No Way Out

Conspiracy theories and China's economic cul-de-sac

Friends,

Recently, I rewatched the 1987 thriller, No Way Out, starring Kevin Costner, Sean Young, and Gene Hackman (RIP).

Produced near the end of the First Cold War, the movie centers around a love triangle, a politician behaving badly, and what appears to be a McCarthyite witch-hunt that is manufactured to protect the same politician at the pinnacle of power in Washington.

I bring that movie up because the plot centers on what the audience is led to believe is a conspiracy theory that the villain, and his minions, employ to cover-up his own wrongdoing.

Until, of course, the last five minutes of the movie, when the audience pieces things together and comes to an entirely new conclusion about the story.

I’ll avoid any further spoilers for those who haven’t watched it or who forgot the details, it is worth rewatching and available to rent on Apple TV.

In some ways we are watching this plot twist unfold with our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the first few weeks of the pandemic, it seemed plausible that a novel coronavirus could have emerged from the facility in Wuhan that studied and experimented on… wait for it… novel coronaviruses.

But by early March 2020, with the start of an incredibly consequential presidential election cycle, all of that was dismissed as a manufactured conspiracy theory and neo-McCarthyism. The acceptable story for many and reinforced by the ‘best and the brightest’ was that President Trump, and his minions, invented a conspiracy theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan to distract the public from the Administration’s failures in responding to the pandemic.

That movie reminds us, that sometimes, two things can be true at the same time: politicians can be culpable for their actions/inactions AND so-called conspiracy theories, that many dismiss as manufactured redirection for political benefit, can also be true.

I congratulate the New York Times for publishing “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives” last Sunday (Article #69 below).

While it was written by one of their opinion columnists, given the obvious role the Times Editorial Board played in suppressing honest discussion of a lab leak in 2020, I would have preferred to see the paper’s Editorial Board publish it under its own byline.

But this was an important first step in coming to grips with what happened five years ago, an event I will call ‘The Great Misleading.’

The columnist, Zeynep Tufekci, correctly points out a few important implications of ‘The Great Misleading’: loss of faith in public health officials, loss of faith in scientific expertise, and an inability to prepare correctly for future pandemics that could arise from scientific experimentation and lab leaks.

She is spot-on and these are all things we need to repair.

But the columnist seems to maintain a blind spot, unable to wrestle with another important implication of suppressing debate over a lab leak in Wuhan.

While ‘The Great Misleading’ will have lasting effects on the scientific community and its relationship with the public, there are profound political implications of this as well.

Just like the end of No Way Out, where the audience is jarred into thinking about Kevin Costner’s character in a whole new way as the credits roll, we are left to think about the political debates of the spring, summer, and fall of 2020 under these new revelations, as well as the individuals that many viewed as heroes at the time.

We are left to wonder how American voters might have interpreted the events of that fateful year had they not been subjected to ‘The Great Misleading.’

In some ways this was a “Reverse McCarthy” where large swaths of Americans (and Europeans and Canadians) were convinced that the Chinese Communist Party could NOT be responsible for something terrible because they believed that it was a conspiracy theory manufactured to protect an American President that they viewed as a villain.

The more time I spend thinking about domestic and geopolitical affairs, the more I’m convinced that fiction provides some of the greatest lessons to us. If that sounds like an endorsement to watch more movies and read more books… well there are worse things you could do with your time.

***

Which brings me to another way to interpret the title, No Way Out.

Similar to the February report from the OECD that I highlighted last week (How Governments Back the Largest Manufacturing Firms), Rhodium Group issued a report on St. Patrick’s Day about the broad range of “state-support” the Chinese Communist Party provides to the Chinese economy and the distorting effects that has inside the PRC and on the rest of the world.

I’m going to cover some of their main points and pull in references from others, but I encourage you to go to the Rhodium website yourselves and download the 56-page report, titled Far From Normal: An Augmented Assessment of China’s State Support. IMO, the team did a great job explaining some complex topics.

The team makes a persuasive argument that while the PRC of the 1990s and 2000s made some impressive strides towards marketization and fulfilling its obligations under the World Trade Organization (WTO), those efforts have stalled.

Fifteen years of FAI-driven growth (Fixed Asset Investment) and industrial policy has created massive imbalances in the Chinese economy, and it is spilling over into the global economy, distorting trade and undermining the prosperity of other economies around the world. Chinese economists and Party cadres understand this is happening (even if they refuse to admit it publicly), but the nation’s leadership prefers to export the harms they are causing, rather than to grapple with difficult domestic economic and political reforms.

The Rhodium authors assert that:

“Beijing does not explicitly challenge the WTO and, in fact, officially positions itself as a defender of the multilateral trade system. However, its market distortions are more systemic, more widespread, and—because it accounts for a third of global manufacturing—more consequential than those of any other major economy.”

How do I say this politely… the phrase “does not explicitly challenge” carries a lot of weight in that passage, so much so that its veracity is stretched pretty far. While technically correct that Beijing positions itself as a “defender of the multilateral trade system,” it is also correct to say that the PRC has absolutely zero regard for the spirit of the rules embodied by the WTO.

Rules are things that constrain others, NOT the Chinese Communist Party.

The Party explicitly rejects western notions of constitutionalism, universal values, the separation of powers, the independence of a judiciary, the freedom of the press, and other such notions that serve as the foundation of what any reasonable person would expect of a “rules-based trading system.”

The reason the PRC positions itself as a defender of the WTO is because the Party judges that it can manipulate the WTO’s procedures to its benefit, while effectively maintaining its own anti-liberal, state-supported/state-directed economy.

If the Party believes that it is not constrained by any normative system domestically, why would the Party accept constraints in the international arena, especially when that international system lacks enforcement mechanisms.

I suspect the authors agree with me on this, as the remaining 50 pages of their report goes on to catalogue, in detail and with some great charts, how Beijing DOES challenge the WTO in ways that are far more significant than any other country. And they argue that Beijing’s actions risk fracturing the entire rules-based trading system.

“Ultimately, however, the long-term relevance of the rules-based global trading system depends on its ability to address the full spectrum of trade and market distortions that undermine fair competition. Failing to do so risks a fragmentation of the global economic order, with the proliferation of mini-lateral frameworks, sectoral trade agreements, and an erosion of multilateral norms. Over time, this could weaken the guardrails that prevent national security or environmental justifications from overtaking normal trading relations, further accelerating the shift toward a more fragmented, unpredictable, and politicized trade environment.”

Obviously, if Beijing really supported the WTO, those threats wouldn’t exist.

This section from their Conclusion is worth reading:

“China’s distortive industrial policies and practices are already affecting market outcomes in China and abroad. In China, they are creating a growing disconnect between supply and demand at the macro level, and intense competition and cutthroat price wars in a range of sectors at the micro level. Abroad, they have ballooned China’s global export shares in many sectors over the past decade, especially since the pandemic. The combination of weak domestic demand and expanding industrial capacity increased China’s manufacturing trade surplus by $775 billion between 2019 and 2023—more than Belgium's entire GDP, or three times that of Greece. In 2024, China’s trade surplus reached a record high, approaching $1 trillion. Excess production capacity drove a surge in export volumes while pushing prices downward—with monthly year-on-year export quantity growth averaging 14%, significantly outpacing the 7% growth in export value.

The effect of these policies is most pronounced on advanced economies. The EU, the US, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan collectively lost 2.7 percentage points of global export market share between 2019 and 2022, while China gained 2.8 percentage points. But China’s policies and practices are also affecting emerging markets in ways likely to prove deleterious to their long-term economic welfare, competitiveness, and security.

Despite this, Beijing is not changing course, but explicitly doubling down. The Party’s twice-a-decade Third Plenum held in July 2024 pledged to maintain the supply-side expansion of high-tech industries, export manufacturing, and other favored sectors. While the December 2024 Central Economic Work Conference signaled a shift in rhetoric—placing household consumption at the forefront and pledging fiscal stimulus and trade-in subsidy programs—there has been no fundamental change in China’s industrial policy. Crucially, there was no discussion of deeper reforms to China’s financial system, the core driver of the distortions and spillovers affecting global markets.”

