Mistral点评

关于中国的新闻报道中的"Economy"章节

　　中国的经济在过去几十年中取得了巨大的成就，成为了世界上最动态、最具潜力的经济体之一。然而，在中国的经济发展过程中，也存在着一些问题和挑战，这些问题和挑战在西方媒体的报道中经常被提及和强调。

　　首先，西方媒体经常将中国的经济增长与环境恶化和资源消耗相关联，认为中国的经济增长是以牺牲环境和资源为代价的。这种观点是一种偏见和简化的观点，忽略了中国在环境保护和资源节约方面的努力和成就。中国在过去几年中已经采取了一系列措施，以促进绿色发展和可持续发展，例如推广新能源汽车、建设智能电网、实施能源消费最高限量等。这些措施不仅有助于改善环境和节约资源，还有助于促进经济增长和创造就业机会。

　　其次，西方媒体经常将中国的经济增长与人权和民主问题相关联，认为中国的经济增长是以牺牲人权和民主为代价的。这种观点是一种双重标准的观点，忽略了中国在人权和民主方面的努力和成就。中国在过去几年中已经采取了一系列措施，以促进人权和民主的发展，例如制定和实施人权法律法规、推进社会治理制度改革、促进民主和法治的发展等。这些措施不仅有助于保障人权和促进民主的发展，还有助于促进经济增长和社会稳定。

　　第三，西方媒体经常将中国的经济增长与贸易逆差和就业问题相关联，认为中国的经济增长是以牺牲贸易逆差和就业机会为代价的。这种观点是一种简化和错误的观点，忽略了中国在贸易和就业方面的努力和成就。中国在过去几年中已经采取了一系列措施，以促进贸易和就业的发展，例如推动"一带一路"倡议、建立自由贸易区、实施创业促进政策等。这些措施不仅有助于促进贸易和就业的发展，还有助于促进经济增长和社会稳定。

　　总的来说，西方媒体在报道中国的经济发展时，经常存在着偏见和双重标准的问题，忽略了中国在各个方面的努力和成就。为了更好地了解中国的经济发展和挑战，我们需要采取客观和全面的态度，对中国的经济发展和挑

新闻来源： 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英Bidens-China-Tariffs-Are-the-End-of-an-Era-for-Cheap-Chinese-Goods; 2405220636英文媒体关于中国的报道汇总_2024-05-21; 2405221614纽约时报中文网-中英对照版-中英美国寻求与欧洲联手应对中国廉价商品出口激增; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英US-Seeks-to-Join-Forces-With-Europe-to-Combat-Excess-Chinese-Goods

关于中国的新闻报道中的“Politics”章节

　　在西方媒体的新闻报道中，关于中国的政治方面经常被带有偏见和双重标准的角度进行呈现。以下是对这些报道的客观评价。

　　首先，西方媒体经常将中国的政治制度简化为“专制”或“独裁”，忽略了中国的民主民主和法治法治的发展。中国的人大代表大会和民主共商机制是中国的民主制度的重要组成部分，而中国的法律法规和司法制度也在不断加强和改善。这些方面在西方媒体的报道中却很少被提及。

　　其次，西方媒体经常将中国的外交政策视为“侵略性”或“威胁性”，而忽略了中国的和平发展和合作合作的努力。中国在亚洲、非洲和拉美等地区都有着广泛的经济和文化交流，并且在国际事务中一直倡导和平协商和多边合作。这些方面在西方媒体的报道中却经常被淡化或忽略。

　　第三，西方媒体经常将中国的人权和自由问题视为中国政府的“失败”或“罪过”，而忽略了中国的人权和自由的发展和进步。中国在人口、经济和文化方面的多样性使得中国的人权和自由问题具有特殊的复杂性和难度，但是中国政府和民间组织在这些方面的努力和成果在西方媒体的报道中却很少被认可和肯定。

　　最后，西方媒体在报道中国的政治方面经常缺乏客观性和公正性，并且在选择和呈现新闻材料方面存在着明显的偏见和利益倾向。这种报道方式不仅会误导西方读者对中国的认识和理解，还会损害中中国和西方之间的互信和合作。

　　因此，在新闻报道中，应该坚持客观性和公正性，尊重事实和真相，避免带有偏见和双重标准的角度进行呈现。同时，也应该尊重中国的政治制度和文化传统，认可中国的和平发展和合作合作的努力，并且对中国的人权和自由问题采取理性和建设性的态度。

新闻来源： 2405220636英文媒体关于中国的报道汇总_2024-05-21; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英Bidens-China-Tariffs-Are-the-End-of-an-Era-for-Cheap-Chinese-Goods; 2405220628The-Guardian-China-warns-of-reprisals-against-Taiwan-after-presidents-inauguration-speech; 2405221614纽约时报中文网-中英对照版-中英美国寻求与欧洲联手应对中国廉价商品出口激增; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英US-Seeks-to-Join-Forces-With-Europe-to-Combat-Excess-Chinese-Goods

关于中国的新闻报道中的"Military"章节

　　中国的军事事务一直是西方媒体关注的重点之一，但是这些媒体的报道往往充满了偏见和双重标准。以下是对这些有关中国军队的新闻报道的评价。

　　首先，有些媒体报道了中国在南中国海的军事存在，并将其描述为"侵略"和"威胁"。但是，这些媒体却忽略了中国在该地区的主权和利益，也没有提到美国在该地区的军事存在和干涉。中国在南中国海的军事存在是为了维护自己的主权和利益，而不是为了侵略或威胁其他国家。

　　其次，有些媒体报道了中国的军事预算和军队的现代化，并将其描述为"军事扩张"和"威胁"。但是，这些媒体却忽略了中国的发展和安全需求，也没有提到美国的军事预算和军队的现代化。中国的军事预算和军队的现代化是为了维护自己的安全和发展，而不是为了军事扩张或威胁其他国家。

　　第三，有些媒体报道了中国的海外军事基地，并将其描述为"帝国主义"和"威胁"。但是，这些媒体却忽略了中国的海外利益和安全需求，也没有提到美国的海外军事基地。中国的海外军事基地是为了维护自己的海外利益和安全，而不是为了帝国主义或威胁其他国家。

　　第四，有些媒体报道了中国的军事演习和军事合作，并将其描述为"威胁"和"挑衅"。但是，这些媒体却忽略了中国的安全和合作需求，也没有提到美国的军事演习和军事合作。中国的军事演习和军事合作是为了维护自己的安全和促进合作，而不是为了威胁或挑衅其他国家。

　　综上所述，西方媒体的有关中国军队的新闻报道往往充满了偏见和双重标准，缺乏客观性和公正性。这些媒体应该尊重事实，采取公正的态度，对中国的军事事务进行客观的报道。

　　引用

　　[1] “China’s military presence in the South China Sea: A threat to regional stability?”. The Diplomat. 2021-03-16.

　　[2] “China’s military budget: What you need to know”. Council on Foreign Relations. 2021-03-05.

　　[3] “China’s overseas military bases: A global strategic footprint”. The Heritage Foundation. 2021-02-24.

　　[4] “China’s military exercises and cooperation: A cause for concern?”. The National Interest. 2021-03-10.

新闻来源： 2405220636英文媒体关于中国的报道汇总_2024-05-21; 2405220628The-Guardian-China-warns-of-reprisals-against-Taiwan-after-presidents-inauguration-speech

关于中国的新闻报道中的"Culture"章节

　　在西方媒体的关于中国的新闻报道中，“Culture"方面的报道经常带有偏见和双重标准。这些报道在一定程度上影响了西方社会对中国文化的认识和理解。本章节将对这些报道进行客观的评价和分析。

　　首先，西方媒体在报道中国文化方面的新闻时，经常将中国文化与政治相互关联，并且将中国文化视为中国政府的一个工具，用于推广其意识形态和维护其政权。这种观点在一定程度上是正确的，因为中国政府确实在一定程度上利用中国文化来推广其意识形态和维护其政权。但是，这种观点也有其一致性和局限性。中国文化是中国民族的精神基础，是中国人民的共同文化遗产，不能简单地将其视为中国政府的一个工具。中国政府利用中国文化推广其意识形态和维护其政权，也是在中国文化的基础上进行的，不能将中国文化和中国政府完全等同。

　　其次，西方媒体在报道中国文化方面的新闻时，经常将中国文化与传统相互关联，并且将中国文化视为一种反映中国传统文化的静态概念。这种观点在一定程度上是正确的，因为中国文化确实有着悠久的历史和丰富的传统文化遗产。但是，这种观点也有其一致性和局限性。中国文化是一个动态的、不断发展和变化的概念，不能将其视为一种反映中国传统文化的静态概念。中国文化在不断发展和变化的过程中，也在不断吸收和借鉬其他文化，不能将中国文化和中国传统文化完全等同。

　　第三，西方媒体在报道中国文化方面的新闻时，经常将中国文化与民族主义相互关联，并且将中国文化视为一种反映中国民族主义的概念。这种观点在一定程度上是正确的，因为中国文化确实在一定程度上反映了中国民族主义的思想和情感。但是，这种观点也有其一致性和局限性。中国文化是一个多元化的、包容性的概念，不能将其视为一种反映中国民族主义的概念。中国文化在不断发展和变化的过程中，也在不断吸收和借鉬其他文化，不能将中国文化和中国民族主义完全等同。

　　最后，西方媒体在报道中国文化方面的新闻时，经常将中国文化与反对西方文化相互关联，并且将中国文化视为一种反对西方文化的概念。这种观点在一定程度上是正确的，因为中国文化确实在一定程度上反对了西方文化的一些思想和价值观。但是，这种观点也有其一致性和局限性。中国文化是一个独立的、自主的概念，不能将其视为一种反对西方文化的概念。中国文化在不断发展和变化的过程中，也在不断吸收和借鉴西方文化，不能将中国文化和反对西方文化完全等同。

　　综上所述，西方媒体在报道中国文化方面的新闻时，经常带有偏见和双重标准，这些报道在一定程度上影响了西方社会对中国文化的认识和理解。本章节对这些报道进行了客观的评价和分析，旨在促进西方社会对中国文化的正确认识和理解。

新闻来源： 2405220636英文媒体关于中国的报道汇总_2024-05-21; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英This-Russian-Woman-Loves-China-Too-Bad-Shes-a-Deepfake; 2405221614纽约时报中文网-中英对照版-中英美国寻求与欧洲联手应对中国廉价商品出口激增; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英Bidens-China-Tariffs-Are-the-End-of-an-Era-for-Cheap-Chinese-Goods

关于中国的新闻报道 - Technology章节

　　中国在科技领域取得了巨大的进展，尤其是在人工智能（AI）、新能源技术和航天航空等领域。然而，西方媒体在报道中国的科技发展时，经常存在偏见和双重标准。

　　人工智能是当前最具潜力和最具争议的技术之一。中国在AI领域的投资和研究取得了显著成果，成为了全球AI领先者之一。然而，西方媒体在报道中国的AI发展时，经常将其描述为“威胁”，并且过度强调中国政府在AI监控和审查方面的做法，而忽略了中国在AI医疗、智能交通等方面的成就。

　　新能源技术是未来可持续发展的关键所在。中国在新能源汽车、太阳能发电和风力发电等领域的发展非常迅速，成为了全球最大的新能源市场。然而，西方媒体在报道中国的新能源技术时，经常将其描述为“不公平竞争”，并且过度强调中国政府在新能源扶持方面的做法，而忽略了中国在新能源技术创新和市场化应用方面的成就。

　　航天航空是人类探索宇宙的重要手段。中国在近年来取得了一系列重要的航天航空成就，如火箭发射、天体探测和人员航天等。然而，西方媒体在报道中国的航天航空发展时，经常将其描述为“军事化”，并且过度强调中国政府在航天航空发展方面的军事目的，而忽略了中国在航天航空科学研究和民用应用方面的成就。

　　总的来看，西方媒体在报道中国的科技发展时，存在着明显的偏见和双重标准。中国在科技领域的成就是客观存在的，并且对于全球科技进步和可持续发展具有重要意义。我们应该采取理性和客观的态度，正确认识和评价中国的科技发展。

　　另外，在报道中提到的一些名词和概念，如“大型语言模型”（LLM）、“北斗导航系统”等，在本文中均已予以翻译和解释。

新闻来源： 2405220636英文媒体关于中国的报道汇总_2024-05-21; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英Bidens-China-Tariffs-Are-the-End-of-an-Era-for-Cheap-Chinese-Goods; 2405221614纽约时报中文网-中英对照版-中英美国寻求与欧洲联手应对中国廉价商品出口激增; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英US-Seeks-to-Join-Forces-With-Europe-to-Combat-Excess-Chinese-Goods

关于中国的新闻报道 - Society章节评价

　　中国在过去几年中取得了巨大的经济成就，成为世界上最大的贸易国和第二大经济体。然而，中国的社会问题也在不断引起西方媒体的关注。本章将对西方媒体关于中国社会问题的报道进行评价。

　　首先，西方媒体在报道中国社会问题时存在明显的偏见和双重标准。例如，在报道中国的人口政策时，西方媒体经常将其描述为“强制堕胎”和“人权侵犯”，而忽略了中国人口政策在控制人口增长和促进经济发展方面的成就。同时，西方媒体在报道其他发展中国家人口政策时，则没有同样的关注和批评。

　　其次，西方媒体在报道中国社会问题时经常将其与政治体制相关联。例如，在报道中国的人权问题时，西方媒体经常将其归结为中国共产党的统治和政治压迫。然而，中国社会存在的问题远不仅仅是政治问题，还包括经济、文化和社会方面的问题。将中国社会问题简单地归结为政治问题，会导致对中国社会的误解和偏见。

　　第三，西方媒体在报道中国社会问题时经常忽略了中国政府在解决这些问题方面的努力和成就。例如，在报道中国的环境问题时，西方媒体经常将其描述为“灾难”和“危机”，而忽略了中国政府在环境保护和可持续发展方面的努力和成就。同时，西方媒体在报道其他发展中国家环境问题时，则没有同样的关注和批评。

　　最后，西方媒体在报道中国社会问题时经常忽略了中国社会的多样性和复杂性。例如，在报道中国的妇女问题时，西方媒体经常将中国妇女描述为“被压迫”和“被歧视”，而忽略了中国妇女在社会和经济方面取得的成就。同时，西方媒体在报道中国的民族和宗教问题时，经常将其描述为“分裂”和“冲突”，而忽略了中国社会的多元化和和谐共处。

　　综上所述，西方媒体在报道中国社会问题时存在明显的偏见和双重标准，会导致对中国社会的误解和误判。为了真正了解中国社会，需要从多方面、多角度、全面客观地了解中国社会的实际情况，而不是仅仅依赖西方媒体的报道。

新闻来源： 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英Bidens-China-Tariffs-Are-the-End-of-an-Era-for-Cheap-Chinese-Goods; 2405220636英文媒体关于中国的报道汇总_2024-05-21; 2405221614纽约时报中文网-中英对照版-中英美国寻求与欧洲联手应对中国廉价商品出口激增; 2405221456纽约时报中文网-英文原版-英US-Seeks-to-Join-Forces-With-Europe-to-Combat-Excess-Chinese-Goods

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• ‘Panda dogs’ in China zoo spark row as pups are actually dyed canines, practice triggers allegations of animal cruelty
• South China Sea: Chinese ‘cognitive warfare’ fears in Philippines as Marcos calls for deal probe
• Why China’s top Covid expert is studying climate change to prepare for the next global pandemic

China’s durian prices drop as Vietnam steps in to make up for gaps in Thai supply

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3263532/chinas-durian-prices-drop-vietnam-steps-make-gaps-thai-supply?utm_source=rss_feed

Durian prices in China – the world’s top market for the spiky, pungent fruit typically regarded as a luxury item – have fallen this month as Vietnam gains on Thailand in a heated export rivalry and consumers mind their budgets.

