Patience and Procedure

Lessons from the film, Warfare

Friends,

On a flight back from California this week, I watched Warfare, the A24 film from earlier this year about a mission that goes sideways during the Battle of Ramadi in 2006.

The contrast between the opening scene with the platoon watching Eric Prydz’s music video of his 2004, “Call on Me,” to pump themselves up, the boredom of sitting around at an OP inside an Iraqi house, and the intensity of the firefight and attempts to evacuate their casualties, brought back some intense memories and appreciation for the importance patience, training, and procedure (even if the Bradleys were fake… and the tactics of sending out a lone vehicle to do CASEVAC was all wrong).

The film reminded me that in a crisis, the best thing to do is fall back on your training and to work your way through procedures and checklists. Training and professional expertise allow folks to operate even when SHTF. The squad is isolated in a building and under attack on all sides with casualties that need to be evacuated. The simplest tasks (like collecting all their gear or coordinating a pick-up point) become difficult and the audience can see what the friction of warfare looks like.

As Carl von Clausewitz observed over two centuries ago: "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult."

When things go sideways for the squad, the members have to slow things down, work together, and stick to processes and procedures that keep them alive.

More on the importance of patience and relying on time-tested procedure during times of crisis and uncertainty later.

It's been years since I heard that remix of Steve Winwood’s 1982 song “Valerie” but since the song was now stuck in my head (just as it is likely stuck in yours as well), I found that Eric Prydz performed a live version in March for the first time in nearly 20 years at a show in Austin.

Researching that took me down a fairly unproductive rabbit hole of 1990s and 2000s house, techno, and trance music. I ended up listening to old Ministry of Sound albums and obscure Scandinavian DJs. Here are a few that should either bring back memories or introduce you to genres that you will only listen to on the privacy of your own headphones.

• Renegade Master (1995) by Wildchild

• Block Rockin’ Beats (1997) by The Chemical Brothers

• Sandstorm (1999) by Darude

• Rose Rouge (2000) by St. Germain

I admit it, this is a bit of a guilty pleasure.

If you don’t find yourself bouncing along to “Call on Me,” then you might want to check if you still have a pulse.

But now back to the main thing…

We still don’t have a “trade deal” between Beijing and Washington yet and things are likely to get more difficult now that a U.S. Appeals Court has ruled that most of the global reciprocal tariffs announced on April 2 are illegal (details below at #7).

President Trump largely relied upon the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as his statutory authority for imposing tariffs on much of the world and that is what this Appeals Court found fault with. The court’s decision left the tariffs in place but has set up a Supreme Court argument that appears pretty straightforward: IEEPA does not grant the President the authority to impose the tariffs he has used to compel trade deals with other countries over the past few months.

This may embolden Beijing to hold out for longer and it could unwind agreements that have isolated the PRC.

The decision to rely on IEEPA, as opposed to using an authority a more time-consuming process like Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, appears to have been one of expediency, a lack of patience and a disregard for procedures that were well established.

Imposing tariffs under Section 301 requires a fairly lengthy investigation and period for public comment (at least 6-8 months), something the President appeared unwilling to wait for. During Trump’s first term, U.S. Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer was able to persuade President Trump to wait for a Section 301 investigation and its findings before imposing tariffs on the PRC, over a year into his first term. That Section 301 Investigation remains active and most of the tariffs imposed under that action remain in place as they weren’t removed by President Biden and withstood numerous legal challenges since 2018.

The April 2 action, the global reciprocal tariffs, are not built on a solid legal foundation but so far, those tariffs have provided the leverage the Administration has relied on to force deals that countries otherwise would not have agreed to. Those negotiations have also resulted in provisions that isolate and disadvantage the PRC.

Now the PRC (and other countries) may believe that the President’s leverage will evaporate and therefore, it is in their interest to stall for time and let the Supreme Court decide the fate of the IEEPA tariffs before making any further concessions to the United States.

It isn’t clear that there was a good alternative that could be used in the timeline that President Trump insisted on. Had the President wanted to use the Section 301 authority for the global reciprocal tariffs, presumably his team would have had to conduct either a blanket global Section 301 investigation or nearly 200 simultaneous Section 301 investigations on individual countries… none of which could be completed before April 2, 2025.

I predict that this will get much more difficult for the Trump Administration… and unfortunately, it was entirely predictable.

***

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Thanks for reading!

Matt

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MUST READ

1. Life Has Gotten Surreal in China
   Michael Schuman, The Atlantic, August 26, 2025

The state is ever more insistent on a reality at odds with people’s experience. That’s not a good sign for progress.

Labubu appears to be yet another sign of China’s global success. Figurines of the grinning, pointy-eared elf, marketed by a Chinese company called Pop Mart, are so wildly popular that fans around the world go to great lengths to get their hands on them. Many of them come in “blind boxes,” meaning that the consumer gets to see the contents only after purchase. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua boasted in mid-June that the Labubu craze “signals a broader shift in China’s role on the global stage”: The country is becoming a cultural center.

At home, however, the Chinese Communist Party is working to dampen the enthusiasm. A June article in its main newspaper, the People’s Daily, criticized the “out of control spending” on blind boxes and similar products among minors who are “irrational” in their decisions and called for tighter regulation to prevent such objects from becoming “tools to exploit children’s wallets.”

Blind boxes are but one cultural trend to incur the party’s ire. In recent years, Chinese authorities have gone after video games and K-pop, comedy clubs and Halloween parties, gay and lesbian activists and women’s-rights advocates, tech entrepreneurs and financial advisers. The incessant crackdowns, and the campaigns of censorship or censoriousness, suggest that the Chinese regime is intent on not just eliminating opposition, but also micromanaging its people’s lifestyles, consumption, and beliefs.

That China under Communist rule is not an open society is hardly a surprise. But before Xi Jinping became the country’s leader, the ruling establishment operated with some constraints. Now David Shambaugh, the director of the China-policy program at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, describes China’s political environment as “neo-totalitarian,” meaning that the state has taken a heavy hand “across the board and in all aspects of the lives of the nation.”

The turn comes at a moment when many outside the country perceive it to be on a trajectory of ascent toward possible global dominance. A recent op-ed in The New York Times declared that the long-anticipated “Chinese century,” when the center of global power switches from Washington to Beijing, “may already have dawned.” Inside China, however, the country often seems to be not taking over the world so much as sinking into an autocratic abyss. Maybe these trends can coexist, and China can continue rising globally while deepening its domestic repression. But another trajectory seems just as likely—that an oppressive state will curtail China’s vitality and place a hard limit on its global rise.

This past November, in the town of Zhuhai, in southern China, a man named Fan Weiqiu got into his car and plowed into a crowd at a sports center, killing 35 people and injuring 43. Apparently distraught over a divorce settlement, the 62-year-old Fan was found inside the car with severe self-inflicted knife wounds to his neck.

The incident immediately became a political problem. Such a tragedy should never have happened in the happy, harmonious society that Xi claims to have created, free of the violence and divisions that plague other, inferior countries. China’s vast security state quickly got to work making sure it hadn’t: Censors scrubbed videos, articles, and comments about the incident from social-media platforms. Workers at the sports center cleared away the bouquets of flowers that mourning residents had laid there. Police chased off curious visitors. Fan was executed two months later.

Disappearing inconvenient truths has always been a feature of Communist rule in China. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer and the family visit Beijing, and as they pass through Tiananmen Square, they find a plaque that reads On this site, in 1989, nothing happened. But Xi has lately taken his efforts to convince people that they live in a socialist utopia to a new extreme.

The Chinese people are content, the state’s propaganda organs insist, as they feed the public good news and suppress discussion of the country’s many economic and social problems. The result is a surreal environment, where public discourse is ever more detached from everyday life, and the government is ever less responsive to the concerns and difficulties of its people.

At the same time, the state intrudes more and more into daily life. My wife and I have experienced this directly. Over the past year, teams of police have made regular visits to our Beijing apartment—four of them just this month. Officers check our passports and visas while recording the interaction with small video cameras. We have already provided this information to the police, as required by local regulations; these repetitive visits are likely meant simply to intimidate.

The resulting atmosphere is a throwback to an earlier era of Chinese Communist rule, before the economic-modernization program of Deng Xiaoping. In 1978, as party leader, Deng inaugurated liberalizing reforms with a speech calling upon his fellow cadres to “emancipate our minds.” Deng did not intend China to become a free society. He made that clear with the Tiananmen massacre. But his approach did open safe spaces for debate and personal expression, especially in areas perceived as more pragmatic than political, such as the economy. This relative relaxation was crucial to China’s rise, as it helped the country’s leaders formulate policy and stoke entrepreneurship.

Today’s Chinese leadership seems intent on winding these developments backwards. In a speech published earlier this year, Xi said he aimed to “ensure that the entire population is grounded in a shared ideological basis for unity.” Minxin Pei, an expert on Chinese politics at Claremont McKenna College, put a finer point on the Chinese leader’s motivations, suggesting to me that for Xi, “the loss of control over ideology, the loss of control over society” present “the primary threats to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power.”

Xi has been reasserting that control by steadily eliminating safe spaces for expression. He has enforced the study of his own philosophical ideas, known as Xi Jinping Thought, and constrained public debate on national issues. What was politically tolerated just a few years ago no longer is. The artist Gao Zhen, famous for his depictions of Mao Zedong, the Communist regime’s founder, was detained last year, and the authorities confiscated several of his works that had been created more than a decade earlier. Censors remove from social media not only criticism and politically sensitive material, but even accounts and posts deemed too pessimistic.

One reason for the suppression may be that China has a good deal of bad news to disappear. Xi’s predecessors could tout the country’s rapid economic progress, but this ready source of political legitimacy has been evaporating, as growth has slowed and jobs are harder to find. Improving China’s economic outlook would likely require more liberalizing reforms. Xi has resisted them, probably because they would weaken his grip on society by expanding the power of a wealthy middle class. China’s leaders “may be fearful of creating a monster they cannot control,” the Yale University economist Stephen Roach told me.

Instead, Chinese propaganda asserts that the economy is fine. Unflattering data and reports by prominent economists vanish from the internet. State media avoid reporting on the cost to Chinese factories of the U.S.-China trade dispute, and when they do acknowledge it, they tend to add a positive spin. Indeed, Cai Qi, a member of the party’s powerful Politburo, has urged officials to “sing loudly” about China’s bright economic prospects.

A chasm has opened, as a result, between the experiences of Chinese citizens and the government’s response. Chinese college graduates struggle to find jobs; the government, rather than reaching for policies to address their predicament, first suspended the release of unemployment statistics for the nation’s young workers in 2023, then rejiggered the method of calculating them to produce a lower figure.

But the Chinese public isn’t so easily fooled. In recent weeks, social-media users expressed nostalgia for the boom times by posting photos and videos of celebrities from the 2000s and commenting on both their fashion and the better opportunities available back then. These posts implicitly criticize the government by puncturing its narrative of economic progress. A recent paper by the scholars Michael Alisky, Martin King Whyte, and Scott Rozelle cited surveys conducted in China in which only 28 percent of respondents said in 2023 that they believed that hard work is always rewarded, compared with an average of 62 percent in polls conducted between 2004 and 2014.

“I really wonder how a state that insists on a narrative that ‘everything is getting better’ and doesn’t want to hear dissenting voices is going to be able to recognize and respond to those types of voices that are going to emerge in Chinese society,” Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me.