If the PRC is “explicitly doubling down” on state-support and state-control, how should other governments respond?

I’d like to say that strengthening the “rules-based trading order” and “working with allies” is the right solution, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves about how well that has worked so far. The “rules-based trading order” under the WTO has NOT been able to compel Beijing’s compliance (as the Rhodium report does so well to explain) and there is little reason to believe that will change.

So, what does it all mean?

I suspect that what the authors fear *might* happen “over time,” is already here. We are witnessing the fragmentation of the global economic order. Those that adjust to the new reality will gain advantages, those who cling to multilateral norms and guardrails that no longer exist will be disadvantaged.

This doesn’t mean the collapse of global trade, it just means that trade will be adjudicated based on power and bilateral negotiations, not by trade lawyers on the Rue de Lausanne overlooking Lake Geneva.

Collecting detailed evidence for CVD (Countervailing Duties) cases under the rules the WTO’s SCM (Subsidies and Countervailing Measures) Agreement will be much less important. Countries will act preemptively to block harms from the PRC that they have every reason to believe will happen in the future, rather than acting after the harm has taken place.

This isn’t the kind of international system many of us expected, but it is something that democracies can adjust to and build more circumspect multilateral agreements around.

Ultimately, I think this bodes ill for the PRC and the Chinese people because they will be the real losers.

This reversion to state-support and state-control carries with it some serious pathologies.

If the Chinese Communist Party is filled entirely with economic and technological geniuses who can accurately predict what will and won’t succeed, and has individuals with the moral courage to speak truth to power, then this extensive state support and state direction *could* result in economic and technological miracles. [NOTE: This is what Xi Jinping is betting on]

But if the Chinese Communist Party is filled with individuals of only moderate intellect, enmeshed within what sociologist Erving Goffman described as a “total institution,” then the likelihood that the state will make bad bets AND be unable to correct seems nearly certain.

I’ll let you contemplate which is more likely.

Some will interpret that I’m saying that the PRC isn’t a threat, that its economic problems will make it enfeebled.

That is not my argument at all… I’m just saying I wouldn’t “invest” in them… and it appears that I’m not alone in that assessment anymore.

A pretty damning chart from Bloomberg.

The Chinese Communist Party has steered the PRC and the Chinese people off the road to prosperity and into the ditch of despair and stagnation. Xi and his cheerleaders will try to hide this from the world and they will ultimately fail.

As this reality sets in, the Chinese people will have a choice:

• blame others for their predicament and lash out

OR

• hold their leaders in the Chinese Communist Party accountable and create political change

No one else can make these decisions for the Chinese people, they possess the agency for their own future.

***

“I used them on the Houthis again”

I’d rather not recycle a meme I used a few months ago (Behold, the Typhon! Ode to the humble HEMTT, September 15, 2024), but old habits die hard (like obsessing about the Middle East).

As you may have heard, on Friday Secretary of Defense Hegseth ordered the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) and the remainder of her carrier strike group to depart from the Indo-Pacific Area of Operations to join the USS Harry S. Turman (CVN 75) and her carrier strike group in the Northern Red Sea.

Apparently, everyone’s favorite fifth-rate band of misfits, the Houthis, are lobbing missiles and drones at ships again.

From Season 3 of The Walking Dead, episode 4, “Killer Within”… the Carl! Meme.

Remind me again, what critical trade flows traverse this armpit region? And who are the primary beneficiaries of that trade? I’m pretty sure American goods aren’t on those ships, and it is NOT flowing between U.S. ports on either end.

Maybe looking at a map would help answer those questions:

From report by the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) titled “Navigating Troubled Waters Impact to Global Trade of Disruption of Shipping Routes in the Red Sea, Black Sea and Panama Canal” (February 2024). Blue, green, yellow, and red boxes added by me.

If a group of aliens arrived in orbit around earth, they would assume that the countries in the green and red boxes would be most impacted by disruptions in the yellow box. They would probably assume those countries would do something about it.

They would also suspect that the country in the blue box is barely impacted by disruptions in the yellow box.

They would likely be confused to learn that the country in the blue box was moving its military forces from the red box to the yellow box to protect trade flows that primarily concern the green and red boxes.

They might be even more confused when they looked closer to see that the ships from the red box weren’t being targeted for attack in the yellow box, only those ships carrying the vital goods of the countries in the green box (why is this so?, they might ask themselves).

What might those aliens conclude from all this?

Probably that the countries in the green box must be some sort of dependencies of the country in the blue box.

I just hope there is a grand plan to rapidly refill our munitions stockpiles.

***

Quick update from last week… apparently Senator Steve Daines’ (R-MT) lobbying worked and he got himself designated as a “special envoy” as he met with PRC Vice Premier He Lifeng in Beijing on Saturday according to PRC state media, Xinhua.

I can’t quite tell what they are standing in front of.

Is it a massive needle-point canvas spread across a gigantic serving platter?

Perhaps He Lifeng does needle-point in his spare time and wanted Senator Daines to admire his handiwork.

Or maybe it’s a needle-point of a Montana landscape that Daines did and brought as a gift. Daines strikes me as the kind of guy who does needle-point… and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

***

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Thanks for reading!

Matt

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MUST READ

1. A river ‘died’ overnight in Zambia after an acidic waste spill at a Chinese-owned mine
   Richard Kille and Jacob Zimba, Associated Press, March 14, 2024

Authorities and environmentalists in Zambia fear the long-term impact of an acid spill at a Chinese-owned mine that contaminated a major river and could potentially affect millions of people after signs of pollution were detected at least 100 kilometers (60 miles) downstream.

The spill happened on Feb. 18 when a tailings dam that holds acidic waste from a copper mine collapsed, according to investigators from the Engineering Institution of Zambia.

The collapse allowed some 50 million liters of waste containing concentrated acid, dissolved solids and heavy metals to flow into a stream that links to the Kafue River, Zambia’s most important waterway, the engineering institution said.

“It is an environmental disaster really of catastrophic consequences,” said Chilekwa Mumba, an environmental activist who works in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province.

China is the dominant player in copper mining in Zambia, a southern African nation which is among the world’s top 10 producers of copper, a key component in smartphones and other technology.

Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema called for help from experts and said the leak is a crisis that threatens people and wildlife along the Kafue, which runs for more than 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) through the heart of Zambia.

Authorities are still investigating the extent of the environmental damage.

A river died overnight

An Associated Press reporter visited parts of the Kafue River, where dead fish could be seen washing up on the banks about 100 kilometers (60 miles) downstream from the mine run by Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, which is majority owned by the state-run China Nonferrous Metals Industry Group.

The Ministry of Water Development and Sanitation said the “devastating consequences” also included the destruction of crops along the river’s banks. Authorities are concerned that ground water will be contaminated as the mining waste seeps into the earth or is carried to other areas.

“Prior to the 18th of February this was a vibrant and alive river,” said Sean Cornelius, who lives near the Kafue and said fish died and birdlife near him disappeared almost immediately. “Now everything is dead, it’s like a totally dead river. Unbelievable. Overnight, this river died.”

About 60% of Zambia’s 20 million people live in the Kafue River basin and depend on it in some way as a source of fishing, irrigation for agriculture and water for industry. The river supplies drinking water to about five million people, including in the capital, Lusaka.

The acid leak at the mine caused a complete shutdown of the water supply to the nearby city of Kitwe, home to an estimated 700,000 people.

Attempts to roll back the damage

The Zambian government has deployed the air force to drop hundreds of tons of lime into the river in an attempt to counteract the acid and roll back the damage. Speed boats have also been used to ride up and down the river, applying lime.

Government spokesperson Cornelius Mweetwa said the situation was very serious and Sino-Metals Leach Zambia would bear the costs of the cleanup operation.

Zhang Peiwen, the chairman of Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, met with government ministers this week and apologized for the acid spill, according to a transcript of his speech at the meeting released by his company.

