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• [Sport] Wada did not mishandle Chinese swimmers case - report
• ‘Pursue your dreams’: woman proud of mother, 53, graduating from top China university
• Who is Sophie Bai? China scientist with planet named after her, creates US skincare buzz
• School in China makes students stand to eat in canteen, separating boys from girls
• Japan arrests Chinese man over Yasukuni Shrine graffiti incident, 2 others put on wanted list
• Unit of Chinese developer R&F Properties faces winding-up petition from Singapore fund
• Alipay drives evolution of contactless payments in China with new tap-and-pay service
• China must unblock internal circulation, No 4 official says in warning of weak domestic demand
• ‘Constant blackmailing’: Russia’s China envoy slams ‘irresponsible’ West, touts Brics bloc
• Has China gained the upper hand over Russia in Kazakhstan?
• China launches high-level probe after paper says fuel tankers used to carry cooking oil
• Hugs and cringes: China watches as Indian and Russian leaders take their diplomatic dance
• Another year of heat and floods spurs China’s climate-change awakening
• Leaked American F-35 and F-15 documents appear authentic, Chinese security expert says
• Honest China woman shocked by US$310,000 cash transfers, returns the lot to rightful owner
• No South China Sea? Calls grow for Philippines to include maritime history in curriculum
• China’s solar power prowess can truly shine in energy-starved Africa
• Floods move to China’s drought-hit farmland as Dongting Lake wall repair holds
• Russia and China peace missions prompt EU members to seek ways to punish Hungary
• Demining diplomacy: to counter China’s Cambodia sway, Japan touts landmine clearance
• While Singapore scrutinises, Hong Kong wins back wealthy Chinese
• How to apply: mainland China multi-entry permit for Hong Kong permanent residents
• Philippines denies South China Sea damage claims, says ‘it’s China’ that harmed corals
• To counter China, NATO and its Asian partners are moving closer under US leadership
• English of self-taught China courier dazzles Cadillac boss so much he joins delivery rounds
• North Korea’s shifting satellite allegiance to Russia signals China’s waning influence
• South China Sea: Philippines coastguard appeals to Virgin Mary for divine intervention
• [Sport] Chinese electric car maker agrees Turkish factory deal
• Kimchi-gate: China-South Korea culinary row breaks out over what to call spicy side dish
• China’s third plenum: implications for solar power, copper, steel, oil refining and grains
• Chinese developers scramble as OpenAI blocks access in China
• South China Sea: is Beijing abusing Philippines talks to mask its ‘policy of aggression’?
• China says grounded Philippine warship harms Second Thomas Shoal marine life and must be removed
• Crying shame: China father tells daughter, 3, to fill bowl with tears as TV punishment
• Unemployment in China
• China professor spots boy reading Murphy’s Law book on train, asks him to visit top university
• Japan wants answers over Chinese buoy found in remote contested waters
• Chinese spa worker pleads not guilty to ‘murder for hire’ plot in New York
• Lay-offs by China’s top firms in key industries show unemployment biting through economic turmoil
• Tough-on-China bills eyed for passage before 2024 election: US House Speaker Mike Johnson

[Sport] Wada did not mishandle Chinese swimmers case - report

https://www.bbc.com/sport/swimming/articles/c0kr1pg8g47o

‘Pursue your dreams’: woman proud of mother, 53, graduating from top China university

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3269813/pursue-your-dreams-woman-proud-mother-53-graduating-top-china-university?utm_source=rss_feed

A mother in China has become an inspiration for her ability to balance work and study to earn a graduate degree from a prestigious university.

When the woman, 53, graduated from Fudan University in Shanghai, her 23-year-old daughter, identified as Xu, made sure to attend the ceremony.

Xu told the mainland media outlet Dami video that, in 2021, her mother had applied for the school’s Masters of Business Administration programme.

The mother, who was not named, spent two hours every evening studying for her courses.

Xu said: “My mum was very happy during her studies. My dad and I would usually help with household chores for her.”

The woman also held a full-time job while attending the programme, and successfully balanced her work and academic life with unconditional support from her family.

The mother’s certification means the entire family has earned graduate degrees. Xu attended the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and her father graduated from the South China University of Technology in Guangzhou in southern China.

When her mother successfully graduated from Fudan University, Xu said: “I’m very proud of my mum! Now, our family’s education levels are all the same.”

Having achieved success in both her career and education, the mother has inspired many young people on mainland social media.

One online observer said they forwarded this story to their parents, telling them: “Even as parents, you have the right to pursue your dreams.”

Another commented: “Parents are the best role models for children.”

In Chinese tradition, parents often see their children’s success as extensions of their own lives and achievements.

They often say wang zi cheng long to their children, which means “they hope their children will become dragons in the future”. This phrase conveys the parental aspiration for their children to become accomplished individuals with successful careers.

But now, more and more young people send similar expectations and blessings to their parents.

One netizen shared his father’s story on Douyin, saying: “My dad got his PhD degree at the age of 59. Over the years of his studies, when my dad would become anxious, my mum and I took him travelling and did everything to make him happy.

“I couldn’t be happier when I saw my dad fulfil his dreams. I was happier watching him than achieving my own success.”

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Who is Sophie Bai? China scientist with planet named after her, creates US skincare buzz

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3269022/who-sophie-bai-china-scientist-planet-named-after-her-creates-us-skincare-buzz?utm_source=rss_feed

Scientist Sophie Bai, known in China as Bai Xuefei, is making waves in the United States’ skincare market.

The 34-year-old former healthcare and life sciences investor from Henan province in central China applies her expertise in biomedicine to develop cutting-edge products for her company, B.A.I. Biosciences.

Bai has a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she worked with Professor Robert Langer, co-founder of the pharmaceutical giant Moderna.

While at the institute, Bai helped develop drug delivery technologies in the quest to find cures for prostate and lung cancer and type 1 diabetes.

“Skin is very personal to me,” Bai told the industry publication Beauty Independent last year.

She grew up with terrible cystic acne and eczema, and was devastated when, at the age of 11, during a public speaking contest in front of an audience of 1,000 people, the judges said she looked “ugly”.

She said she did not eat lunch for a week after that competition so she could save her money to buy her first foundation makeup. She then became a “very heavy beauty consumer”.

“That incident really changed my personality. It made me more insecure and not want to hang out with, or be seen by, people.”