In October, residents of Shanghai who ventured out in Halloween costumes got a rude surprise: Police hauled them off the streets. Unsanctioned Halloween celebrations were apparently now off-limits. The authorities didn’t offer an explanation. Were they afraid that a reveler would criticize the regime with a satirical disguise, or dress up in a manner offensive to socialist morality? That a Halloween party might morph into a protest? In a politically charged society, nearly anything could appear to be a threat.

Students in the central city of Zhengzhou began taking nighttime bike rides to nearby Kaifeng. Late last year, the outings became a phenomenon as more and more riders joined them; sometimes the cyclists sang the country’s national anthem as they peddled. At first, officials encouraged these jaunts. But then the crowds swelled to the tens of thousands, and the security state got jittery. In mid-November, police shut the bikers down.

If such arbitrary, paranoid behavior sounds familiar, it should, as it’s common in authoritarian states and can contribute to their decline. China has already been through this. During the initial three decades of Communist rule under Mao, China plunged into violence, political paralysis, economic chaos, and a famine that killed tens of millions. Those who challenged Mao or tried to repair the damage were purged.

The Communist Party was able to save itself only after Mao’s death, by opening China to the world in the 1980s and introducing the reforms that sparked its rapid economic growth. Ever since, China has appeared to be a “different” kind of authoritarian regime, one that merged political control with economic vibrancy. The “China model” supposedly furnished an alternative to the West’s democratic capitalism as a pathway to national success.

Now China appears to be going back to the future. The four decades of reform were “an aberration,” Wang Feng, a sociologist at UC Irvine and the author of China’s Age of Abundance, told me. The Xi era is “a reset,” Wang said, returning China to a system in which the only source of power is political—the Communist Party, which is “exercising control over all sectors and suffocating society.”

Can China continue to ascend economically under these conditions? Some of its new industries, such as electric vehicles and AI, seem to be continuing to thrive. But in other respects, China is following a pattern familiar from the failed autocracies of the past. Shambaugh told me he was reminded of the late Soviet period, noting “the systemic sclerosis inherent in one-man dictatorship, especially the sycophancy and the need to carry out the leader’s directives no matter what they are.” Shambaugh wrote in a 2024 paper that as the Soviet regime felt itself losing control, its raison d’être seemed to become simply staying in power—“rule becomes rule for rule’s sake.” Xi’s “evident insecurities and obsession with maintaining total control,” Shambaugh wrote, are “clear evidence” that the same is happening in China.

That’s not to say that China’s system is on the verge of collapse. Beijing “has an economy and international linkages to fall back on that the Soviet Union never did,” Shambaugh told me. Chinese Communism could simply “atrophy” in place, he said, citing as examples of this trajectory North Korea, Venezuela, and Cuba.

Could China really become like North Korea or the Soviet Union? Neither outcome is easy to imagine. But neither is the continued progress of a country that can’t allow its citizens to grieve or celebrate.

COMMENT – As long as the outside world shins a light on the CCP’s authoritarianism, the Party will not be satisfied and will seek to silence those voices as well. The problem with wanting to control information is that it is an ever-expanding effort… the Party’s efforts to control the Chinese people will not stay within the country’s borders.

2. I’m a Stanford student. A Chinese agent tried to recruit me as a spy

   Elsa Johnson, Times of London, August 28, 2025

The playbook: start friendly, then ask questions

After that I started screenshotting our conversations. I was beginning to suspect that Charles might be working for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and he could be trying to recruit me as a spy.

I know it sounds paranoid, but I had heard of other Stanford students receiving communications like this out of the blue — especially those studying science, tech, engineering or mathematics.

Generally, it’s the same playbook: a person claiming to be a Chinese student “slips into your DMs”, or direct messages. They start out friendly with inquiries about your home life and ask whether or not you have mutual friends. Sometimes they point out shared interests and invite you to hang out.

Then the hard sell begins, with offers of an all-expenses-paid trip to China. They might flatter you with compliments and claim you can make money in the country as a social media star. If the conversation progresses, they may ask about your research, academic achievements over the years or the software you might use in class.

And this is exactly what happened with Charles. He shared videos of another woman he claimed was a Stanford student. “She was on a TV show in China and is famous now!” he wrote.

The implication was clear: I, too, could become prosperous and popular in China.

‘If someone pays for you, would you come?’

On June 27, Charles pressed the point. “You really should travel to China soon,” he wrote, adding that I could visit the country for six days without a visa under a government-approved tourist programme. He sent me an article explaining this.

“A bunch of people at Stanford have been to China this summer,” he wrote. “If someone pays for you, would you come?”

He sent me a flight itinerary from LA to Shanghai that cost $912 (£675) with China Eastern Airlines. “I can take care of your accommodation and transportation here,” he wrote.

Then he showed me a bank wire worth $5,485 that he received in May to prove he could afford it.

I messaged him back, saying the trip would be too expensive. He persisted. “Can’t you afford a thousand-dollar flight ticket?”

“It’s not worth it for a quick trip,” I replied.

He shared a video of another American college girl he said had visited China and built up an online following in the country. “This American college girl visit her Chinese friend every vacation no matter summer, Christmas, new years [sic],” he wrote.

I decided to message one of the Stanford students he mentioned when he first contacted me. I found her on Instagram and when I texted her what was happening to me, she said Charles had bombarded her with the same messages and requests. She had felt so harassed, she blocked him.

3. Chinese envoy warns against sowing ‘fear and hostility’ as US plans visa revamp

   Khushboo Razdan, South China Morning Post, August 28, 2025

Beijing’s top diplomat in Washington on Wednesday warned against undermining of people-to-people relations just hours after the US government proposed a sweeping revamp of visa rules for foreign students, scholars and media citing national security risks.

COMMENT – If the kinds of things that happened to that Stanford student are as routine as they sound, perhaps the United States should tighten its visa requirements.

Beijing cannot help itself from interfering in the internal affairs of others because the CCP is obsessed with enforcing a “correct” view on all sorts of issues.

4. Xi Unleashes China’s Biggest Purge of Military Leaders Since Mao

   Bloomberg, August 26, 2025

On a crisp April morning in Beijing earlier this year, China’s most senior military leaders gathered for a routine tree-planting ceremony that ended up providing a rare glimpse into the secretive world of power politics under President Xi Jinping.

Ahead of the event, reports spread that He Weidong — the second-highest ranking uniformed officer in the People’s Liberation Army — was the latest casualty of a sweeping purge that had already taken down two former defense ministers. Less than three years ago, Xi had appointed He as a vice chair of the Central Military Commission (CMC) over more senior generals, indicating he was one of the president’s chosen men to run the Communist Party’s armed forces.

The annual tree-planting event had included all of the top CMC members since Xi took power in 2012, a tradition that goes back four decades. As a nightly state-run television broadcast showed the group in camouflage uniforms shoveling soil, China watchers quickly noticed that He was missing, the clearest sign yet that he had become the most senior general to be ousted since Mao Zedong’s chaotic rule ended in 1976.

As surprising as He’s disappearance was, it fit a growing pattern under Xi. China’s leader has ousted almost a fifth of the generals whom he personally appointed while running the country, something his predecessors never did, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of TV footage, parliamentary gazettes and other public records. Moreover, Xi’s purge has left the CMC with only four total members, down from seven when his third term started. That’s the fewest in the post-Mao era, the Bloomberg analysis shows.

As more and more of China’s top military leaders fall, it leaves those trying to understand the nation grappling with a near-impossible question given the opaque nature of the Communist Party: Is this all a sign of Xi’s political strength, or of his weakness? The implications reach around the world and across the global economy.

COMMENT – As Taylor Fravel described in a recent Foreign Affairs article, “Is China’s Military Ready for War? What Xi’s Purges Do—and Don’t—Mean for Beijing’s Ambitions”, these purges and probes won’t likely impact Xi’s willingness to use force if he believes it is necessary.

Though Fravel’s three examples (1950 with the attack on United Nations forces in Korean War, 1962 with the attack on India along their border, and 1979 with the attack on Vietnam) all took place well before anyone in a leadership position today was in power.

5. Kim and Putin to Join Xi in Show of Unity at Beijing Military Parade

   Brian Spegele and Dasl Yoon, Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2025

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plans to join Russia’s Vladimir Putin at China’s grand military parade in Beijing next week, in a show of unity and defiance of the West.

The parade on Wednesday will be hosted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping and is set to be the trio’s first event together, providing powerful optics as Beijing asserts itself as a leader of countries seeking to upend the U.S.-led international order.

Yet the potential for the three countries to build on the moment faces limits, as each pursues its own agenda with the U.S. A summit between President Trump and Xi before the end of the year is possible, as China seeks a reduction of U.S. tariffs.

Trump is also holding out the possibility of better ties with both Russia and North Korea. He met Putin recently in Alaska to discuss the war in Ukraine and earlier this week said he would like to meet Kim again, after meeting the North Korean leader three times during his first term.

Beijing revealed Kim’s inclusion on Thursday when it unveiled the guest list for the parade. Trump won’t be attending, nor will most European leaders. Instead, Xi is set to be joined by the leaders of countries including Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia. South Korea will be represented by the speaker of the country’s National Assembly.

The parade will commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II and is an opportunity for China to show off its growing military might, as thousands of troops march past Tiananmen Square alongside some of China’s latest weapons.

For Kim, the event marks a shift as it would be his first time joining a multilateral gathering of leaders and his first visit to China since 2019. While Xi attended Putin’s Victory Day gathering in Moscow in May, North Korea sent a handful of military officers.

6. Mexico to Raise Tariffs on Imports from China After US Push

   Eric Martin, Bloomberg, August 27, 2025

The Mexican government plans to increase tariffs on China as part of its 2026 budget proposal next month, protecting the nation’s businesses from cheap imports and satisfying a longstanding demand of US President Donald Trump.

The tariff hikes, expected for imports including cars, textiles and plastics, aim to shelter domestic manufacturers from subsidized Chinese competition, according to three people briefed on the matter, who asked not to be identified revealing details of the plans. Other Asian countries are also expected to face higher tariffs, one of the people said.

Specific tariff rates weren’t immediately clear, and the plan could change, the people said. The draft revenue proposal from President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration is scheduled to be sent to Congress by Sept. 8.

While the budget plan will require approval from the legislative branch, Sheinbaum’s party and its allies hold two-thirds majorities in both houses, limiting likely changes by lawmakers. The president’s office and the Economy Ministry had no immediate comment. The Finance Ministry didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

The Trump administration since early this year has urged Mexican officials to raise duties on Chinese imports as the US has done. Mexican officials subsequently floated the idea of a “Fortress North America” that limits shipments from China while strengthening trade and manufacturing ties among the US, Mexico and Canada. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has expressed enthusiasm for the concept.

The nations are also preparing to review the free-trade deal between them, negotiated during Trump’s first term, by the middle of next year.

7. Trump’s Sweeping Tariffs Invalidated by Appeals Court

   Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, New York Times, August 29, 2025

The decision is a big blow to President Trump’s trade policies, but the judges left the duties in place for now to allow time for a likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that many of President Trump’s most punishing tariffs were illegal, delivering a major setback to Mr. Trump’s agenda that may severely undercut his primary source of leverage in an expanding global trade war.

The ruling, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, affirmed a lower court’s initial finding in May that Mr. Trump did not possess unlimited authority to impose taxes on nearly all imports to the United States. But the appellate judges delayed the enforcement of their order until mid-October, allowing the tariffs to remain in place so that the administration can appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

The adverse ruling still cast doubt on the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s trade strategy, which relies on a 1970s law to impose sweeping duties on dozens of the country’s trading partners. Mr. Trump has harnessed that law — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA — to raise revenue and to pressure other countries into brokering favorable deals. The law has typically been reserved for sanctions and embargoes against other nations.