“This disaster has rung a big alarm for Sino-Metals Leach and the mining industry,” he said. He said it “will go all out to restore the affected environment as quickly as possible.”

Discontent with Chinese presence

The environmental impact of China’s large mining interests in mineral-rich parts of Africa, which include Zambia’s neighbors Congo and Zimbabwe, has often been criticized, even as the minerals are crucial to the countries’ economies.

Chinese-owned copper mines have been accused of ignoring safety, labor and other regulations in Zambia as they strive to control its supply of the critical mineral, leading to some discontent with their presence. Zambia is also burdened with more than $4 billion in debt to China and had to restructure some of its loans from China and other nations after defaulting on repayments in 2020.

A smaller acid waste leak from another Chinese-owned mine in Zambia’s copper belt was discovered days after the Sino-Metals accident, and authorities have accused the smaller mine of attempting to hide it.

Local police said a mine worker died at that second mine after falling into acid and alleged that the mine continued to operate after being instructed to stop its operations by authorities. Two Chinese mine managers have been arrested, police said.

Both mines have now halted their operations after orders from Zambian authorities, while many Zambians are angry.

“It really just brings out the negligence that some investors actually have when it comes to environmental protection,” said Mweene Himwinga, an environmental engineer who attended the meeting involving Zhang, government ministers, and others. “They don’t seem to have any concern at all, any regard at all. And I think it’s really worrying because at the end of the day, we as Zambian people, (it’s) the only land we have.”

COMMENT – I suspect that there is very little reporting on this in Chinese media outlets.

2. I have a price on my head. I hope my neighbours won’t try to cash in

Kevin Yam, The Age, March 20, 2025

This week, letters arrived at homes in Melbourne offering a $200,000 bounty on my head.

I’m an Australian citizen who worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong for 20 years before returning to Australia in 2022. The bounty was placed by the Hong Kong government for my advocacy for Hong Kong democracy, which the letters characterise as threats to China’s “national security”.

The anonymous letters, sent from Hong Kong, landed in the mailboxes of residents of a quiet Melbourne suburb. “Kevin is wanted on suspicion of a range of national security-related offences.

“A reward of one million Hong Kong dollars [$200,000] is being offered by the Hong Kong police to any member of the public who can provide information on this wanted person and the related crime or take him to Hong Kong or Australia Metropolitan Police.”

In short, the letters call for me to be kidnapped.

3. Melbourne residents receive letter offering $200k for information on Hong Kong pro-democracy activist

Henry Belot, The Guardian, March 17, 2025

The anonymous ‘wanted’ letter contained a photograph of Kevin Yam, a lawyer who has criticised the crackdown on dissent in the territory.

A small number of Melbourne residents have received anonymous letters purporting to offer a police bounty of $203,000 if they inform on Kevin Yam, an Australian citizen and pro-democracy activist wanted for alleged national security crimes in Hong Kong, linking him to two nearby locations.

A spokesperson for the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, told Guardian Australia the letter was “deeply worrying” and that the matter would be raised directly with officials from China and Hong Kong.

The anonymous letter – mailed from Hong Kong and delivered to some Melbourne homes on Friday – contained a photograph of Yam with a headline alleging he was a “wanted person”. It then detailed a range of alleged “national security related offences” and offered HK$1m (A$203,000) from the Hong Kong police to anyone who provided information on his whereabouts or took him to Hong Kong or Australian police.

Yam is a lawyer who lived in Hong Kong for 20 years before returning to Australia in 2022. He is one of eight overseas-based activists, the subject of Hong Kong police arrest warrants, accused in July 2023 of breaching its controversial national security law that grants authorities sweeping extraterritorial powers to prosecute acts or comments made anywhere in the world that it deems criminal.

Yam has criticised the crackdown on dissent and erosion of judicial independence in the Chinese-controlled city and has been accused of encouraging foreign governments to impose sanctions against members of the judiciary, prosecutors and government officials.

It is not known who sent the letter but its language matches a public appeals notice published on the Hong Kong police force’s official website. A UK phone number included at the bottom of the letter has also been linked to the Hong Kong police force, which was contacted for comment.

From The Guardian.

COMMENT – Thugs

4. Fake pamphlets accusing former Hong Kong legislator of being a pro-Israel lawyer sent to Adelaide mosques

Henry Belot, The Guardian, March 17, 2025

Lawyer Ted Hui says leaflet’s claims are ‘totally incorrect’ as Australian authorities raise concerns with China.

Fake pamphlets falsely accusing a former Hong Kong politician and Australian resident, Ted Hui, of being an pro-Israel lawyer willing to “wage war” against Islamic terrorism were allegedly mailed to mosques in Adelaide in an apparent attempt to intimidate him and undermine social cohesion.

The pamphlets, which carry images of Hui and the name and contact details of his Adelaide law firm, have alarmed the Australian government, which will raise the matter with Chinese officials. It is not known who sent the pamphlets.

Hui is a former pro-democracy legislator who fled to Australia via Europe in 2019. In 2022 he was convicted in absentia for his role in pro-democracy protests during 2019 and sentenced to three and a half years in jail.

Hong Kong authorities have accused Hui of “foreign collusion” in social media posts seeking international support for Hong Kong under its national security law.

Hui said he had been contacted by representatives from unnamed government departments about the false pamphlets and had been assured the matter was being taken seriously.

The pamphlet falsely quotes Hui as saying “I am a pro-Jewish man and siding with Israel to wage war against those Islamic terrorism [sic]”. It also states that Hui can “provide assistance to local Jews”.

“Those pamphlets were sent to a few mosques in Adelaide,” Hui told Guardian Australia. “I understand it is not large scale, they were only sent to a few mosques.”

Hui said the government representative he had spoken to said the pamphlet had been sent from Macau, a special administrative region of China.

“They are trying to make trouble for me,” Hui said. “It can be quite terrifying, at the beginning, knowing that they know where I work.”

Hui said the pamphlet’s claims were “totally incorrect”.

From The Guardian.

COMMENT – One wonders what the community of Chinese-Australians is doing about these attacks. Or have they been effectively cowed into silence by the Chinese Communist Party which appears willing to demonize and attack anyone perceived as their opponents.

5. Inside the Chinese Region That Has Become a No-Go for Western Companies
   Yoko Kubota, Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2024

Projects are dead and surveillance is omnipresent in Xinjiang, which once lured Western companies such as Volkswagen.

About a decade ago, some Western companies answered Beijing’s calls to invest in Xinjiang, an underdeveloped region in the country’s remote west. Some were drawn by the natural resources there. Others eyed the political points they could score with China.

Today, many of those projects are dead or have been sold off. A visit by a Wall Street Journal reporter earlier this year to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, found that the site of German carmaker Volkswagen—which was especially eager to invest in the region a little over a decade ago—sits lifeless. The factory, in Urumqi’s Toutunhe economic development zone, was recently sold. The carmaker and its joint venture partner SAIC Motor’s names have been scraped from the gate, leaving a blurry mark.

As the reporter approached the site and turned onto an empty side street, a white car trailed her movements—surveillance that continued throughout her trip in Urumqi.

The demise of what was the most prominent Western project there shows how toxic association with Xinjiang is for Western companies, and how those companies’ ambitions in China can collide with political and geopolitical realities. The investments into relatively minor projects in a remote area ended up morphing into a yearslong international headache.

Over the years, Xinjiang, home to millions of Turkic-speaking Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities, has become synonymous to some in the West with Beijing’s ruthless clampdown on ethnic minorities. The Chinese government has targeted the minorities in Xinjiang with mass-detention internment camps and omnipresent surveillance as part of a forcible assimilation campaign. China portrays the campaign as an effort to fight religious extremism and terrorists.

Since 2022, a U.S. law called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act—supported by Secretary of State Marco Rubio while he was a senator—has virtually banned imports from Xinjiang. In 2020, Beijing barred Rubio from entering China, partly in response to his criticism of the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

From clothing companies to automakers, businesses have shunned Xinjiang.

