanese Defense Ministry said was a Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile into waters some 200 kilometers off Hokkaido on Saturday. It was also the the first trilateral naval exercises since October.
66. How the U.S. improvised a plan to deal with a Chinese balloon
William Neff, Leslie Shapiro and Dylan Moriarty, Washington Post, February 23, 2023
COMMENT: Interesting graphics from the Washington Post on the details of the shootdown.
67. China’s Growing Naval Influence in the Middle East
Blake Herzinger and Ben Lefkowitz, AEI, February 17, 2023
Current Chinese basing capacity and force commitment in the region seem insufficient to support the level of economic and diplomatic engagement that appears to be Beijing’s new normal, so Washington should prepare for further expansion.
ONE BELT, ONE ROAD STRATEGY
68. No foreign aid should be sent to China, says development minister
Nick Gutteridge, The Telegraph, February 16, 2023
Andrew Mitchell was ‘surprised’ £50 million was spent in China and believes taxpayers’ money could be better used to help other countries.
Britain should not be sending any foreign aid cash to China, the development minister has insisted.
Andrew Mitchell said he was “surprised” to learn £50 million was spent there in 2021 and wants to put a stop to such payments.
He added taxpayers’ money could be better used to help other countries rather than the world’s second biggest economy.
Beijing has spent tens of billions on its space programme in recent years and has a defence budget more than four times the size of the UK’s.
“We shouldn’t be giving aid to China and we’re looking to make sure that aid is best spent,” Mr Mitchell told Sky News.
“There will have to be a very strong case indeed and it will have to be an open and public case if we’re to spend aid money in China.”
Asked whether limited foreign aid cash could be better spent in other countries, he replied: “That is my starting point, yes.”
Much of the money funded scholarships for Chinese students to come to the UK, as well as work by the British Council building cultural links.
‘Virtually impossible to defend’: Mr Mitchell said he wants to see development spending return to 0.7 per cent of GDP and “as far as I’m concerned, that can’t come soon enough”.
It was cut to 0.5pc back in 2021 to reflect the huge economic impact of the pandemic, in what the Government described as a “temporary measure”.
Rishi Sunak, then the Chancellor, set out two tests on the state of the nation’s finances which must be met before it returns to pre-Covid levels.
They are that “on a sustainable basis” the country is not borrowing for day-to-day spending and that debt as a proportion of national wealth is falling.
Mr Mitchell has previously described the use of foreign aid cash in China and India as “virtually impossible to defend”.
He told a hearing of MPs last year that such spending was doing “great damage to the reputation of the development budget”.
Official figures show that the UK sent a combined almost £150 million to the two countries in 2021.
John Glen, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, is chairing a “star chamber” investigation into where foreign aid cash is being spent.
COMMENT – It is a bit ridiculous that the United Kingdom, the sixth largest economy, still provides aid to the People’s Republic of China, the second largest economy, even as the PRC spends its own development aid and infrastructure lending in ways that undermine UK interests around the world… to say nothing of a PRC military budget that is four times the size of the United Kingdom’s.
What’s amazing to me is that this is still going on… here’s piece from TWO years ago highlighting the same issue: UK aid to superpower China hit a record £70 million in 2019, Deborah Haynes, SkyNews, April 28, 2021… and from almost three years ago: Why China - with its massive economy - receives £71m a year in UK foreign aid, Arion Mcnicoll, The Week, July 23, 2020
OPINION PIECES
69. Trudeau incapable of responding like an adult to Chinese election interference
National Post, February 25, 2023
The Trudeau government would have us believe it is a well-oiled, political powerhouse, full of bright, intelligent people who are more than capable of keeping this great country functioning as a shining democracy, a beacon to the world, and as a place to live, prosper and raise a family.
And yet there is more than a whiff of desperation around them as they react with incoherence and hostility to troubling questions about election tampering by China.
To concerns that China interfered in two elections, the answer from Liberals is: Donald Trump. To questions about how far that tampering went: Donald Trump. Fears that it might happen in the future: Donald Trump. What exactly was the danger? Can’t talk about that. Also, Donald Trump.
Painting the opposition as right-wing Trumpers who risk causing an insurrection for even talking about election tampering, is certainly a strategy, and one that has obviously been deliberately decided on by the Trudeau government. It might even fly for some dyed-in-the-wool Liberal partisans.