Bai demonstrated a talent for science from a young age, taking part in maths and science competitions from the age of seven.

At 16, while at secondary school in Shanghai, she discovered an anti-ageing compound.

A minor planet was named after her by Nasa and MIT Lincoln Laboratory to recognise her scientific accomplishments.

“By seeing all the exciting things happening in pharma and biotech, I wanted to be able to get the most innovative, advanced scientific innovations from that world and translate them into personal care,” said Bai.

Before founding B.A.I. Biosciences, she was a healthcare and life sciences investor at Bain Capital Private Equity, and a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group where she advised pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies.

In 2020, she started her Masters of Business Administration programme at Harvard and founded her company the same year.

In March last year, the company launched its brand Pavise, which focuses on “photo-ageing protection” which ensures that skin does not age drastically when exposed to UVA and UVB.

The brand developed DiamondCore Shield Technology, or zinc oxide, that incorporates nano-diamonds to improve the dispersion of UVA and UVB rays hitting the skin and eliminates white cast, the residue left after applying sun screeen.

The company has secured financial backing worth more than US$8 million from a diverse range of investors including American rapper Jay-Z and former Allergan Chairman and CEO Brent Saunders, whose company was one of the original investors in Botox.

Bai acknowledged that commercialising these scientific achievements is time-consuming and costly.

“I’ve been working on this for four years, sleeping only about three or four hours a night,” she said.

“I do think there’s a tremendous opportunity for scientific innovation coming in to actually cure acne...”

Bai says her company is also working on new drugs for baldness, greying, and alopecia.

“All of those are unmet needs that currently have no solutions. I believe science and technology can solve those issues,” Bai said.

School in China makes students stand to eat in canteen, separating boys from girls

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/gender-diversity/article/3269696/school-china-makes-students-stand-eat-canteen-separating-boys-girls?utm_source=rss_feed

A secondary school in central China is facing criticism after a video emerged of employees forcing students to eat while standing next to a table, separating them by gender.

The school canteen in Henan province was equipped with rows of tables without chairs that required the students to stand and hunch over as they ate, according to a viral video on Douyin, China’s TikTok.

The video was uploaded by a part-time employee, surnamed Li, who attends Donghua University in Shanghai, and was visiting the secondary school to help students with their university applications.

The school defended its decision to remove chairs from the canteen, saying that although they initially had seats, they decided that removing them “was more beneficial than harmful”.

Administrators said the chairs had previously tripped students several times, so standing while eating was “safer”.

The school also added that students needed to stretch their legs and move around after sitting too long in classrooms.

Li explained that separating the male and female students was meant to prevent early romantic relationships. It is common for parents in China to dissuade teen relationships so their children can focus on their studies.

In the video caption, Li compared the school to a famous military-style secondary school in China, which is extremely controversial in the country.

“I would call this school a slightly better version of Hengshui,” Li wrote.

At Hengshui Secondary School, students follow strict rules and regulations, with the primary goal of achieving high scores on the gaokao, China’s national college entrance exam.

Despite criticisms, Hengshui’s rigorous discipline has led to positive results, with a relatively high number of students earning admission to top universities in mainland China, prompting other schools to emulate its model.

Other online observers remained sceptical about the Henan school’s decision to remove the chairs.

“The school said its decision was in the interest of the students, but they don’t care about the actual feelings of the children,” one person commented.

“Is this a school or a prison?” another person said.

Yet, others pointed out that this is a common practice.

“My secondary school also removed the chairs in the canteen,” said one online observer from Henan. “Teachers told us it would make us eat faster so we could return to studying sooner. If there were chairs, everyone would sit and chat, slowing the eating process.”

Last November, another secondary school in Hebei in north China was reported by angry parents for forcing students to eat while standing.

However, both the school and the local education department claimed these students were willing to eat while standing because they “loved to study”, reported Dawan News.

According to data released by provincial education departments, Henan had around 1.3 million students taking the gaokao in 2024, 20 times the number of students taking the exam in Beijing.

The province has consistently had the highest number of participants nationwide in recent years. Meanwhile, its college admission rate remains among the lowest in the country.

Japan arrests Chinese man over Yasukuni Shrine graffiti incident, 2 others put on wanted list

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3269794/japan-arrests-chinese-man-over-yasukuni-shrine-graffiti-incident-2-others-put-wanted-list?utm_source=rss_feed

A Chinese national living in Japan was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly conspiring with two others to spray-paint the word “toilet” in English on a stone pillar at the war-linked Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo earlier this year, police said.

Jiang Zhuojun, 29, is suspected of purchasing the spray paint and playing other roles to vandalise the pillar engraved with the shrine’s name near the entrance.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Public Security Bureau issued arrest warrants for two other Chinese nationals, Dong Guangming, 36, and Xu Laiyu, 25, placing them on wanted lists.

The three allegedly vandalised the pillar at around 9:55pm on May 31.

Dong and Xu left Japan for China on June 1, but a video was posted on Chinese social media showing a man appearing to urinate on the stone pillar before spray-painting the word “toilet” in red.

According to the bureau, the damage is estimated at 4.2 million yen (US$26,000), with Dong suspected of being the perpetrator and Xu alleged to have filmed the act.

The police declined to disclose whether Jiang has admitted to the allegations.

Yasukuni has been a source of diplomatic friction with China and other Asian countries as Japan’s wartime leaders, convicted as war criminals in a post-World War II international tribunal, are among the more than 2.4 million war dead honoured at the shrine.

Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa said at a press conference last month that the Japanese government had expressed its concerns about the actions to the Chinese government through diplomatic routes.

Unit of Chinese developer R&F Properties faces winding-up petition from Singapore fund

https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3269797/unit-chinese-developer-rf-properties-faces-winding-petition-singapore-fund?utm_source=rss_feed

Singapore-based Seatown Private Credit Master Fund has filed a winding-up petition against a unit of Guangzhou R&F Properties over unpaid principal and interest of about US$614 million, according to a filing by the embattled developer.

A hearing for the petition against Trillion Glory is scheduled before the Hong Kong High Court on September 25, R&F said in its disclosure to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Tuesday.

Seatown is one of the lenders of the loan in question, holding 18 per cent of the outstanding principal, R&F said.

The private equity fund is owned by Seviora Holdings, the asset-management group of Temasek Holdings, an investment company owned by the Singapore government.