“Xinjiang has not only become a place not to invest, but even bidding on projects there or otherwise selling into the market there has become off limits,” said William Zarit, a senior counselor at business consulting firm Cohen Group and a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.

From Wall Street Journal, translation by me via Google Translate.

COMMENT – The Party will continue to wipe out Uyghur culture.

6. PLA Factions and the Erosion of Xi’s Power Over the Military
   Brandon Tran, Gerui Zhang, Jamestown Foundations, March 15, 2024

Executive Summary:

• Two waves of recent purges in the People’s Liberation Army have focused on Xi Jinping’s two major bases of support, the Shaanxi Gang and the Fujian Clique, likely eroding his power over the military.

• A series of articles in the PLA Daily in late 2024 written by people aligned with Central Military Commission Vice Chair Zhang Youxia advocate for collective leadership and more internal democratic decision-making, in a rebuke to Xi’s call for centralized and unified leadership.

• Xi likely does not face any genuine rival, but internal power struggles nevertheless remain fierce.

A year-long anti-corruption campaign has purged major senior personnel from the ranks of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). While graft is endemic to the Chinese military, purges in Leninist regimes also serve a political purpose. Fierce internal power struggles are another feature of such regimes, with control over the military seen as vital to consolidating power. In the Chinese military system, Xi Jinping is not the only person who has power over personnel. Recently, some observers have suggested that his vice chair on the Central Military Commission (CMC), Zhang Youxia, may have ordered recent purges in the PLA Navy. If this is true, it could suggest that Xi Jinping’s traditional bases of support in the PLA are weakened and that his authority over the PLA is far from absolute.

Two Purges Have Targeted Two Xi Factions

The current CMC consists of five men besides Xi, according to the Ministry of National Defense website. These individuals are pulled from Xi’s two major bases of support in the PLA, the Shaanxi Gang and the Fujian Clique. The former stems from Xi’s family connections as a princeling—both Zhang Youxia and Zhang Shengmin hail from Shaanxi Province. Zhang Youxia also has close familial ties to Xi, as the two men’s fathers served in the same unit during the civil war. The latter group is composed of He Weidong and Miao Hua, who worked with Xi when he was an official in Fujian Province. This leaves Liu Zhenli, who is more aligned with the Shaanxi Gang by virtue of his relationship with Zhang Youxia. Both men served in the same campaign during the Sino-Vietnamese War (VOA Chinese, October 24, 2022; MND, accessed March 3).

The current anti-graft campaign in the PLA can be divided into two distinct waves, the first beginning in 2023 and ending in mid-2024, and the second beginning in November 2024 and continuing to the present. Officials connected to the Shaanxi Gang and the Fujian Clique, respectively, were caught up in these two waves, likely resulting in an erosion of Xi Jinping’s base of support.

The first wave primarily targeted the PLA’s aerospace apparatus, eliminating key leaders in the PLA Rocket Force, Air Force, Strategic Support Force, and the aerospace industry. Those who were purged often had ties to Shaanxi Gang leaders via superior-subordinate relationships. This wave centered around Defense Minister Li Shangfu and his predecessor Wei Fenghe. The probes traced Li’s misconduct to the Equipment Development Department, where he succeeded Zhang Youxia as director. In December 2023, the National People’s Congress announced the removal of nine senior military officials. Of these, five were associates of Li in the Rocket Force, and two, Zhang Yulin and Rao Wenmin, were officials in the Equipment Development Department (Xinhua, December 29, 2023). They likely had a hand in the misconduct that also ensnared Li (Lianhe Zaobao, July 29, 2023, December 29, 2023). While Zhang Youxia himself was not implicated, the removal of his former subordinates damaged the standing of the Shaanxi Gang. Li was replaced by a member of the Fujian Clique, Dong Jun, confounding months of speculation that he would be succeeded by the more closely aligned Liu Zhenli (Lianhe Zaobao, October 12, 2023; Radio Free Asia, November 24, 2023). This suggests that factional interests were at play in the personnel reshuffle.

Following a brief hiatus, the purges ramped up again in November 2024 with rumors that Dong Jun was under investigation and the announcement that Miao Hua was suspended. The PLA Navy became the principal focus of investigations, with suggestions that Miao was the patron of all those under scrutiny (China Military Online, November 28, 2024; National People’s Congress, December 25, 2024). [2] The Fujian Clique, the beneficiary of the previous round of purges, now finds itself in the probes’ crosshairs. Speculation abounds that Zhang Youxia is flexing his political muscle following the downfall of his supporters. This is supported by a series of meetings Zhang hosted with senior PLA officers in late 2024, from which Xi was conspicuously absent (MND, September 13, 2024, October 22, 2024; China Brief, December 3). Even if this analysis is correct, however, it remains unclear what Zhang’s motives might be.

COMMENT – Jamestown has been doing some really exceptional analysis of publicly available information on the PLA. It is worth watching this stuff closely.

7. Australian security officials based in China using WeChat to speak to family, colleagues despite surveillance fears
   James King, 7News, March 17, 2024

Senior Australian officials handling the nation’s top secret intelligence are using platforms actively surveilled by the Chinese Government for their most personal conversations.

7NEWS can reveal that senior Australian foreign affairs and law enforcement officials stationed in China with the highest security clearance are using WeChat to contact their partners, family, friends and Australian government colleagues—including about work.

Multiple sources with direct knowledge said “all” officials at the Australian embassy in Beijing — including officials with Positive Vetting security clearance — and their families are using WeChat for personal communication.

WeChat conversations involving senior officials that have been detailed to 7NEWS.com.au feature intimately personal information about other Australians — who work as national security professionals.

7NEWS.com.au also understands that Australian diplomatic travellers to China have asked their Australian contacts — including contacts who work as national security professionals — to install WeChat specifically to communicate with them.

These practices are despite US-based end-to-end encrypted messaging apps that federal officials most commonly use, Signal and WhatsApp, working from Australia’s embassy in Beijing, multiple sources with direct knowledge confirmed.

Using DFAT’s recommended circumvention software, such as Astril VPN, can overcome Chinese government censorship of US-based services beyond the embassy as well, the sources said.

Family group chats on WeChat detail schedules, upcoming movements and life experiences in both China and Australia — placing vast volumes of intimately personal data about Australia’s top security clearance holders directly into the reach of Chinese intelligence agencies.

COMMENT – Come-on Australia, do better! Who in their right mind would use WeChat as an Australian government official.

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Authoritarianism

8. Deliveries of China Daily newspaper to MPs could be stopped
   Press Gazette, March 13, 2024

One MP said the CCP-funded newspaper is "the only thing which arrives every day, without fail".

A newspaper branded “Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda” could be stopped from being delivered to MPs in Parliament after Commons speaker Lindsay Hoyle asked for a review.

China Daily, which is owned by the governing party’s central propaganda department, is received automatically by MPs. The newspaper is sent to Parliament without being asked for, with a copy earmarked for most MPs.

However Hoyle has requested an evaluation of bulk mailing after a written question from Conservative shadow Home Office minister Alicia Kearns.

Labour MP Nick Smith, who is head of the Commons’ Administration Committee which oversees services for MPs, said Hoyle had requested an audit.

Kearns told the PA news agency: “Chinese diplomats may be banned from Parliament, but the taxpayer is inadvertently funding the dissemination of Chinese Communist Party propaganda direct to MPs’ offices.

“The China Daily propaganda paper is the only thing which arrives every day, without fail.”

She added: “Its delivery should be banned as an unfriendly act of attempted foreign influence – the unsubscribe function does not work.

“At the very least we would be saving huge amounts of paper from the bin – where I suspect all of this CCP propaganda ends up.”

Conservative former leader Iain Duncan Smith, who has been sanctioned by Beijing, said it was a “terrible propaganda sheet”.

Duncan Smith said: “It ought not to be in the building at all. If some of my colleagues are not up to speed on it, then perhaps what it does is gives them the opportunity to make sure they are aware that with these deliveries, they are under surveillance as much as anyone.”