The loss proved especially stinging after the Trump administration told the court earlier on Friday that any weakening of its tariff powers could unleash economic chaos. Hours before the ruling, the president’s top economic advisers raised special concern about the fate of the trade agreements the United States had struck with other governments. Among the deals they cited was an agreement with the European Union, which made favorable concessions to escape even higher U.S. taxes on its goods.

COMMENT – This should not have come as a surprise to the President and his Administration. They were warned by multiple people that IEEPA was a questionable authority to based global reciprocal tariffs on.

Had they more narrowly scoped the use of IEEPA to cover just a handful of countries or had they gone through the more time-consuming process of a Section 301 investigation, they wouldn’t be in this position. The President’s impatience and unwillingness to respect the constitutional limits on his authority have put him in the position in which the courts could unwind his signature economic and foreign policy initiative.

The President’s strategy now will be to dare the Supreme Court to uphold this Appeals Court decision.

Had the President spent time making the case to Congress and the American people of the need for his unilateral action on April 2, he might have been able to build the kind of consensus and legislative support that he needs now.

Even if the Supreme Court upholds the decision and invalidates the IEEPA tariffs, that won’t necessarily remove the tariffs on the PRC (as those come from other, more solid authorities, that the Administration followed procedure on), but most of the tariffs used on the rest of the world would go away and have to be repaid.

8. Spanish government cancels contract with Telefonica for using Huawei gear

   Reuters, August 29, 2025

The Spanish government has cancelled a fibre-optic service contract with Telefonica (TEF.MC), opens new tab over the use of equipment made by China's Huawei, the Digital Transformation Ministry said, amid concerns in Europe that such gear may pose a security risk.

"We confirm the cancellation of the contract for reasons of digital strategy and strategic autonomy," the ministry said in an emailed statement, without elaborating.

COMMENT - Smart move by Madrid, I take back my earlier criticisms.

9. Trump’s reversal on AI chips is a historic blunder
   Chris McGuire and Oren Cass, Washington Post, August 27, 2025

A short-term profit grab risks eroding America’s biggest advantage in the AI race.

Chris McGuire is a former National Security Council deputy senior director for technology and national security. Oren Cass is chief economist at American Compass.

In the global race to build up computing power to fuel the development of artificial intelligence, the United States and its allies possess an extraordinary technological edge over China. But the Trump administration is on the verge of squandering this hard-won strategic advantage in pursuit of short-term profit, which would cost the United States dearly down the road.

The objective of existing U.S. export controls on AI chips is simple: maximize U.S. leadership over China in AI by obtaining “as large of a lead as possible” in aggregate AI computing power. Data shows this strategy is working. Since the Biden administration’s decision in October 2022 to ban AI chip exports to China, the U.S. share of AI computing power has risen from 51 percent to 74 percent, while China’s share has plummeted from 33 percent to 14 percent.

But Nvidia, the leading AI chip designer, has been determined to gain traction in the lucrative Chinese market. Its engineers modified a previously banned chip in a way to elude export controls. With lower processing power but very fast memory, the resultant H20 chip is extremely capable at running advanced AI models. China’s leading AI firms need large numbers of these chips to remain competitive.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration tightened restrictions to also ban AI chips such as the H20. But now, after months of lobbying from Nvidia, it has reversed course. The president has announced an agreement under which AI chip companies will pay a 15 percent tax on their China revenue, and the Commerce Department has already begun issuing licenses for export. This is a historically bad deal.

China’s greatest weakness in the AI race is in hardware. In every other key element of AI development, China closely rivals or even surpasses the United States. China has world-class engineering talent and four times as many people; leading Chinese AI models are technically sophisticated; and Chinese firms have access to all the data that U.S. firms do, plus additional data inside China.

But AI chips are arguably the single most difficult item on Earth to manufacture. The United States banned China from purchasing not only chips but also key chipmaking equipment, leaving China’s semiconductor production ecosystem 10 to 15 years behind the leading edge. This year, China will make about 200,000 AI chips, equivalent to 1 percent to 2 percent of estimated U.S. production (which itself is insufficient to meet U.S. demand). And because China is forced to use less advanced chipmaking equipment, the leading Chinese AI chip today is almost five times less powerful and less reliable than leading U.S. AI chips. This gap will only widen over the coming years.

China will never make enough AI chips to fill domestic demand. If Chinese AI firms can only access Chinese chips, they will fall extremely far behind U.S. firms in terms of aggregate AI computing power, which will provide the United States with enduring advantages in AI capabilities.

Leading figures in China admit that U.S. controls are working. In July, Chinese Premier Li Qiang called China’s shortage of AI chips a “bottleneck.” The CEO of DeepSeek, China’s leading AI firm, said that the ban on AI chip shipments is his biggest problem. DeepSeek delayed the release of its next-generation AI model because it did not have enough Nvidia H20 chips, and its efforts to train the model using Huawei chips have failed.

President Donald Trump’s reversal puts the entire U.S. strategy at risk. If China can buy degraded versions of any U.S. AI chips, China will use large quantities of them to replicate the performance of more advanced chips, causing China’s aggregate AI computing power to increase significantly and U.S. AI advantages to erode.

Selling AI chips to China also means fewer AI chips for the United States. Leading AI labs have stated publicly that they are constrained by the number of AI chips they can buy. Allowing exports to China does not mean more production or higher sales for American firms or workers. It only reallocates computing power to the detriment of the national interest.

Thus, even putting aside the substantial national security concerns, the deal struck by Trump is a commercial disaster. Last year, Nvidia sold $17 billion worth of AI chips to China; if it replicates those numbers this year, the U.S. government’s cut would be $2.5 billion. By comparison, Morgan Stanley estimates that the efficiency gains resulting from AI could add $16 trillion in value to the S&P 500. If the United States has an extremely large lead over China in AI, it will capture nearly all of this value; if it does not, the United States and China will divide up the most valuable pie in history.

Advocates for the sales argue that the United States can further entrench its technological edge by supplying China, embedding U.S. chips at the heart of the Chinese AI “stack” and reducing the likelihood that indigenous Chinese firms develop their own alternatives.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It is precisely the theory under which U.S. firms spent a generation transferring their own technology into China, handing it global industrial dominance and helping to build up Chinese firms that proceeded to toss the foreign competitors out on their rears. Sure enough, the Trump administration has indicated that it may even take the disastrous step of permitting Nvidia to sell China the B30A, a modified version of its most advanced chip. Charlie Brown exercised greater caution in his kicks at Lucy’s football.

U.S. leadership over China in AI is too critical to be left to half-measures and corporate lobbyists. The United States should maximize its advantages in hardware by comprehensively blocking China from buying or remotely accessing any U.S. AI chips, or using any Western technology to make advanced chips. The U.S. objective should be to make the AI competition with China as lopsided and unfair as possible. Because if the United States cedes its advantages in AI hardware, there is a real chance that we could lose the AI competition overall.

COMMENT – Ironically, President Trump signed the “Maintaining American Superiority by Improving Export Control Transparency Act” on August 19 which is meant to make it more difficult for companies like Nvidia to lobby away export restrictions on its most powerful AI chips.

10. China is why we should support the VOA, not shut it down

    Larry Diamond, Orville Schell, and Robert Daly, Washington Post, August 30, 2025

Kari Lake says VOA cooperated with the Chinese Communist Party. In reality, VOA fights propaganda.

Kari Lake, senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media — parent of the Voice of America — has made serious and deeply troubling accusations about the VOA’s Mandarin Service. Testifying to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in June, she said she wanted to “root out the Russian, Chinese, Iranian propaganda … at VOA.” In July, she told the website Just the News that members of the Chinese Communist Party had been “meeting regularly with VOA management to tell them how they should be covering China.” And in late August, she posted on X: “The CCP has infiltrated VOA and YOU are paying for it.”

The VOA described by Lake is not the VOA we know and to which we have all contributed. Though we share her concerns for media outlets that yield to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party, the Voice of America is not one of them. On the contrary, since it was established in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, the VOA has been one of our most effective bulwarks against Beijing’s influence-seeking abroad, and an effective means of promoting accurate information and critical analysis to the world. During the Cold War, millions beyond the Iron Curtain risked arrest by listening to VOA broadcasts. The need for such a global, objective, multilingual American news source is as great today as it was then.

Lake’s criticisms, and her work leading to the near-total shutdown of VOA, are misguided and bad for our country — for several reasons.

First, some of Lake’s claims appear to be drawn from our 2019 report, published by the Hoover Institution, “China’s Influence and American Interests,” in which we cited interviews with several VOA staff members. One was Sasha Gong, who had been chief of VOA’s Mandarin Service until she was terminated in late 2018; she accused VOA of caving to pressure from Beijing to fire her after Gong broadcast an interview with a China critic, the exiled and notoriously unreliable billionaire Guo Wengui. After our research for the report was completed, however, multiple internal and external investigations concluded that VOA management had acted appropriately in terminating Gong and had upheld the editorial standards that informed the agency’s decision.

We regret that Gong’s false and outdated accusations are apparently being used by Lake to attack VOA, which has long served as a reliable and authoritative news source for people in China who might otherwise find themselves limited to the propaganda and censorship of the country’s state media.

Second, VOA’s Mandarin Service in recent years has consistently delivered hard-hitting coverage of U.S.-China relations, exposed Chinese Communist Party disinformation and investigated Beijing’s malign influence around the world. In fact, it remains one of the few independent news outlets providing uncensored, fact-based reporting in both English and Mandarin to global Chinese audiences. It frequently features analyses by Americans whose critiques of the party would probably land them in prison if they went to China, including Miles Yu, who served as China affairs adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the first Trump administration. Our recent discussions on Chinese college campuses indicate that these programs are widely welcomed by Chinese students and intellectuals.

Third, we think the most telling evidence that VOA challenges Chinese Communist Party propaganda is the Beijing authorities’ decades-long efforts to jam its broadcasts, as well as the glee with which the party greeted the Trump administration’s near-shutdown of the agency in March. China’s international propaganda arm, the Global Times, hailed the move in an editorial: “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.” The editorial denounced VOA for “stirring up conflicts” and “inciting social divisions”— boilerplate party language used to justify the repression of dissidents and truth-tellers within China. The Global Times also railed against VOA’s coverage of China’s human rights violations in Xinjiang, aggression in the South China Sea and unfair trade practices, as well as the broadcaster’s support for popular efforts to maintain democracy in Taiwan and achieve it in Hong Kong. If the Beijing authorities had co-opted VOA’s coverage of China, as Lake alleged, they would not have conducted a frenzied assault on the VOA as a “lie factory.”

It is important to remember that, in her assault on VOA, Lake has been wrong about procedure as well as facts. On Thursday, a federal judge found that Lake’s attempt to fire Michael Abramowitz, the VOA director, was illegal. (On Friday, she issued termination notices to more than 500 employees of VOA and its parent agency.)

As specialists in Chinese politics and democracy-building, we firmly believe that the VOA has long played — and should be allowed to continue playing — its essential role in countering Beijing’s malign narratives and combating its richly resourced, nakedly authoritarian propaganda worldwide. As of now, VOA’s Mandarin Service is one of four language services that (by statute) continue to operate, but it does so at a greatly reduced rate — and VOA asserts that all of its operations are legally protected from the administration’s efforts to eliminate it.