R&F said Trillion Glory is seeking legal advice about the petition.

“The board of directors of [R&F] is of the view that the petition does not represent the interests of other stakeholders of the subsidiary and the company,” it said.

“The loan is sufficiently collateralised by, among others, a pledge over the equity interest of a wholly owned subsidiary of the company holding indirectly 68 hotels and one office building” in mainland China, R&F added.

The company has a portfolio of 90 hotels with 27,716 rooms, managed by the likes of Marriott International, InterContinental Hotels Group, Hilton Worldwide, Hyatt Hotels, Accor Hotels and Wanda Hotels and Resorts, according to its latest financial report.

The suit is the latest in a series of troubles for R&F, which had total liabilities of about 288.5 billion yuan (US$39.6 billion) as of 2023, 4 per cent lower than its liabilities in 2022, according to the report. Total assets were down 9 per cent to about 335 billion yuan.

R&F’s revenue in 2023 rose 3 per cent to 36.2 billion yuan, but its losses widened by 28 per cent to 20.1 billion yuan.

In February, R&F disclosed that it had agreed to sell Nine Elms, a mixed-use residential and commercial project in London, for a token sum of HK$1 plus debt. The £1.34 billion (US$1.7 billion) development included two towers offering 437 private residential units and 57 affordable housing units, along with a hotel in one of the towers.

Under the agreement, buyer London One, which is solely owned by Hong Kong tycoon Cheung Chung Kiu, will assume at least US$800 million of the loan related to the transaction.

The asset sale came weeks after China Evergrande was ordered to liquidate in the biggest corporate failure in Hong Kong. Other developers on the receiving end of a wave of winding-up petitions include Country Garden Holdings, Times China, and Shimao Group Holdings.

Founded in 1994, R&F is among several major Chinese developers that have ventured beyond the mainland. It rolled out a global strategy in 2013 and said it has developed more than 450 projects in around 145 cities and regions, including Australia, Cambodia, Malaysia and South Korea.

Alipay drives evolution of contactless payments in China with new tap-and-pay service

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3269767/alipay-drives-evolution-contactless-payments-china-new-tap-and-pay-service?utm_source=rss_feed

Alipay, China’s leading mobile payment service provider, has launched a new tap-and-pay function that it expects would streamline the checkout process for merchants, while offering consumers a simplified experience compatible with both Android handsets and Apple’s iPhones.

Ant Group-operated Alipay, which helped popularise the QR code-based scan-and-pay feature in the country, on Monday introduced its Tap! function that enables users to complete payment by tapping their smartphone on a merchant’s USB add-on at the cash register. Fintech giant Ant Group is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.

The tap-and-pay service, which is being rolled out in major cities across mainland China, was designed to “expedite in-store mobile payments”, according to Alipay.

This initiative by Alipay marks its latest effort to shape the evolution of contactless payments nationwide, years after Samsung Electronics, Google and Apple introduced their own tap-and-pay functions overseas.

Samsung Pay, launched in 2015, lets users make payments via the Samsung Wallet app downloaded on Samsung-produced devices. Google Pay, formerly known as Android Pay in 2015, allows users to make contactless purchases on Android smartphones, tablets and smartwatches.

Apple introduced its own contactless payment feature, Tap to Pay on iPhone in 2022. It allows merchants to securely accept Apple Pay and other contactless payments by using an iPhone and a partner-enabled iOS app.

Tap-and-pay functions are supported by Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology, which allows users to make secure transactions and exchange digital content with a tap of a smart device over a distance of 4 centimetres or less.

Alipay, however, said its Tap! function is different from the NFC payment methods of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay, which function via a so-called card emulation mode. Alipay’s tap-and-pay service turns a smartphone into an NFC tag reader, replacing a few steps in a typical QR code-based payment scanning process with a simple tap.

Alipay’s Tap! service is currently available for more than 2,300 brands and merchants in major mainland cities including Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan and Hangzhou. Merchants using the service include the 7-Eleven convenience store chain and stores at Jing’an Joy City, a major shopping centre in Shanghai, according to Chinese media reports on Tuesday.

The USB add-ons for Alipay’s Tap! that merchants use can also support traditional scan-and-pay services – including those of WeChat Pay, Meituan Pay and QuickPass – through a built-in camera.

In the third quarter of 2023, Alipay recorded 118.2 trillion yuan (US$16.25 trillion) in total transactions, followed by WeChat Pay’s 67.8 trillion yuan, according to online database Mpaypass. It said Alipay and WeChat Pay accounted for a combined share of more than 94 per cent in China’s mobile payments market during that period.

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China must unblock internal circulation, No 4 official says in warning of weak domestic demand

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3269786/china-must-unblock-internal-circulation-no-4-official-says-warning-weak-domestic-demand?utm_source=rss_feed

Beijing’s chief theoretician has called for a consolidation of leadership’s dual-circulation economic strategy that prioritises domestic demand, ahead of the Communist Party’s tone-setting third plenum, according to official media.

The domestic market, or the internal leg of that approach, would be of central importance to China’s new growth structure and needs to function more smoothly to shield the economy against global uncertainties, said Wang Huning, head of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), at a meeting of the political advisory body on Monday.

A strategy that kicked off four years ago amid rising geological rivalries, with an eye on seeking greater self-reliance while remaining open to the outside world, it was China’s “strategic deployment to seize the initiative in development”, the party’s No 4 official was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency.

The policy was reiterated as economic activity remains weak and low revenue and profits continue to trouble the private sector, adding pressure on leadership’s economic growth goal of 5 per cent growth for all of China this year.

“Smoothing out domestic circulation is a strategic choice to boost economic growth and create new advantages for our international economic cooperation and competition,” Wang said at Monday’s meeting.

Presenting their research findings at the meeting, themed “unblocking internal circulation”, leaders of minor political parties pointed to a series of issues, including a more efficient logistics system, a unified national market, the bigger role played by innovation, and better coordinated regional development, Xinhua said.

Yin Yanlin, deputy director of the economic affairs committee of the CPPCC, warned during a forum at Tsinghua University at the weekend that the world’s second-largest economy was facing some “obstruction in circulation” and still lacks vigour.

Looking abroad, “the external environment is obviously becoming more complex, troublesome and uncertain, especially as risks of non-economic factors are rising,” said Yin, formerly deputy director of the office of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission – a key economic decision-making body.