Most Canadians will see it as a diversionary and fearmongering tactic intended to draw the spotlight away from the true arena of controversy.
China, we now know, has interfered in elections in 2019 and 2021. Last week, the Globe and Mail reported that in 2021 China employed a sophisticated strategy to attempt to influence the election by having a Liberal minority returned and some Conservative MPs defeated. The source for the story was documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Defeated Conservative MP, Kenny Chiu previously outlined to National Post his suspicions that his riding was targeted by Chinese proxies.
The parliamentary procedure and house affairs committee is already investigating a Global News report that China interfered in the 2019 election by secretly funding 11 candidates, nine Liberals and two Conservatives. The committee is now expanding its investigation to include the 2021 election.
The overall result of both elections was very likely not affected by the tampering, and, to be clear, no one is saying that the outcomes were in any way illegitimate.
But the fact that China interfered in both votes needs to be openly and transparently addressed.
The prime minister has acknowledged some of this.
“This is an extraordinarily serious issue,” he said Wednesday, adding that China, as well as Russia, was attempting to “sow chaos” in our democracy.
But after that, Trudeau shifted into deflection mode.
He accused the opposition Conservatives of partisanship for highlighting the issue and alleged they were doing Beijing’s work by “sowing confusion and mistrust.”
Then came the demagoguery as Trudeau called forth the spectre of Trump and the possibility of an insurrection similar to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol building in Washington.
“Amplifying and giving reasons, partisan reasons, to mistrust the outcome of an election, mistrust the experts at Elections Canada, and in our security services, and our top public servants, who are saying that the election integrity held, that’s something that we have seen from elsewhere, is not a good path to go down for society or for democracy,” said Trudeau.
The prime minister spoke the day after Liberal MP Jennifer O’Connell was more direct at the parliamentary committee on procedure and house affairs.
“This is the same Trump-type tactics to question election results,” she said of Conservatives. “That is dangerous for Canadians to go down this road because, like I said, we have seen our neighbours to the south and what happens when you start demonizing democratic institutions and when you start undermining their legitimacy.”
And in case anyone wasn’t quite stirred by her rhetoric, she accused the Conservatives of “American-style politics.”
The prime minister and O’Connell are clear that there is a persistent and pervasive threat that has been “unsuccessful — so far,” but any attempt to clarify how penetrative the threats have been, or getting details on what they entailed, or seeking to ensure future attempts are thwarted and elections are fair and free, are now “American-style” politics.
Everyone agrees that the threat is real, the risk substantial, and the future dangerous. But Trudeau’s response is to demand silence, as if he were the chief librarian of Canada instead of its prime minister.
On Thursday, he said, “We are very concerned with the (Globe) leaks, particularly because there are so many inaccuracies in those leaks.”
The prime minister, of course, did not elaborate on what those “inaccuracies” might be.
Which sounds very similar to what he said in 2019 when the Globe first reported on the SNC-Lavalin allegation that the prime minister put pressure on Jody Wilson-Raybould, the attorney general and justice minister to interfere in a criminal case against the company.
“The allegations in the Globe story are false,” he said in 2019. As we now know, the ethics commissioner eventually found that Trudeau did indeed use his authority over Wilson-Raybould to try and pressure her on the case.
In a speech to the procedure and house affairs committee, MP O’Connell made much play of quoting from a 2019 report by the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP). But here is what the report actually concluded about foreign interference: “If it is not addressed in a comprehensive, whole-of-government approach, foreign interference will slowly erode the foundations of our fundamental institutions, including our system of democracy itself.”
A parliamentary report warns that our system of democracy is in danger, but the Trudeau government doesn’t want to talk about it because, well, Donald Trump apparently.
70. The Liberals play the Trump card on election interference, and lose
The Global and Mail, February 24, 2023
71. Met steun aan Oekraïne verdedigen we onze manier van leven [With support to Ukraine, we defend our way of life] – ORIGINAL IN DUTCH
Prime Minister Mark Rutte, NRC, February 2023
GOOGLE TRANSLATE – I therefore fail to see how this will be China's century, as is often said. The 21st century will also be the century of democracy and therefore the century of America.