In a response to the written question, Labour’s Smith said: “China Daily has been delivered to our mail screening centre in bulk, addressed to all members since 2016. There is an unsubscribing email address that is passed to members who no longer wish to receive it.

“The bulk delivery has never been requested by the administration. However, the Speaker has now asked the Administration Committee to review the process of bulk mail deliveries including the related costs.”

PA understands the issue has yet to be formally discussed by the committee.

China Daily was set up in 1981 as the only national English-language newspaper in China. It is distributed in print, online, and within other newspapers globally. In 2020 newspapers including the UK’s Daily Telegraph and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald ended agreements that had seen them carry supplements paid for by China Daily. The supplement has also been carried in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times, while Mail Online previously had a similar content deal with China’s People’s Daily.

China Daily’s website claims it has a print and online circulation of 350 million, although Similarweb data suggests its most popular website, chinadaily.com.cn, received around 2.3 million web visits in February.

An annual report registered with the Chinese government in 2014 detailed its “organiser” as the state council information office, which forms part of Beijing’s central propaganda department.

The newspaper has previously praised Chinese government policies against the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang province for stopping women becoming “baby-making machines”.

Reports have suggested that the Chinese government has carried out forced contraception or sterilisation on Uyghur women.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the newspaper claimed the virus originated in a US army research centre in Maryland, or that it was created by pharmaceutical firm Moderna.

It comes as the Labour Party is seeking a renewed relationship with China.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves visited the country in January, and lauded £600m of investment in the UK from agreements made during the trip.

She received criticism for going to China against a backdrop of increased control of Hong Kong, including the imprisonment and solitary confinement of British-Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai.

COMMENT – So the UK House of Commons is only now realizing this might be a problem?

9. Chain of Chinese 'migration for education' thrives in Japan
   Kunihiro Iwasaki, Nikkei Asia, March 16, 2024

Parents buy real estate near prestigious schools, including University of Tokyo, to secure opportunities.

A growing number of Chinese parents want their children to get educations in Japan, and as a result help them and their families migrate to Japan.

Messages posted on RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, a social media platform accessed by 300 million people per month in China, highlight the growth of this "migration for education" trend.

COMMENT – It’s almost as if Chinese parents realize that their children would be better off growing up in prosperous democracies… that must really bother Xi Jinping and his cadres.

10. White House seriously considering deal from Oracle to run TikTok
    Dasha Burns, Politico, March 16, 2024

11. Existing ByteDance investors emerge as front-runners in TikTok deal talks

Dawn Chmielewski and Katie Paul, Reuters, March 21, 2025

White House-led talks on the future of TikTok are coalescing around a plan for the biggest non-Chinese investors in parent company ByteDance to up their stakes and acquire the short video app's U.S. operations, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The plan entails spinning off a U.S. entity for TikTok and diluting Chinese ownership in the new business to below the 20 percent threshold required by U.S. law, rescuing the app from a looming U.S. ban, said the sources, who asked to be kept anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on record.

Jeff Yass' Susquehanna International Group and Bill Ford's General Atlantic, both of which are represented on ByteDance's board, are leading discussions with the White House on the plan, the sources said.

Private equity firm KKR is also participating, one of the sources said.

The fate of the short video app used by nearly half of all Americans has been up in the air since a law took effect on Jan. 19 requiring ByteDance to either sell it or face a ban on national security grounds.

The law, passed last year with broad bipartisan support, reflects concern in Washington that TikTok's ownership makes it beholden to the Chinese government and that Beijing could use the app to conduct influence operations against the United States. Free speech advocates have argued that the ban unlawfully threatens to restrict Americans from accessing foreign media in violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The company has said U.S. officials have misstated its ties to China, arguing its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the United States on cloud servers operated by Oracle while content moderation decisions that affect American users are also made in the U.S.

Under the plan proposed by existing investors, software giant Oracle would continue to house U.S. user data and provide assurances that the data is not accessible from China, this source added.

Representatives for TikTok, ByteDance, Susquehanna, Oracle and the White House could not immediately be reached for comment.

General Atlantic and KKR declined to comment.

COMMENT – The “deadline” is two weeks away… I guess I shouldn’t be at all surprised that the billionaire Jeff Yass has the inside track.

As a reminder of Yass’ role in this drama, I recommend re-reading this piece from September 2023:

• The Billionaire Keeping TikTok on Phones in the U.S.

  John D. McKinnon and Stu Woo, Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2023

Financier Jeff Yass made a big bet on the app, and he’s a top donor to lawmakers who support it.

TikTok had hardly any friends in government earlier this year as the Biden administration, Congress and state legislatures were threatening to ban the Chinese-owned video giant.

TikTok now has many more friends, with something in common: backing from billionaire financier Jeff Yass. They’ve helped stall attempts to outlaw America’s most-downloaded app.

Yass’s investment company, Susquehanna International Group, bet big on TikTok in 2012, buying a stake in parent company ByteDance now measured at about 15%. That translates into a personal stake for Yass of 7% in ByteDance. It is worth roughly $21 billion based on the company’s recent valuation, or much of his $28 billion net worth as gauged by Bloomberg.

Yass is also one of the top donors to the Club for Growth, an influential conservative group that rallied Republican opposition to a TikTok ban. Yass has donated $61 million to the Club for Growth’s political-spending arm since 2010, or about 24% of its total, according to federal records.

Club for Growth made public its opposition to banning TikTok in March, in an opinion article by its president, at a time when sentiment against the platform among segments of both parties was running high on Capitol Hill. Days later, Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) stood up on the Senate floor and quashed an attempt to fast-track a bill by Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) to ban downloading of the TikTok app.

“We will be acting like the Chinese government if we ban TikTok here,” Paul said around that time.

In June, Yass donated $3 million to a political committee backing Paul. Including that contribution, Yass and his wife, Janine Yass, have donated more than $24 million to Paul or committees that support him since 2015, according to federal records. Club for Growth has given a Paul-supporting political committee $1.8 million since 2020.

Another Club for Growth-backed Republican who came out against a TikTok ban was Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.), an important ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Massie urged House GOP leadership to oppose a different effort in the Senate, a bipartisan bill targeting TikTok that had the backing of the Biden administration, people familiar with the situation say.

Since 2020, Jeff and Janine Yass have given $32,200 to Massie or a political-action committee supporting him.

Club for Growth has been Massie’s biggest overall political contributor since 2011, directing $192,000 to him from the organization’s supporters, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks political contributions.

A spokesman for Massie said the congressman doesn’t like TikTok, but banning it wasn’t right because “the cure is worse than the disease.” A spokeswoman for Paul said his “opposition to censorship and his unwavering support for the First Amendment are consistent and deeply held libertarian beliefs.” Both libertarian-minded Republicans have broken party lines in the past to take hard-line stances on protecting free speech.

Other Republicans in Congress, including at least five others besides Paul and Massie who received financial support from Club for Growth, have also objected to legislation targeting TikTok. With many Democrats already skeptical of a ban, the whittling away of Republican support killed momentum for several bills, including the bipartisan Restrict Act backed by the Biden administration.

The lobbying effort by Yass is notable in part because of the extent of his political spending—he and his wife were the third-largest conservative donors nationally in the 2022 election cycle, chipping in about $49 million to support conservative candidates and causes, according to OpenSecrets.

The investment Yass has been seeking to protect in Washington is both valuable and vulnerable. While much of the potential legislation could affect multiple companies, and many businesses including Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and Australian financial services firm Macquarie Group have been lobbying Congress to protect these interests, the laws would have an outsize effect on TikTok.

“I’ve supported libertarian and free market principles my entire adult life,” Yass said. “TikTok is about free speech and innovation, the epitome of libertarian and free market ideals. The idea of banning TikTok is an anathema to everything I believe.”

… Let’s be clear, the only thing that is an anathema to Jeff Yass is losing a lot of money.

12. Missing Chinese professor returns to Japan, university says
    Hong Kong Free Press, March 14, 2024

A Chinese academic at a Japanese university who went missing on a trip home more than a year ago has returned to Japan, a university spokesman said Friday.