Looking inward, “there are blockages and bottlenecks in domestic circulation – the situation of insufficient domestic effective demand has not fundamentally changed”, he said. “Consumer prices are at a low level, and the producer price index and indicators of the real estate market are still declining.”

Many supportive policies have failed to be implemented while hesitant market players are taking a wait-and-see approach, he noted.

Thus, “a pattern of mutual promotion between international and domestic circulation has yet to be formed”, he added.

More than half of about 60 Chinese private companies in a recent survey were pessimistic about the overall business performance of the private sector, according to a findings report published on Monday by the Beijing Dacheng Enterprise Research Institute.

As domestic market competition becomes increasingly fierce and costs continue to rise, many companies expect revenue and profits to decline this year, including some hi-tech and emerging industry companies, it said.

Cash-strapped local governments that are chasing back-owed taxes are also stifling business confidence and leading to a rising sense of insecurity, it said.

Debt-payment arrears are still troubling small and medium-sized firms, “making the already tight cash-flow situation even worse for companies, seriously affecting their normal operations and development”, it noted.

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‘Constant blackmailing’: Russia’s China envoy slams ‘irresponsible’ West, touts Brics bloc

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3269781/constant-blackmailing-russias-china-envoy-slams-irresponsible-west-touts-brics-bloc?utm_source=rss_feed

Russia’s ambassador to China accused the West of “constant blackmailing and pressure” during a peace forum in Beijing on Sunday, and attempted to position the Brics bloc of major emerging economies as an inclusive force that seeks to shape the future world order.

Igor Morgulov told the gathering that a unipolar world order, which he said had long served the interests of the “collective West”, was “receding into the past” and no longer reflected the aspirations of the world. Instead, he suggested a more multipolar system was emerging.

“[The West] is doing everything in its power to preserve its domination including imposing on the rest of the world [its] self-invented rule-based order,” he told a panel at the annual World Peace Forum, an event hosted by Tsinghua University.

“[Their] goal is to make key decisions … on our behalf while making sure that we implement that in a way that suits the West.”

In an attempt to revive the unipolar model, the West has been dividing the world and “uncompromisingly trying to force countries” of the Global South to take its side, Morgulov added.

The Russian envoy said that the United States and its allies had imposed unilateral sanctions on countries like Russia that disagreed with their views, adding that the US dollar has been weaponised and that the West has “irresponsible macroeconomic policies”.

“The international community grows weary of the constant blackmailing and pressure from the West to please their new colonial ambitions,” he said.

But Brics, he argued, is different. According to Morgulov, the bloc does not seek to isolate economies but instead seeks to foster cooperation among like-minded countries.

The group of emerging economies was founded by Brazil, Russia, India and China in 2009, with South Africa joining a year later. This year, it expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Russia, which assumed the rotating presidency on January 1, will hold the next summit in Kazan in October.

Brics now accounts for nearly half of the world’s population and over a third of global GDP, surpassing the Group of Seven.

Morgulov told the panel that the expansion reflected the “rising international profile” of Brics, adding that the group would “undoubtedly play a more visible role in global affairs and allow voices of the developing world to be heard loud and clear”.

The bloc has fought for greater representation of emerging markets in multilateral institutions, viewed by observers as seeking to challenge the West-led order.

But Morgulov said Brics is “about genuine multilateralism”, where countries with different histories, political systems and independent foreign policies can cooperate.

“Our aspirations are not aimed at creating yet another mechanism of dominance alternative to the Western one. Not at all,” he said. “The association is actually participating in shaping the global agenda, defending common interests, and offering its vision of the future world order.”

Some 30 counties have expressed interest in joining Brics, according to the Russian envoy, and with Russia as chair this year, it would seek to focus on cooperation in areas ranging from politics and security to economy and finance.

Morgulov said Brics was working on a financial system that would be “independent from the dominance of any third country”, noting that trade among member states using national currencies such as Russian rouble and Chinese yuan had grown.

While a unified Brics currency would take “some time”, the group is moving in that direction, according to Morgulov.

“We are now leaving this space – the dollar-dominated space – and developing new mechanisms and instruments, [and a] truly independent financial system,” he said.

Morgulov was speaking during a panel focused on the Brics expansion and its impacts.

South Africa’s ambassador to China Siyabonga Cwele, meanwhile, discussed the key role that Brics would play in a multipolar world, telling the same panel that the bloc’s expansion reflected the “current realities” of the world.

He said South Africa viewed the expansion as a way to “strengthen our collective influence on global affairs and a more robust platform for negotiation and decision-making on international economic issues”.

Brazil’s envoy to China said the country has sought to increase the participation and influence of developing countries on issues such as international law and multilateral decision processes.

Marcos Galvao said Brazil continued to prioritise reforms to international institutions like the United Nations – including the UN Security Council – and for Brics to be “an expression of governance reform”.

“It is essential that the world continues to see us working for the right causes. The causes of peace, of development, of reduction of inequality [and] combating hunger,” he added.

Pradeep Kumar Rawat, India’s ambassador in Beijing, said the expanding bloc sends a “clear message that the world is multipolar, rebalancing, and that old methods cannot address new challenges”.

“Brics aspires to be a symbol of change in this regard,” he said.

Rawat said he was disappointed over the failure of a “democratisation of the world order”, saying that economic concentration had resulted in many nations at the mercy of a few.

“I have no doubt in my mind that by following a constructive agenda, many more countries would like to join Brics, and it may grow to become a second United Nations but a different United Nations where all member countries are equal,” he said.

Asked about India’s participation in Brics and other US-led frameworks like the Quad, Rawat said that there was no contradiction.

“There is a lot of noise around the Quad and it’s very important for us to remove that noise,” he said, adding that both the Brics and Quad groups have shared interests such as protecting sovereignty and the rule of law.

“Actually both are very complementary. And in my mind, the Quad will end up strengthening Brics rather than weakening it.”

Has China gained the upper hand over Russia in Kazakhstan?

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/world-opinion/article/3269266/has-china-gained-upper-hand-over-russia-kazakhstan?utm_source=rss_feed

Isolated by the West over its actions in Ukraine, Russia seeks to retain Central Asia in its geopolitical orbit. But growing Chinese influence in the strategically important region threatens to end the era of Russian dominance in significant parts of Central Asia.