The Voice of America remains a vital instrument serving the U.S. national interest by combating authoritarian narratives and disseminating accurate news and information that our adversaries don’t want their people to hear or see. If Washington takes competition with China seriously, VOA must continue to be supported and even strengthened, with the Mandarin Service at the forefront of its work.

COMMENT – Lake’s attacks on VOA’s Mandarin Service are mistaken, they suggest that Lake doesn’t know what she is talking about and is only interested in dismantling the organization she is supposed to be leading.

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Authoritarianism

11. Satellite Images Show China Parade Weapons Capable of US Strikes
    Josh Xiao and Jon Herskovitz, Bloomberg, August 25, 2025

12. Powerful optics': China's Xi to welcome Putin, Modi in grand show of solidarity
    Laurie Chen, Reuters, August 26, 2025

13. Chinese flock to Russian universities in afterglow of Xi-Putin ties
    Jens Kastner, Nikkei Asia, August 26, 2025

COMMENT – This perhaps says more about the quality of Chinese universities than anything about the closeness of Xi and Putin.

14. China urged to take pragmatic approach as South Korea and Japan pledge closer cooperation
    Meredith Chen, South China Morning Post, August 26, 2025

15. As South Korea’s Leader Meets with Trump, China Looms Large
    Choe Sang-Hun, New York Times, August 24, 2025

16. Hong Kong Denies Visa Renewal for Senior Bloomberg Journalist
    David Pierson, New York Times, August 23, 2025

17. Beijing builds out REE traceability system
    Trivium China, August 26, 2025

18. Trump Signals Fourth Delay of TikTok Ban
    Sapna Maheshwari, New York Times, August 22, 2025

19. The Test That Rules Chinese Society
    Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2025

The gaokao is China’s college entrance exam, but it shapes the country and its people far beyond the classroom.

For two days every year in June, China comes to a standstill. Unusual sights abound: Men put on qipaos, traditional dresses typically worn by women, as a symbol of luck; police stand on street corners, silencing drivers to ensure minimal disturbance; temples overflow with relatives sending out final prayers; crowds, unusually quiet, gather in hushed vigils outside thousands of schools. State media zero in on an event affecting 10 million students and their many family members: the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.

The highest scorers on the gaokao in each province are practically guaranteed a spot at an elite university and the life-changing power that comes with it. In some places, top scorers are treated like celebrities and interviewed on local television. In others, legal measures now shield the identity of the highest scorers to protect them from overexposure.

The gaokao is the culmination of hundreds of tests that Chinese students take during the 12 years of elementary to high school. Exams are a fact of life in many places around the world. But no country is as thoroughly governed by test scores as China, where they both reflect and reinforce the structure of society as a tournament—a zero-sum competition where, if your neighbor wins, in all likelihood you lose.

The higher education system in China is a pyramid with five tiers. At the top are approximately 100 elite universities, which receive priority in government funding and resources. Below them are several thousand four-year universities designated Tier 2, Tier 3 and Tier 4, which differ substantially in terms of their reputation and resources. At the bottom of the pyramid sit two-year or three-year vocational colleges, which are similar to community colleges in the U.S.

Every student’s score on the gaokao is compared to the score of every other student within their province; it is only by knowing how well others are performing that one can gauge one’s own performance. Of the 10 million students who take the gaokao every year, about 500,000, the top 5%, will gain admission to a Tier 1 college. Admission is entirely determined by test score, in contrast with the U.S., where standardized tests like the ACT and SAT are just one of many factors considered by an admissions office, and each college typically accepts students with a range of scores.

For Chinese families, obsessing over the gaokao is perfectly rational: Unless they do so, they have little chance of succeeding within the system. That is why, even though Chinese primary and middle schools are free and high school tuition is relatively low, families with students devote about 7.9% of their total household expenditure to education, compared to a global average of roughly 2% to 3%. After all, if every student is supposedly receiving the same free public education, the only way to surpass your peers is to do something different, something extra. That’s where tutoring comes in.

For ambitious urban students, tutoring is nonnegotiable. The chance of getting into China’s two top universities, Peking and Tsinghua, is close to zero if a student does not attend one of the top 10% of high schools in their province. To attend a top high school, a student must be a top tester in one of the best middle schools. And to get into one of the best middle schools, a student must be a top tester in one of the best elementary schools. That means children often begin the tutoring grind at age 4 or 5.

The need to pay for tutoring puts wealthy families at a notable advantage. The same is true in many countries, but inequality of educational opportunity is especially problematic in a country that emphasizes socialist ideals. In recent years, China’s government has taken pains to tackle inequalities in the exam system, even outlawing all forms of tutoring in 2021. Within a month, the stock price of China’s most prominent tutoring company plummeted by 90%.

But while the policy was meant to help students and families struggling with expenses, it did nothing to change the underlying reality of the system. The demand for higher scores exists because the gaokao exists. Wealthy individuals now simply hire private tutors under the table instead of contracting with bigger companies. Other tutoring companies have gone underground, which only drives up the cost and limits access for students already struggling with limited resources.

Even housing can be considered an educational expense, since living in a top school district offers a shortcut to the best elementary schools. In Beijing, a 550-square-foot apartment in a prestigious district can cost roughly $1.2 million, a higher price per square foot than in Palo Alto, Calif., one of the most expensive cities in America.

20. China-linked hackers targeted diplomats in Asia, Google says

    The Straits Times, August 26, 2025

Diplomats in South-east Asia were targeted in a cyber-espionage campaign earlier in 2025, likely waged in support of operations aligned with the strategic interests of China, according to Google.

The attacks, using social engineering and malware disguised as innocuous software updates, are attributed to the China-linked UNC6384 group, Alphabet’s Google Threat Intelligence Group said on Aug 25, citing technical evidence. The “UNC” term applies to hacking activity that is linked but not yet categorised under another group.

About two dozen victims downloaded malware, according to Mr Patrick Whitsell, a senior security engineer at Google. While Google did not specify the nationalities of the affected diplomats, Mr Whitsell told Bloomberg News in an interview that he has high confidence that the attacker is “China-aligned”.

21. China refuses to explain ‘greyed out’ parts of London embassy plan
    Anna Gross, Financial Times, August 22, 2025

22. Ministers delay planning decision on Chinese ‘super-embassy’ in London

    Sammy Gecsoyler, The Guardian, August 23, 2025

Date pushed back to October amid concerns over redacted drawings in plans for 20,000-sq-metre complex.

Ministers have delayed a decision on whether to grant planning permission to a proposed Chinese “super-embassy” in London amid concerns about redacted drawings in the building’s plans.

The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, was expected to make a decision on 9 September but has pushed the date back to 21 October, saying more time was needed to consider the plans for the development, which would occupy 20,000 sq metres (five acres) at Royal Mint Court in east London.

The plan has met fierce opposition from local people and campaigners concerned about Beijing’s human rights record in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region. Several large protests have taken place outside the site in recent months.

Earlier this month, Rayner, who also serves as the housing secretary, gave the Chinese embassy two weeks to send additional details about its plans. In a letter, she noted that two of the proposed embassy buildings in the drawings – the cultural exchange building and Embassy House – had been “greyed out”.

COMMENT – I don’t think this is going to end well for the UK Labour Government. They are between a rock and a hard place and Prime Minister Keir Starmer is going to come across looking weak because Beijing will eventually make them cave.

The CCP knows that their UK counterparts are in a weak position and Beijing sees no reason to compromise.

23. Navigating Chinese Censorship in Podcasts, Publishing, Scholarship, and Social Media

    Arthur Kaufman, China Digital Times, August 21, 2025

Recent articles have highlighted the ways in which various Chinese groups attempt to circumvent censorship in the liminal spaces of its enforcement. Across different domains, shifts in censorship capacity and communication methods provide opportunities to expand the limits of free speech, albeit sometimes only temporarily.

As mentioned in a previous CDT post, the Made in China Journal’s Gateway to Global China Podcast featured comments by veteran Chinese journalist Fang Kecheng on the spectrum of externally and internally imposed censorship, and the creative ways in which he and his colleagues managed to push the boundaries of what was possible in the newsroom. Increasingly, podcasts have emerged as a popular—and to some extent, perhaps less censored—alternative medium for discussing societal issues.

The Asia Society recently highlighted several Chinese-language podcasts hosted by journalists, academics, independent analysts, and others both inside and outside of China, which offer a “flexible and accessible format for in-depth analysis that is often less constrained than traditional media.” That said, they are still subject to censorship: on Tuesday, censors removed the podcast “Eight and a Half Minutes” from Chinese streaming platforms after the host discussed Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong media mogul facing national security charges. The podcast, hosted by Hong Kong writer, commentator, and host Leung Man-tao, is still available on Apple Podcasts.

24. Rising risk to China’s covert Iran oil lifeline

    Amirreza Etasi, Asia Times, August 28, 2025

Snapback enforcement of sanctions on Iran’s oil exports would have a devastating impact on China’s economy

25. Taiwan, China battle it out in competing World War Two narratives
    Ben Blanchard, Reuters, August 25, 2025

26. Collapse of Bridge Under Construction in China Leaves at Least 12 Dead
    Jonathan Wolfe, New York Times, August 23, 2025

27. Chinese ownership of US farmland no threat to American security, envoy says
    Orange Wang, South China Morning Post, August 24, 2025

Xie Feng says agriculture should not be politicised and US farmers should not pay for the trade war.

China’s top envoy in Washington has rejected suggestions that Chinese ownership of US farmland is a national security threat, saying such claims are “completely unfounded”.

Addressing a soybean industry event in Washington on Friday, Xie Feng, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, said Chinese investors owned less than 0.03 per cent of the total farmland in the US.

“How can it pose a threat to US food security as some have claimed?” Xie said, according to a transcript of his speech published by the Chinese embassy on Saturday.

“Restricting Chinese citizens and businesses from buying farmland is purely an attempt at political manipulation on the pretext of national security.”

“It is completely unfounded, and is aimed at hijacking China-US agricultural cooperation for a few individuals’ own agenda,” he said at an event held as part of the US Soybean Export Council’s global summit.

COMMENT – Of course, the Chinese Communist Party would never permit Americans to own farmland in the PRC… so I think we should dismiss the ambassador’s remarks as empty rhetoric.

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Environmental Harms

28. China burning coal at record high levels in 2025 — report

    Jon Shelton, DW, August 25, 2025

China has expanded its use of coal energy more in the first half of 2025 than at any time in the past nine years. The spike comes despite massive renewable capacity and threatens climate goals.

China burned more coal at power plants between January and July of 2025 than at any time since 2016, despite massive renewable capacity, according to new environmental research report.

The report — published by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a Finland-based independent air-quality research organization; and Global Energy Monitor (GEM), a US-based energy analytics company — says China put 21 gigawatts (GW) of coal power online in the first six months of 2025.

That is the highest six-month level in nine years. The CREA/GEM report also cites new construction and re-firing of existing coal plants totaling 46 GW and proposed projects with the capacity to produce a further 75 GW.

Total projected coal plant output is forecast to hit between 80-100 GW in 2025.

Coal currently accounts for half of China's energy production, down from three-quarters in 2016.

China, the world's second-largest economy, is also the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter.

China installing enormous amounts of renewables, sinking overall emissions

Paradoxically, this spike in coal use takes place as China massively expands its renewable capacity, which now covers growth in electricity demand. Solar capacity, for instance, jumped by 212 GW in the first six months of 2025.

This year alone, the country is on track to install enough new renewable energy to cover the energy needs of Germany and the UK combined.

Germany, according to its Federal Network Agency, added roughly 20 GW of renewables to its grid in 2024, bringing its total to 190. China will add 500 GW in new wind and solar power in 2025 alone.