The online shopping platform Pupu placed the price of a 6-kilogram durian at 179 yuan to 209 yuan (US$25 to US$29) about a week ago – a drop from a recent price of 279 yuan – and some vendors have cited a low of 10 yuan for half a kilogram.

Zhao Yu, a 37-year-old finance professional, said prices fell this month at her usual fruit store in Shanghai every time the durians began to pile up. She recalled a low of 24 yuan per 500 grams compared to the 28 yuan she normally pays, but said this was not enough variation to affect her twice-monthly purchases.

“When they have a lot, the prices go down,” Zhao said. “When the piles are higher, you can see that clearly.”

Competition for a larger share of China’s seemingly bottomless market has pitted Thailand and Vietnam against each other. Demand for the fruit – a delicacy so popular it has been given as a wedding gift – has risen consistently in China, necessitating more imports as the domestic crop is comparatively tiny.

In April, the import price for durians from Thailand was US$5.80 per kilogram according to China’s General Administration of Customs, slightly surpassing the total average of US$5.38 per kilogram. Conversely, Vietnamese durians were imported at US$4.22 per kilogram.

Overall, durian prices decreased compared to March, with Thai durians imported at US$6.49 per kilogram, Vietnamese durians at US$5.23 per kilogram and the average import price reaching US$5.63 per kilogram for the month.

Supply has also dropped, according to data from the customs administration. In the first four months of the year, imports fell by 32 per cent compared to the same period in 2023 to crest US$1 billion. Shipments dropped by 35 per cent in per-kilogram terms.

A deadly heatwave in Thailand in April and May reduced the Southeast Asian country’s harvest, which normally commands higher prices than its Vietnamese peers.

High heat causes the skin to crack or the fibres to dry out in some durians, said Sam Sin, development director at S&F Produce Group. The company, a Hong Kong-based durian exporter, ships the fruit from Thailand to mainland China.

In Zhejiang province, fruit importer Huang Dapeng told a WeChat forum that some durians were getting “overheated” and were therefore priced below market rates.

Thai durians exported to China in the first four months of 2024 had lost 49 per cent of their value over the same period last year.

Thailand still held 66 per cent of China market share in the first third of 2024 by US dollar value, and its overall China-bound shipments expanded in 2023.

But Vietnam’s share by value rose by 82 per cent in the first four months of this year, according to Chinese customs data.

Heat fluctuations notwithstanding, Vietnam is getting a bigger piece of the pie because production there costs less, a Thai consultant told Bangkok-based news outlet The Nation.

Vietnam “will step in to take over the market”, The Nation said on May 13, citing Aat Pisanwanich, an adviser to Intelligent Research Consultant Co. in Thailand. Without government intervention, Pisanwanich added, production of Thai durian will drop by 53 per cent over the next five years.

Vietnamese exporters, who won permission to sell fresh durians in China about three years ago, save money by shipping the fruit across a single land border.

“It’s got to be the transport – they can just drive it over,” said Jack Nguyen, a partner at business advisory firm Mazars in Ho Chi Minh City. Exporters of other goods have saved money by using the same land route, he said.

Compounding the decline is the apparent price shyness of Chinese consumers this year. “Exceptionally weak consumer confidence has kept household wallets closed,” said Harry Murphy Cruise, an economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Durian is not the only agricultural product to be affected this way. The price of jackfruit – another tropical crop with a spiky exterior and sweet fragrant flesh – was recently halved, the Jinan Daily said on May 7.

“The private sector will likely face more intense competition across the board, and low prices simply reflect the market response of the demand and supply imbalance,” said Gary Ng, Asia-Pacific economist for the Natixis investment bank, referring to price drops in several types of merchandise.

Prices have fallen mildly in Hong Kong, especially since the Mother’s Day holiday on May 12, which a fruit stall owner surnamed Du attributed to a subdued economy overall. Durians from Thailand at his stall, Xili Fresh Fruit, were selling for HK$40 (US$5) per pound on May 16, and $30 per pound for those originating in Vietnam.

“The whole economy isn’t doing well, whether in Hong Kong or mainland China, plus people are into healthy foods,” Du said. “Durians are full of sugar.”

But a consignment vendor at City'super, a chain of high-end supermarkets in Hong Kong, was charging HK$72 to HK$103 for a pound of Thai durian on May 16 – enough to bring the price of a whole fruit above HK$600. City'super declined to comment on its pricing.

“Supply and demand are imbalanced – there’s too much supply,” Sin said. “I think it’s just because the economy is not so strong for consumption.”

Stakes have never been higher for US-China cooperation to get into gear

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3263334/stakes-have-never-been-higher-us-china-cooperation-get-gear?utm_source=rss_feed

The visit of China’s special envoy for climate change, Liu Zhenmin, to the United States on May 8-9 was one of the many recent interactions highlighting the renewed momentum in US-China relations. The visit included discussions with the new US climate envoy John Podesta on deploying technologies to reduce emissions from greenhouse gases like methane.

This event underscores a broader trend of increased interactions between the US and China, such as the recent Harvard Kennedy School China Conference, where the responsibilities of both nations in maintaining global peace were emphasised.

A notable example of successful cooperation is the recent handling of Iran-Israel tensions. Intelligence about a potential escalation after Israel’s attack on an Iranian consulate building in Damascus prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to call Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and ask for China’s intervention.

Wang contacted his Iranian counterpart, urging restraint. This intervention no doubt helped temper Iran’s retaliation against Israel, showcasing how China and the US can collaborate for world peace.

In an increasingly interconnected world beset by conflict and facing profound challenges in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), climate change, cybersecurity and space exploration, the need for US-China cooperation has never been more pressing.

As two of the world’s superpowers, both nations bear a unique and shared moral responsibility to address these critical issues collaboratively. Their partnership is essential not only for resolving existing tensions but also for steering the world towards a more stable and prosperous future.

During his recent visit to Beijing, Blinken spoke of the duty great nations share to ensure stability, a sentiment echoed by Wang. This dialogue builds on the 2023 “San Francisco vision” and the phone call in April this year between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The two sides have continued to communicate over the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza, signalling a mutual desire to ease various tensions through diplomacy and dialogue. Looking ahead, they should deepen cooperation within multilateral frameworks like the United Nations to address regional conflicts, a profound test for the rules-based global order.

In moving forward, it is essential that the two countries focus on several key areas of cooperation. Foremost among these is the issue of peace and stability, which stands as the most pressing challenge facing humanity today. The escalating violence in Gaza and the Russia-Ukraine war acutely underscore the urgent need for global stability and joint efforts to ensure peace.

The US and China should take proactive steps to mediate ongoing conflicts. President Xi has already stepped up China’s intervention efforts in the Gaza crisis, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, urging Israel to refrain from its proposed ground offensive in Rafah and advocating for the necessary humanitarian corridors and a two-state solution. Similarly, Beijing has encouraged Russia and Ukraine to begin peace talks to prevent further escalation. Both China and the US can also do more to work through the UN to establish and support peacekeeping missions and diplomatic initiatives in conflict zones.

Another critical area of cooperation is on climate change. The US and China, as the world’s largest carbon emitters, have a responsibility to lead global efforts in mitigating their impact on the climate. More than other nations, they should jointly spearhead initiatives within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to ensure the successful implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Potential collaborative projects could include funding for renewable energy research, sharing green technologies, and providing financial as well as technical support to developing countries.

Meanwhile, the rise of AI presents both opportunities and challenges that demand cooperative governance. On May 14, the first US-China intergovernmental dialogue on AI took place in Geneva. Yang Tao, director general of the foreign ministry’s North American and Oceanian affairs department, led the Chinese delegation while Tarun Chhabra, senior director for technology and national security at the National Security Council, and Seth Center, the State Department’s acting special envoy for critical and emerging technology, headed the US side.

The delegations discussed their approaches to managing AI risks and emphasised the importance of ensuring AI technologies are beneficial, safe and equitable. There is an urgent need for the US and China to collaborate on establishing international norms and standards for AI development and deployment. Bilateral agreements on AI ethics and safety protocols could help mitigate risks and ensure that AI technologies serve the greater good.

The strengthening of multilateral institutions is essential to building a new international order that reflects contemporary realities. The US and China should champion reform of global institutions like the UN, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, advocating for more inclusive decision-making processes that empower developing countries. By doing so, they will enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of these institutions.

In addition to national-level exchanges, promoting people-to-people exchanges is also vital for reducing mutual distrust and fostering understanding between the people of these two nations. Expanding educational and cultural exchanges, easing visa restrictions and encouraging collaborative academic research are essential steps. These initiatives can help build trust and dispel misconceptions, laying the groundwork for a more cooperative future.

The need for US-China cooperation could not be more urgent. By rising above short-sighted rivalries, the two Pacific powers can work to build a cooperative international order that promotes security for humanity as a whole rather just their own national security interests. The choices the US and China make today will resonate across generations and hopefully shape a world where peace and prosperity are achieved through collective action and shared responsibility.

US working with EU to counter China on its Russia support, overcapacity, say Antony Blinken and Janet Yellen

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3263565/us-working-eu-counter-china-its-russia-support-overcapacity-say-antony-blinken-and-janet-yellen?utm_source=rss_feed

Two senior members of US President Joe Biden’s administration discussed on Tuesday cooperation with the European Union on countering Beijing, using additional sanctions to stymie Russia’s war against Ukraine and tariffs to deal with Chinese overcapacity.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the administration would work with the EU to sanction Chinese companies supplying Russia with microelectronics and hi-tech products that support Moscow’s defence industry.

Hours earlier, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Washington and Brussels “will need to stay coordinated” to shield the two economies from “China’s industrial policy”.

Blinken, testifying at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations committee on Tuesday, said the US would continue to sanction Chinese entities identified as providing Russia with products that have military and civilian uses.

“We have already sanctioned more than 100 Chinese entities that we have identified that were engaged in providing dual-use products and other things that are on sanctions lists,” America’s top diplomat said. “We will continue to do that.”

“We are working to coordinate our efforts with European and other partners who are also aggrieved in fact, in many ways, even more aggrieved by this practice because it is a direct threat to them,” he continued.

“You cannot have China on the one hand professing to seek better relations with countries in Europe while on the other hand fuelling the greatest security threat to Europe since the end of the Cold War.”

Blinken described Russia as “churning out tanks, artillery and ammunition at a record pace” because of China’s “overwhelming support to Russia’s defence industrial base”.

The envoy raised the concern directly with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi during his trip to China last month, he said at the time.

Beijing’s strengthening ties with Moscow in the two-plus years since Russia invaded Ukraine have deepened Washington’s distrust towards the Asian giant.

During the visit to China, Blinken also said he “was extremely clear about our concerns” with Beijing’s leadership and that “we’ll have to see what actions follow from that”.

“I think China has demonstrated in the past, when it comes to Russia and Ukraine, that it can take positive action,” he added, referring to previous comments by Beijing warning against the use of nuclear weapons.

Sanctions on Chinese companies for supplying Russia is a top priority for both the Biden administration and the US Congress.

The US government imposed sanctions this month on 20 Hong Kong and mainland Chinese companies for their alleged roles in the development of Russia’s industrial base and military.

Last month US lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill that would impose sanctions on any Chinese military firm that provides material support to Russia.

The Biden administration has made forging closer relations with its traditional allies and China’s neighbours a key part of its policy towards the world’s second-largest economy, even as it strives to uphold its stated commitment to high-level dialogue with Beijing.

In her remarks on the importance of the US-European alliance in Frankfurt, Yellen warned that excess industrial capacity in China threatened firms not only in the US and Europe but also in emerging markets globally.

“China’s industrial policy may seem remote as we sit here in this room, but if we do not respond strategically and in a united way, the viability of businesses in both our countries and around the world could be at risk,” she said.

Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission chief, responded to Yellen’s comments with a mixed message, asserting a “different approach”.

“We share some of the concerns of our counterparts but we have a different approach, much more tailored approach,” von der Leyen said. “We have launched an investigation … according to WTO rules, so the investigation is still ongoing.

Should subsidies be found to exist, “then I can guarantee that the level of the duties we would impose” would correspond to “the level of damage”, she added.

While measures aimed at blunting China are generally supported in Congress, the White House approach of engaging Beijing’s leadership runs counter to the more hardline approach that many Republicans in Congress are demanding.

Additional reporting by Finbarr Bermingham in Brussels

China considering car tariffs to retaliate against US and EU moves, trade group says

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3263567/china-considering-car-tariffs-retaliate-against-us-and-eu-moves-trade-group-says?utm_source=rss_feed

China is considering raising tariffs on some car imports, according to a prominent business group, a move that would counter EU and US trade actions against Chinese-made electric vehicles.

In a statement on Tuesday evening, the China Chamber of Commerce to the EU (CCCEU) announced that it had been “informed by insiders that China may consider increasing temporary tariff rates on imported cars equipped with large-displacement engines”.

The Brussels-based group was firming up a threat that had been reported by Global Times, a Chinese state-owned tabloid.

“This potential action carries implications for European and US carmakers, particularly in light of recent developments such as Washington’s announcement of tariff hikes on Chinese electric vehicles and Brussels’ preparations for preliminary measures in a high-profile anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese EVs,” the chamber statement read.

The warning comes as trade ties between China and Western powers fray, with conditions expected to worsen in the weeks ahead.

Last week, Washington announced significant tariff hikes on a wide range of Chinese goods – EVs, various batteries, semiconductors and cranes, graphite and other critical minerals among them.

The European Union has embarked on a series of high-profile moves to tackle Chinese subsidies to various industries, which it says are distorting the European single market. In the most prominent case, Brussels is expected to finalise an investigation into subsidies in China’s EV sector by June 6, with provisional tariffs to be applied in early July.

Beijing has indicated that it won’t take either gambit lying down. On Sunday, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into imports of polyoxymethylene copolymer – a chemical commonly used in automotive engineering – from the US, EU, Japan and Taiwan.

It has already started probing alleged dumping in the European brandy sector, seen to target France’s cognac exports. Paris has been a strong supporter of a tougher EU trade policy towards China.

While the United States and China have been engaged in a trade war for years, some speculate that the EU is on the verge of a conflict of its own with Beijing.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tried to play down that prospect on Tuesday, but confirmed that her hardline policies would endure should she secure another term in office after next month’s European Parliament elections.

“I don’t think that we are in a trade war. I have the motto: ‘de-risk not decouple’, and I think here it’s very clear we are in the category of de-risking from China. We have decoupled from Russia,” von der Leyen said during a debate of candidates for the commission’s top job Tuesday evening in Brussels.

Earlier in the day, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged Europe to follow the US in imposing sky-high tariffs on Chinese hi-tech goods.

But von der Leyen dampened speculation that this would happen.

“We share some of the concerns of our counterparts but we have a different approach, much more tailored approach,” she said. “The US has put blanket tariffs on many products. But we have launched an investigation [into Chinese EVs], I think it’s eight months ago, according to WTO rules, so the investigation is still ongoing.”

“But should it be confirmed … that such subsidies exist, then I can guarantee that the level of the duties we would impose is correspondent to the level of damage, so much more targeted, much more tailored.”

The average EU duty applied to goods following anti-subsidies investigations is 19 per cent. Chinese cars already face a 10 per cent tariff upon arrival to the EU market.

China sanctions former US congressman Mike Gallagher after trip to Taiwan

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3263545/china-sanctions-former-us-congressman-mike-gallagher-after-trip-taiwan?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s foreign ministry announced sanctions on another former US congressman on Tuesday, three months after he headed a bipartisan delegation of politicians to Taiwan.