72. Stand up to China, Mr. Trudeau
The Globe and Mail, February 21, 2023
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is awfully tough on suspected Chinese spy balloons. After the United States shot one down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, he authorized a similar fate for another flying in Canadian airspace a week later.
If only Mr. Trudeau were as quick to pull the trigger on Chinese interference in Canadian elections.
It was already known that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service briefed him last fall about efforts by China’s consulate in Toronto to meddle in the 2019 general election by targeting 11 candidates in the Greater Toronto Area.
But then last week came the bombshell that China deployed a sophisticated strategy – one that involved possible fraud – in the 2021 election in yet another effort to ensure an outcome favourable to its interests.
According to top-secret CSIS documents seen by The Globe and Mail, Beijing pulled the strings on an operation that had two aims: to ensure that a minority Liberal government was returned in 2021, and that certain Conservative candidates were defeated. (The Tories say Beijing’s efforts cost them up to nine seats.)
And yet, faced with this latest troubling intelligence, Mr. Trudeau is sticking to a line that he first used last fall in Question Period: Neither election was interfered with to a degree that changed their outcomes, and Canadians can rest assured that their democracy is secure.
73. Stand Up to China’s Bullying and Defend Taiwan
Representative Mike Gallagher, Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2023
My grandmother told me that “every bully is deep down a coward.” When President Dwight Eisenhower arrived in Taipei in 1960, the Chinese Communist Party, in a fit of rage, spent a week pounding the Taiwanese island of Kinmen with more than 85,000 rounds of artillery. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi touched down in Taipei last August, the party threw another tantrum. For days after her visit, sortie after sortie of fighter jets violated Taiwan’s airspace, warships cruised into Taiwan’s territorial waters, and bombs exploded around the island.
Every day we read about the party harassing dissidents in the U.S., disappearing tech executives such as Jack Ma, coercing American companies into ideological complicity. The party locks ethnic minority populations in concentration camps for possessing religious books or the wrong smartphone app. It welds its own citizens into their apartments for “public health.” Confident nations don’t act like this. The party’s rulers are defined by a fear of their own people and operate from a place of almost crippling paranoia.
I’m chairing the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party this Congress, and when we think about how to deter the Chinese Communist Party, it’s useful to think about how you deal with a bully—by getting your friends together and standing up.
We stand up by protecting Chinese-Americans from transnational repression—and by supporting Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers and minority groups suffering under the party’s repression. We stand up by rebuilding our military industrial base. We stand up by protecting our research institutions and companies from IP theft. We stand up by reclaiming control of strategic supply chains, including lifesaving pharmaceuticals.
And we stand up by aiding Taiwan in its self-defense. In our meeting, Taiwan’s Vice President William Lai used the analogy of a basketball game: One-on-one the Chinese Communist Party might win, but an American-led team of allies and partners fighting together can’t be beaten. Surging hard power to the Indo-Pacific before the shooting starts and clearing the nearly $20 billion backlog of Foreign Military Sales to Taiwan will give our friends confidence and our enemies pause.
We must also do a better job of countering the Communist Party’s malign influence operations in Taiwan, the U.S., and around the world. That means speaking the truth about the brutal, genocidal regime in Beijing.
We must also demonstrate the ability to make its worst fears come true. The Great Firewall exists because the party’s rulers are terrified of the people of China having access to the truth. The party employs millions of censors just to keep tabs on its population. We should develop the capabilities to rupture the Great Firewall and deploy them at a time and place of our choosing.
Repression is spreading outward all around the periphery of China—Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong. The darkness presses beyond China’s borders, slithering into multinational institutions, over the internet, throughout the global financial system. Against the darkness stands a candle that burns freely, fiercely, improbably in opposition: Taiwan.
We need to make sure that General Secretary Xi Jinping wakes up every morning and looks toward Taiwan, calculates the balance of power across the Taiwan Strait, calculates the risk to his party if the Chinese people were inundated with the truth, and says to himself: “Today is not the day.”
Mr. Gallagher, a Republican, represents Wisconsin’s Eighth Congressional District and is chairman of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party.
74. China Challenges Russia by Restoring Chinese Names of Cities on Their Border
Bohdan Nahaylo, Kyiv post, February 26, 2023
While proclaiming its support for Russia, is China capitalizing on Moscow’s weakness to stab it in the back?