Beijing's push has led to a 1% drop in six-month emissions year-on-year, according to the UK-based climate and energy website Carbon Brief, yet China's increased reliance on coal threatens to derail its pursuit of gas emissions reductions.

"Despite a rapidly changing capacity and generation mix, coal power construction in China shows no sign of easing," wrote CREA.

"Coal power development in China... shows no sign of easing, leaving emissions on a high plateau and stranding coal in the system for years to come," echoed Christine Shearer, research analyst at GEM and co-author of the report.

China's 'powerful coal interests' threaten climate goals

In 2021, Chinese President Xi Jinping said he would "strictly control" the coal industry in order to "phase it down" between 2026 and 2030.

Despite Xi's pledge to remove 30 GW of coal from China's grids between 2020 and the end of 2025, only 1 GW has been taken offline.

CREA authors cite "powerful coal interests" in warning that these are crowding out renewables by securing "long-term contracts and broad capacity payments," allowing them to "keep many plants running at high output."

Xi has said he will announce China's Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) — a national commitment to greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2035 — before November's COP30 climate summit in Brazil.

Details are also expected when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) releases the details of its 15th Five-Year Plan for 2026 to 2030 in the coming months.

COMMENT – For all the articles praising Beijing’s installation of renewable energy, the reality is that the PRC is pursuing a “more of everything” strategy when it comes to energy… it will increase its use of renewables AND increase its use of coal-burning power plants.

DW portrays this policy as “China’s contradictory energy policy”… but that is wrong, it isn’t contradictory at all, it just isn’t the same policy as what Germany and many Europeans are pursuing.

Unlike Europe, Beijing is not primarily concerned with reducing carbon emissions… it wants to massively increase the total energy it has and can employ to dominate global manufacturing.

If that means putting up solar panels: great.

If that means burning more coal: also, great.

Therefore, it will simultaneously add as much solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, and coal-powered generation to its grid as possible. The PRC will continue to burn coal as long as coal is available.

If Europeans want to delude themselves into believing that Beijing and Brussels can “cooperate” on reducing carbon emissions, then the CCP is fine with letting them believe that.

From “Why the World Cannot Quit Coal,” Financial Times, June 18, 2025.

I don’t mean to make my friends who obsess about the wonderfulness of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement feel bad… BUT…

Since 2015, the United States and its European friends have retired 187 GW worth of coal-fired power plants, significantly reducing their own CO2 emissions… however, during that same time, just the PRC added 294 GW of coal-fired power plants… that’s not counting the other 151 GW worth of additions by the other countries on this chart.

294 + 151 = 445

Now I’m no math whiz but I’m pretty sure that:

187 < 445

Those coal-fired power plants will likely remain online for the next 50-75 years, and inevitably more will be added in those countries in the coming years, guaranteeing even higher CO2 emissions.

Localized CO2 reductions are meaningless… emissions of CO2 anywhere on the globe contribute to climate change by going into the atmosphere. So, for all the cost and lost productivity the U.S. and Europe has imposed upon themselves in the name of the Paris Climate Agreement, we have seen a net increase by 258 GW worth of coal-fired power plants since 2015.

And since so many of the countries that are committed to reducing their carbon emissions are also committed to free trade, we are likely to see even more economic activity move away from places that make energy expensive (side-eye at Europe) and to the places that try to expand the amount of energy that is available, regardless of CO2 emissions, which makes energy less expensive.

Europe’s “goods” will be produced by the plentiful energy from these coal-fired power plants.

29. China's new mega dam triggers fears of water war in India
    Krishna N. Das, Reuters, August 24, 2025

30. Chinese solar makers' losses deepen as industry vows to end price war
    Wataru Suzuki, Nikkei Asia, August 25, 2025

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Foreign Interference and Coercion

31. How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City
    Michael Forsythe, Jay, Root, Bianca Pallaro, and David A. Fahrenthold, New York Times, August 25, 2025

The Chinese Consulate in Manhattan has mobilized community groups to defeat candidates who don’t fall in line with the authoritarian state.

In New York City, social clubs backed by China undermined a congressional candidate who once challenged the regime on Chinese television.

They helped unseat a state senator for attending a banquet with the president of Taiwan.

And they condemned a City Council candidate on social media for supporting Hong Kong democracy.

In the past few years, these organizations have quietly foiled the careers of politicians who opposed China’s authoritarian government while backing others who supported policies of the country’s ruling Communist Party. The groups, many of them tax-exempt nonprofits, have allowed America’s most formidable adversary to influence elections in the country’s largest city, The New York Times found.

The groups are mostly “hometown associations” of people hailing from the same town or province in China. Some have been around for more than a century, while dozens of others have sprung up over the past decade. Like other heritage clubs in a city of immigrants, they welcome newcomers, organize parades and foster social connections.

But many hometown associations have become useful tools of China’s consulate in Midtown Manhattan, according to dozens of group members, politicians and former prosecutors. Some group leaders have family or business in China and fear the consequences of bucking its authority. Consulate officials have enlisted them to intimidate politicians who support Taiwan or cross Beijing’s other red lines. In one case, a Chinese intelligence agent and several hometown leaders targeted the same candidate.

This meddling may seem modest, involving politicians who are unlikely to affect international policy. But China is determined to quash dissent in its diaspora before it spreads back home, said Audrye Wong, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies Chinese influence.

Beijing is also making a longer bet, she said: “You never know which politician might eventually run for Congress at the national level, or become a presidential candidate.”

…

Zhang Yun, president of the American Lianjiang Association, said that it was “tradition” to invite Chinese consulate officials to these events, which are aimed at boosting ties between the two countries. “You all think that whatever Chinese people do is bad,” he said. “It’s discrimination.”

Among the 53 groups, The Times found at least 19 registered charities that had ignored the ban on election activities. Under federal tax law, these nonprofits — which do not pay most taxes — can take positions on policy issues but cannot endorse candidates for office. And yet, in case after case, the hometown groups made endorsements or hosted fund-raisers despite answering “no” to questions from the Internal Revenue Service about political involvement.

“That’s totally out of bounds,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a professor at Notre Dame who studies nonprofit law. “That’s a clear violation of the limits that Congress has put on their tax-exempt status.”

The I.R.S. declined to comment. A spokesman for New York’s tax agency, which is responsible for enforcing a similar state law, said it did not have the resources to look for such violations.

COMMENT – Reminds me of the German American Bund of the 1930s in which an organization for promoting German American heritage got taken over by Nazis and used to build support for Nazism within the German-American community and undermine the United States for the benefit of Berlin.

For more on this, read Steven Ross’s 2017 book Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.

I’m sure there are plenty of loyal Americans within these Chinese American community groups, but they should understand that their groups have been subsumed within a wider effort by the Chinese Communist Party to mobilize “Overseas Chinese” on behalf of the Party.

32. Inside Our Investigation of China’s Influence Campaigns
    Michael Forsythe, Jay Root, and Bianca Pallaro, New York Times, August 25, 2025

33. Justice Department Charges Two Individuals with Acting as Agents of the PRC Government
    Office of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of Justice, August 1, 2025

34. German Prosecutors Charge American with Attempted Spying for China
    Jim Tankersley and Christopher F. Schuetze, New York Times, August 25, 2025

35. US Navy sailor convicted for selling military secrets to China
    Riley Ceder, Navy Times, August 21, 2025

36. MD Anderson researcher accused of stealing cancer data
    John Wayne Ferguson, Houston Chronicle, August 25, 2025

37. Foxconn’s Recall of More Chinese Staff Tests Apple’s India Push
    Sankalp Phartiyal and Debby Wu, Bloomberg, August 23, 2025

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Human Rights and Religious Persecution

38. Young Chinese Scholar Missing Since 2018 After Conducting Research on Uyghur Culture

    Human Rights in China, August 22, 2025

Feng Siyu, a young scholar from Zhejiang, was once admitted to 17 of the world’s top universities and celebrated in Chinese media as an exceptionally gifted student. She dedicated herself to the study of Asian cultures, mastering both English and Uyghur, and was deeply committed to research on Uyghur cultural traditions. Her rare cross-cultural academic background earned her wide recognition within the field of Uyghur studies. Yet since her arrest in 2018, this promising young scholar has vanished without a trace.

From the Ivory Tower to the Field

After graduating from Hangzhou Foreign Languages School in 2012, Feng Siyu received offers of admission from 17 of the world’s leading universities, including the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, and Northwestern University. She ultimately chose to complete a bachelor’s degree in history at Amherst College in Massachusetts, then to study at SOAS University of London.

Alongside her pursuit of academic excellence, Feng was also deeply committed to social engagement. In the summer of 2013, she traveled to Yushan County, Jiangxi Province, to teach as a volunteer. There, she introduced local children to poetry and music, guiding them through the works of Gu Cheng and classics such as Returning to Live in the Countryside. Before she left, she bought them books like Charlotte’s Web and Exploring the Earth to inspire their learning and imagination.

Feng Siyu’s passion for Uyghur culture was unmistakable. She enrolled in a summer program at the University of Wisconsin to study Uyghur under Professor Gulnisa Nazarova, eventually achieving fluency. In 2017, her senior thesis—From Istanbul to Kashgar: Ahmed Kemal’s Educational Mission in Chinese Turkestan, 1885–1917—won Amherst College’s Alfred F. Havighurst Prize, awarded for outstanding work in the humanities.

That same year, she joined the Folklore Research Center at Xinjiang University, where she conducted in-depth fieldwork on Uyghur women’s folk culture. Her ambition was clear: she planned to pursue a doctorate in history at Harvard University under the supervision of renowned scholar Mark Elliott.

While pursuing her research in Asian culture and history, Feng Siyu also paid close attention to China’s political realities. In 2014, she shared on Facebook a South China Morning Post article marking the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. She could not have imagined then that the persecution once unleashed on students in 1989 would one day be replayed against her. For this young scholar, an academic dream was cut brutally short.

Political persecution disguised as absurd criminal charges

According to internal police documents from Urumqi obtained by The Intercept, authorities began investigating Feng Siyu in October 2017 after claiming her OnePlus phone contained “foreign software.” The absurdity of the charge was evident even in the police report itself, which acknowledged that the application in question was a factory-installed program, with no evidence that Feng had ever used it.

Nevertheless, in 2018 the young scholar was arrested and vanished without a trace. It is believed she was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and may since have been transferred from a Xinjiang facility to a prison in her home province of Zhejiang.

Yet anthropologist Rune Steenberg argues that the real reason for Feng Siyu’s arrest likely lies in her academic work. In February 2017, Feng had joined the Folklore Research Center at Xinjiang University, working alongside Rahile Dawut, the internationally renowned ethnographer of Uyghur culture. Dawut, the center’s founder, had devoted her career to studying Uyghur folklore, religious traditions, and oral literature. But in December 2017, she too disappeared, and in 2018 was secretly sentenced to life in prison.

As Dawut’s collaborator and a young scholar focused on Uyghur cultural research, Feng Siyu almost certainly fell victim for the same reason—another casualty of the authorities’ assault on Uyghur cultural studies. The so-called investigation into her phone software was nothing more than a flimsy pretext to cloak political persecution. Feng Siyu’s case illustrates the Chinese Communist Party’s deep fear of academic inquiry and cultural exchange in Xinjiang: any effort to understand, document, or preserve Uyghur culture is treated as a threat to state security.

Human Rights in China calls on the Chinese government to unconditionally release Feng Siyu and to disclose the true reasons and legal grounds for her detention.