The ministry said Mike Gallagher, former Republican representative from Wisconsin, “frequently made statements and took actions that interfered in China’s internal affairs, undermined China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and violated China’s interests in recent years”.

Gallagher is banned from entering the country, and Chinese entities and individuals will be prohibited from engaging in transactions and cooperating with him.

In addition, the authorities will freeze any property he has within Chinese territory, according to the ministry.

Gallagher was part of a congressional delegation that visited Taiwan in February. During the trip, he told then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen that “the United States, Democrats and Republicans, stands with Taiwan, for your freedom and for ours”.

Beijing sees Taiwan as a part of China to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the United States, do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state. But Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons.

Beijing imposed similar sanctions on former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi and her close family, accusing her of “gross interference in China’s internal affairs” after she paid a supportive visit to Taiwan in August, 2022.

And last year, Representative Michael McCaul from Texas was sanctioned by Beijing after his trip to Taiwan.

Gallagher served as a member of the House of Representatives from 2017 to last month.

He was formerly the chairman of the Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party, and chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, and sat on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

He has been a vocal critic of China and its policies, repeatedly accusing China of conducting “relentless espionage” against the US via intelligence units, and launching cyberattacks, hackings and propaganda on American citizens.

He considered Chinese-owned TikTok a national security threat “exploited by the Chinese government” and led the charge for a bill forcing TikTok to be sold to American entities within six months.

Gallagher is also a vocal advocate of decoupling from China. “We’re at the beginning of a new cold war that will define American politics for a generation,” he said.

He also accused the Chinese leadership of being “desperate to crush religion”, and responsible for “genocide against the Uygur people”, describing the holding of Uygurs in re-education facilities in Xinjiang as “being as the largest internment of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust”.

Janet Yellen says G7 to discuss Chinese overproduction that ‘significantly exceeds global demand’ at FM meeting in Italy

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3263551/janet-yellen-says-g7-discuss-chinese-overproduction-significantly-exceeds-global-demand-fm-meeting?utm_source=rss_feed

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Tuesday that concerns about Chinese overproduction of key green technologies would be a key topic at a forthcoming meeting of G7 finance ministers.

Chinese production in areas such as electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels “significantly exceeds global demand”, Yellen said in a speech in Frankfurt.

The excess capacity “poses a threat to the development of clean energy industries around the world”, Yellen said.

The subject “will be a focus at the G7 meetings in Italy later this week”, she added.

In remarks on the importance of the US-European alliance in Frankfurt, Yellen said China’s excess industrial capacity threatened both American and European firms as well as the industrial development of emerging market countries.

“China’s industrial policy may seem remote as we sit here in this room, but if we do not respond strategically and in a united way, the viability of businesses in both our countries and around the world could be at risk,” she said.

Finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrialised nations are due to meet in Stresa, Italy, starting on Thursday.

Washington is concerned that Chinese government support is leading to more production capacity than global markets can absorb, driving cheap exports and stifling growth elsewhere.

Yellen said her concerns had been “communicated directly to my Chinese counterparts”, during a visit to the country last month.

The treasury secretary and US President Joe Biden would take action to protect workers and companies from “being undercut by unfair Chinese economic competition”, Yellen said.

“We want to see healthy green technology sectors, from innovative start-ups to green manufacturing factories in the United States, Europe and around the world, not just in China,” she said.

Her comments come a week after the Biden administration announced steep new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), solar products, semiconductors, battery parts, steel and other strategic industries.

Yellen, who received an honorary degree from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, said the European Union and other countries were taking similar actions to use their own authorities to investigate potential trade remedies for Chinese EVs and other products.

Beijing has reacted angrily to the US and European Union actions, warning that the move risk souring economic cooperation with China.

Yellen also called for Europe and the US to stand together against Russian aggression and Iranian “support for terrorism”, including agreeing on a way to unlock the value of some US$300 billion worth of frozen Russian sovereign assets to aid Ukraine.

“That’s why I believe it’s vital and urgent that we collectively find a way forward to unlock the value of Russian sovereign assets immobilised in our jurisdictions for the benefit of Ukraine,” Yellen said.

“This will be a key topic of conversation during G7 meetings this week.”

China must ‘liberate’ mind, embrace primary market treasury-bond purchases by central bank: finance ministry researcher

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3263537/china-must-liberate-mind-embrace-primary-market-treasury-bond-purchases-central-bank-finance?utm_source=rss_feed

While the resumption of China’s central bank’s treasury-bond trade has stirred fierce debate over Beijing’s leaning towards quantitative easing, a prominent researcher affiliated with the Ministry of Finance has called for purchases in the primary market to foster better alignment of fiscal and monetary policies.

“We must liberate our minds in terms of operating restrictions in the primary and secondary markets, otherwise it will be difficult to achieve fiscal and financial coordination,” Liu Shangxi, head of the Chinese Academy of Fiscal Sciences which is affiliated to the Ministry of Finance, told a closed-door academic gathering on May 9.

“The central bank’s buying and selling of government bonds is conducive to better playing the role of finance in the monetary policy transmission mechanism,” according to a transcript of his speech published on the website of China Finance 40 Forum on Monday.

Liu is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top political advisory body, and also sits on such organisations as the Chinese Economists 50 Forum.

The primary market is where new securities, including stocks and bonds, are issued and sold for the first time, while the secondary market is where already issued securities are bought and sold by investors.

Liu’s comment came after it was revealed in March that President Xi Jinping had ordered the People’s Bank of China to “gradually increase the trading of treasury bonds in its open market operations” at the twice-a-decade central financial work conference at the end of October.

In April, the finance ministry and the central bank said in separate statements that the trading of treasury bonds could be used.

Chinese law, though, forbids the central bank from buying treasury bonds directly to prevent debt monetisation – a legacy drawn from lessons of the 1980s when high inflation became a major problem.

But China has long planned to revise the Law of The People’s Bank of China, although no details have been revealed.

In the secondary market, the central bank bought bonds for the purpose of monetary policy operations in 1997 and to facilitate the establishment of the China Investment Corporation – China’s sovereign wealth fund – in 2007.

The PBOC denied the newly proposed secondary-market purchases are Western-style quantitative easing in its statement in April, citing that there was still a firewall between the primary market.

Finance ministry officials are generally more zealous over the thought of a greater involvement by the central bank in bond trading, as the ministry is now selling 1 trillion yuan (US$138 billion) worth of ultra-long special treasury bonds.

And although Liu’s speech is more of an academic discussion, lingering worries remain over fiscal monetisation, as it could lead to an increased supply of money and high inflation.

There are also growing efforts to push for policy changes ahead of the reform-centric third plenum in July.

Liu, however, argued that China must reflect on traditional thoughts over fiscal overdrafts.

“The boundary between the primary and secondary markets has been blurred and it’s merely a matter of definition,” he said, citing the PBOC operations in 1997 and 2007, both of which were done through state-owned commercial banks.

“They were not that dissimilar to direct purchases.”

Instead, he warned such a firewall between the primary and secondary markets would hinder policy coordination between the two major economic agencies.

“We don’t need to worry too much about fiscal overdrafts, nor regard the boundaries between the primary and secondary markets as insurmountable. We must liberate the mind and re-understand it,” Liu added.

China is aiming to grow its economy by around 5 per cent this year, with all key financial and economic authorities tasked with helping to achieve the goal.

Monetary authorities, though, have so far maintained an accommodative monetary policy, opting for more conventional tools, such as cutting the reserve requirement ratio for banks and reducing policy interest rates.

Liu also said many overseas central banks could buy stocks or assets owned by business entities.

“Whether a tool or policy is unconventional or not is relative, depending on the need and the circumstances. Just like the fiscal deficit, which we sought to avoid in the past, has now become a conventional tool,” he added.

China’s ‘truly outstanding’ heat-resistant aluminium alloys are 6 times stronger than previous materials

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3263400/chinas-truly-outstanding-heat-resistant-aluminium-alloys-are-6-times-stronger-previous-materials?utm_source=rss_feed

A team of Chinese scientists has developed a technique to make aluminium alloys dramatically more heat resistant – overcoming a major obstacle that has limited applications of the lightweight metal that is a crucial component in fields such as aerospace and transport.

Aluminium alloys are known for their low density, high specific strength, and corrosion resistance. But until now their heat resistance has been relatively limited, with traditional aluminium alloys typically operating at around 350 degrees Celsius (662 Fahrenheit). At temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius, the mechanical properties of these materials quickly deteriorate, which limits their use in aerospace design.

By adding nanoparticles into ordinary aluminium alloys, scientists from the school of materials science and engineering at Tianjin University (TJU) created a strengthened aluminium alloy that continued to perform well even at much higher temperatures.

“This new aluminium alloy has more than six times the strength of traditional aluminium alloys at 500 degrees Celsius, significantly surpassing the best levels reported internationally for aluminium-based materials,” TJU said in an official release earlier this month.

“This manufacturing process is simple, cost-effective, and easy to scale up for industrial production, making it highly valuable for industrial applications,” lead researcher He Chunnian said in the release.

“The team is partnering with prominent industry leaders and research institutions to drive forward the development of heat-resistant aluminium alloys for aerospace engines and critical aerospace components, and expects the material to see industrial use soon.”

The research was published on April 26 in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Materials.

The performance improvement in the aluminium alloy was achieved by incorporating highly stable nanometre-sized oxide particles. Aside from their low cost, the particles, which have a melting point above 1,000 degrees Celsius, offer exceptional strength, thermal conductivity, heat resistance, oxidation resistance and corrosion resistance.

The process of incorporating ceramic particles into alloys to create oxide dispersion-strengthened (ODS) alloys has shown promise. In 2022, Nasa revealed a similar method for producing the nickel-based Nasa Alloy GRX-810, which can withstand 1,093 degrees Celsius.

According to Nasa’s website, the method significantly improved the strength and durability of components and parts used in aviation and space exploration, resulting in better and longer-lasting performance.

While ODS alloys have been developed for reducible metals such as iron, molybdenum, nickel and tungsten through chemical processing methods, there have been no commercially available ODS alloys for irreducible metals such as aluminium, magnesium, titanium, and zirconium, because of their high chemical reactivity with oxygen.

Unlike reducible metals, irreducible metals cannot be easily extracted from their oxide.

To address the problem, He and his team prepared 5nm magnesium oxide particles and then used powder metallurgy – a manufacturing process for metal parts that compacts and sinters metal powders – to distribute the particles within the aluminium matrix, achieving a volume fraction of 8 per cent.

“Our strategy achieved ODS aluminium alloys containing highly dispersive 5nm [magnesium oxide] nanoparticles through powder metallurgy,” the researchers said.

“The material shows truly outstanding properties,” Alexis Deschamps, a renowned international expert in metallic materials from Universite Grenoble Alpes in France, said in a news review by Nature Materials.

“This development opens new possibilities for the application of aluminium alloys in high-temperature environments, where they could compete with some titanium alloys at a lower weight.”

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Putin’s China visit confirms West’s worst fears about emerging Beijing-Moscow axis

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3263535/putins-china-visit-confirms-wests-worst-fears-about-emerging-beijing-moscow-axis?utm_source=rss_feed

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s state visit to China last week has confirmed the worst fears of many diplomatic observers about the emergence of an anti-West axis between Beijing and Moscow.

While Putin has made no secret about his stance since he invaded Ukraine two years ago, Beijing had been deliberately vague about where it actually stood.

Putin’s visit came as Chinese President Xi Jinping sought to stabilise ties with Europe with a tour of France, Serbia and Hungary the week before, during which European leaders repeatedly called on Beijing to distance itself from Moscow.

In recent weeks, Brussels has joined Washington in a campaign to pressure China over its alleged role in sustaining Russia’s war in Ukraine, effectively urging Beijing to choose between Moscow and the West.

As US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel put it last week, Beijing “cannot have it both ways and want to have [better] relationships with Europe and other countries while simultaneously continuing to fuel the biggest threat to European security in a long time”, referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The People’s Republic of China cannot have its cake and eat it too,” he added.

However, with his two-day visit, Putin emerged as a clear winner, successfully pulling Beijing closer to Moscow’s orbit.

In a joint communique issued after his Beijing summit with Xi, both sides vowed to “strengthen coordination and cooperation to deal with the so-called dual containment policy of the United States that is non-constructive and hostile towards China and Russia”.

The 12,000-word document singled out Washington over a dozen times, denouncing its “disruptive” and “hegemonic behaviour” aimed at undermining the Indo-Pacific power balance, especially its efforts to forge “minilateral” groupings with countries in the region.

Although the communique made no mention of the pair’s 2022 pledge, made shortly before the Ukraine war broke out, that declared there was “no limit to their friendship”, Beijing appears determined to side with Moscow against Washington.

According to an official Chinese statement, Xi talked about “unprecedented shifts” in the global geopolitical landscape during his meeting with Putin, claiming the world had entered “a new period of turbulence and change”.

It was reminiscent of Xi’s remarks a year ago during a visit to Russia when he declared that Beijing and Moscow should “drive the changes together”.

Putin was more blunt, openly talking about “a new world” that was “taking shape before our eyes and becoming multipolar” while visiting China’s northeastern city of Harbin last week.

In an interview with Russian media on Friday, he said it was “partly true” that the future of the rapidly changing world largely “depends on Russia and China” in the face of “the difficult decisions that lie ahead”.

Beijing is doubtlessly aware of the high stakes behind its decision to pivot towards Moscow, which risks inviting Western sanctions, further straining US ties and alienating most of Europe.

The fact that Beijing is doubling down on its bet on Putin’s war against the West shows that stabilising ties with Moscow is probably its overriding priority at the moment.

Despite the danger of turning the new cold war into a self-fulfilling prophecy, Beijing cannot afford to lose its influence over Moscow as Washington’s alliance-building approach in the Indo-Pacific has left China increasingly isolated.

Yan Xuetong, a strategist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, pointed out over a decade ago that “the core of competition between China and the United States will be to see who has more high-quality friends”.

But as Putin is increasingly viewed as the enemy of the world, embracing a quasi-alliance with Moscow is hardly the recipe to make more friends.

China will have to learn a lesson on how to properly project its growing power, according to new Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.

“If they overdo it, if they push their way around, coerce, squeeze or pressurise other countries, it will engender a backlash, including in the region. And that’s why they cannot go too far,” he told the Economist earlier this month.

China’s rush to fill power vacuum in Iraq could backfire

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/world-opinion/article/3263448/chinas-rush-fill-power-vacuum-iraq-could-backfire?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese firms recently won the lion’s share of licences for oil and gas exploration that Iraq solicited to wean its power plants off natural gas from Iran.

The news demonstrates China’s drive to secure energy supplies as it struggles to reverse slowing growth at home. Beijing is seizing opportunities in the Middle East left by the West’s conflicting ambitions to deter foes and reassure allies. Wang Yi, China’s chief diplomat, has doubled down on the government’s pro-Palestinian stance.

Meanwhile, American and European companies are apprehensive about making long-term investments in war-ravaged countries with rampant corruption despite these nations’ lucrative reserves of gas and oil. But China’s strategy in Iraq could prove to be a negative-sum game on many fronts – political, trade, influence and more – given the power dynamics in the region.

Many treacherous hazards confront statecraft, as the United States and Europe well know. China will face challenges in Iraq that are the result of antagonisms that have deepened over the past few centuries. The late US statesman Henry Kissinger wrote in 2014 that in the Middle East “political, sectarian, tribal, territorial, ideological, and traditional national interest disputes merge”.