Kazakhstan, the largest country in Central Asia, has close ties with both Moscow and Beijing. Despite being Russia’s ally in the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and a member of the Russia-dominated Eurasian Economic Union, Astana has increased economic cooperation with China. Last year, China overtook Russia to become Kazakhstan’s biggest trading partner, with two-way trade hitting US$41 billion.

It is, therefore, no surprise that Chinese President Xi Jinping was given a warmer welcome this year at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Astana than any other leader of the multilateral group, founded in 2001. Unlike Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of other SCO members – Belarus, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – Xi was welcomed at the airport in Astana by Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. All the other leaders were met by Prime Minister Oljas Bektenov.

Also, before Xi’s visit to the Central Asian nation, Chinese flags and announcements of his visit appeared on the streets of Astana. These symbolic gestures indicate that Kazakhstan sees China as a de facto leader of the group, and that it seeks to strengthen economic relations with Beijing.

Officially, Xi came to Kazakhstan for a state visit, while other SCO leaders only came to participate in the summit. But as Kazakhstan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Roman Vassilienko told me in an interview, out of 10,000 people who came to Astana for the forum, more than half were Chinese, which suggests that the event in the Kazakh capital had huge importance for Beijing.

For Putin, on the other hand, the SCO summit was an opportunity to show his audience in Russia that Moscow might be isolated from the West, but not from the rest of the world. He met Xi for the second time in two months, as well as his “dear friend” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who came to the summit as a dialogue partner of the SCO.

The fact that Putin and Erdogan met in Astana shows that the Kremlin still sees Nato member Turkey as a strategic frenemy. Meanwhile, Erdogan did not want to miss the opportunity to deepen bilateral cooperation with Kazakhstan, Ankara’s partner in the Organisation of Turkic States.

Kazakhstan, for its part, continues its “multi-vector foreign policy”, balancing between its two giant neighbours – Russia to the north, and China to the south. That is why Kazakhstan seeks to develop closer ties with the West, hoping that it would help it create a counterbalance to its allied ties with Moscow and close economic cooperation with Beijing.

Quite aware of Kazakhstan’s status as a middle power, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who also took part in the summit, said that Kazakhstan serves as a “shining example of a consistent struggle for peace”.

Since the SCO leaders adopted the Kazakh-proposed initiative, On World Unity for a Just Peace and Harmony, it is entirely possible that the future of various conflicts such as the Ukraine war were on their agenda behind closed doors.

Over the years, the major focus of the SCO has been on tackling the “three evils” of terrorism, extremism and separatism, but in the coming years it will almost certainly have to pay more attention to economic cooperation. As Tokayev reportedly stated, over the past 20 years not a single major economic project was carried out under the auspices of the SCO.

“We try to advance economic cooperation, but it’s not an easy task. Countries still work more on a bilateral rather than on a multilateral basis,” Vassilienko told me.

Indeed, to strengthen its role in the international arena the group will have to work more on economic issues. The SCO represents 40 per cent of the world’s population. Together, member countries account for around 20 per cent of global gross domestic product. But the problem in such a diverse organisation is that its members can hardly reach consensus over crucial matters.

To this day, despite India’s push for the use of English as one of the main working languages of the SCO, all SCO documents are only prepared in Mandarin and Russian. More importantly, SCO members often have diametrically opposed views on important geopolitical developments and completely different geopolitical interests.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in Kazakhstan, and Central Asia in general, where China can eventually replace Russia as the major foreign actor in the energy-rich region.

China launches high-level probe after paper says fuel tankers used to carry cooking oil

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3269808/china-launches-high-level-probe-after-paper-says-fuel-tankers-used-carry-cooking-oil?utm_source=rss_feed

Beijing has set up a high-level team to investigate food transport standards, after a report in state-backed media said companies were using fuel trucks to carry cooking oil.

The Beijing News published a report last week alleging that the same tanker trucks were being used to transport both cooking oil and chemicals, without cleaning between shipments to save costs.

The article has sparked public food safety concerns, with other state media also pressing for answers.

State broadcaster CCTV reported on Tuesday that the State Council, China’s cabinet, had set up an investigative team involving several government bodies to tackle the matter.

Planning body the National Development and Reform Commission, the ministries of public security and transport, the state administrations of market regulation and grain and reserves, and other departments will be part of the team.

Several cooking oil companies – including two named in the Beijing News report – have also launched their own investigations.

A subsidiary of state stockpiler Sinograin, and another major player, the Hopefull Grain and Oil Group, were named in the report. Neither company has confirmed or denied the allegations.

In a response posted on Weibo on Saturday, Sinograin said that it had ordered a subsidiary to carry out an investigation and also kicked off a comprehensive probe among affiliated companies.

It also pledged to immediately terminate cooperation with and blacklist any transport companies and vehicles found to have violated regulations.

Any major issues discovered would be reported to regulators, the company said, while promising to discipline affiliated companies and employees found to have violated the rules.

An employee of Hopefull Grain and Oil told The Beijing News on Monday that the company had cooperated with the regulatory authorities in their investigation, which had since been concluded, with further updates to follow after an official announcement.

But the member of staff also said that the company did not own any tanker trucks, and the transport vehicles belonged to its clients.

Founded in 1999, Hopefull Grain and Oil is a market leader with plants in the provinces of Hebei, Jiangsu and Liaoning, and a total processing capacity of 10 million tonnes.

Several other brands have denied that they were involved in the malpractice, with some launching their own investigations, according to media reports.

Hainan Jingliang Holdings, a producer and seller of cooking oils, said in a statement that it had carried out internal inspections and confirmed that its subsidiaries complied with food safety regulations.

Yihai Kerry Arawana Holdings, a company known for its cooking oil brand Jinlongyu, told Shanghai-based media outlet The Paper that it had strict supervisory measures in place, and all transport processes followed regulations, asserting that “this incident has not affected us”.

State media also weighed in this week, criticising practices that undermine food safety regulations and calling for a thorough investigation.

CCTV earlier said the issue showed “extreme disregard” for consumer health.

“Usually, as long as we do not seek cheap options and choose big brands, select reputable manufacturers, we can avoid low-quality edible oils. But even major brands can have loopholes in the transport process … this obviously exceeds the understanding of most people,” it said on its official WeChat account on Monday.

Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily has also called for a “thorough investigation and rectification”.