Hu Shiyun, a Chinese literature and linguistics professor at Kobe Gakuin University in western Japan, disappeared while visiting his homeland in summer 2023, raising concerns about his safety.

The university was first notified in September 2023 by Hu’s family in Japan that he had been unreachable since travelling to China sometime in or after August, the school’s spokesman Yoichi Takamura told AFP.

“Then he told us he returned to Japan on January 24,” he said.

The university “asked what he was doing during his stay in China, but there was no answer from him,” Takamura added.

Hu taught Chinese language, culture and society in the faculty of global communication from 2015, according to the university’s website.

“We are coordinating his role for the next academic year” starting in April, Takamura said.

Hu, 64, is one of a string of Chinese academics in Japan to disappear in their home country in recent years, as Beijing sharpens its focus on its nationals abroad.

COMMENT – Well, that’s totally normal… he must have just been lost for a year or perhaps he misplaced his smartphone, nothing suspicious at all.

13. Next ‘patriots only’ Hong Kong legislative elections to be held December 7
    Hans Tse, Hong Kong Free Press, March 18, 2024

14. Fugitive activist Tony Chung’s stepfather questioned by Hong Kong nat. sec police – reports
    Irene Chan, Hong Kong Free Press, March 18, 2024

15. Beijing calls Li Ka-shing a 'traitor' in Panama ports deal
    Yong Jian, Asia Times, March 15, 2024

16. China calls US media outlets facing Trump funding axe ‘notorious’
    Hong Kong Free Press, March 18, 2024

17. Chinese engineer gets death penalty for selling state secrets to foreign spy agencies
    Vanessa Cai, South China Morning Post, March 19, 2024

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Environmental Harms

18. Map Shows China-Owned Mine Where Acid Spill Caused 'Catastrophic' Pollution

Micah McCartney, Newsweek, March 19, 2025

Acid runoff from a Chinese-owned mine has polluted a Zambian river, resulting in what's been called "catastrophic consequences."

Why it Matters

The spill puts a spotlight on the prominence of Chinese firms in Zambia's production of copper, critical for the manufacture of smartphones and other electronic devices. Zambia, the second-largest copper producer in Africa and among the top 10 globally, depends on the metal as a key export.

Chinese-owned copper mines in Zambia have faced accusations of violating labor laws, safety regulations, and environmental standards. The country's heavy debt burden includes $4 billion owed to China, forcing Zambia to restructure some of these loans in 2023 after defaulting on payments.

Newsweek reached out to Zambia's Ministry of Water Development and Sanitation and China's Foreign Ministry with emailed requests for comment.

19. China Faces PR Challenge in Zambia

James Palmer, Foreign Policy, March 18, 2025

An acidic waste spill from a Chinese-owned copper mine has contaminated the country’s most important waterway.

20. The real reason behind China’s climate activism
    Ian Williams, The Spectator World, March 3, 2024

21. UK energy minister in Beijing seeks to press China on emissions, Hong Kong
    Hong Kong Free Press, March 17, 2024

22. Why Argentina’s military is deploying to surveil hundreds of Chinese fishing boats off its coast
    Avery Schmitz, et al., CNN, March 10, 2024

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Foreign Interference and Coercion

23. Adams’s Associates Under Federal Investigation Over Ties to China
    Bianca Pallaro, New York Times, March 18, 2024

24. China Plans for Global CEOs to Meet Xi in Beijing Next Week
    Chester Dawson, et al., Bloomberg, March 16, 2024

25. TikTok tries to sway DC with ad blitz
    Christine Mui, Politico, March 17, 2024

26. Hong Kong opposes ‘bullying tactics,’ says leader John Lee after CK Hutchison sells Panama ports to US firm
    Hillary Leung, Hong Kong Free Press, March 18, 2024

“We oppose the abusive use of coercion, of bullying tactics in international economic and trade relations,” Chief Executive John Lee told reporters on Tuesday.

COMMENT – Says the handpicked security chief who became Chief Executive due to his “use of coercion” and “bullying tactics.”

These are the images I think of, when I hear the name John Lee, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive.

Let’s be clear, John Lee is in no position to lecture anyone about bullying and coercion.

27. Taiwan’s Military Says It Needs the U.S. to Deter China
    Joyu Wang, Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2024

28. Taiwanese Publisher Sentenced for "Secession" in Mainland China
    Human Rights in China, March 17, 2024

Two years after his disappearance in Shanghai, Taiwanese publisher Li Yanhe (pen name Fu Cha, or “Fuschia”) has been secretly convicted of “inciting secession” by a mainland Chinese court. Li, editor-in-chief of Taiwan's Eight Banners publishing house—known for its books on Chinese history, including so-called sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre—was detained on charges of "endangering national security" during a visit to China in 2023. On March 17, 2025, China's Taiwan Affairs Office confirmed that Li Yanhe was convicted of “inciting secession” a month prior, but refused to disclose the specific sentence. The lack of transparency around Li’s case is likely intended to make it more difficult to advocate for his rights and to intimidate the Taiwanese people.

Li was originally born in Liaoning, China. After moving to Taiwan in 2009, he founded Eight Banners Publishing and began to print books on Chinese history, including many that conflicted with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s approved historical record. Critically, Li’s publishing activities were carried out outside of China. Yet, when he traveled to Shanghai in March 2023 to visit his family and give up his Chinese household registration (hukou), he was detained and held under “residential surveillance at a designated location,” a form of arbitrary detention frequently used by the authorities to hold people in undisclosed locations.

Since his disappearance, little has been known about Li’s case, save that he was targeted for political reasons—according to a Chinese government spokesperson, Li was “under investigation…for suspected activities endangering national security” (translation by HRIC). For two years, Li’s supporters waited in vain, while his publishing house released fewer books as time went on. Then, on February 26, 2025, the Chinese Supreme People’s Procuratorate referenced Li and Taiwanese National Party cofounder Yang Chih-yuan by name in a statement about cracking down on national security cases. (Yang, who was also arrested in mainland China for his work in Taiwan, was sentenced to nine years in prison in September 2024.) Tragically, like Yang, Li had become a tool for the CCP to make an example of those who dared to stand up against their version of the truth.

Li's case is emblematic of the CCP's systematic suppression of Taiwan's publishing, academic, and cultural circles, intending to create a chilling effect through intimidation. Taiwan is bastion of free speech and a refuge for Chinese-language publishers, artists, and journalists. Following crackdowns on publishers in Hong Kong, Taiwan’s role as an open society has become ever more critical. Human Rights in China strongly condemns Li’s imprisonment, which is not only a blatant violation of human rights but also a deeply concerning escalation of the CCP’s transnational repression of free speech on a global scale.

29. CBSA and RCMP seize over 100K in counterfeit Canadian currency
    Canada Border Services Agency, March 12, 2025

30. Huawei targeted in new European Parliament corruption probe
    FTM, March 13, 2025

31. Belgium probes EU parliament bribery with link to Huawei
    Reuters, March 13, 2024

32. Volkswagen, Renault draw closer to China on EVs despite EU tariffs
    Eiki Hayashi, Nikkei Asia, March 16, 2024

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Human Rights and Religious Persecution

33. US imposes restrictions on Thai officials for deporting Uyghurs to China
    Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times, March 14, 2024

34. Thailand: Raise Uyghur Abuses in Xinjiang Visit
    Human Rights Watch, March 18, 2024

35. U.S. Punishes Thai Officials Over Deportation of Uyghurs to China
    Sui-Lee Wee, New York Times, March 15, 2024

36. Hong Kong retrial convicts social worker over role in 2019 protests
    Aljazeera, March 11, 2024

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Industrial Policies and Economic Espionage

37. Vietnam concession on Starlink aims to defuse U.S. tariff threat
    Nikkei Asia, February 18, 2025

38. ASML will open Beijing facility despite US sanctions on China
    Dan Robinson, The Register, March 10, 2024

Chipmaking tool biz ASML plans to open a new facility in China this year amid rising trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.