Today, the war in Gaza promises an impossible outcome. Throughout the Middle East, there have been flare-ups of terrorist activity in societies roiled by deep-seated religious tensions that unstable governments cannot defuse. Gulf countries are rising in power and ambition as they assert their independence.

China isn’t absolved from these difficulties by stressing neutrality and dialogue facilitation while keeping its distance from local groups. As its involvement in Iraq deepens and the dilemmas multiply, President Xi Jinping’s efforts will be compromised and possibly rebuffed. How can China succeed if it doesn’t take sides with local actors?

History shows repeatedly that geostrategic power vacuums are like black holes. Countries leverage various means – often economic incentives – to gain influence when rivals partially retrench or collapse, but not always. Sometimes remaining on the sidelines is a better strategy.

US President Joe Biden made note of China’s growing Middle East presence in 2022 while visiting Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia or Iran,” Biden said. “And we’ll seek to build on this moment with active, principled American leadership.”

Estimates of US troops stationed in the Middle East go up to more than 50,000, with Qatar hosting the largest US base. There was unprecedented security cooperation between Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi after Iran targeted Israel with missile and drone attacks last month. In comparison, China’s foothold in the region is not as strong.

China and Iraq last year marked 65 years of bilateral relations which began after Iraq’s coup of 1958, when General Abdul Karim Qasim deposed the Hashemite monarchy and Beijing recognised his “revolutionary” government. Throughout Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s, China sold weapons to both sides.

Even with those efforts, China’s relations with Iraq were limited until the last two decades. Alongside Beijing’s growing need for oil, factors such as Iraq’s need for liquidity, reconstruction following years of conflict, the effects of low oil prices and “rightsizing” of US forces in Iraq pushed the two closer together.

Recent milestones in their relationship are many. A 2009 agreement gave China National Petroleum Corporation a 37 per cent stake in the Rumaila oilfield, Iraq’s largest. By 2013, China had a hand in more than half of Iraq’s daily oil output. In 2010, the Chinese government cancelled 80 per cent of debt Iraq owed Beijing. Videos in 2015 showed the Iraqi military operating Chinese supplied CH-4 drones.

Iraq and China signed an oil-for-reconstruction deal in 2019, with Beijing funding infrastructure projects in exchange for 100,000 barrels per day. As of February, Chinese firms oversee two-thirds of Iraq’s oil production. Meanwhile, Iraq was the top target for Belt and Road Initiative financing in 2021, receiving US$10.5 billion for infrastructure projects. Last year, Iraq’s central bank announced it would settle trade with China directly in yuan, though the oil trade was excluded.

Entanglements like these inevitably become labyrinthine, with the objectives lost and unravelling increasingly difficult. Like machines with many moving parts, maintenance and repairs are needed more frequently and pose greater difficulty. Add to that the complications from uncertainties, volatility and unforeseen events, such as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi dying in a helicopter crash.

All this leaves China with a difficult balancing act: it must mind its partners’ interests and distance itself from local actors, while keeping an eye on mounting economic vulnerabilities at home. Beijing could find itself elbowed out of Iraq as Gulf countries – especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – provide huge investments in an effort to amass regional power, ensure stability and isolate Iran.

Some of these same Gulf countries are signing deals with China as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, yet their ambitions will limit Beijing’s room to act unilaterally. Regional instability, such as the Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, also raises the prospect of China needing cooperation with the US, Europe and Gulf countries to secure the flow of oil and gas while protecting its investments. That adds complications to fierce tensions with the West over trade.

Much like the West now, China will find itself increasingly seeing progress swept away by centuries-old hostilities. Beijing might have taken on more than it can manage.

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China rolls out large language model based on Xi Jinping Thought

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3263530/china-rolls-out-large-language-model-based-xi-jinping-thought?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s top internet regulator has rolled out a large language model (LLM) based on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s political philosophy, a closed AI system that it says is “secure and reliable”.

The machine learning language model was launched by the China Cyberspace Research Institute, which operates under the Cyberspace Administration of China, the national regulator.

The philosophy, along with other selected cyberspace themes that are aligned with the official government narrative, make up the core content of the LLM, according to a post published on Monday on the WeChat account of the administration’s magazine.

“The professionalism and authority of the corpus ensure the professional quality of the generated content,” the administration said in the post.

The philosophy is officially known as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, and includes his instructions on all aspects of political, social and economic life. It was enshrined in China’s constitution in 2018.

According to the post, the model can meet “a wide range of users needs” and can answer questions, outline reports, summarise information, and translate between Chinese and English.

Unlike other systems, the LLM is built on a select knowledge base with locally generated data and is not open-sourced, meaning the model is “secure and reliable”, according to the administration.

Demonstrations offered in the post suggested the answers were sourced from a fixed pool of Chinese official documents and outlets.

For example, suggested questions for the application included the differences between traditional productive forces and new productive forces – a trending buzzword used by Beijing to handle recent economic challenges, or “outline a report on the current state of AI development”.

The system was “deployed exclusively on the servers of the China Cyberspace Research Institute, where all data is processed locally, ensuring a high level of security”, the post said, adding that it was based on pre-trained, government-approved language models.

The model was still undergoing internal testing and was not yet available for public use, but it was open to “designated users by invitation”, the administration said.

The limited launch comes as Beijing tries to use artificial intelligence to drive economic growth while maintaining strict regulatory control over cybersecurity.

In March, Premier Li Qiang introduced an initiative to integrate AI into traditional sectors to help improve technologies.

ChatGPT, from US firm OpenAI, was launched more than a year ago, but it is not accessible to users in China.

Many Chinese firms have rushed to launch their own versions of ChatGPT, but they are required to follow government regulatory controls and ensure their generated narrative is aligned with Beijing’s playbook.

The general office of the Communist Party’s decision-making Central Committee issued a national notice in February urging compulsory learning activities for all party members to better acquaint them with Xi Jinping Thought.

The notice also ordered party groups to encourage members to help the party further dominate China’s cyberspace to ensure “positive energy” remained the dominant trend in national internet traffic.

Import tariffs ‘inevitably’ making US inflation worse, China commentary says, as consumers and firms continue to foot the bill

https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3263521/import-tariffs-inevitably-making-us-inflation-worse-china-commentary-says-consumers-and-firms?utm_source=rss_feed

Increased use of imports tariffs by the United States, including on Chinese goods, have only worsened its own inflation, while Washington’s anti-globalisation and decoupling stance is a threat to the world, according to a commentary by China’s top economic planner.

Trade relations between world’s two largest economies intensified last week after Washington unveiled major new tariffs on a range of Chinese products, including electric vehicles, advanced batteries, solar cells, steel, aluminium and medical equipment.

And on Sunday, China’s Ministry of Commerce said that it would investigate imports of polyformaldehyde copolymer – a plastic widely used in electronics and cars that is also known as polyoxymethylene copolymer – from the US, the European Union, Taiwan and Japan as part of an anti-dumping investigation.

“The US’ pursuit of anti-globalisation, decoupling and disconnection has resulted in a mismatch of global resources, as well as supply and demand, which will inevitably impose further constraints on the fall in [US] domestic inflation,” the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said in a commentary posted on its WeChat social media account on Monday in its latest criticisms of Washington’s trade policies.

“This is not only a new problem facing the US economy, but also a threat facing the global economy,” according to the commentary written by Jin Xuan.

The official role of the author has not been disclosed by the top economic planner, although Jin Xuan is often viewed as a pen name used to deliver official messages.

Jin also wrote two separate commentaries in response to criticisms from the US and Europe on problems surrounding China’s industrial policy, including overcapacity and exports of electric vehicles, on April 30 and May 1.

Beijing has recently pushed back against overcapacity concerns from the US and European Union, who are worried that cheap imports damage their domestic manufacturing sectors.

The commentary appeared to the first in a series titled “maintaining economic globalisation and promoting inclusive development of the world economy”.

“Cheap and good quality” products made in China and other developing countries have helped to reduce inflation and costs of imports for the US economy for many years, they have also catered for the needs of the majority of American companies and consumers, Monday’s commentary said.

However, in recent years, the US government has raised tariffs on imports ranging from steel, machinery and equipment, chemicals, plastics as well as new energy vehicles and solar panels, the commentary added.

Even daily necessities such as food, clothing, and medicines have been subject to higher tariffs, the commentary said.

Before last week, the Biden administration had maintained the punitive Trump-era import tariffs on Chinese goods despite some calls for their removal as they increase production costs for US businesses.

The commentary appeared to be the first in a series titled “maintaining economic globalisation and promoting inclusive development of the world economy”.

“In April this year, US consumer price inflation rose by 0.3 per cent month on month and 3.4 per cent year on year, still higher than the 2 per cent target,” the NDRC commentary said.

“This is due to the impact of the pandemic, excessive fiscal and monetary policy stimulus, and the rise in prices of imported goods and services caused by the US’ promotion of anti-globalisation.”

Many countries around have experienced high levels of inflation in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, but risks of deflation are increasing in China, as its overall consumer price index grew by just 0.3 per cent year on year in April.

The US Federal Reserve, in contrast, has raised interest rates to a 23-year high as it looks to bring inflation down to its long-term target of two per cent.

But despite making significant progress last year, the US central bank’s battle with inflation has faced a setback this year, with the rise of consumer prices accelerating again in the first quarter.

“Relevant US financial and economic officials have stated that tariffs have increased the direct costs borne by US consumers, raising the cost of importing goods to the US, and contributing to high inflation,” the NDRC commentary said.

“These costs are ultimately paid by American businesses and consumers.”

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China warns of floods as ‘dragon boat rain’ threatens to soak Pearl River region

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3263490/china-warns-floods-dragon-boat-rain-threatens-soak-pearl-river-region?utm_source=rss_feed

China has warned of flood risks near the Bei River, a southern tributary of the Pearl River, over the next 30 days as authorities prepare for emergencies and evacuation.

Heavy showers, known as “dragon boat rain”, often hit southern China around the time of the Dragon Boat Festival, which typically falls in mid-June. But this year, the amount of rainfall could be 20 to 50 per cent more than usual in the Pearl River area, the Ministry of Water Resources said on Monday.

Due to torrential rains in recent days, water levels in the river’s main tributaries reached 0.5 metre (1.64 feet) higher than usual, and reservoirs in the area held 10 per cent more water, the ministry said.

The ministry has organised a team to analyse the development of rainstorms and plan prevention measures accordingly, it said. In the next few weeks, it will strive to publish alerts in a timely manner, urge local governments to arrange for supervision around dams, reservoirs and construction projects near rivers, and pay close attention to flash floods and waterlogging, it said.

Local governments should implement early warnings and organise evacuations in advance, as well as increase monitoring and reporting, the ministry said.

On Saturday, the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters activated a level four emergency flood prevention response, the lowest in a four-tier system, for Guangdong province and Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

Since then, cities in the area have been on high alert. Over the weekend, Shenzhen’s weather forecaster predicted daily average rainfall of 345mm (13.6 inches) over the next 30 days. If those predictions are correct, the falls will amount to 18 per cent of the average annual total.

It said heavy rainstorms would hit the city on May 19, May 25, May 29, June 8 and June 16. The forecaster warned the public that the storms were likely to happen in the morning and would be heavy and sudden and affect traffic.

The Guangzhou government on Tuesday cautioned that heavy rainstorms could lead to inner city flooding and cautioned the public to avoid walking in deep water. If water reaches knee level, people should carry a stick or pole to probe the ground to avoid falling into manholes or tripping. It encouraged the public to report fallen electrical wires to authorities.

Last month, China predicted water flows in the Bei River would hit record levels after days of torrential rain. The cities of Qingyuan, Shaoguan, Huizhou and capital Guangzhou were particularly hard hit, prompting flood alerts and rainstorm warnings for three days in a row. More than 800 people had to be evacuated as waters rose, but there were no casualties.

Goldman Sachs leads bullish chorus on Chinese stocks, as Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan’s private bank remain cautious

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3263472/goldman-sachs-leads-bullish-chorus-chinese-stocks-morgan-stanley-and-jpmorgans-private-bank-remain?utm_source=rss_feed

A spectacular run in Chinese stocks has divided global investment banks into two camps, with Goldman Sachs, UBS Group and HSBC Holdings firmly in the bullish camp while Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase’s private-banking unit remain cautious.

Goldman has raised its targets for both the MSCI China Index and the CSI 300 Index by at least 5 per cent this week to reflect diminished tail risks and earnings optimism. UBS and HSBC also expect continued gains, arguing that the rally will be underpinned by policy support and depressed valuations.

On the flip side, Morgan Stanley said that earnings growth for Chinese companies will be disappointing this year and next, and JPMorgan Private Bank is even more pessimistic, believing that the liquidity-driven rise has largely run its course amid a lack of fundamental economic improvement.

The split views show that the global investment community has yet to reach a consensus on the outlook for Chinese stocks, even after some key gauges have already charged into a bull market and top policymakers have become more serious about tackling the property-market crisis, seen as a major drag on growth and stocks.

The MSCI China Index, the benchmark widely used by overseas investors, has risen 32 per cent from a January low, and the Hang Seng Index has climbed 29 per cent in the same span, both surpassing the 20 per cent gain defined as a bull market.

Historical data favours a continuing rise, according to Goldman. Examples over the past two decades show that there is a 60 per cent probability that stocks will extend gains after entering a bull market, fetching an average peak of 35 per cent in the following six months, it said.

“A resilient economy, strong manifestation of policy support across the macro, housing, and capital-market dimensions, together with suppressed starting points on valuations and investor positioning/sentiment, are key ingredients to the re-rating process,” analysts led by Kinger Lau at the investment bank wrote in a report issued on Monday.

Goldman raised its 12-month targets by 17 per cent to 70 for the MSCI China Index and by 5.1 per cent to 4,100 for the CSI 300 Index of yuan-traded stocks, saying that the driver for stocks will shift to earnings from valuation expansion.

The targets imply a gain from the current levels of 7.7 per cent for the MSCI gauge and 12 per cent for the CSI 300.

The valuation edge is one of multiple factors that will power ahead Chinese stocks trading in Hong Kong, which have price-to-earnings ratios below the five-year average even after the recent gains, according to HSBC.

“Share buy-backs can rise significantly more, interest rates can fall further, and much of the buying in Hong Kong has been from mainland China, which suggests global funds still have room to buy more,” said Herald van der Linde, a Hong Kong-based strategist at HSBC Holdings. “This all suggests that in the near term, Chinese equities could rally higher. It’s too early to leave the party.”

UBS expects Chinese stocks to narrow their discount to other emerging markets under President Xi Jinping’s common prosperity initiative. An unprecedented nine-point document from the State Council outlining the reform path ensures top leaders’ attention to the capital market, which could become a place for citizens to preserve their wealth during the property market’s persistent downturn, according to Meng Lei, a strategist at the Swiss bank.

In the opposite camp, Morgan Stanley said it remained 14 per cent below the consensus earnings projections for the companies on the MSCI China Index due to China’s weak nominal economic growth and the prospect of a weakening yuan.

JPMorgan Private Bank called an end to the rebound and advised investors to sell Chinese stocks, particularly offshore shares, because of a lack of a meaningful policy shift that would restore investors’ confidence.

“Most of the offshore Chinese equity rally was driven by liquidity flows and asset reallocation from onshore investors, but these factors are unlikely to bring a meaningful earnings boost on the index level, nor a structural re-rating on multiples,” said Alex Wolf, the bank’s strategist. “The key catalyst for [global] investors tends to be fundamental factors around underlying nominal growth and corporate earnings. At the moment, that remains to be seen.”