Something very telling appears to be happening behind the scenes in Chinese-Russian relations. Clearly, they are not all that they seem and the implications for Russia should give grounds for concern.
“China’s Ministry of Natural Resources has just issued new regulations on map content, which require the addition of old Chinese names to the current Russian-pronounced geographical names of eight places along the Russian-Chinese border,” Radio France International in Chinese reported on Feb. 23.
The eight Russian place names, comprise six cities, including Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, one island and one mountain.
This led Akio Yaban, head of the Taipei branch of the Japanese newspaper Sankei Shimbun, to quip, “Are you going to recover the lost land?”, RFI added.
The Asia Times noted on Feb. 25 that it is ironic that while releasing a peace plan this week “which conspicuously fails to say clearly whether Moscow should with draw its troops” from Ukraine’s Donbas region and Crimea,” China “this very month, made a politically sensitive change in its official word view – a change that affects Russia.”
It elaborates that “Under Beijing’s new directive, Vladivostok once again is called Haishenwai (meaning Sea Cucumber Bay) while Sakhalin Island is called Kuyedao. The Stanovoy Range is back to being called the Outer Xing’an Range in Chinese.”
“China lost large expanses of land in its northern region due to the invasion of Russian,” Asia Times explains, and now Beijing has directed a return to the use of Chinese names for them. It also notes that despite Beijing seemingly wanting to strengthen its ties with Russia, it has permitted Chinese columnists to publish articles from time to time about the vast territories lost to foreign powers, thereby in effect reminding “Chinese people of their wish to recover the lost territory.”
COMMENT – Vladivostok = Haishenwai
75. Putin Scraps Arms Treaty, China and Russia Threaten to Use Nukes
Gordon Chang, Newsweek, February 22, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday announced Russia's suspension of its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
New START, as the landmark agreement is known, is the only remaining arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. The pact generally limits the U.S. and Russia to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads each.
"With today's decision on New START, the whole arms control architecture has been dismantled," said Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary general, immediately after Putin's announcement, made in an address to Russian lawmakers.
The Russian leader did not formally withdraw from the pact. He did, however, threaten to resume testing nuclear weapons.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that "we remain ready to talk about strategic arms limitations at any time with Russia, irrespective of anything else going on in the world or in our relationship."
What's there to talk about? The treaty is already a dead letter.
Russia was openly violating its inspection provisions. Moscow had not allowed the resumption of 18 annual on-site inspections, which were "temporarily" suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, Russia "unilaterally postponed" meetings of a commission monitoring compliance. On January 31, the State Department confirmed that Russia was not adhering to New START.
There's no point talking with Putin about arms control. For instance, China is not a party to New START and has rebuffed all American attempts to discuss arms control or disclose the number of its warheads. As the Hudson Institute's Peter Huessy told Newsweek, "No deal to limit China's arsenal is possible if the size of that arsenal is unknown."
Moreover, Beijing and Moscow are forming a quasi-alliance. They issued a 5,300-word joint statement on February 4 of last year, proclaiming their "no limits" partnership, and the pair regularly conducts joint military exercises. American war planners, therefore, have to assume that China and Russia will gang up on the U.S. These two militant powers could soon have a combined nuke arsenal twice the size of America's.
Although arms control advocates argue that countries need only a few hundred warheads to deter attacks, a great disparity in numbers could invite nuclear adventurism. Washington, in short, should not extend New START without China joining the pact.
Moreover, New START suffers from another major flaw: It does not include Russia's large arsenal of tactical nukes. Huessy says that without inclusion of these weapons, a new New START would be "a very bad deal."
What should be done? Connor Murray, a scholar at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, argued at the beginning of this month for negotiations to extend the pact—it is set to expire February 5, 2026—by inking a "political agreement" not requiring Senate approval.
76. China’s Ukraine Peace Gambit: Beijing offers itself as a broker even as it may send arms to Russia.
Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2023
China is elbowing its way into the Ukraine war on the side of Russia, and it isn’t making more friends in the bargain. The latest example is the 12-point peace plan China floated on Friday that would help Vladimir Putin consolidate his gains in Ukraine.
Most of Beijing’s 12 points are too vague to mean anything—for instance, the second item warns against a “Cold War mentality.” But two points in the plan are revealing about Beijing’s concerns and the weakness of its Russia strategy.