“To ensure food safety, we must consistently adhere to the strictest standards, the most rigorous oversight, and the most severe penalties,” it said in a commentary.

China’s top corruption watchdog on Monday published a series of reports on inspections made last year, including at Sinograin. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection report did not mention any problems related to Sinograin’s goods transport process.

It is not the first time that Chinese media have reported issues with transporting cooking oil.

Similar practices were reportedly discovered in the southern city of Nanning in 2005, while a 2015 news report revealed problems with vehicles transporting goods between Hunan and Guangdong provinces.

Hugs and cringes: China watches as Indian and Russian leaders take their diplomatic dance

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3269800/hugs-and-cringes-china-watches-indian-and-russian-leaders-take-their-diplomatic-dance?utm_source=rss_feed

In the game of power diplomacy, body language is often more revealing than words. Two photos showing interactions between leaders from Beijing, New Delhi and Moscow have effectively summed up the state of their trilateral relations.

One was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bear hug with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday during his first visit to Moscow in nearly a decade. The other was taken in Beijing during Putin’s latest China visit in May, when he received a farewell hug from his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.

While Modi is famous for his public displays of warmth and “hug diplomacy”, neither Xi nor Putin are known as big fans of physical contact other than shaking hands, which partly explains why they both appeared a bit uncomfortable in the pictures.

That is probably why the photos have hit the international headlines, prompting Washington and its allies to scrutinise the roles Beijing and New Delhi may have played in enabling Putin’s grinding aggression against Ukraine.

When the White House was asked to comment on the Xi-Putin embrace, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said wryly: “Well, that’s nice for them.”

Washington has good reasons to feel unease about the personal bonds between leaders of the two top US adversaries, with Beijing defying repeated threats of fresh Western sanctions over its perceived implicit support for Moscow over Ukraine.

In public, China has stopped talking about its “no limits” partnership with Russia in recent months, and Xi has refrained from referring to Putin as his “best, most intimate friend” following an international arrest warrant issued last year for the Russian leader.

But his photo with Putin was widely believed to have captured some rare, unscripted moments of China’s most powerful leader in decades. Unfazed by widespread criticism of Beijing’s warming ties with Moscow, Xi appeared to have initiated the embrace, raised his arms and hugged a seemingly hesitant Putin twice.

Beijing’s message is fairly clear – no matter how much it dislikes Putin’s expansionist war and the Western accusations about its entanglement as Russia’s top enabler, it cannot afford to give up on Moscow in the midst of its existential rivalry with Washington.

As war-beleaguered Moscow becomes increasingly reliant on Beijing, Xi sat down with Putin again last week on the sidelines of a security summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, reiterating support for Russia and their anti-US coalition.

But it is a different story for Putin.

Although he also hailed ties between Moscow and Beijing that were “experiencing the best period in their history” last week, the Russian strongman remains defiant and his hugs with Modi are probably a well-crafted message to the US-led West as well as Beijing.

Despite its isolation and deepening economic dependency on China, a weakened Russia still has other friends and partners to turn to, especially when Beijing is reluctant to throw all of its weight behind Putin’s costly war against Ukraine.

Following his trip to Beijing, Putin also visited Russia’s traditional allies North Korea and Vietnam last month, where he also enjoyed a red-carpet welcome and warm hugs.

Modi’s rare visit to Moscow is no doubt a major boost for Putin, on the eve of a Nato summit in Washington expected to be focused on how to help Ukraine win the war.

It shows that despite New Delhi’s strategic pivot to Washington in the US-China rivalry, Modi’s India is not choosing sides between the US and Russia, defying growing pressure from the White House.

Modi’s trip to Moscow, his first bilateral visit since he won a third term in office last month, marked a departure from past tradition for Indian leaders, who usually visit its South Asian neighbours first.

For Modi, the visit is clearly aimed at Beijing too, just days after he skipped the Astana summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a political, economic and security platform founded by China and Russia in 2001 to challenge the US-led world order.

With Beijing and New Delhi showing little inclination to mend deeply troubled ties over a deadly border clash in eastern Ladakh in June 2020, India, which joined the SCO in 2017, has often been accused by critics in China of acting as a spoiler.

As the power balance between Russia and China becomes increasingly asymmetrical in the wake of the Ukraine war, Modi’s top priority during his visit is to ensure Moscow is not siding with Beijing in its increasingly acrimonious relations with New Delhi.

In other words, while New Delhi has to accept Moscow’s growing dependence on Beijing, China may also have had to live with the reality that Russia is still balancing between China and India, despite Beijing’s efforts to pull Moscow into its own orbit.

In both bilateral and triangular dynamics, Beijing is paying the price for its unwillingness to repair ties with New Delhi and end the prolonged border stand-off. The fact that Xi is barely on speaking terms with Modi has not only offered openings for Moscow and others, but also undermines its own efforts to position itself as a leader for the Global South.

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Another year of heat and floods spurs China’s climate-change awakening

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/09/china-floods-climate-change/2024-07-08T03:29:36.899Z

Three years after Zhengzhou was hit with China’s deadliest flash floods in decades, the central Chinese city was underwater once again.

For over three hours on Monday afternoon, 9.21 inches of rain was dumped on this city of 13 million — and forced an all-out effort to prevent a repeat of 2021, when 300 died in a sudden deluge that flooded the subway and trapped people in submerged cars.

This time, local authorities weren’t taking chances. They canceled buses, closed tourist sites and warned residents to stay home. Water pumps were deployed to prevent underpasses flooding. Subway entrances were barricaded with sandbags and metal sheeting.

China’s summer has begun with a massive emergency response effort in multiple provinces to prevent extreme weather, now routine, from turning into a political and humanitarian crisis for the ruling Communist Party.

After last year’s record-breaking heat waves, June brought drought, floods and typhoons — sometimes quickly coming one after the other. Extreme heat delayed crop planting in eastern Shandong province weeks before it was hit with floods.

After decades of campaigning by climate activists that were largely ignored, Beijing has made adapting to bouts of extreme weather a greater policy priority. Last week, weather officials issued an unusually direct warning about the country’s vulnerability to intensifying heat and rainfall worsened by climate change.

A month earlier, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment also released its first progress report on adaptation to the threat of climate change, which highlighted the need for better early-warning systems and improved coordination among departments in charge of construction, water management, transportation and public health.