COMMENT – Feng Siyu attended Amherst College and became a human rights advocate… and was disappeared in 2018.

I figured American organizations like “Stop AAPI Hate” or “Asian Americans Advancing Justice” must be tracking her disappearance and publishing articles about it and advocating for her release…

Well, I’m wrong neither organization pays any attention to issues like this.

A Chinese-American who is abused by the Chinese Communist Party gets zero attention from these organizations.

To add insult to injury, Feng Siyu was concerned about the plight of Uyghurs, and those two organizations don’t care at all about Uyghurs.

Uyghurs are the most abused minority in the world, there is a population of Uyghurs in the United States, they are “Asian-Americans” but they are abused by the Chinese Communist Party, which means that these two organizations don’t even acknowledge their existence.

So maybe you think these organizations only narrowly define what an “Asian-American” is and therefore a Uyghur doesn’t fit the definition…

Well, they seem to have plenty to say about Palestinians.

Wouldn’t it be great if organizations that supposedly stood for protecting Asian-Americans actually did something to acknowledge the plight of Uyghur-Americans and their families or of Asian-Americans who have been disappeared by the Chinese Communist Party for showing concern and empathy for Uyghurs?

Maybe these organizations just really hate Uyghurs and that is why they refuse to acknowledge them or show any concern for individuals that stand up for Uyghurs. Perhaps they are laser beam focused on just issues that impact Asian-Americans directly… like when a 7-year old Asian-American citizen is held for a year in China with an exit ban to coerce the child’s father into confessing that he has maligned the CCP.

What is happening to Gao Jia, that 7-year old Asian-American, must be the sort of issue that gets these organizations animated… rights?

Nope.

Apparently, those kinds of abuses against Asian-Americans deserve no attention whatsoever.

Hell, they don’t make any reference to the term “exit ban” at all.

These are the human rights organizations that pretend to stand for the interests of Asian-Americans, but they deliberately ignore the issues that most impact the lives and well-being of important segments of the Asian-American community because it would make their Chinese Communist Party benefactors angry.

39. Kmart supply chains under scrutiny for potential Uyghur forced labour links in Australian court case

    Ben Doherty, The Guardian, August 23, 2025

The letter was effusively polite, the allegations anything but.

“We have the honour to address you,” the seven United Nations special rapporteurs began their correspondence to the head of Jiangsu Guotai Guosheng garment factory in China’s Xinjiang province.

The 2021 letter then detailed allegations of brutal working conditions for members of China’s Uyghur minority, reportedly forcibly transported hundreds of kilometres and arbitrarily detained for re-education and forced labour.

“Workers are reportedly required to work in fenced-in factories … allegedly exposed to intimidation, coercion, threats, and restriction on their freedom of movement, and are subjected to surveillance by security personnel and through digital tools.”

COMMENT – Ah yes, the wonderful benefits of globalization and labor arbitrage… let’s remember that for many multinational companies, forced labor in the PRC and the CCP’s willingness to crush dissent and abuse its citizens, is a feature, not a bug, for these companies. Their primary interest is driving down cost and maximizing shareholder returns… employing workers where there are high labor standards and a free press is the exact opposite of what these companies want to do.

I know this might come across as crazy talk but hear me out…

What if, democracies that said they supported human rights, labor standards, environmental protections, and press freedoms actually created an international trading system that ensured that goods were only manufactured in places that respected those things? Rather than the system we’ve built over the past three decades in which companies outsource work to jurisdictions where those things can’t be enforced.

It would mean accepting higher prices and lower profits for shareholders… a company that employs workers who have rights and can organize will get higher wages than slaves… but those workers in the company’s home country would be better paid and could then afford more goods and services. One might even envision a virtuous cycle, rather than a race to the bottom.

Outsourcing is simply a way to avoid complying with laws and standards within one’s own country. Rather than trying to get the PRC to change and adopt values that respect human beings, we should just change our patterns of manufacture and trade.

I know it sounds crazy because it completely rejects the free trade orthodoxy of globalist cheerleaders and the so-called expertise of main-stream economists… but it is clearly less crazy than expecting the Chinese Communist Party to stop abusing its citizens when we make them rich for doing it.

I’m reminded of Mathias Döpfner’s excellent book from two years ago, The Trade Trap: How to Stop Doing Business with Dictators. Döpfner is no crank, he is the CEO of Europe’s most influential media company and the owner of publications like Politico.

My advice comes straight from Döpfner: stop doing business with dictators.

When folks complain that producing goods in our own countries is “too expensive”, turn that around and internalize the truth that the goods we are importing from China are “artificially cheap”… to price them correctly, we must add in the costs of maintaining our societies and values. In essence, companies that offshore manufacturing are cheating on their taxes… because the wages we pay to workers, the safety standards we must observe, and the environmental regulations we have to live up to, are the “taxes” of maintaining our civilization.

When we let people cheat by not paying those taxes, we all suffer.

40. Artist who fled to the UK after exhibition exposing authoritarian regimes was censored ‘does not feel safe at all’

    Tara Cobham, The Independent, August 26, 2025

Burmese artist Sai opens up about ongoing battle against global oppression after Chinese officials allegedly demand his show on authoritarian regimes be shut down

An artist forced to flee to the UK from Thailand after his exhibition on authoritarian regimes was censored has said he does “not feel safe at all”.

Sai, who is Burmese, said that pieces in his Bangkok show by Tibetan, Uyghur and Hong Kong artists were removed and names of the artists obscured following an alleged pressure campaign by Beijing.

“Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity” opened on 24 July at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), with the aim of exposing the repression tactics used by authoritarian governments. However, just three days later, Chinese embassy staff are claimed to have visited the BACC, accompanied by Bangkok city officials, and demanded that the exhibition be shut down.

Sai has now opened up about the ordeal after he and his co-curator wife fled, fearing arrest or deportation to Myanmar, where he believed he would be punished by the military-run junta for his activism.

“My wife was really trembling,” Sai, who did not want to share his full name for safety reasons, told The Independent. “We tried to buy the earliest flight possible, [thinking]: ‘We don’t know what this is, or the magnitude, but we’ll try to get out of the country for now and solve this while we’re outside.’”

41. Solicitor-activist Kevin Yam barred from practising in Hong Kong over ‘grave’ misconduct linked to sanctions call

    Hillary Leung, Hong Kong Free Press, August 22, 2025

A vocal Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, Australia-based Kevin Yam is one of 34 overseas activists who are wanted under the national security law.

Australia-based lawyer-activist Kevin Yam has been barred from practising as a solicitor in Hong Kong, following a ruling by a disciplinary committee that cited his calls for US sanctions.

According to a notice published by the government on Friday, a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal – which reviews solicitors for alleged misconduct – found a complaint against Yam “duly proved.”

Yam’s misconduct was “grave and serious,” the notice read. It ordered that he be struck off the solicitors’ roll, a record of individuals qualified to practise as solicitors in Hong Kong.

A vocal Hong Kong pro-democracy activist, Yam is one of 34 overseas activists who are wanted under the national security law.

He is accused of urging foreign countries to impose sanctions on judges and prosecutors in Hong Kong in May 2023, during a hearing by a “foreign official organisation,” believed to be the US Congress’ Congressional-Executive Committee on China (CECC) – a group of bipartisan US lawmakers that monitors human rights in China.

42. China’s Revised Law of Public Order Offenses (Part 1): Physical Liberty, Due Process, and Speech vs. Public Security Administration

    NPC Observer, August 18, 2025

43. Timeline: Hong Kong civil society’s mysteriously axed venue bookings

    Khunsha Dar, Hong Kong Free Press, August 17, 2025

From singers to unions, from international NGOs to authors, it can be tough to find space in Hong Kong – in the figurative and literal sense. As the city seeks to maintain its open, freewheeling reputation, HKFP details how venues can face a political maze when accepting events.

Independent civil society groups, NGOs, opposition parties and activists say that the space for operating in Hong Kong has shrunk since the onset of the city’s two security laws. But aside from dwindling political room, finding literal, physical spaces for their events and fundraisers has also become complicated.

In recent years, bookings by these groups have been cancelled at the last minute. Some venues cited anodyne reasons like urgent maintenance work, while others provided no explanation for the cancellations or alluded to official pressure.

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Industrial Policies and Economic Espionage

44. Everybody wants a stablecoin, even China
    Ananya Kumar, Atlantic Council, August 25, 2025

45. 5 Years On, China’s Property Crisis Has No End in Sight
    Daisuke Wakabayashi and Joy Dong, New York Times, August 25, 2025

46. US to shut out China from undersea-cable supply chains
    Ryohei Yasoshima, Nikkei Asia, August 22, 2025

The U.S. government is revising its rules on undersea cables for the first time in more than two decades, tightening regulations to shield the supply chain from companies linked to such adversaries as China and Russia.

47. A German town's bid to break China's grip on rare earths
    Ekaterina Venkina, Deutsche Welle, August 20, 2025

48. U.S. Export Controls and China: Advanced Semiconductors
    Congressional Research Service, August 22, 2025

49. Top Chinese Trade Negotiator Set to Head to U.S. as Talks Resume
    Lingling Wei, Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2025

50. Too Old, Too Uneducated: Aging Workers in Beijing Struggle for Work
    Vivian Wang, New York Times, August 26, 2025

51. Trump says he will allow 600,000 Chinese to study in the US – double the current number
    Zhao Ziwen, South China Morning Post, August 26, 2025

52. Chinese sales of heavy electric trucks surge on Beijing's subsidies
    Shizuka Tanabe, Nikkei Asia, August 26, 2025

53. Nvidia results to spotlight fallout of China-US trade war
    Arsheeya Bajwa, Reuters, August 26, 2025

54. Evergrande's delisting marks new chapter in China's property slump
    Kensaku Ihara, Nikkei Asia, August 26, 2025

55. How China became an innovation powerhouse
    The Economist, August 25, 2025

56. Trade war deepens decline in China’s economic powerhouse province
    William Langley and Haohsiang Ko, Financial Times, August 25, 2025

57. Where Your Medicines Are Made
    Rebecca Robbins and Jonathan Corum, New York Times, August 23, 2025

58. China's top venture capital companies flock to Singapore
    Eudora Wang and Kristie Neo, Nikkei Asia, August 4, 2025

59. Apple Claims Ex-Employee, China’s Oppo Stole Trade Secrets
    Bloomberg, August 22, 2025

60. China Defense Earnings Face Reality Check Amid Market Hype, Global Ambitions
    Rachel Yeo and Sangmi Cha, Bloomberg, August 25, 2025

61. China's Manufacturing Innovation Centers: A Benchmarking Report for the Manufacturing USA Network
    Michael Molnar, NIST, May 5, 2025

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Cyber and Information Technology

62. China cut itself off from the global internet for an hour on Wednesday
    Simon Sharwood, The Register, August 21, 2025

63. Nvidia’s Roller Coaster for China AI Chips Takes a New Turn
    Raffaele Huang and Amrith Ramkumar, Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2025

64. Chinese cities target 70% AI chip self-sufficiency to counter Nvidia
    Shunsuke Tabeta, Nikkei Asia, August 21, 2025

65. China turns against Nvidia’s AI chip after ‘insulting’ Howard Lutnick remarks
    Zijing Wu and Cheng Leng, Financial Times, August 21, 2025

66. Nvidia Readies New China Chip as Washington Debates A.I. Exports
    Tripp Mickle and Lily Kuo, New York Times, August 22, 2025

67. TSMC cuts Chinese tools from cutting-edge chip production to avoid US ire
    Cheng Ting-fang, Nikkei Asia, August 25, 2025

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Military and Security Threats

68. Taiwan is preparing for a Chinese attack, but its people don't think war is coming soon
    Tessa Wong, BBC, August 25, 2025

69. Why China and the US still invest in costly crewed military systems when they have drones
    Amber Wang and Sylvie Zhuang, South China Morning Post, August 26, 2025

70. Guns of September: What a Parade May Reveal About China’s Military Modernization

    John S. Van Oudenaren, Jamestown Foundation, August 28, 2025

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) upcoming military parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII will serve as both a symbolic display and an operational exercise, highlighting the PLA’s advancements in new combat domains—such as unmanned systems, directed energy, and electronic warfare—while also revealing improvements in command structure and organizational capacity. The parade aims to underscore loyalty to Xi Jinping as central to combat readiness, even as recent purges expose deep institutional instability and a persistent “trust deficit” between the CCP and the PLA. These tensions underscore the regime’s challenge in balancing political control with genuine military professionalization.