One is a criticism of “unilateral sanctions,” meaning sanctions imposed on Russia by Western allies without approval of the United Nations Security Council. Mr. Xi has been alarmed to discover that the West is able and willing to unite behind sanctions against Russia after the Ukraine invasion—a bad omen for China if Mr. Xi invades Taiwan.
China also says it “stands ready to provide assistance and play a constructive role” in Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. Beijing may hope it can cash in on Ukraine’s immense needs after the war. But Mr. Xi’s friendship with Mr. Putin has encouraged greater skepticism across the West about commercial ties to China.
Meanwhile, Western officials are warning that China may be preparing to send artillery and armed drones to help Russia. This would be a hostile act that would result in further economic decoupling between China and the West.
The diplomatic stakes for Mr. Xi came to the fore in a speech by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock at the U.N. Thursday. “We do have a peace plan right here in front of us,” she said. “It’s called the Charter of the United Nations. Its principles, which apply to every state, are very simple: Sovereign equality. Territorial integrity. And the non-use of force.” This was a pointed jab at the plan Beijing was on the verge of releasing. It’s all the more notable coming from a senior German official after so many years when Berlin was wary of offending Beijing.
Mr. Xi may still conclude he can’t afford to let his Russian ally lose in Ukraine. He’s more likely to do so if he senses that Western support for Ukraine is faltering. Beijing no doubt understands all this. American politicians who believe Ukraine is a distraction from the strategic competition with China rather than part of that competition might want to clue in, too.
77. Ronald Reagan’s Singular Grand Strategy
Dan Blumenthal, National Review, February 21, 2023
Seeing the Soviet Union as weak and seeking its negotiated surrender, Reagan broke away from both hawks and doves.
Ronald Reagan’s statesmanship was far more complex and contradictory than is often portrayed by both his supporters and his detractors. On the one hand, he pushed for a U.S. rearmament program, including the modernization of the U.S. nuclear “triad” of bombers, nuclear submarines, and survivable ballistic and cruise missiles. On the other hand, he abhorred nuclear weapons and sought real arms-control agreements that would abolish them. He negotiated one of the most successful nuclear-reduction treaties during the Cold War.
Reagan attacked Jimmy Carter for undermining allies in the name of human rights, but he also jettisoned Cold War allies such as Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos to push Manila toward democracy. Though a staunch anti-communist, Reagan embraced the Communist Chinese, whom he saw both as an ally against the Soviet Union and as a country committed to capitalist reform. Though committed to free markets and free trade, Reagan supported government intervention to guard against high-tech competition from Japan.
University of Texas scholar William Inboden makes sense of these contradictions in his masterful account of Reagan’s diplomatic strategy: The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. According to Inboden, Reagan’s grand strategic objective was the “negotiated surrender” of the Soviet Union. This artful term helps explain Reagan’s sometimes internally inconsistent policies. A onetime Democrat, Reagan was inspired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and sought the equivalent of the unconditional surrender of his Soviet adversary. However, he wanted to achieve this without going to war. Reagan’s strategy was founded on a unique insight for cold warriors like himself: What appeared to be overwhelming Soviet military, political, and economic power was built upon weak foundations that could collapse. In developing a grand strategy grounded in this perspective, he broke away from both hawks and doves. Inboden argues that Reagan was not just a peacemaker but an iconoclast. His strategy called for negotiation when necessary. His erstwhile hawkish allies believed that any compromise with Moscow would only encourage more aggression. But the goal of “surrender” required both a massive military buildup and serious risk-taking to press the Soviet system. Doves believed this approach would lead to World War III.
78. China, Russia and the U.S. ‘Red Line’ on Ukraine
Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2023
What will Biden do if Beijing sends military aid to Moscow?
President Biden’s visit to Kyiv on Monday was an important symbolic display of American support for Ukraine, and credit to him for traveling into a war zone. But the bigger Ukraine news in recent days may be the public alarms coming from U.S. officials that China could soon provide Russia with military aid.
“The concern that we have now is, based on information we have, that they’re considering providing lethal support,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CBS News on Sunday. “And we’ve made very clear to them that that would cause a serious problem for us and in our relationship.” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield went further on CNN, saying Chinese military aid “would be a red line.”