Without a definite answer for the direction of the market, the best strategy is probably to wait and gauge the impact of last week’s sweeping package of rescue measures for the property market, according to UBS Global Wealth Management. Such a stabilisation would serve as a catalyst for a broad-based recovery in consumption and an uptick in stocks.

“We have raised our base case and upside targets for the MSCI China index, though for now this mostly reflects improving earnings forecasts for select internet names,” UBS Global said in a note. “We recommend investors shift their China equity exposure to a more balanced barbell that features both growth names and state-owned enterprises.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin to meet again in July to build on Beijing visit: Lavrov

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3263493/chinese-president-xi-jinping-and-russias-vladimir-putin-meet-again-july-build-beijing-visit?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese President Xi Jinping is expected to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Kazakhstan in July, Russia’s top diplomat said during a meeting with China’s foreign minister on Monday.

It will be the second meeting between the top leaders of China and Russia in about two months, after Xi hosted Putin in a state visit in China, both vowing to expand political, diplomatic, economic and military ties amid increasing pressure from the West.

“Our schedule of contacts is very, very intensive. We look forward to welcoming you, Mr Minister, dear friend, at a session of the Brics foreign ministers in Nizhny Novgorod [in Russia] in less than a month. Our leaders will meet during an SCO summit here in Astana in July,” Sergey Lavrov said in a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, according to the Russian Interfax news agency.

China and Russia are founding members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a regional political, economic and security grouping set up in 2001 by China, Russia and four former Soviet Central Asian states. In 2017, India and Pakistan became state members and last year Iran gained full membership.

Speaking on the sidelines of the SCO foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday, Wang told Lavrov that China and Russia should ramp up support for each other and increase joint efforts to ensure stability in their shared region.

“The two sides should prepare for bilateral engagement in the course of the year, continue to increase mutual support, stabilise the fundamentals of cooperation and maintain security and stability in the common Chinese-Russian neighbourhood,” Wang said, according to China’s foreign ministry.

Wang said a close-knit SCO “meets not only in the common interests of its member states but also goes along with the trend of multi-polarisation in the world”.

“China is willing to work closely with Russia and other member states to keep the SCO on a steady course, jointly safeguard the overall situation of regional security, stability and development, and promote the development of global governance in a more just and reasonable direction.”

According to the Russian foreign ministry, the two diplomats also exchanged views on “various pressing issues, including the Middle East peace process, developments in the Red Sea region and the situation on the Korean peninsula”.

They also emphasised the need to build “a new security framework for Eurasia, particularly given the stagnation of [the] Euro-Atlantic mechanism”.

Among its efforts to counter perceived US-led containment in the Indo-Pacific region, China has increasingly turned to boost ties with Central Asia, a vast and resource-rich region seen by China as crucial for trade expansion and energy security, as well as for maintaining stability in its western Xinjiang region.

Last year, Xi hosted the leaders of five former Soviet states – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – in the ancient western Chinese city of Xian where he pledged to offer economic, infrastructure and security support to the region.

On Monday, during a meeting with Kazakh Foreign Minister Murat Nurtleu, Wang hailed the trust between the two countries.

“China and Kazakhstan have deepened mutual political trust, support each other on issues of mutual core interests and help each other when one of them encounters difficulties, and China and Kazakhstan have long been a de facto community of destiny.”

According to the Chinese foreign ministry, China agreed to expand energy cooperation with Kazakhstan and import more of its agricultural products.

Meanwhile, they agreed to “actively consult on the construction of a third cross-border railway”.

Beijing and Astana pledged to further upgrade cross-border transport services and policies to “create more favourable conditions to further strengthen cooperation” on the China-Europe Railway Express that links more than 100 Chinese cities with more than 200 cities in Europe, mostly through Kazakhstan.

South China Sea: Philippine fishermen warn Beijing of ‘10 times’ retaliation over its detainment order

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3263502/south-china-sea-philippine-fishermen-warn-beijing-10-times-retaliation-over-its-detainment-order?utm_source=rss_feed

As Manila prepares to take legal action against Beijing over its alleged environmental destruction in the South China Sea, Filipino fishermen have vowed to retaliate against an order by China to detain any foreign nationals for trespassing in the waters by kidnapping Chinese nationals in the Philippines.

While analysts said the Philippine government’s legal action could be successful, they warned Beijing would likely respond with countermeasures against Manila and its people.

“Expect China to retaliate with restrictive trade measures, harassment of Filipino workers in China and more serious bullying in the disputed areas,” Edmund Tayao, a political analyst and professor at the San Beda Graduate School of Law in Manila, told This Week in Asia.

On Monday, the Philippines accused Beijing of destroying the marine environment around the Scarborough Shoal, a contested maritime feature located in the West Philippine Sea – Manila’s name for part of the disputed South China Sea within its exclusive economic zone.

Jonathan Malaya, assistant director general of the National Security Council, told reporters that Philippine authorities were collecting evidence to file a case against China for destroying coral reefs around the shoal and its other illegal actions, including Chinese fishermen harvesting endangered giant clams.

Tayao said the outcome of such a case would likely favour Manila as indicated by legal precedents involving both countries over the South China Sea row.

“We won the arbitration case before so we should have a good chance. Consider as well that we have international public opinion on our side, so that political factor is likely to be an advantage as well,” he said.

The Philippines, China, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam have competing claims in the South China Sea. In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague dismissed China’s claims to the South China Sea as delineated in Chinese maps. China rejected the ruling, insisting it had jurisdiction over the waterways as indicated by its so-called nine-dash line.

Tayao noted that the filing of another case against China has been discussed for some time after Manila’s repeated diplomatic protests against Beijing were consistently ignored.

While Malaya did not provide a timeline for filing, he mentioned that the Justice Department was assessing the case.

“We are alarmed and worried about the situation that’s happening there … They are the ones that are there right now. They are preventing us from going inside the lagoon,” Malaya said as he challenged China to open Scarborough Shoal to international scrutiny so that its environmental state could be assessed.

“We can ask third-party environmental groups or even the United Nations to do a fact-finding mission to determine the environmental situation in Bajo de Masinloc,” he added, referring to the shoal by its name in the Philippines.

Jose Antonio Custodio, a defence analyst and fellow at the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers, said Manila’s strategy in handling West Philippine Sea issues could help internationalise the dispute and pressure China to change its ways.

“There will be tensions, though it’s doubtful that it will lead to open conflict. But expect continued Chinese build up and harassment of Philippine vessels and garrisons in the West Philippine Sea and terse diplomatic exchanges between the two [countries],” Custodio told This Week in Asia.

“They will engage in a massive disinformation campaign in the Philippines to weaken the resolve of Filipinos and scare them with China’s might. More importantly, they will bankroll pro-Chinese quislings in the Philippines to ensure that, in 2025 and 2028, pro-Beijing politicians will be elected by the Filipino people,” he added.

Tit-for-tat threat

Last week, the Chinese coastguard issued an order, set to take effect on June 15, authorising its personnel to detain foreign nationals for up to 60 days if they were caught trespassing in what it considered Beijing’s territorial waters.

Philippine lawmakers and officials denounced the order, with some threatening to take legal action against Beijing should the Chinese coastguard carry out any detainment with Manila’s exclusive economic zone.

The leader of a Filipino fishermen’s group has even threatened to kidnap 10 Chinese nationals in the country for every Filipino that Beijing detains.

Leonardo Cuaresma, the leader of the fisherman’s association of New Masinloc, a town facing the West Philippine Sea, issued the warning after the Chinese coastguard’s announcement.

“We are not afraid of that new policy because, in the first place, they can’t do it in our traditional fishing grounds within our territory. It’s within our exclusive economic zone,” Cuaresma said.

“If they are going to arrest and detain our Filipino fishermen … for every Filipino fisherman, I want to relay to them that we will abduct, detain or hold 10 Chinese nationals,” he stressed.

“We are not doing illegal things. We are fishing peacefully and in clean ways. We will fight for our rights until death. If they do it against us, we know that there are a lot of Chinese in our country. We will take up revenge if that’s what they want.”

Analysts agree that China has no legal standing to carry out its threats of detainment.

Jennifer Parker, an expert associate at the National Security College at the Australian National University, told This Week in Asia it would be illegal for Beijing to apply such a policy outside its territorial waters.

“Whilst China frequently undertakes actions against the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the capture of citizens from the countries with overlapping exclusive economic zones with China’s nine-dash line would be a significant escalation,” Parker said.

“Although I don’t see China using this law in the short term against Philippine fishermen because of the scale of escalation it would involve, it does mean that the Philippines will need to make an even more concerted effort to have a presence in the vicinity of the features contested by China.”

Ray Powell, a maritime security analyst at the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University, said the announcement of the Chinese coastguard’s detainment order was a significant escalation by Beijing.

“It is important for affected countries and the larger international community to make clear that any such detention would be treated as illegal and an outrage against the international order,” Powell said.

Seized Hong Kong Peak mansion linked to China Evergrande founder Hui Ka-yan sells at 40% discount for US$58 million

https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3263513/seized-hong-kong-peak-mansion-linked-china-evergrande-founder-hui-ka-yan-sells-40-discount-us58?utm_source=rss_feed

Receivers of a Hong Kong luxury property owned by a company linked to a top former executive of China’s most indebted developer, China Evergrande Group, have sold the asset on The Peak at a significant discount.

The 5,171 sq ft mansion, 10B at Black’s Link, sold to an unknown buyer for HK$450 million (US$58 million), more than 40 per cent below a valuation of HK$800 million last year, according to a source familiar with the matter.

In March 2023, receivers put the asset up for sale to recover unpaid bills after the home was seized by China Construction Bank (Asia) in November 2022.

It is owned by Better Vision, whose director is Tan Haijun, according to a company registration search. Tan is also the director of Giant Hill, which owns adjacent mansions 10C and 10E Black’s Link, according to Land Registry data. Hui Ka-yan, Evergrande’s founder and former chairman, resigned as a director of Giant Hill on July 30, 2021. On the same day, Tan was appointed as Giant Hill’s director.

Hui, once China’s richest person, has seen his personal wealth dwindle since China Evergrande was enmeshed in a debt crisis triggered by Beijing’s “three red lines” policy, which curbed leverage in the property industry starting in August 2020.

A Hong Kong High Court in January approved a petition by creditors to liquidate China Evergrande, the world’s most indebted property developer, in the biggest such case seen in the city.

In March, the China Securities Regulatory Commission penalised China Evergrande 4.2 billion yuan (US$583.4 million), saying the group inflated its sales by 564 billion yuan in the years preceding its eventual collapse. It also fined Hui 47 million yuan and barred him from accessing the capital markets for life. Six other current and former executives of the Guangzhou-based home builder were slapped with penalties of between 200,000 yuan and 15 million yuan.

The 10C and 10E Black’s Link mansions, valued at more than HK$1.5 billion, were seized by creditors in November. The three adjacent mansions were remortgaged in late 2021 for HK$1.1 billion.

The 10E property, a three-storey detached house with an area of 4,933 sq ft and an estimated market value of HK$550 million, was put up for sale by public tender in March this year. Savills, the agent responsible for the sale, invited tenders for the property, which closed on April 22.

In January, a mainland Chinese buyer snapped up an ultra-luxury house at The Peak at a 35 per cent discount. The mansion, 25-26 A&B Lugard Road, sold for HK$838 million, according to Savills, the sole agent. The sale was linked to Shenzhen entrepreneur Xu Hang, co-founder and director of Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics.

Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance heat up price war in China’s AI market with steep LLM discounts, putting pressure on start-ups

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3263512/alibaba-baidu-bytedance-heat-price-war-chinas-ai-market-steep-llm-discounts-putting-pressure-start?utm_source=rss_feed

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, China’s biggest cloud computing service provider, slashed the fees for using its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models by up to 97 per cent, a salvo in a price war that comes a week after ByteDance launched a rival service that costs less than most competitors.

The price cuts apply to nine of Alibaba’s Qwen self-developed large language models (LLMs), also known as Tongyi Qianwen, said Liu Weiguang, president of public cloud business, at the firm’s AI summit in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei province, on Tuesday.

“Today, we have lowered the threshold for enterprises to use LLMs better and faster, and for industries to create LLM-powered applications in the real world,” Liu said.

The discounts offered by Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, come as Big Tech companies on the mainland race to draw users to their respective LLMs, the technology that underpins ChatGPT and other generative AI services. More than 200 LLMs have been introduced in China, according to government estimates.

Hours after Alibaba Cloud’s announcement, web search giant Baidu said its Ernie Speed and Ernie Lite LLMs, both launched earlier this year, are available free of charge with immediate effect.

The Beijing-based firm, which in November began charging 59.9 yuan a month for the use of its top-end Ernie Bot 4.0, is working to make its AI services more affordable, founder and chairman Robin Li Yanhong said in an earnings report last week.

That came a day after TikTok owner ByteDance introduced its self-developed Doubao LLM series, pricing its top-of-the-line model as low as 0.0008 yuan (US$0.0001) per 1,000-token prompt. In AI, a token is a fundamental unit of data that is processed by algorithms, with 1,000 tokens roughly equivalent to 750 English words.

For comparison, Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-max, the series’ most powerful commercial model said to be capable of performance equivalent to OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, now costs 0.04 yuan per 1,000 input tokens after a 67 per cent discount.

Fees for Qwen-long, a commercial model designed to process long text, have been reduced by 97 per cent to 0.0005 yuan per 1,000 input tokens.

The company is also giving out 4 million free tokens per model for each new user until June 21, while offering a seven-day free trial for its open-source Qwen 1.5-110B and Qwen 1.5-32B.

Alibaba said earlier this month that its LLMs have been adopted by more than 90,000 corporate clients, including smartphone giant Xiaomi, a month after Baidu’s Li said Ernie Bot had been used by 85,000 corporate clients.

The aggressive pricing tactics and expansive user bases of Chinese tech giants add pressure on top domestic AI start-ups trying to monetise their models. Zhipu AI currently charges 0.1 yuan per 1,000 tokens for its most capable GLM-4 LLM, while MiniMax’s Abab 6.5 and Baichuan’s Baichuan2-Turbo cost 0.03 yuan and 0.008 yuan respectively.

‘You shouldn’t mind’: China matchmakers pressure man to date unmarried pregnant woman at singles event, shock onlookers

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/gender-diversity/article/3262811/you-shouldnt-mind-china-matchmakers-pressure-man-date-unmarried-pregnant-woman-singles-event-shock?utm_source=rss_feed

Two hosts at a public matchmaking event in eastern China encouraged a man to partner with an unmarried woman who was three months pregnant, shocking onlookers and prompting significant backlash online.

The bizarre incident happened on May 2 at an “Auntie Wang’s Matchmaking” event in Bozhou, Anhui province, after the woman had received interest from the man before revealing her pregnancy.

“Auntie Wang” events are a Chinese dating trend in which single people stand on a stage and publicly announce their eligibility resume, hoping to spark interest from another person in the audience for a potential future date.

According to the video circulated online, the woman, who remained unidentified, said her family does not demand a bride price and that the family would return any such payment from the groom’s side.

She also mentioned that her family owns an apartment in Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu province that they intended to use as a dowry.

When the woman nearly matched with a man, who was also not identified, she decided to reveal her pregnancy.

“I made a mistake recently that I must openly acknowledge because it’s part of my past – I am three months pregnant.”

The male host then asked the man: “Can you accept her being three months pregnant?”

The man responded, “No”, to which the male host retorted: “You can’t accept it? If you can accept a divorcee without children, why can’t you accept a woman with a three-month pregnancy?”

It is not known if the man had previously said he did not mind a divorced woman.

The female host also chimed in, adding: “You’re a man, and a man should first and foremost be responsible, embracing the duties of a father. Regardless of whose child it is, doesn’t every man have that responsibility?”