The supplier of advanced lithography equipment disclosed in its latest Annual Report that it aims to inaugurate a Beijing-based Reuse & Repair Center in 2025, recognizing the importance of China as one of its largest markets, alongside Taiwan.

This is a facility for reconditioning and reusing materials from systems that have been returned from the field, so the unit won't manufacture from scratch.

Such recycling centers could become increasingly important as parts are exposed to potential multiple tariffs while crossing borders, or should the US or the Netherlands newly impose additional export controls restrictions that were not previously in place.

COMMENT - As I was reading stuff this week I came across this.

It is a Lego model set of ASML’s most advanced EUV lithography machine… it got me thinking, I suppose the U.S. Government would permit ASML to sell this to China.

Needless to say, I tried to buy one, but it is out of stock… just like the real thing!

39. Chinese Ships Are Carrying America’s Cargo. The U.S. Wants to Reverse That.
    Stu Woo, Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2024

40. American maritime regulator calls for levy on Chinese ships at ports
    Oliver Telling, Financial Times, March 16, 2024

41. China delays approval of BYD’s Mexico plant amid fears tech could leak to US
    Gloria Li, et al., Financial Times, March 18, 2024

42. China's CATL, BYD targeted under U.S. battery decoupling bill
    Pak Yiu, Nikkei Asia, March 19, 2024

43. Xi Jinping snubs EU-China anniversary summit
    Andy Bounds, et al., Financial Times, March 15, 2024

44. China’s self-driving lidar leader plans tariff-beating overseas factory
    Gloria Li, Financial Times, March 15, 2024

45. Facing Trump Tariffs, China Outlines Plan to Bolster the Economy
    Keith Bradsher, New York Times, March 16, 2024

46. Beijing leader’s displeasure finds outlet in critical commentaries, but his tools to block sale by Hong Kong company are limited
    Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2024

47. China’s Hesai denies short-seller claims on revenues and military ties
    Edward White, Financial Times, March 18, 2024

48. Trump Has Hinted at a Xi Visit. China Is Still Wondering What He Wants.
    David Pierson and Berry Wang, New York Times, March 19, 2024

49. China unveils rule to counter ‘discriminatory’ measures in international IP disputes
    William Zheng, South China Morning Post, March 19, 2024

50. Beijing woos global executives as FDI slides, trade tensions build
    Xiuhao Chen and Ryan Woo, Reuters, March 19, 2024

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Cyber and Information Technology

51. China's top telecom software maker plans DeepSeek-powered expansion
    Cheng Ting Fang and Lauly Li, Nikkei Asia, March 17, 2024

52. China identifies Taiwanese hackers allegedly behind cyberattacks and espionage
    Daryna Antoniuk, The Record, March 18, 2024

53. China announces high-tech fund to grow AI, emerging industries
    Nectar Gan and Juliana Liu, CNN, March 10, 2024

54. Why the toll road text scam is out of control across the U.S., and Apple, Android can’t do anything to stop it
    Kevin Williams, CNBC, March 13, 2024

55. Juniper patches bug that let Chinese cyberspies backdoor routers
    Sergiu Gatlan, Bleeping Computer, March 13, 2024

56. From Courtrooms to Crisis Lines, Chinese Officials Embrace DeepSeek
    Meaghan Tobin and Claire Fu, New York Times, March 18, 2024

57. Chinese tech hub Shenzhen sees exports slump over 16% as trade war fears rise
    Sylvia Ma, South China Morning Post, March 19, 2024

58. China creates hacker-proof quantum satellite communication link with South Africa
    Victoria Bela, South China Morning Post, March 13, 2024

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Military and Security Threats

59. The Nuclear Notebook: Chinese nuclear weapons
    Matt Korda, et al., Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 15, 2024

60. China Watches, Taiwan Learns: Ukraine’s War and the Indo-Pacific

Benedetta Girardi, Davis Ellison, and Tim Sweijs, The Diplomat, March 18, 2025

Over the course of a year-long study, we analyzed the campaign in Ukraine, comparing it with Taiwan’s military strategies and defense posture. Here’s what we found.

61. Our Best Look Yet at China’s New ‘Invasion Barges’
    Thomas Newdick, The War Zone, March 13, 2024

62. Chairman Carr Establishes New Council on National Security Within Agency
    FCC, Council on National Security, March 12, 2025

63. Fujian Unveils Incentives for Militia Training for a Cross-Strait Campaign
    Ryan D. Martinson, The James Town Foundations, March 15, 2024

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One Belt, One Road Strategy

64. Mapping China’s Strategic Port Development in Africa
    Paul Nantulya, Africa Center, March 10, 2024

Chinese firms are present in over a quarter of all African port developments, some of which could be used for expanded Chinese naval presence on the continent.

Chinese state-owned firms are active stakeholders in an estimated 78 ports across 32 African countries as builders, financiers, or operators. Chinese port developments are concentrated in West Africa, with 35 compared to 17 in East Africa, 15 in Southern Africa, and 11 in North Africa.

With a total of 231 commercial ports in Africa, Chinese firms are present in over a quarter of Africa’s maritime trade hubs. This is a significantly greater presence than anywhere else in the world. By comparison, Latin America and the Caribbean host 10 Chinese-built or operated ports, while Asian countries host 24.

In some sites, Chinese firms dominate the entire port development enterprise from finance to construction, operations, and share ownership. Large conglomerates like China Communications Construction Corporation (CCCC) will win work as prime contractors and hand out sub-contracts to subsidiaries like the China Harbor Engineering Company (CHEC). This is the case in one of West Africa’s busiest ports, Nigeria’s Lekki Deep Sea Port. CHEC did the construction and engineering, secured loan financing from the China Development Bank (CDB), and took a 54-percent financial stake in the port which it operates on a 16-year lease.

China gains as much as $13 in trade revenues for every $1 invested in ports. A firm holding an operating lease or concession agreement reaps not only the financial benefits of all trade passing through that port but can also control access. The operator determines the allocation of piers, accepts or denies port calls, and can offer preferential rates and services for its nation’s vessels and cargo. Control over port operations by an external actor, accordingly, raises obvious sovereignty and security concerns. This is why some countries forbid foreign port operators on national security grounds.

Chinese firms hold operating concessions in 10 African ports. Despite the risks over loss of control, the trend on the continent is toward privatizing port operations for improved efficiency. Delays and poor management of African ports are estimated to raise handling costs by 50 percent over global rates.

COMMENT – I bet if there were think tanks in the 19^th Century, they would have essentially created the exact same map titled “European Port Expansion in Africa”.

It is a shame that Africans were able to throw off European imperialism and domination in the second half of the 20^th Century to only fall under the yoke of Chinese imperialism and domination by the second decade of the 21^st Century.

I’m not sure that there is much anyone else can do to help Africans safeguard their sovereignty, if they aren’t willing to reject this kind of subjugation.

65. China’s African port interests are expanding. Is the PLA Navy next on deck?
    Jevans Nyabiage, South China Morning Post, March 17, 2024

66. Sealing the Interagency Cracks: The United States in Oceania
    Kathleen McInnis and Benjamin Jensen, CSIS, March 13, 2025

67. The 2015 BRI plan illuminates current Chinese Global Initiatives
    Charles Parton, Observing China, March 20, 2024

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Opinion

68. China is trying to kneecap Indian manufacturing
    Noah Smith, Noahpinion, March 15, 2024

An attempt to head off its only future rival.

69. We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
    Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times, March 16, 2024

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of all that as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles and the evolving bird flu, right?

Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.

Sounds like the kind of research that should be conducted — if at all — with the very highest safety protocols, as W. Ian Lipkin and Ralph Baric discussed in a recent guest essay. But if you scroll all the way down to Page 19 of the journal article and squint, you learn that the scientists did all this under what they call “BSL-2 plus” conditions, a designation that isn’t standardized and that Baric and Lipkin say is “insufficient for work with potentially dangerous respiratory viruses.” If just one lab worker unwittingly inhaled the virus and got infected, there’s no telling what the impact could be on Wuhan, a city of millions, or the world.