The PLA will use the parade to demonstrate its growing joint capabilities, showcasing an integrated “Four Services + Four Arms” model and the role of new branches like the Aerospace and Cyberspace Forces. The involvement of militia units and strategic strike formations further emphasizes the whole-of-force approach underpinning China’s military modernization trajectory.

71. China challenges US freedom of navigation operations as having ‘no legal basis’
    Orange Wang, South China Morning Post, August 25, 2025

Beijing accuses Washington of ‘double standards’ in first report of its kind criticising its activities in South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

The Chinese government has hit out at US freedom of navigation operations in the first report of its kind.

The report – “Legal Assessment of the United States’ ‘Freedom of Navigation’” – is the first official study of its kind published by Beijing and marks its growing desire to challenge what it characterised as “gunboat diplomacy”.

“US ‘freedom of navigation’ lacks a basis in international law and seriously distorts the interpretation and development of international law,” the report said.

It challenged Washington’s position on a number of grounds, saying: “The United States created several ‘legal concepts’. One is ‘international waters’. It does not exist in the contemporary law of the sea.”

The report added that freedom of navigation operations “risk threatening regional peace and stability with military force and disrupting the international maritime order [and] embody distinct illegality, unreasonableness and double standards”.

COMMENT – Says the country that completely ignores the ruling of the 2016 arbitral tribunal ruling which found that the PRC’s expansive claims and historical rights within its so-called nine-dash line claim were unlawful and that its land reclamation to create fake islands violated Philippine sovereignty.

Since the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post has just become yet another PRC state directed media outlet.

I guess SCMP has to publish stuff like this, particularly after the embarrassment of a PLAN destroyer ramming its own Chinese Coast Guard cutter as it was aggressively pursuing a Philippine Coast Guard cutter in the waters that the arbitral tribunal ruled nearly a decade ago does not belong to the People’s Republic of China.

There is a country that is operating in the South China Sea with ‘no legal basis’, but it isn’t the United States.

72. How US nuclear sanctions on China backfired
    Dannie Peng, South China Morning Post, August 24, 2025

Washington’s strict blacklist rule amid national security concerns has forced Beijing to become self-sufficient with ‘incredible’ results.

When Sama Bilbao y León, director general of the World Nuclear Association – a global industry body based in London – toured China’s nuclear facilities this summer, she was left speechless.

“I couldn’t close my mouth in amazement,” she admitted, stunned by China’s advanced capabilities and “incredible” industrial scale.

This awe-inspiring progress exists despite stringent US sanctions – including the 2019 blacklisting of China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) and the recent suspension of equipment licences – imposed over national security concerns.

Ironically, these very restrictions have backfired spectacularly. Instead of crippling China’s nuclear ambitions, the sanctions have forced Beijing to develop a fully self-sufficient nuclear ecosystem, achieving near-total domestic equipment production and rapid reactor deployment.

Now, as the US and Europe struggle with costly delays and atrophied supply chains in their own nuclear expansions, China’s sanctioned industry has become an unattainable benchmark of efficiency – and its exclusion threatens to stall the West’s own atomic energy revival.

“The current geopolitical situation at all levels is incredibly complex. But our position has always been that the nuclear industry is global, and we would like to see countries working together and sharing best practices and lessons learned,” said Bilbao y León.

The industrial leader, originally from Spain, has been calling on member countries to strike a balance between global cooperation and local participation to ramp up the supply chain.

The world is in a heated race to expand nuclear power capacity, with major countries – particularly the US and China – announcing ambitious goals recently, driven by concerns about climate change mitigation and energy security.

“Many countries are looking to triple or even quadruple their nuclear capacity, but achieving these goals will require rebuilding and reintegrating supply chains and industrial capabilities,” Bilbao y León told the South China Morning Post in an exclusive interview at the end of July.

COMMENT – More propaganda on behalf of Beijing by the South China Morning Post.

This is part of the campaign to rollback U.S. export controls on semiconductors by portraying them as counterproductive, in this case by showing examples in another industry sector. The reader is supposed to believe that the only reason why the PRC strives for technological dominance in a field, like nuclear power, is because the United States imposes export restrictions on the technology. If Washington didn’t impose these controls, then Beijing would happily let the United States maintain technological dominance and the CCP would allow itself to be “addicted” to the American tech stack (sound familiar?).

Of course, there are technology sectors where the United States did not impose export restrictions or lifted them in the 1990s… like solar panels, wind turbines, and telecommunications equipment.

Did that benevolence result in Beijing accepting American technological dominance and becoming addicted to American solar panels, wind turbines, or telecom equipment? How about the manufacture of smartphones, or high-speed trains, or pharmaceuticals, did our lack of export controls in those sectors result in PRC dependence on American or even foreign companies?

Are there still American companies in those sectors?

You know the answers to these questions.

73. Beyond the 'bling', China aims for deterrence in military show
    Greg Torode, Reuters, August 25, 2025

74. NATO effective in patrolling Baltic undersea cables, says commander
    Clement Ngu, Nikkei Asia, August 25, 2025

75. China Condemns Vietnam Over Island-Building in South China Sea
    Bloomberg, August 25, 2025

China condemned Vietnam over a report it had sped up island-building in an area of the disputed South China Sea that Beijing claims as its own.

“China firmly opposes the relevant country’s construction activities on islands and reefs they have illegally occupied,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Monday. “We will do what is necessary to safeguard our own territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests.”

Guo was responding to a report that Vietnam has accelerated work in the Spratlys. The report, released Friday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, uses satellite imagery to show all 21 Vietnamese-held outposts now feature artificial land.

The think tank estimates that as of March Vietnam has created about 70% as much artificial land in the Spratly Islands as China. With the addition of the eight newly reclaimed sites, it said that Vietnam is on track to “match — and likely surpass — the scale of Beijing’s island-building.”

Beijing claims almost the entire South China Sea, where it has built numerous artificial islands. Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan also make competing claims, leading to disputes with China over where the boundaries fall.

Vietnam lodged a formal protest against China and the Philippines in May, accusing them of violating its sovereignty in the Spratlys.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

COMMENT – Gee, I wonder why Vietnam thinks it is necessary to protect and fortify its territory in the South China Sea? Might it have something to do with Beijing’s massive, multi-decade military build-up and aggression against its neighbors?

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One Belt, One Road Strategy

76. Why the Russia-India-China Reboot Won’t Last
    Karishma Vaswani, Bloomberg, August 24, 2025

77. How Africa’s e-commerce giant is fighting off Shein and Temu
    Damilare Dosunmu, Rest of world, August 25, 2025

78. Why the Global South Won’t Give Up on China
    Galip Dalay, Foreign Policy, August 25, 2025

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Opinion

79. China’s ‘Unforced Error’ In the South China Sea Could Spark a War

    Joe Varner, National Security Journal, August 27, 2025

When Saving Face Risks Losing the Sea: China’s Dangerous Scarborough Escalation

When a People’s Liberation Army (PLAN) Navy destroyer rammed and crushed the bow of its own China Coast Guard (CCG) earlier this month China’s bid to project seamless maritime dominance instead exposed its own seamanship as a liability.

In the contested waters near Scarborough Shoal, the Chinese navy managed to deliver a humiliation to itself that no rival could have engineered. In a dangerous manoeuvre intended to intimidate a smaller Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) ship, a Chinese Type 052D destroyer collided with and crushed the bow of a CCG vessel that had been closing in on the same target. The intended show of seamless naval–coast guard coordination became, instead, a public display of confusion, miscommunication, and poor seamanship.

For Beijing, this was not simply a tactical mishap. In Chinese political and military culture, such incidents eroded the perception of competence and control—two pillars of the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to legitimacy in the South China Sea. The Party has spent over a decade building the image of an unstoppable maritime presence in these disputed waters. That image cracked when the PLA Navy and CCG vessels collided.

80. 80 years on from WWII, has China become a main guarantor of the post-war order?

    Jane Cai, South China Morning Post, August 28, 2025

Experts say the country’s wartime sacrifice makes it a steward, not a disruptor, of the international system.

COMMENT – Again from the South China Morning Post.

This is like an article from The Onion.

Let’s just remember who our ally was during WWII, the Republic of China… the Chinese Communist Party spent the war hiding in Yan’an, conserving its strength to wage war against their own government (including the ambush of Nationalist troops in January 1941) while Chinese soldiers were risking their lives to free China from Japanese domination.

81. Why India Should Not Walk into the China-Russia Trap

    James Crabtree, Foreign Policy, August 27, 2025

New Delhi has other options, and the standoff with Washington may not last.

You know a relationship is on the skids when one party refuses to answer the phone. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi did just that recently, according to reports in the German media, when he declined to take a number of calls from U.S. President Donald Trump. This week, Trump turned the simmering tensions into a full crisis by hitting India—notionally a vital U.S. partner in its long-term competition with China—with 50 percent punitive tariffs. Suddenly being treated this way has caused understandable anger and shock in New Delhi, prompting a hunt for new foreign-policy options.

Modi will demonstrate his independence from Washington when he heads to Beijing this week for a summit of the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a loose bloc promoting economic and security ties. It will be Modi’s first visit to China since 2018 and heralds an anticipated thaw in India-China ties, following a period of intense competition prompted by deadly clashes on their Himalayan border in 2020. Both China and Russia, which is also an SCO member, will now court India, seeking to capitalize on Modi’s rift with Trump. But New Delhi will rightly be wary of this. India’s recent foreign-affairs strategy has aimed for balanced engagement with multiple powers, with a particular focus on building ties with technologically advanced democracies. From India’s vantage point, this remains a sensible long-term approach, even if ties with the United States are tense. Throwing its lot in with China and Russia is to walk into a trap that could quickly backfire.

Trump’s approach represents a dramatic and wrongheaded departure from previous U.S. policy. For two decades, Washington has pursued a policy of strategic altruism toward New Delhi, patiently investing in better ties on the understanding that India’s rise served the United States’ long-term interests. Trump has ditched that for a new kind of impulsive unilateralism, dismantling years of engagement in pursuit of short-term leverage for a trade deal. This shift constitutes a monumental act of geopolitical self-harm, given India’s critical position as a long-term geopolitical counterweight to China.

India must shoulder some responsibility for its predicament. New Delhi has pursued multi-alignment, building ties with Western partners while maintaining links with countries like Russia and Iran. Under former U.S. President Joe Biden, Washington tolerated this balancing act, recognizing India’s strategic value. Trump’s team took a dimmer view, imposing additional tariffs in response to India’s purchases of Russian oil. Until early this year, New Delhi thought it could manage Trump well enough. Only belatedly has Modi’s team recognized its miscalculation. At home, Modi took political risks to align India more closely with Washington, facing criticism from advocates of traditional nonalignment. To have this carefully cultivated partnership thrown back so abruptly by Trump has proven galling, generating domestic political uproar.