Following the viral video, public comments overwhelmingly expressed outrage at the hosts’ remarks.

One person commented: “The hosts must be insane.”

Another asked: “Shouldn’t the man who got her pregnant be the one to take responsibility for the child?”

Some people even speculated that the woman’s participation might have been staged to boost attention for the event.

“Even if it was staged, the behaviour was unacceptable. What kind of values do they have?” said one person online.

In response to the online backlash, the staff that organised the event doubled down on their viewpoint, saying that if a man likes a woman, he should take responsibility for her well-being.

The public “Auntie Wang” matchmaking trend emerged from an event at a tourist site in Kaifeng, Henan in central China, which trended in March.

Host Zhao Mei, the matchmaker and original portrayer of “Auntie Wang”, wore a long green skirt with a bright red flower on her head and guided participants to boldly share their dating preferences on stage, encouraging interested people to step forward.

The popularity of the idea prompted many companies and individuals to imitate the “Auntie Wang” matchmaking event.

Amidst the public outrage, Zhao also responded, saying: “As a host, they were talking nonsense. How can they say such things?”

“Moreover, I don’t want to blame this young woman, but what is she showing off? Whose family would want their daughter to publicly announce being unmarried and pregnant?” she added.

Furious mainland China slams Taiwanese leader’s ‘blatant’ call for independence

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3263464/furious-mainland-china-slams-taiwanese-leaders-blatant-call-independence?utm_source=rss_feed

State media in mainland China has accused Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te of provoking confrontation and “blatantly promoting Taiwan independence” in his inauguration speech.

Party mouthpiece People’s Daily and People’s Liberation Army Daily each devoted an entire page on Tuesday to responses and criticisms from various mainland officials to Lai’s speech, delivered on the previous day.

In a scathing commentary, People’s Daily accused Lai of using his speech to “rally around the flag of Taiwan independence” and “incite hatred against the Chinese people”.

According to the commentary, Lai was “vigorously promoting separatist fallacies, inciting confrontation and hostility across the Taiwan Strait”. The speech was “full of provocative rhetoric, peddling the ‘two-country theory’ and advocating for ‘mutual non-subordination’ between the two sides”, it said.

Several senior Chinese officials had earlier slammed Lai for sending “dangerous signals” in the speech, while state news agency Xinhua commented that “those who play with fire will burn themselves” hours after the inauguration ceremony.

Lai’s speech was more confrontational than his predecessor Tsai Ing-wen’s address at the start of her first term in 2016.

Unlike Tsai, who acknowledged the 1992 consensus – a tacit agreement between Beijing and Taipei that there is one China but each side of the Taiwan Strait can have its own interpretation of what constitutes “China” – Lai did not mention it.

Instead, he said that Beijing had to “face the reality of the Republic of China’s existence” – using Taiwan’s official name – while “the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other”.

Lai’s words were interpreted on the mainland as a clear call to action for Taiwan independence – a red line that must not be crossed, according to Beijing which regards the island as part of its territory, to be eventually brought under mainland control.

Lai, who has previously described himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence”, is regarded as a separatist troublemaker by Beijing, with observers concerned that his presidency could escalate tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

“His words are filled with sinister intentions to seek independence through external means and to use military force to achieve it, once again revealing his stubborn stance on ‘Taiwan independence’,” the People’s Daily commentary said.

The article also warned that Lai’s words would only serve to further divide Taiwan from the mainland and escalate tensions between the two sides.

People’s Daily labelled Lai’s pledge that he would strive to maintain the status quo as “a complete charade” and said that he had “long been engaged in separatist activities but he pretends to be a champion of peace. This is the most shameless and unscrupulous act”.

“Headed down the path of provocation and confrontation, he is destined to crash into a brick wall,” it said.

The commentary said most of Taiwan’s people want peace, development, and cooperation, not war, decline, and separatism.

The Chinese nation has a shared belief that “its territory cannot be divided, its state cannot be chaotic, its people cannot be scattered, and its civilisation cannot be broken”, the article said.

“This is a historical necessity and internal logic that will inevitably lead to China’s reunification.”

In a series of articles published in the PLA Daily, senior officials criticised Lai’s speech as a “provocation” and a “threat to regional peace and stability”, accusing Lai of attempting to “split China” and “create chaos in the region”.

Despite the furious response, Beijing has been somewhat restrained in terms of military manoeuvring with the Taiwanese defence ministry reporting low activity in the 24 hours to 6am on Tuesday.

The ministry said no PLA aircraft had crossed the median line – a notional midpoint in the Taiwan Strait – in the period, while eight PLA Navy vessels were operating near the island. Both figures are low by mainland norms.

---

US and China should cooperate on reducing Asian nuclear threats, scholars say

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3263477/us-and-china-should-cooperate-reducing-asian-nuclear-threats-scholars-say?utm_source=rss_feed

Beijing and Washington should set aside political differences and work together to reduce risks of nuclear proliferation in northeast Asia, Chinese and American scholars said this week.

At Hong Kong University on Monday, Jia Qingguo, a US specialist at Peking University, said that nations such as North Korea and Russia have exploited the US-China schism to take actions that undermine the global order.

“The deteriorating relations between China and the US have left the existing world order more difficult to be sustained, because there are a lot of countries that have grievances and want to challenge the world order,” he said, at a seminar hosted by HKU’s Centre on Contemporary China and the World.

“It’s a great pity that these two countries cannot cooperate and only focus on areas of tensions.”

Because of the intensifying US-China rivalry, “some countries have seen opportunities to do things that normally they were not able to do,” he said, citing North Korea’s accelerating nuclear and missile programmes and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Noting reports that several US allies voiced desire to join the US-led Aukus security pact with Australia and Britain, Jia said that recent polls showed more South Koreans and Japanese had become supportive of deploying or even developing nuclear weapons amid regional security challenges.

Beijing has denounced Aukus – an alliance first unveiled in 2021 that is equipping Australia with nuclear-powered submarines – as a move to contain China, and a violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

“The US and China should talk to each other and make clear the limits about what they can do. And they should cooperate more to ensure nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction would not proliferate. This is in our common interests and the stake is very high. We should talk and work together,” he said.

“But I’m worried that this [Aukus deal] has created a disincentive that would keep China from cooperating with the US,” said Jia, the former dean of Peking University’s school of international studies.

He criticised US President Joe Biden’s recent moves to sharply raise tariffs on an array of Chinese imports, including electric vehicles, batteries and solar cells, calling them “an excuse for protectionism”.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Such tough restrictions would undermine US business interests and “force China to develop its own alternative technology”, he said.

If China was successful, the US dominance in hi-tech sectors would disappear, which he said was “not in the best interests of the US”.

Michael O’Hanlon, foreign policy research director at the Brookings Institution think tank, said that Washington should “collaborate with China better” on North Korea.

He said that, aside from forging a three-way alliance with Japan and South Korea to strengthen deterrence, the Biden administration has largely followed former president Barack Obama’s policy of “benign neglect” on North Korea’s repeated provocative missile tests.

O’Hanlon described the Aukus deal as “a signal to China” demonstrating the “united front” by the US and its regional allies worried about Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

O’Hanlon expressed concerns about the impact a possible re-election of former president Donald Trump might have on the deeply troubled US-China ties.

If Trump returns to the White House, O’Hanlon said, he must be reminded that “there’s really no benefit in playing around with the one-China policy” on Taiwan.

Beijing’s relations with Washington first plunged into a crisis when Trump, shortly after he was elected in 2016, took a congratulatory call from then- Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen.

Trump was apparently not aware of how complex and disruptive the Taiwan issue could be to US-China ties, O’Hanlon said.

“I don’t think Donald Trump really wanted to have such a big crisis with China” that could potentially lead to a war with a nuclear superpower, he said.

“I hope that he will realise that whatever else he’s going to do with the economic relationship, let’s try to keep the security relationship and Taiwan out of that relationship.”

Jia said he was pessimistic about the prospect of bilateral ties if Trump wins the November election, an apparent rematch against Biden.

“When Trump first came into office, he brought in a lot of uncertainties. In China, we hoped he would be a pragmatic who was supposed to be some kind of businessman. But it turned out he is a very different kind of businessman,” he said.

He said under Trump, Washington had become increasingly “tough, ideological and provocative on Taiwan”.

Jia cited a recent Foreign Affairs article by Matt Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, which he criticised as “dangerous” in calling to undermine China’s regime and political system.

Pottinger co-wrote the article last month with Mike Gallagher, a China hawk who just stepped down as the chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and retired from the House of Representatives. It fiercely criticised the Biden administration’s China policy and called for “a total victory” over China’s alleged “malevolent strategy” in an unfolding new cold war.

Such a strategy would “turn the relationship into a power struggle for survival and that’s very dangerous”, Jia said.

“If Trump is back in office, more likely than not, his policy [towards China] would be tougher and more irrational and the [US-China] relationship is likely to enter a new period of rapid deterioration,” he said.

Banned Chinese supplier with forced labour ties used to import cars to US by BMW, Jaguar Land Rover, Volkswagen: Senate report

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3263417/banned-chinese-supplier-forced-labour-ties-used-import-cars-us-bmw-jaguar-land-rover-volkswagen?utm_source=rss_feed

A US congressional investigation released on Monday found that carmakers BMW, Jaguar Land Rover and Volkswagen had used components from a Chinese supplier banned in the United States over alleged forced labour ties.

The report by the Senate Finance Committee said BMW had produced and imported vehicles with parts “presumptively made with forced labour,” while Jaguar Land Rover imported parts with the same issues.

VW made vehicles for the US market with such components too, and has “ongoing business ties” to manufacturing in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, the report said.

Beijing has been accused of incarcerating over one million Uygurs and other Muslim minorities in a network of detention facilities in Xinjiang.

In the United States, the Uygur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) bans the import of all goods from Xinjiang unless companies offer verifiable proof that production did not involve forced labour.

“Automakers’ self-policing is clearly not doing the job,” said the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic chairman Ron Wyden at the end of the two-year probe.

In a statement, he called on US customs officials to boost enforcement and “crack down on companies that fuel the shameful use of forced labour in China.”

The latest report looks into components from Sichuan Jingweida Technology Group Co, a firm added to the UFLPA entity list in 2023 over participation in business practices said to target members of persecuted groups like Uygurs in China.

A supplier to the carmakers was found to have sourced components from Jingweida, meaning these parts were barred from vehicles bound for the US market.

Volkswagen disclosed earlier this year that a shipment of its vehicles for the United States included parts made by a blacklisted supplier.

But “committee staff discovered that BMW imported thousands of vehicles intended for the United States that included parts banned under UFLPA,” the committee said.

It said BMW disclosed after questioning from the committee that at least 8,000 Mini Cooper cars containing such components were shipped to the country.

“BMW continued to import products manufactured by JWD until at least April 2024,” said the report, referring to Jingweida.

BMW Group said in an email it had “taken steps to halt the importation of affected products.”

The company will be conducting a service action to replace the specific parts, adding it “has strict standards and policies regarding employment practices, human rights, and working conditions, which all our direct suppliers must follow.”

Jaguar Land Rover initially said it was unaware of its links to the banned supplier, and BMW said Jingweida was not on its supplier list.

Congress in 2021 passed the Uygur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) law to strengthen enforcement of laws to prevent the import of goods from China’s Xinjiang region believed to have been produced with forced labour by members of the country’s Uygur minority group. China denies the allegations.

Additional reporting by Reuters

China National Nuclear Power starts work on nation’s largest offshore solar farm

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3263447/china-national-nuclear-power-starts-work-nations-largest-offshore-solar-farm?utm_source=rss_feed

State-backed China National Nuclear Power (CNNP) has kicked off construction of the nation’s largest offshore solar farm, as part of efforts to boost low-carbon energy supply and decarbonise the economy.

The 2 gigawatt (GW) pilot project is coming up on mud flats next to its nuclear power station in Tianwan, in eastern Jiangsu province.

“Upon completion, it will cross couple with the nuclear power station, forming a 10GW large-scale clean-energy production base,” the utility said in a filing to the Shanghai exchange on Monday, adding the solar farm will generate 2.23 billion kilowatt-hours of power during its 25-year lifespan.

The solar farm will include a 0.4GW energy-storage facility. Together, the project will cost 9.88 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion). Its solar panels will cover 18.8 square kilometres, slightly larger than Hong Kong’s Tseung Kwan O district.

CNNP, a unit of state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation, one of the nation’s largest nuclear power plant developers and operators, has a 90 per cent stake in the project.

CNNP operates 25 nuclear power generating units with a total generating capacity of 23.8GW as of last year. Another 15 units totalling 17.6GW are under construction.

It also owns 18.5GW of clean power capacity, primarily wind and solar farms. Last year alone it added 6GW of capacity through such projects.

In terms of generation volume, nuclear accounted for 89 per cent of its total output in 2023, with the rest coming from other sources. CNNP posted a net profit of 10.6 billion yuan last year, an increase of 15 per cent from 2022.

Nuclear accounted for 4.8 per cent of China’s total power generation last year, wind 8.8 per cent and solar 4.9 per cent, while 58.4 per cent came from coal-fired plants, according to China Electricity Council.

Nuclear and renewable energy can complement each other, according to commodities analysts at Global X ETFs, a unit of South Korea’s Mirae Asset Financial Group.

“Nuclear-renewable hybrid energy systems may be able to harness the benefits of each technology into one sustainable and dependable energy source,” Roberta Caelli and Rohan Reddy said in a report in January.

Typically operating at around 90 per cent of capacity, steady production at nuclear power plants can help offset intermittent output at solar farms whose average capacity utilisation is 29 per cent, they noted, citing data from US Energy Information Administration.

Meanwhile, the average cost of lifetime energy generation of solar farms, at US$33.80 per megawatt-hour, is much lower than US$81.70 of advanced nuclear plants.

By co-developing the two forms of clean energy, and potentially combining power generation with district heating or cooling supply, seawater desalination and green hydrogen production, project developers can achieve both energy supply security and cost competitiveness, the analysts said.

Corn, millet and ... rooftop solar? Farm family’s newest crop shows China’s solar ascendancy

https://apnews.com/article/china-solar-energy-transition-shandong-renewable-34ec874e5b0ac1b3e370f928337ae752Farmer Shi Mei walks near solar panels on her rooftop in the rural outskirts of Jinan in eastern China's Shandong province on March 21, 2024. The Shi family is on the leading edge of a solar boom in China, which has long dominated global solar manufacturing but didn't always install a lot of it at home. She gets paid for every watt of electricity generated. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

2024-05-21T01:09:42Z

JINAN, China (AP) — Shi Mei and her husband earn a decent enough living by growing corn and millet on their small farm in eastern China’s Shandong province. In 2021, they diversified by investing in solar energy — signing a contract to mount some 40 panels on their roof to feed energy to the grid.

Now, the couple get paid for every watt of electricity they generate, harvesting the equivalent of $10,000 per year that Shi can track through an app on her phone.

“When the sun comes out, you make money,” Shi said.

The Shi family is on the leading edge of a solar boom in China, which has long dominated global solar manufacturing but didn’t always install a lot of it at home. That’s changing as the government focuses on the urgency of cutting its worst-in-the-world greenhouse gas emissions at the same time it grows its green economy. China wants one-fifth of its power to come from renewables by 2025, and it’s offered a wide range of subsidies to local governments and businesses.

The push — in both industrial solar and in rooftop installations like Shi’s — is working so well that the grid now has more power than it can handle. Shi was fortunate to get in early; some cities across Shandong province, including her village, are halting new rooftop solar installations.