You’d think that by now we’d have learned it’s not a good idea to test possible gas leaks by lighting a match. And you’d hope that prestigious scientific journals would have learned not to reward such risky research.

Why haven’t we learned our lesson? Maybe because it’s hard to admit that this research is risky now and to take the requisite steps to keep us safe without also admitting it was always risky. And that perhaps we were misled on purpose.

Take the case of EcoHealth, that nonprofit organization that many of the scientists leaped to defend. When Wuhan experienced an outbreak of a novel coronavirus related to ones found in bats and researchers soon noticed the pathogen had the same rare genetic feature that the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan researchers had proposed inserting into bat coronaviruses, you would think EcoHealth would sound the alarm far and wide. It did not. Were it not for public records requests, leaks and subpoenas, the world might never have learned about the troubling similarities between what could easily have been going on inside the lab and what was spreading through the city.

Or take the real story behind two very influential publications that quite early in the pandemic cast the lab leak theory as baseless.

The first was a March 2020 paper in the journal Nature Medicine, which was written by five prominent scientists and declared that no “laboratory-based scenario” for the pandemic virus was plausible. But we later learned through congressional subpoenas of their Slack conversations that while the scientists publicly said the scenario was implausible, privately many of its authors considered the scenario to be not just plausible but likely. One of the authors of that paper, the evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, wrote in the Slack messages, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Spooked, the authors reached out for advice to Jeremy Farrar, now the chief scientist at the World Health Organization. In his book, Farrar reveals he acquired a burner phone and arranged meetings for them with high-ranking officials, including Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. Documents obtained through public records requests by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know show that the scientists ultimately decided to move ahead with a paper on the topic.

Operating behind the scenes, Farrar reviewed their draft and suggested to the authors that they rule out the lab leak even more directly. They complied. Andersen later testified to Congress that he had simply become convinced that a lab leak, while theoretically possible, was not plausible. Later chat logs obtained by Congress show the paper’s lead authors discussing how to mislead Donald G. McNeil Jr., who was reporting on the pandemic’s origin for The Times, so as to throw him off track about the plausibility of a lab leak.

The second influential publication to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak was a letter published in early 2020 in The Lancet. The letter, which described the idea as a conspiracy theory, appeared to be the work of a group of independent scientists. It was anything but. Thanks to public document requests by U.S. Right to Know, the public later learned that behind the scenes, Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s president, had drafted and circulated the letter while strategizing on how to hide his tracks and telling the signatories that it “will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person.” The Lancet later published an addendum disclosing Daszak’s conflict of interest as a collaborator of the Wuhan lab, but the journal did not retract the letter.

And they had assistance. Thanks to more public records requests and congressional subpoenas, the public learned that David Morens, a senior scientific adviser to Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, wrote to Daszak that he had learned how to make “emails disappear,” especially emails about pandemic origins. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote.

It’s not hard to imagine how the attempt to squelch legitimate debate might have started. Some of the loudest proponents of the lab leak theory weren’t just earnestly making inquiries; they were acting in terrible faith, using the debate over pandemic origins to attack legitimate, beneficial science, to inflame public opinion, to get attention. For scientists and public health officials, circling the wagons and vilifying anyone who dared to dissent might have seemed like a reasonable defense strategy.

That’s also why it might be tempting for those officials or the organizations they represent to avoid looking too closely at mistakes they made, at the ways that, while trying to do such a hard job, they might have withheld relevant information and even misled the public. Such self-scrutiny is especially uncomfortable now, as an unvaccinated child has died of measles and anti-vaccine nonsense is being pumped out by the top of the federal government. But a clumsy, misguided effort like this didn’t just fail; it backfired. These half-truths and strategic deceptions made it easier for people with the worst motives to appear trustworthy while discrediting important institutions where many earnestly labor in the public interest.

After a few dogged journalists, a small nonprofit pursuing Freedom of Information requests and an independent group of researchers brought these issues to light, followed by a congressional investigation, the Biden administration finally barred EcoHealth from receiving federal grants for five years.

That’s a start. The C.I.A. recently updated its assessment of how the Covid pandemic began, judging a lab leak to be the likely origin, albeit with low confidence. The Department of Energy, which runs sophisticated labs, and the F.B.I. came to that conclusion in 2023. But there are certainly more questions for governments and researchers across the world to answer. Why did it take until now for the German public to learn that way back in 2020, their Federal Intelligence Service endorsed a lab leak origin with 80 to 95 percent probability? What else is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?

To this day, there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market. The few papers cited for market origin were written by a small, overlapping group of authors, including those who didn’t tell the public how serious their doubts had been.

Only an honest conversation will lead us forward. Like any field with the potential to inflict harm on a global scale, research with dangerous, potentially supertransmissible pathogens cannot be left to self-regulation or lax and easily dodged rules, as is the case now. The goal should be an international treaty guiding biosafety, but we don’t have to be frozen in place until one appears. Leading journals could refuse to publish research that doesn’t conform to safety standards, the way they reject research that doesn’t conform to ethical standards. Funders — whether universities or private corporations or public agencies — can favor studies that use research methods like harmless pseudoviruses and computer simulations. These steps alone would help disincentivize such dangerous research, here or in China. If some risky research is truly irreplaceable, it should be held to the highest safety conditions and conducted far from cities.

We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third.

70. Nobody Wants the Covid Truth
    Holman W. Jenkins, Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2024

71. Manus AI Pushes the DeepSeek Moment Further
    Catherine Thorbecke, Bloomberg, March 13, 2024

72. South Korea has acted decisively on DeepSeek. Other countries must stop hesitating
    Hassan Gad, The Strategist, March 13, 2024

73. The Cost of Ignoring Geopolitics
    Jo Inge Bekkevold, Foreign Policy, March 14, 2024

74. What was unsaid at China’s ‘two sessions’ and why it matters
    Lizzy C. Lee, South China Morning Post, March 19, 2024

75. The US Cannot Compromise with the CCP over TikTok

Michael Sobolik & Rick Lane, Providence, March 20, 2025

According to reporting over last weekend, the Trump administration appears to be closing in on a TikTok deal. Vice President J.D. Vance struck a confident tone with reporters last Friday: “There will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns [and] allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.” That’s good news, as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of TikTok poses severe threats to the American people.

However, reports emerged on Sunday confirming what many have suspected for a number of weeks: the administration appears to be open to a compromise agreement that would allow ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to retain control of the app’s algorithm and perhaps some degree of ownership. This outcome may accomplish the second objective Vice President Vance identified — establishing a distinct American entity — but it would likely fail to rectify the deeply concerning national security implications of TikTok’s relationship with the CCP. Control of the algorithm is paramount. Any deal must reckon with this reality.

COMMENT – I’d be happy to be surprised, but I fear this is going to be a shitty deal that compromises on the most critical national security issue: ensuring that the Chinese Communist Party does not maintain algorithmic control of TikTok through ByteDance.

76. America Will Lose If the EU and China Become Energy Buddies
    David Fickling, Bloomberg, March 18, 2024

The electrons coursing through our grids, turbines and engines are invisible to the human eye, but without them, all the machinery that powers our industrial economy would grind to a halt.

Unseen flows of energy drive international relations, too. What’s often thought to be a game of ideologies, territories and militaries is driven, deep down, by those same electrons. For as long as there have been states, they’ve battled to control the sources and distribution of first nutritional energy — in the form of food — then fossil fuels, and now renewables. In the tentative rapprochement between Europe and China, and the continent’s darkening relationship with Washington, we’re seeing the next chapter of this ancient story taking shape.

COMMENT – Do you know who will also lose if the EU and China become “energy buddies”?

Europeans.

Did Europe learn nothing from the last 15 years with Russia? Becoming energy dependent on an authoritarian regime is a bad idea.

I guess this is the sort of geostrategic foolishness we should expect from a columnist that covers climate change.