The result leaves Indian foreign policy facing genuine dilemmas. Multi-alignment theoretically seeks to maintain good ties with multiple powers simultaneously. In practice, however, India has lately focused heavily on strengthening ties with the United States, fellow Quad nations Australia and Japan, and European partners. Now, the central pillar of that strategy—namely its ties with Washington—is crumbling.

In its place, India is exploring alternatives. China and Russia appear tempting. Modi’s first diplomatic response to the crisis with Washington involved calling both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Last week, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar traveled to Moscow to meet with Putin, who is expected to visit India later this year.

Both authoritarian powers offer options that could, in theory, compensate for diminished cooperation with the United States. India maintains long-standing ties with Russia for defense procurement and energy imports, a relationship that could potentially be expanded. China presents a more complex opportunity, given border disputes and strategic competition in the region, including in South Asia. When Modi first assumed office, he was open to closer ties with China but a mix of Chinese intransigence and U.S. engagement led him down a different path.

Now, confronted with Washington’s hostility, those in New Delhi who warned against trusting the Americans are taking a public victory lap. Strengthening ties with Russia provides one obvious option. Repairing ties with China is also possible. A meeting between Modi and Xi on the sidelines of the SCO summit will likely produce modest improvements, including practical measures like more commercial flights between the two nations. Beyond that, much rests on China’s approach, given that Beijing has previously shown few signs of being willing to address India’s long-term security concerns, from disputes along the shared border in the Himalayas to Chinese naval activities in the Indian Ocean.

Despite these immediate pressures, a major shift toward China and Russia would prove a serious mistake. New Delhi’s recent foreign-policy approach was built on sound insights about the country’s development requirements. To sustain rapid growth, India needs foreign investment, which is most likely to come from richer and more technologically advanced nations. It also needs technology transfers for industrial and digital transformation, which neither China nor Russia will likely be willing to provide. Most importantly, how to manage an assertive China remains India’s long-term challenge. None of these underlying realities have changed, simply because of Trump’s diplomatic intransigence.

As India contemplates its options, therefore, three points should be kept in mind.

First, the current challenge with the United States may not last. Given Trump’s transactional approach and frequent changes of mind, a face-saving agreement that allows both sides to step back from confrontation remains possible. If a deal is reached to paper over recent divisions, Trump could still visit New Delhi this fall to attend a planned Quad summit.

Second, Russia and China cannot provide what India needs most for long-term development and security. India has been gradually but systematically diversifying away from Russian weapons, as it seeks more modern and reliable suppliers. Moscow is useful for cheap energy but offers little in terms of advanced technology and investment. China, meanwhile, is viewed with deep suspicion by Indian security establishments, who rightly consider it the primary long-term threat to Indian interests. To manage China, India needs friends elsewhere.

Third, India has options beyond simply choosing between the United States and China. It can further deepen security cooperation with Australia and Japan, while also strengthening ties with South Korea, another major arms producer. European nations are eager to expand ties, too, and a long-awaited trade deal with the European Union appears within reach. India can continue building relationships with other advanced middle powers, including Israel and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, as well as Singapore and Malaysia in Southeast Asia.

All of this is unlikely to entirely replace what India may have lost through the deterioration of its U.S. partnership. But New Delhi is not alone in its predicament. Like the leaders of other U.S. allies and partners in Europe and Asia, Modi must now function in a world where Washington is transactional, unpredictable, and coercive. Even so, abandoning India’s strategy of engagement with technologically advanced democracies for the uncertain embrace of authoritarian alternatives would be unwise. Even if the hotline to Washington is dead, there are plenty of leaders in Europe and elsewhere whose calls Modi should be happy to take.

COMMENT – I hope someone in Delhi is reading James Crabtree’s piece.

82. The Real Reason China Hasn’t Invaded Taiwan

    Brent M. Eastwood, National Security Journal, August 26, 2025

No, China Will Not Attack Taiwan in the Near Future

The Taiwan question is the biggest issue facing the Chinese military. It drives the Middle Kingdom’s grand strategy and has obsessed leaders for decades. Xi Jinping is no exception. Every military move he makes has implications for future China-Taiwan relations.

An attack to reunify the island with the mainland is always imminent. Xi will be judged by Chinese historians on how well he handles the Taiwan issue. He cannot “lose” the island.

Taiwan has always been considered a wayward renegade province that annoys the Chinese like a bee in a bonnet. Taiwan is seen as rightfully owned by Beijing. Full independence would be a nightmare for the People’s Republic.

COMMENT – Let me let you in on a little secret: The Chinese Communist Party has already lost Taiwan.

The Party “lost” Taiwan in 1996 when the island held its first democratic elections and made the transition from right-wing authoritarian rule into a multi-party democracy. Once the KMT lost its monopoly hold on power and became just a normal political party, the conditions changed irrecoverably.

As former Taiwanese President Tsai has said on several occasions: Taiwan doesn’t need to declare independence because it is already independent.

The question for the Chinese Communist Party is do they eventually accept this reality or do they plunge the world into catastrophe for no good reason.

83. China’s Nvidia Ban Is a Win for the U.S.
    Aaron Ginn, Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2025

Beijing fears dependency on American technology. Companies will find ways around the mandates.

The global chip wars are heating up. Beijing is preparing to restrict—and potentially ban—U.S.-manufactured graphics processing units, or GPUs. The target is Nvidia, but the fallout would hit AMD, Positron, Groq and smaller manufacturers as well. China has framed this as a show of strength. In reality, it is an admission of weakness.

Exporting GPUs and American artificial intelligence is sensible and strategically essential. Beijing is proving the point. China’s growing dependence on U.S. infrastructure has spooked China’s leadership. They don’t like it. But before Washington reacts to Chinese import controls on U.S. GPUs, it’s important to understand that China’s domestic production still lags. Its foundries remain stuck on designs that are at least five years behind the frontier. Industry projections show that next year China’s entire GPU output will rival only that of AMD, a second-tier player to Nvidia.

Chinese AI firms prefer Nvidia to Huawei. The reason is simple: CUDA, a collection of lower-level software libraries that optimize AI hardware. Nvidia’s software ecosystem, developer community and tools make its hardware far more valuable than just its specifications. Huawei can make solid hardware, but it can’t compete without the software support. That’s why the adoption of domestic chips in China has been slow, despite heavy subsidies and political pressure.

The same pro-export-control analysts who once dismissed Nvidia as merely a hunk of metal and claimed China could easily reproduce it now act surprised that China is struggling with CUDA migration. But Nvidia is more than hardware; it’s primarily a platform. Its strength lies in platform software-hardware synthesis. Every GPU shipped abroad is another tether to America’s AI ecosystem, which Beijing now fears.

Beijing can order state-backed data centers to buy 50% domestic chips, but Chinese companies will find ways around mandates. They’ll rent Nvidia GPUs overseas, expand their global commercial reach, and still collect subsidies for “buying Chinese.”

The timing of Beijing’s likely ban is particularly awkward. Nvidia had just gained approval to ship to China under a revenue-sharing deal with Washington, only to halt sales of H20—the Nvidia chip the U.S. has approved for export to China—in response to Beijing’s plans, costing Nvidia billions in potential revenue. If China proceeds with restrictions, U.S. chip makers and service firms risk losing hundreds of billions in revenue as Beijing builds a parallel, non-American AI ecosystem, one that could erode America’s lead. Today, U.S. semiconductors remain the world’s only true AI ecosystem.

If Beijing enforces GPU restrictions, the U.S. should respond by expanding Nvidia and other U.S. chips’ presence in Asia, increasing capacity in markets around China, encouraging global adoption quickly, and restricting Huawei’s ability to expand internationally. The Trump administration is already targeting Chinese foundry capabilities with export curbs. The U.S. should also recognize that if reshoring semiconductor manufacturing is considered crucial for American security, China likely thinks the same for itself.

Given Beijing’s shift in policy, expect Washington’s export hawks to start rewriting history and claiming the bans “worked,” despite China’s decision to give priority to sovereignty, which counters the hawks’ argument. Export-control hawks promised bans would slow China. Instead, they reduced U.S. influence, accelerated Beijing’s push for self-reliance, guaranteed customers for Chinese semiconductors, and forced America to show its playbook.

Export controls have always been a policy that hides weakness behind a facade of strength. They sound assertive but fall apart when faced with actual market dynamics. Export hawks overlook a simple truth: You can’t control a market you’ve abandoned.

The U.S. shouldn’t retreat into paranoia but increase engagement. America’s strength depends on platforms, ecosystems and scale. As with telecom and the internet backbone, the U.S. should expand its technology so thoroughly that no alternatives can keep up. Strength comes from presence, not absence. Beijing has admitted what Washington’s export hawks refuse to see: Nvidia is hard to replace or replicate.

China’s looming restrictions on U.S. chips are defensive. The Chinese aren’t blocking U.S. chips out of strength, but because they depend on them. America wins the AI race not by bans, but by leading markets and free enterprise. No one can beat us at that game.

Mr. Ginn is CEO and a co-founder of Hydra Host, a venture-backed AI data-center services and management company that is a Nvidia cloud partner.

COMMENT – First of all: has the Wall Street Journal given Mr. Ginn a weekly opinion column?

Second, is he admitting that restrictions on GPU chips would actually work at harming the PRC’s development of artificial intelligence? Is he arguing that PRC chip makers, like Huawei, are years behind American companies? (quote: “Today, U.S. semiconductors remain the world’s only true AI ecosystem.”) I think he is… which is of course the opposite of what he and Jensen Huang (and David Sacks) have been saying for the last three months.

They have been arguing that export controls on GPU chips won’t work at all because Chinese companies will make their own GPUs and export controls simply harm the United States by robbing Nvidia of revenue (never mind that all of Nvidia’s chips have buyers even without access to the PRC). They have also been arguing that companies like Huawei are licking Nvidia’s heels… which according to Ginn in this article isn’t true.

I’m baffled by Ginn’s admission and why he still appears unable to see what is obvious to anyone who isn’t on the Nvidia payroll… I guess it just reinforces that old saying attributed to Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

It appears that Ginn and company really just want to make Chinese Communist AI great… that is their main objective, they want to ensure that the PRC has a top tier artificial intelligence offering and that Nvidia is inside of it.

The alternative is to deny the PRC access to Nvidia’s chips, ship as many of those chips to U.S. AI companies, cut off Huawei’s access to semiconductor tools and software (to keep them years behind in making GPUs), and enable the creation of the world’s best AI infrastructure within the United States. This is the opposite of abandoning the market… this would be market dominance and monopoly.

The real issue here is the interests of Jensen Huang, Ginn, and the Nvidia cliche is NOT the same as the interests of the companies making the actual AI platforms. Nvidia wants as many platforms as possible, so that it can push up the price of its chips by having as many competing buyers as possible. Nvidia wants to be the guts of inside as many AI platforms as possible, and sees benefit in having great PRC AI platforms.

Nvidia doesn’t want there to be a dominant American AI platform because then Nvidia would become dependent to just that single AI company, Nvidia would just be a supplier to a single dominant customer who could then demand discounts on Nvidia’s chips.

This is the real issue that folks are missing… Nvidia is shaping the market dynamics to benefit itself and really has zero concern about the broader interests of the United States.

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