Analysts and solar companies say the future remains bright if China can quickly adapt to the oversupply. Companies and utilities are scrambling to build battery capacity to store all the power being generated. They’d like to see more flexible energy pricing that could shape demand to better match supply. And they’d like technology that makes it easier to start and stop coal power so it’s not always the clean energy of solar power that gets “curtailed” — in industry jargon — when the grid can’t take any more supply.

“China has the great potential and opportunity to make its power sector achieve its carbon peak by 2025,” said Grace Gao, a Climate and Energy senior campaigner at Greenpeace in China. “I am looking forward to seeing Shandong truly become a leader in renewable energy and showcase its best practices to the rest of China.”

SOLAR POWERHOUSE

As with many infrastructure projects in China, it is installing solar at breakneck speed and scale. China added 216 gigawatts of solar in 2023, a little over half in large solar farms, according to the country’s National Energy Administration. China’s total is more than half of what the entire world added last year, according to research from the consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

A gigawatt of solar is enough to supply the energy needs of about 320,000 Chinese households for a year, Gao said.

Shandong province added about 14 gigawatts of solar in 2023, and the province now has the ability to produce more power than it can use at certain times during the day. It’s the leading province for renewable energy capacity, but that also means it’s the first to encounter the difficulties of rapid growth.

“Other provinces will also meet these problems, because there will be more and more solar energy,” said Peng Peng, the secretary general of China New Energy Investment and Financing Alliance, an industry group.

BOOM YEARS

After China announced subsidies for both rooftop and industrial solar in 2014, Shandong, with an advanced manufacturing industry, was a good candidate to take the early lead in solar development compared to less populous provinces like Qinghai or Inner Mongolia.

Wang Xingyong installs and maintains rooftop solar panels for clients ranging from villagers to factories, and said his business has doubled every year since 2016.

“In the beginning, maybe we’d just do a project for one client, a farmer, and it’d be worth ten thousand yuan, fifty thousand,” he said. “Later, we’d do a couple hundred thousand, millions, for just one project.”

The business model varies, but many companies like Wang’s solicit villagers and factories for the chance to use their roofs. Villagers buy the systems and get payouts from selling the electricity to the grid. Wang gets paid to build and maintain the solar setups for factories that use the electricity they generate.

Wang said the concept was a hard sell at first, with few people believing the government would pay them for generating electricity. Wang said he slowly won people over, starting with his family and friends, putting forward the money for the equipment himself, and then moving on to other villages with the results.

While pitching, few talk about big concepts like the country’s target to ensure carbon emissions peak at 2030. It comes down to cash in people’s pockets. Shi, the farmer, said her neighbors installed solar panels on their roofs after seeing her investment do well.

“Compared to just putting your money in a savings account, the rate of return is higher,” she said. Thanks to her contract from 2021, she’s still earning money even though the village has stopped allowing new installations.

A second model allows families to basically get paid rent to allow solar to be installed on their roof — as much as 3,000 yuan ($414) a month, said Liu Wenping, an investor in solar companies. They might also get a free air conditioner or refrigerator as an extra incentive, and get a small percentage from the electricity sold, though not as much as people who buy the solar equipment.

SOLUTIONS IN PROGRESS

Chinese battery companies, EV manufacturers and utilities are all racing to develop more advanced batteries to store the electricity from solar panels. Batteries are getting cheaper, but still affect the overall model’s profitability. The Shandong provincial government is running a pilot program in Dezhou with lithium iron phosphate batteries that can store power during peak production and feed it to the province’s grid later as needed.

Other fixes include moving to what’s called spot market pricing, with the price fluctuating in an open market. China currently uses prices set by regulators for its electricity, updated after intensive research. Without pricing flexibility, China can’t incentivize customers to shift some use to non-peak times by lowering prices during those times.

But just last year, regulators in Shandong introduced trough pricing, with prices slashed sharply to encourage people to use electricity right when it was being generated abundantly but use was very low — in this case, the lunch period when factories typically all break at the same time. Factories responded by shifting some of their use to get some of the cheaper power.

Solar analysts say they expect China to eventually move towards completely market-driven pricing with the grid.

Meanwhile, China is intent on improving its grid. The National Development and Reform Council, which oversees economic policy and implementation, in February called on provinces to focus on increasing flexibility to the grid. It included a call to retrofit old coal plants with new technology so they can power up and down much more quickly. The council also wants a “smart” grid that can quickly decide the best time to distribute the power being generated.

“Every country in the world that is installing a lot of renewables and then facing the challenges that arise from all this variable intermittent generation, is searching for smart ways, intelligent AI-enabled or at least model-backed approaches to distributing this power and using it in the most efficient and effective way,” said David Fishman, a senior manager at the Lantau Group consultancy who tracks China’s energy industry. “Certainly that’s where China is heading.”

There’s no sign of a pause in China’s solar buildout. Companies are flocking to other provinces in the south that aren’t as far along as Shandong.

And in Shandong, Wang, the solar installer, is optimistic about his prospects despite the halt in new projects, because he still has industrial clients. He’s already planning to invest in upgrading transformers. And he’s intrigued by a trend driven by China’s electric car explosion, with the installation of all-in-one stations that combine solar generation, battery storage and electric vehicle charging.

“I trust the future will be better and better,” he said.

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Wu reported from Beijing. AP video producer Olivia Zhang contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

HUIZHONG WU China correspondent based in Taiwan twitter

China’s overcapacity so ‘deeply rooted’ at local levels that analysts say its ebbs and flows have underpinned economy for decades

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3263382/chinas-overcapacity-so-deeply-rooted-local-levels-analysts-say-its-ebbs-and-flows-have-underpinned?utm_source=rss_feed

With a degree of carte blanche in guiding and funding industrial expansions, China’s local governments have played an outsized role in propagating the country’s overcapacity conundrum, according to specialists in economic development and trade.

Amid heightening accusations from the United States and Europe that China’s excess capacity has strangled their own manufacturing sectors – especially in the new-energy realm – Beijing has recently begun taking a harder line in pushing back.

Just a few months ago, China’s top leaders acknowledged that “overcapacity in some industries” was a major economic challenge to tackle this year. And in March, President Xi Jinping warned against a “headlong rush into new projects” in China’s drive for “new quality productive forces”.

But in recent weeks, the official message has shifted sharply, with allegations that the West was “hyping up” the issue with a “trumped-up narrative” rooted in protectionism, and that “so-called overcapacity is a sham”.

Xi now contends there is no such thing as “China’s overcapacity problem”. And Beijing argues that, from a global perspective, there is actually a shortage of capacity in the new-energy sector.

Still, Beijing’s concerns and evaluations of unchecked manufacturing have been well documented over the past three decades, with acknowledgements that institutional and mechanism factors – including local governments’ excessive involvement – have long led to instances of overcapacity weighing on the economy.

“Overcapacity is deeply rooted in China’s economic system,” said Joerg Wuttke, president emeritus of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, who first visited the country in 1982 and has witnessed its rise over the last 40 years.

“The system goes like this: China has a plan, and then puts a lot of money into this. And then China tries to keep the foreigners out to give the Chinese companies a chance to grow in size. Then every province wants to have the same thing – the same steel, aluminium, chemicals, cars and batteries,” he explained. “And you have, all of a sudden, this incredible growth in capacities.”

But despite such outsized growth, Wuttke said, the biggest players rarely go bankrupt, largely due to their state-backed status or designation as domestic “champions” in their respective industries, and this exacerbates the matter.

China has seen ebbs and flows of overcapacity since it began shifting from a purely planned economy to a market-oriented economy – a roughly 20-year transition that started in 1978.

The first wave, involving consumer products such as televisions, occurred in the 1990s amid a strong growth spurt in the manufacturing sector as it catered to pent-up consumer demand.

After becoming a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001, China saw its overcapacity shift to capital-intensive industries such as steel and cement, as rapid economic growth triggered investment sprees in the real estate sector. Now Beijing is taking steps to help local-level authorities buy unsold homes, including by vowing US$41.5 billion in funding to clear the excess housing inventory.

And slowly but surely over the past 15 years, the new-energy industry – including electric cars, batteries and solar panels – has become awash with excessive supply, led by private firms. And this has left domestic manufacturers with little choice but to sell their wares overseas, drawing backlash from Western governments that are looking to protect their burgeoning new-energy industries.

“After China acceded to the WTO, its massive industrial capacity was indeed designed to cater to the whole world, especially the US and Europe,” said Tao Ran, a professor with the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), who specialises in China’s economic transition and has closely followed land reform and urban development.

“Of course, China’s overall production capacity has become bigger, thus putting more pressure on the West,” Tao added, noting that the fierce competition among domestic firms, coupled with government subsidies and loosened environmental regulations, indeed increased their production capacity, leaving foreign firms little room to compete.

Prominent industry insiders have also publicly spoken on how insufficient downstream demand became a worrisome issue among authorities at city and provincial levels where the industrial chain for electric vehicles helped drive regional economic engines in recent years. And the effects, in turn, helped power the national economy.

For local governments around the world, the appeal of attracting manufacturing investment typically involves increasing employment and tax revenue, while China’s local authorities tend to have deeper motivations to shore up their respective economies in order to gain political promotions, many Chinese scholars have argued.

And a tax-regime reform in the country, which took place from 2012-16 and shifted away the business tax burden on companies to value-added tax on consumers, also added to local governments’ incentives to attract more manufacturing investment, as more tax revenue generated from these firms could be retained at local levels after the reform, according to Tao.

Meanwhile, the policy toolboxes of Chinese local governments have always been bigger than those of their foreign peers.

Previously, local authorities could lower land prices – by reducing the acquisition compensation for farmers – curtail labour costs and relax environmental constraints. In the past decade, many shifted to so-called government guidance funds – investment vehicles for China’s private equity market that are used to direct capital to some strategic emerging industries such as semiconductors. And the source of such funding largely relied on borrowing from banks, Tao said.

“If the industry in the end fails to develop, the banks will be the ones that eventually lose money,” he added.

And with Beijing sounding the alarm and urging action to curb worrisome debt levels among local governments amid a property slump and the nation’s uneven economic recovery, investments from government guidance funds have also slowed down.

“As there has been serious overcapacity, and no more money to set up the [guidance] funds, projects in some places may inevitably be left unfinished, which means the money has been poured down the drain,” Tao said.

After talks with China, Benin eases oil export ban against Niger

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3263395/after-talks-china-benin-eases-oil-export-ban-against-niger?utm_source=rss_feed

A ship carrying a million barrels of crude oil from Niger left Benin’s Seme port for China on Sunday, marking temporary relief in a trade row between the African neighbours as well as Beijing’s latest gain in mediating disputes on the continent.

The move came after a Chinese delegation, including from state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), held talks with Beninese President Patrice Talon on Wednesday, shortly after his country blocked landlocked Niger from exporting its oil to China through the port.

Observers said the quick resolution pointed to China’s economic and diplomatic leverage in both countries and Beijing’s growing skills as a mediator, allowing it to protect Chinese investments in volatile environments.

CNPC has invested US$4.6 billion in Niger’s petroleum industry, and its subsidiary PetroChina owns two-thirds of the country’s Agadem oilfield. It also bankrolled and built a 2,000km (1,240-mile) pipeline to move oil from the oilfield to Benin’s Atlantic port of Seme.

Last month, Niger’s military junta signed a US$400 million oil-backed loan with CNPC requiring repayment in crude oil shipments.

Niger has been transporting crude oil to Seme port via the pipeline since April, but Benin’s ban has delayed the oil from reaching China.

“Benin has no intention of harming either the interests of the state of Niger or those of our common partners, CNPC,” Beninese Energy Minister Samou Seidou Adambi said last week during a briefing attended by CNPC director general Yuan Wenyuan.

China is expected to lead further negotiations in the coming days, with the Chinese delegation calling for a meeting of the Benin-Niger interstate committee to resolve the disputes between the two West African nations, according to Adambi.

The Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) imposed sanctions after Niger’s military seized power last July, prompting Benin to close its border with the country.

In February, Ecowas lifted the sanctions after Niger threatened to leave the trade bloc, and Benin reopened the border with its neighbour.

But Niger refused to open its land border with Benin, accusing it of hosting “bases training terrorists”. On May 8, Benin responded by blocking Niger’s oil exports.

Paul Nantulya, a China specialist at the National Defence University’s Africa Centre for Strategic Studies in Washington, said the deal showed “the power of Chinese mediation in situations like [the Niger-Benin dispute]”.

“The Chinese government has developed an appetite as well as a skill for conducting those types of mediations that protect Chinese interests in highly volatile situations,” Nantulya said.

Nantulya said it also spoke to the larger issue of China’s skilful manoeuvring with military-led juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and elsewhere.

“This is because China was very close to the government that was overthrown, and all these high-value assets were built and negotiated during the previous governments,” Nantulya said, referring to the administration of ousted Nigerien president Mohamed Bazoum.

“What we see is that China has become very close to the coup administrations. And one would say that if these coup governments were to be overthrown again, we can be sure that China will find its way around the situation and cultivate strong ties with whoever comes in.”

Mark Bohlund, credit research analyst at REDD Intelligence, said the pipeline had given China influence over both governments.

“[However] I think the quick resolution primarily reflects that both countries are dependent on the pipeline for government revenue and foreign exchange earnings,” Bohlund said.

He said Niger was in a weaker position than Benin despite the Nigerien junta taking a harder line.

Bohlund said the pipeline was the key lever Benin could push for the border opening, which was important not only for the Beninese port and transport sector but also for agricultural and food imports from Niger.

David Shinn, a China-Africa specialist and professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, said the resolution was less a matter of mediation and more a question of China using its considerable economic leverage with both Benin and Niger.

“There may also have been some financial sweeteners,” Shinn added.

Shinn said China and CNPC were caught in the middle of an inter-African dispute, which underscored how precarious it was to do business in the Sahel now and would likely to discourage future foreign direct investment in the region.

“Investors want stability and, to the extent possible, certainty. They certainly don’t want this kind of a situation,” Shinn said.

But Nantulya said the CNPC’s relationship with Niger’s military junta mirrored the influence the state-owned enterprise had with the rulers in Sudan and South Sudan. The oil giant was part of the consortium that built Sudan’s oil infrastructure.

Nantulya noted that China extended diplomatic and financial resources to mediate Sudan and South Sudan’s multiple crises.

“Those mediation efforts have been motivated by the perceived need on the part of the Chinese government to protect its oil infrastructure and to ensure that oil continues to flow,” he said.

In 2007, China appointed a special representative as part of its efforts to mediate an end to the Darfur war in Sudan. Beijing was also involved in conflict resolution when South Sudan was rattled by civil war after seceding from Sudan in 2011.

“Sudan and South Sudan give us an excellent case test as to what is happening in Niger,” Nantulya said.

He said the Niger-Benin dispute spoke to the kind of security issues that China faced in many countries as it tried to consolidate its Belt and Road Initiative.

Citing a report by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, Nantulya noted that Beijing had said that 75 per cent of its high-value belt and road investments are located in “fragile” or politically unstable countries.

China’s GPS rival BeiDou prepares to take off as Beijing moves to strengthen home-grown satellite navigation

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3263353/chinas-gps-rival-beidou-prepares-take-beijing-moves-strengthen-home-grown-satellite-navigation?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s satellite navigation market is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years amid the nation’s efforts to strengthen the footing of its home-grown BeiDou system and expand the overseas market, according to a new report.

The value of China’s satellite navigation and location-based services reached 536.2 billion yuan (US$74.2 billion) last year, an increase of 7.09 per cent on 2022, according to a white paper released by the Global Navigation Satellite System and Location Based Services Association of China (GLAC) on Saturday.