“When these departments are siloed off, it impedes a systematic response to climate,” said Liu Junyan, a Beijing-based campaigner for Greenpeace, an environmental advocacy group. “We can’t miss the big picture because we’re all tucked away in different corners putting out our own crises.”

This coordination, Liu said, will be key to saving lives during this year’s floods, as will improving advanced notice for residents in the remote and mountainous countryside, where mitigation work remains weak.

Forecasts for the rest of July underscore a sense of urgency: Torrential rain is expected in 18 regions across the country. The government has sent in hundreds of soldiers, relocated tens of thousands of villagers, and allocated $200 million to aid disaster relief.

Some of the worst flooding this year has been in Hunan province along the middle stretch of the Yangtze river. There, four towns in Pingjiang county were evacuated Tuesday.

A 740-foot breach in the dikes of China’s second-largest freshwater lake over the weekend has reignited debate about farmland and industrialization encroaching on wetland that is better at absorbing rainfall.

China’s climate-change adaptation problem is worsened by vast differences in wealth and geography. The country’s 1.4 billion people mostly live in dense, concrete sprawl prone to flash flooding during downpours. Factories and financial centers are concentrated along the low-lying east coast.

While local governments recognize the importance of climate change, “differences in economic development between regions mean there are gaps in capacity for disaster prevention, resistance and response,” said Tang Xu, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Fudan University in Shanghai.

Tang, who previously served as director of the Shanghai Meteorological Bureau, reels off the disasters that regions faced in recent years — drought in the northwest, landslides and mudslides in the southwest, typhoons and storm surges on the east coast — to underscore why “disaster prevention is a formidable task.”

The result, according to Tang, is that some places are moving fast to find and address risks while others take their time — but at least everyone is now aware of the issues. “You can’t use the same standard to say who’s doing a good job and who’s doing a bad job,” he said.

The central government in Beijing is increasingly asking local officials to do better.

China is especially vulnerable to extreme weather intensified by climate change, China’s Meteorological Administration underscored in its annual “blue book” on the topic released last Thursday. The report laid out mounting evidence of the threat, such as record-breaking temperatures last year that melted glaciers and permafrost at speeds never seen before.

More dramatic than the report were a weather official’s unusually stark warnings of worse to come.

Speaking at a news conference to launch the report, Yuan Jiashuang, deputy director of the administration, told journalists that heat waves will scorch China for to 15 more days of the year and reach temperatures 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher within 30 years.

Yuan highlighted that northeastern Xinjiang will be among the most severely affected regions. Last July, temperatures in its Turpan Depression, which sits 500 feet below sea level, reached 126 degrees Fahrenheit, China’s highest on record.

Over the same period, downpours lasting five days and concentrated in the center and northeast of the country are expected to become more frequent, until eventually more rain and snow will fall during extreme weather events than as normal precipitation, Yuan said.

The Chinese government only recently began warning openly of the dangers of climate change. For decades, officials accepted the science but argued that responsibility lay with richer developed nations like the United States, which has released more carbon dioxide historically.

That position became harder to sustain as the country’s reliance on polluting coal-fired power and its massive construction boom made it the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

Within China, a gradually warming atmosphere took a back seat to concerns about clearing hazardous smog that blanketed major cities. Public discussion and scientific research on the topic were limited compared to Europe or North America.

That situation has changed dramatically in recent years, in part because Chinese leader Xi Jinping wants to be seen as global leader on climate issues. Green technologies are also now a critical driver of the Chinese economy.

China brought more solar panels online last year than the rest of the world combined, and the country is projected by the International Energy Agency to account for 60 percent of global renewable energy installations by 2028.

Experts on Chinese energy systems widely believe the country could reach peak carbon dioxide emissions ahead of the official goal of “before 2030” — if Beijing keeps a check on local governments that keep approving new coal-fired power plants.

But the focus on climate adaptation has also been driven by the annual drumbeat of natural disasters that underscored the threat of extreme weather for everyday Chinese and policymakers in Beijing.

For the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, which prides itself on nature-defying feats of engineering and disaster preparedness, more frequent crises are becoming public relations nightmares for its carefully crafted image.

A year after the deadly flash floods of Zhengzhou, the lengthy heat waves of 2022 turned lakes into streams, wilted crops and sparked forest fires.

Last August, Beijing faced its largest downpours since 1883. Authorities responded by activating a massive flood-diversion system that sacrificed rural areas to protect the capital and a new development zone personally backed by Xi.

Leaked American F-35 and F-15 documents appear authentic, Chinese security expert says

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3269726/leaked-american-f-35-and-f-15-documents-appear-authentic-says-chinese-security-expert?utm_source=rss_feed

Recently leaked documents, purported to contain technical information about the F-35 fighter jet and sensitive US weapons, appear authentic, according to a Chinese information security expert.

A user claiming to be a Russian pilot, identifying himself as Ivan Ivanov with the handle Fighterbomber, stated on the Telegram encrypted messaging service they had received 250 gigabytes of US military data from an American company.

On July 2, Fighterbomber posted some of the documents to their channel, which has more than 500,000 subscribers before uploading more of the leaked data the next day. Some of the uploaded documents remain available for download.

“We downloaded and examined the files, much of this content appears to be highly authentic,” said Tang, chief marketing officer of Beijing-based antivirus and network security firm Rising Information Technology.

The leaked files include manuals for the F-35 jet and documents relating to the F-15 and its modifications and weapon systems, the Switchblade drone and precision-guided missiles.

“The documents are detailed and their format resembles other US military information previously leaked online. However, these are not strictly blueprints or design documents, and their true value can only be assessed by professionals,” said Tang, who asked to be referred to by his surname only.

The leaks have caused a stir in the military enthusiast community and sparked jokes about the ability to now build a fighter jet in a garage.

Chinese aviation blogger Makayev stated on his video channel that the leaks fell into three categories. The first type includes the flight manual, maintenance manuals and aircrew weapon delivery manuals for the F-15SA, a version sold to Saudi Arabia more than a decade ago.

The second type includes the engine maintenance manual for the F110 engine used in the F-15SA and the third comprises user manuals for precision-guided missiles.

Makayev also doubted the leaked files held any true value.

“The most extensive document is an 800-page flight manual by Boeing, last revised in 2018, detailing various systems of the aircraft, preparation for flight, emergency operations and operational limitations,” he said.