The use of “red line” as a diplomatic ultimatum has a degraded reputation after President Obama declared one to deter chemical-weapons attacks in Syria but then failed to enforce it when those weapons were used. Is the Biden Administration more serious about enforcement now, and what would that mean?
The concern is heightened after what appears to have been a contentious meeting between Mr. Blinken and China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference over the weekend. The U.S. pursued China for the meeting, hoping to reset relations after the spy balloon episode.
Mr. Wang finally granted the meeting, but China boasted in a public readout afterward that the U.S. had sought the bilateral session. The implication of the U.S. as supplicant was clear. Mr. Blinken said afterward that China had offered no apology for sending the balloon over U.S. airspace and military sites.
Mr. Wang reinforced the point in his public remarks in Munich, chastising the U.S. for what he called an “absurd and hysterical” response to the balloon. He also blamed the U.S. for being an obstacle to peace in Ukraine. Mr. Wang was heading to Moscow after Munich even as Mr. Biden was going to Kyiv.
The U.S. says China has provided Russia with technical and economic support for the war, but so far not weapons. Mr. Blinken’s alarm about the prospect is warranted because it would exacerbate the conflict, add to the bloodshed, and make it harder for Ukraine to recapture occupied territory. It would also extend the war, further depleting the West’s weapons stockpiles that are already stretched after a year of backing Ukraine.
To put it more bluntly, arming Russia would be a new and explicit demonstration of China’s hostile intentions toward the U.S. and the West. It would certainly erase Beijing’s seeming desire since the Biden meeting with President Xi Jinping in Bali late last year to put U.S.-China relations on a better course. It would also require a firm U.S. response, which would have to include further economic decoupling.
But Mr. Xi and his war hawks may be willing to take that risk if they want to prevent a Russian defeat in Ukraine. China may want to bleed the West of its weapons and see if Russia can outlast political support in Washington and European capitals for Ukraine. This would be foolish, and bad for China and the world, but the possibility is one more urgent reason for Members of both parties in Congress to get serious about rebuilding U.S. defenses.
79. China’s hunger for our data should set alarm bells ringing
Charles Parton, Times of London, February 20, 2023
A year ago, Europe woke up to a disturbing truth. Its dependency on Russian energy left it dangerously vulnerable to a hostile power. That lesson has not sunk in. Today we continue to sleepwalk into a more dangerous dependency: on Chinese cellular internet-of-things modules (CIMs).
Try asking a minister or civil servant if they know what a CIM is. I have yet to meet one that does. Yet these small components are essential to operations in industry, logistics, defence, security, payment, energy, cars, you name it. And will become more so. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knows this. That is why it is subsidising and pushing three Chinese companies, Quectel, Fibocom and China Mobile — hardly household names, and they want to keep it that way — towards a monopoly of supply. They already have over half of the global market.
Imagine if they achieve a total triopoly of supply. Connected to the internet, CIMs control processes but also send and receive data in order to improve those processes. So not only could the CCP receive buckets of data from, for example, our police body cameras or the prime minister’s car, they could also bring our grid to a standstill by turning off smart meters, disable alarm systems on military bases, prevent aircraft maintenance and thereby flights, or gum up traffic in London by taking down the traffic light system.
80. What China Has Learned from the Ukraine War
Evan A. Feigenbaum and Adam Szubin, Foreign Affairs, February 14, 2023
Even Great Powers Aren’t Safe from Economic Warfare—If the U.S.-Led Order Sticks Together.
81. Don't Play Partisan Games with China Policy
Michael Sobolik and Joshua Eisenman, Newsweek, February 22, 2023
It is rare in American politics for citizens of different viewpoints to focus on the same thing at the same time. Our partisan media ecosystem makes it easy for us to remain safely within our personally curated information bubble—having our preexisting biases and perceptions repeatedly reaffirmed.
Sometimes, however, something happens that calls us all to the table. This time, it was China's high-altitude surveillance balloon, which entered U.S. airspace on January 28 and flew over at least nine states before it was shot down off the South Carolina coast on February 4.
Americans of all political stripes oppose foreign espionage, and over the last five years have come to increasingly dislike and distrust Beijing. In 2017, according to Pew Research, Americans were roughly split in their views of China; by 2022, 82 percent of Americans held an "unfavorable" view of the country and only 16 percent had a "favorable" view—and that was before the balloon arrived.