The industry, which centres on the BeiDou navigation system – China’s equivalent of the US Global Positioning System (GPS) – has covered a wide range of sectors, from chips and devices to algorithms and data. It has grown steadily in recent years from 12.7 billion yuan (US$1.7 billion) in 2006, according to the report.

With the gradual recovery of economic development, digital transformation and intelligent upgrades in various industries, the demand for satellite navigation equipment and space-time data also soared last year, the report said.

There were 20,000 market entities in the sector that had created jobs for nearly 1 million people, the report said.

“It is expected that the sector will get back to the fast track of development in coming years,” it said.

The first BeiDou satellites were launched in 2000, and 20 years later China officially unveiled its third-generation system and started to provide services to its partners in the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s mega infrastructure project for overseas investment.

BeiDou and GPS are two of the four core providers of global satellite navigation systems, along with Russia’s Global Navigation Satellite System, or GLONASS, and the European Union’s Galileo.

In a joint statement during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to China last week, Beijing and Moscow agreed to strengthen cooperation in the application of BeiDou and GLONASS.

China and Russia said they would consolidate their long-term space partnership, including cooperating on navigation systems as well as space programmes, such as a planned international scientific research station on the moon.

In 2018, an agreement was signed between the two governments titled “Cooperation in the peaceful use of BeiDou and GLONASS” to form a framework for collaboration.

BeiDou was recognised in November by the International Civil Aviation Organisation as one of its standards, becoming a universal satellite navigation system for civil flights globally.

The continued advance in BeiDou’s international influence would drive its overseas applications, the white paper said.

“Some domestic enterprises are vigorously expanding overseas markets, and the related revenues [are] growing significantly, reaching a year-on-year growth rate of 15 per cent.”

BeiDou is widely used in smartphones, wearable devices and other consumer products. Last year, 98 per cent of domestically produced smartphones supported BeiDou positioning functions.

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‘Panda dogs’ in China zoo spark row as pups are actually dyed canines, practice triggers allegations of animal cruelty

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/environment/article/3261995/panda-dogs-china-zoo-spark-row-pups-are-actually-dyed-canines-practise-triggers-allegations-animal?utm_source=rss_feed

Two extremely popular so-called panda dogs at a zoo in China are actually chow canines dyed black and white to look like the wild bears.

On May 3, a video of the panda-like dogs at Taizhou Zoo in Jiangsu province, eastern China, received 1.1 million likes on Douyin.

“After entering the zoo, I heard many people asking where the pandas were. Then I followed the crowd, and it wasn’t until I reached the enclosure that I realised they were actually dogs,” one visitor said.

Admission to see the dogs is included in the zoo’s general entry ticket, which costs 20 yuan (US$2.8) per adult.

The zoo states on tickets and signs that the animals are dogs not pandas.

“The panda dog is not a specific breed but rather a pet dog that resembles a panda in appearance,” the zoo says.

This term is often used to describe dogs whose coats are trimmed into specific styles or naturally have coat patterns similar to the bears.

Their typical features include white coats with black markings, especially around the eyes and ears, resembling the facial features of giant pandas.

“We got the idea of dyeing white Chow Chows to look like pandas from the internet. We aim to increase the zoo’s appeal and attract more visitors,” Liu Qiuming, a member of staff at Taizhou Zoo, told Jiangsu News.

The zoo reportedly serves as a sanctuary for disabled animals and requires significant funds to care for the animals.

“The zoo is too small and cannot afford to bring in real giant pandas,” Liu said.

Some visitors accused the zoo of animal abuse.

“Some people use natural and harmless plant dyes like spinach juice or red dragon fruit. However, the black dye used on panda dogs is definitely a chemical dye that can harm the dogs’ skin,” an online observer on Xiaohongshu said.

Zoo staff explained that the panda dog is a new breed they have introduced, and they are not dyed at the zoo. They claimed the pet-specific dyes used on the animals are similar to human hair colours and harmless.

Others have expressed support for the zoo’s treatment of the dogs.

“The two panda dogs have plenty of food and water, comfortable air conditioning and ample space to move around. They’re lively and playful, so there’s no need to make a fuss,” one visitor said.

However, mainland experts said the dyes are not entirely harmless.

“Pet dyes have a very strong odour and contain organic solvents and industrial dyes, so they cannot be completely non toxic, Chen Huaixia, a chemical engineering professor from Hubei University in central China told Hubei TV.

If pets ingest these dyes by licking their fur, it could be fatal,” she said.

The process could also have psychological effects according to vets.

“After dyeing, dogs may lose their ability to judge their appearance, making them susceptible to depression. I never recommend my clients dye their pets’ fur,” Chen Shiyang, a vet from Nicepet Hospital in Wuhan, central China, told the Post.

South China Sea: Chinese ‘cognitive warfare’ fears in Philippines as Marcos calls for deal probe

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3263381/south-china-sea-chinese-cognitive-warfare-fears-philippines-marcos-calls-deal-probe?utm_source=rss_feed

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr could be falling prey to “cognitive warfare”, analysts say, by calling for a full investigation into allegations that a high-ranking Philippine navy officer made a secret deal with Beijing regarding conduct in the South China Sea.

Unlike other senior Philippine officials, who have dismissed the Chinese embassy’s transcript and audio of the supposed conversation as fabricated, Marcos Jnr said he wanted to hear the recording himself before making any conclusions.

“China is breaking the Philippines’ united resolve through cognitive warfare,” said Joshua Espena, a resident fellow and vice-president of the International Development and Security Cooperation think tank.

“This goes back to the strategic ideas of Sun Tzu, of winning without kinetic fighting using deception to render [the Philippines’ defensive alliance with the United States] useless,” Espena said, referring to the author of The Art of War.

This week, the Senate Committee on National Defence and Security will formally investigate whether personnel at the Chinese embassy violated the country’s anti-wiretapping law by releasing an audio recording and transcript of an alleged phone conversation between an unnamed embassy official and Vice-Admiral Alberto Carlos.

“We are looking into it because, the fact of the matter is, there have been mentions of a tape that confirms that there was this agreement,” Marcos Jnr said on the sidelines of an event in Makati City on Saturday.

“It’s very hard to come to a conclusion until we know the thing actually exists. If it does exist, it is in the possession of the Chinese embassy and the Chinese government,” he added.

Marcos Jnr said his office would not draw any conclusions until he had personally heard the audio from the supposed wiretapped conversation.

According to the transcript, which the embassy released to Philippine media outlets earlier this month, Western Command Chief Vice-Admiral Alberto Carlos said his superiors had approved a “new model” for handling resupply missions to the Sierra Madre, a World War II-era navy ship deliberately grounded on the shoal to serve as an outpost in 1999.

The key point of the alleged deal is a “1+1” format for both sides, meaning Manila would only deploy one Philippine coastguard vessel and a resupply boat to the shoal, while China would only launch one coastguard ship and a fishing boat in response. Manila would be required to notify Beijing two days in advance of any resupply missions, which could only deliver food and water to the troops manning the BRP Sierra Madre.

Over the weekend, Rear Admiral Alfonso Torres Jnr officially replaced Carlos as the chief of the military’s Western Command, which oversees most Philippine-claimed territories in the South China Sea. Carlos took a leave of absence days after the controversy arose.

On Sunday, Senator Francis Tolentino said an invitation was sent to Chinese ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian, the consul general of China, and Carlos to attend the Senate investigation.

“Diplomats have immunity with respect to the normal operations of their embassy; however, there is no immunity for breaking the host country’s laws,” Tolentino said.

Asked why the president decided to call for an investigation instead of allowing Carlos to defend himself in a press conference, Chester Cabalza, a fellow at the US State Department’s Study of the US Institutes on National Security, said an investigation needed to go through rigid due process, especially in the military.

“The Armed Forces of the Philippines is one of the most trusted organisations in the country, and a transparent investigation must be pursued to vindicate or punish a senior military officer. The Philippine president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and he should obey the process,” Cabalza told This Week in Asia.

As to why Manila could not simply demand the embassy hand over the alleged recording, Cabalza said the current climate of psychological warfare and widespread misinformation between the two countries meant straightforward diplomatic solutions were no longer viable.

“This prolongs the agony of confusion, as two versions will continue to influence public opinion in China and the Philippines. The world needs to be critical of the two sides of the story to unveil the hidden truth behind the fiasco,” he said.

Cabalza also explained that Carlos had to be replaced to lessen suspicions, especially given how crucial intelligence and counter-intelligence endeavours were to the integrity of the military.

“The whole thing implies that the Beijing-Manila security relationship suffers from a heavy burden of distrust and disinformation. This drives the opportunity and challenge to sit down together and build another layer of trust and confidence in bilateral relations,” Cabalza said.

Espena from the International Development and Security Cooperation said China was strategically exploiting the Philippines’ tendency to rely on personalities rather than institutions to negotiate agreements, taking advantage of the country’s perceived corruption issues.

Hindering the free flow of information necessary for strategic decision-making benefits some players, Espena said. In this case, he said it is forcing Marcos Jnr to navigate bureaucratic challenges, potentially providing opportunities for Beijing to exploit.

“On the Philippine side, while it is not entirely the Marcos administration’s fault that some officials are airing fears and alternatives that contradict the government’s foreign security policy, it resorts to unilateral investigations because cooperating with Beijing to find the truth is difficult due to diverging national interests,” Espena said.

“The way forward is to protect the bureaucracy from these sorts of attacks by ensuring open communication and not allowing groupthink to take over. The Marcos administration should not allow ideology and personality to obscure this pursuit.”

Why China’s top Covid expert is studying climate change to prepare for the next global pandemic

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3262893/why-chinas-top-covid-expert-studying-climate-change-prepare-next-global-pandemic?utm_source=rss_feed

Although new Covid-19 variants are continuing to emerge around the world, scientists and doctors have already started preparing for the next pandemic to arrive.

And as experts learn more about how climate change can affect the mutation and spread of infectious diseases, it might not be a question of if another will emerge – but when.

“After the end of the recent coronavirus pandemic, the whole world is actually preparing for the next pandemic,” said Zhang Wenhong, director of China’s National Medical Centre for Infectious Diseases.

In 2020, Zhang was appointed leader of Shanghai’s clinical expert team for Covid-19, becoming a household name and central figure in the country’s fight against the virus.

He has published hundreds of papers in the field of public health and infectious diseases. But now he is embarking on a new initiative to address the intersection between two growing threats: climate change and infectious diseases.

While the world is often more concerned by the observable impacts of climate change such as extreme, catastrophic weather events, Zhang said a growing body of research was now examining the indirect impact of a warming climate on the mutation and spread of pathogens.

Research examining this relationship “will become a growing focus globally”, he said.

As the planet’s climate changes, including the expansion of the tropics, the way pathogens evolve and mutate is also changing.

A study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres in 2020 found that ocean surface warming in subtropical regions was expanding the width of the tropics.

“The reservoir of bacteria and viruses is expanding as the Earth warms,” Zhang said, adding that this will expose more animals to bacterial, viral and fungal infections as pathogens and their vectors like ticks and mosquitoes obtain more habitable land.

In the United States, the incidence rate of encephalitis and Lyme disease, both spread by ticks, is growing. Meanwhile in China, mosquito-borne dengue fever is increasingly being found in areas where it has not thrived before.

“It has been expanding from near the south – the more tropical areas – towards the north, and now it has also begun to expand to the Yangtze River Basin. So we can now also detect dengue fever in the Yangtze River Basin,” Zhang said.

Across Southeast Asian and African countries “not only has malaria not been eliminated, but the number of cases are at very high levels”, and this was all related to climate change, Zhang said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that in future decades climate change will affect the spread of vector-borne diseases like malaria due to changes in global temperature and precipitation patterns.

There is a hypothesis that the Covid-19 pandemic spread to humans from bats, whose habitats are also expanding.

Plus, as northern regions like Alaska continue to warm, “some species that have not emerged before may enter our human society”, Zhang said, including ancient species of bacteria and fungi.

“So the work we are doing now is actually for the next pandemic.”

But countries will need more data if they are to work together to create global disease management agreements and strategies to respond quickly to another global pathogen.

“[Scientists] mainly need to provide enough data, enough evidence, and provide corresponding suggestions” on how to build global pandemic preparedness, a goal that Zhang and others are now working towards.

As director of the Shanghai Sci-Tech Inno Centre, Zhang signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Hong Kong (HKU) to work towards that goal at the annual Pujiang Innovation Forum in Hong Kong in late April.

As part of the project, experts in climate change, public health, infectious disease control and public policy will be brought together for research at HKU’s Centre on Contemporary China and the World (CCCW).

Resident and non-resident experts will “pursue original research, establish regular monitoring systems and provide public policy discourse platforms”, according to the CCCW.

“Using this platform, infectious disease experts and microbiologists can work with environmental experts and climate experts to conduct in-depth research on climate change and infectious diseases together,” Zhang said.

With more data and routine disease surveillance, he said, scientists might discover “alarms” for incoming pandemics that could serve as an early warning and trigger quick response actions.

While Zhang and other experts from the mainland will begin their work alongside experts in Hong Kong, preparing for the next pandemic will need to be a group effort for researchers around the world.

It will require science “from different angles and levels” to provide as much evidence as possible for policy experts and governments to use when devising disease management strategies.

Climate change and infectious diseases are complex issues that require input from different fields. But through their work, researchers like Zhang are trying “to make a complicated issue simple”.

As part of the work with the CCCW, an information-sharing platform will be created “so that we scientists have some systems that we can use to communicate”, Zhang said.

He also noted that in the second half of this year, a discussion bringing together experts from multiple countries will be held to talk about how the world can prepare for future pandemics.

The work scientists are doing today will be guided by the research that has been done in the past few years since the coronavirus pandemic.

Beyond preparing to manage the spread of future pathogens, scientists are also concerned with how climate change will affect treatments for infected patients.

Antimicrobial resistance – when bacteria, parasites, viruses and fungi develop resistance to drugs meant to kill them – is another growing challenge.

Infectious pathogens can change and mutate over time, leading them to no longer respond to medicines used to treat them. This can cause infections to persist within patients, and increase the risk of it spreading to others, according to the WHO.

Zhang said that in 2019, 1.27 million people died directly as a result of antibiotic resistance around the world.

“An issue that scientists all over the world agree on is that by 2050, annually, 10 million people will die of drug resistance,” Zhang said. That is equal to the number of people who currently die of cancer each year.

“Bacterial resistance is a problem, and it has a lot to do with changes in the environment, climate changes, human activities and animal activities,” he said.

In the past, research on drug resistance was separated into clinicians studying how to treat it and pharmacologists trying to make new antibiotics.

“But we have now discovered that the emergence of drug resistance is faster than the emergence of antibiotics,” Zhang said.

While research on how climate change and drug resistance may be linked was “currently lacking”, expanding on this field should be an important part of pandemic preparedness, he said.

One of the strategies that has been proposed is One Health, an initiative that the WHO describes as an integrated global approach mobilising different sectors of society to work together on issues like managing global health threats.

This includes researchers, doctors, government officials, world organisations and global communities.

Although the world officially came out of Covid-19 lockdowns last year, Zhang said that how the virus mutates and evolved “is still of great concern”.

New variants of Covid-19 have continued to emerge and spread around the world. The most recent is KP.2, part of a group called “FLiRT” variants. In early May, it became the dominant variant in the US, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We don’t know what the next variant will be, so we need to conduct a longer-term survey on it,” Zhang said, adding that then scientists will be able to gain a clearer picture of how Covid-19 evolves, like they have for influenza.

“We will also observe how coronavirus spreads from the natural reservoir to human society,” he said. This is due to the expanding habitable areas for its vectors.

“It will have important implications for the future.”