“Yet, these texts are more likely simplified introductions rather than detailed descriptions of the design processes, aimed at maintenance personnel rather than offering insights that could benefit China’s mature military aviation industry,” Makayev said.

Given the Russian pilot’s claim of possessing 250 GB of data, other commenters said they believed more maintenance manuals and weapon designs might still be released, including some that might reveal the aircraft’s weakness.

Tang suggested several possible sources for the leaks, including breaches from US military companies or third parties posing as them. Some of the F-35 documents were partially redacted, which may indicate they were already declassified. The older F-15 model is subject to a lower level of official secrecy, according to Tang.

Tang said similar leaks were not likely to occur in China, thanks to what he described as its robust data security and confidentiality laws. If security departments effectively implemented these policies, breaches could be well contained.

An anonymous expert from a military research institution in China said the institution conducted regular data security training and evaluations to ensure compliance with confidentiality obligations.

Rising Information Technology advised the public via a WeChat post not to download suspicious documents, warning that hackers could exploit popular events to spread viruses and that downloading malicious documents could result in users’ devices being infected by ransomware or Trojan virus infections.

Honest China woman shocked by US$310,000 cash transfers, returns the lot to rightful owner

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3269288/honest-china-woman-shocked-us310000-cash-transfers-returns-lot-rightful-owner?utm_source=rss_feed

A woman in China who received multiple money transfers amounting to 2.26 million yuan (US$310,000) from a stranger, and returned all the funds without hesitation, has won praise for her honesty.

The woman, surnamed Wang, said she received a number of phone calls at the end of June from someone she did not know, Henan TV reported.

“That person called me again and again. So I finally picked up the phone,” Wang, who lives in Xuchang, Henan province, central China said.

“A woman cried on the phone, telling me that she got it wrong by transferring 2.26 million yuan to me.”

The stranger, surnamed Tian, said she had sent the money through Alipay, a mobile payment platform.

Wang, who had never used Alipay, suspected it was a scam, but still comforted and calmed Tian, promising she would not hold any of her money if what she claimed was true.

Wang went to the police station with her daughter to report the case.

“We were shocked. How could there be a fault leading to such a big amount of money?” her daughter said.

Police officers said they had handled similar cases in the past and they also doubted it was an attempt at fraud.

Wang and Tian, who lives nearby in Hebei province, were asked to come to the police station for questioning.

The police logged onto the Alipay app with Wang’s mobile number, and saw the account had received a series of money transfers with a combined value of 2.26 million yuan, just as Tian claimed.

They also verified the source of the funds before confirming it was a normal amount of income for Tian.

Wang immediately sent all the money back to Tian: “This is what I am supposed to do,” she said.

News of the incident went viral on mainland social media after being viewed 140 million times on Weibo alone.

“What a good-hearted person Auntie Wang is,” one online observer said.

“Auntie Wang is very considerate. She knew the money’s owner must be anxious, so she returned it promptly. I wish her a safe and healthy life,” said another.

Cases involving honesty and integrity often captivate social media in China.

Last year, a 13-year-old boy found a bag containing 160,000 yuan (US$22,000) in cash on the street, and reported it to the police who later identified the rightful owner.

The boy returned the money despite his family’s dire financial situation and the fact his father was ill in hospital.

No South China Sea? Calls grow for Philippines to include maritime history in curriculum

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3269732/no-south-china-sea-calls-grow-philippines-include-maritime-history-curriculum?utm_source=rss_feed

The Philippines should incorporate discussions on maritime territory into its national history curriculum, a former chief justice said, ahead of the new education minister taking office.

Former judge Antonio Carpio said educating Filipinos on issues such as the ruling in Manila’s favour by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2016 could help the Philippines win the fight against Beijing’s claims in the entire South China Sea.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr last week appointed Senator Sonny Angara as the next education secretary after Vice-President Sara Duterte quit the portfolio. Angara will assume his new role on July 19.

Carpio on Tuesday warned in an ABS-CBN interview that a lack of historical knowledge on treaties signed by former colonial rulers of the Philippines could be a problem, arguing that it “should be included in the new curriculum”.

He also questioned the origin of the South China Sea name, insisting the Chinese previously only called it the “South Sea” in colonial times and “the Portuguese called it the South China Sea to distinguish it from the East China Sea”.

Congresswoman Margarita Nograles, the representative of Puwersa ng Bayaning Atleta (PBA) on Sunday recommended that Angara include in the curriculum Manila’s claim to the West Philippine Sea, its name for a part of the South China Sea within its exclusive economic zone.

“Educating our youth about the significant issues surrounding our territorial claims in the West Philippine Sea is crucial for fostering a well-informed citizenry and cultivating a sense of national pride and responsibility,” she said.

Filipino students must be taught comprehensively about the 2016 arbitral ruling, according to Nograles.

“Our young Filipinos should be aware of the legal and historical context of our territorial claims to better appreciate the efforts of our government and diplomats in defending our sovereignty,” Nograles said.

Marcos Jnr made a similar call when he appointed Angara.

“The one thing I asked of him was to please teach our children Philippine history. Because I have seen my children’s workbooks and there’s very little said about the history of the Philippines. And for me, that is so important,” Marcos Jnr said.

Since last year, the education department has revised the curriculum to include lessons on the West Philippine Sea and the 2016 ruling.

Under a draft by the department, lessons on “the islands of the West Philippine Sea” will be taught in Grade 10 under “territorial issues and border conflicts”. The 2016 victory of the Philippines against China over their maritime row is a topic listed under “responses to economic challenges” in the same grade.

The Hague ruled in 2016 that Beijing’s claims over the South China Sea through its so-called nine-dash-line had no legal basis and instead recognised Manila’s sovereign rights in the waterways. China has refused to accept the verdict until now.

The draft was released last year but there have been no updates during the stint of outgoing education secretary Duterte.

Political analyst Edmund Tayao, president and CEO of think tank Political Economic Elemental Researchers and Strategists, told This Week in Asia on Tuesday that he welcomed the proposal but said a more comprehensive education about the country’s history was fundamental.

“A functional understanding of the issue requires a more comprehensive study, which includes pre-colonial Philippine history that requires more initiatives and therefore support,” Tayao said.

“This perspective will allow Filipinos a clearer and fuller understanding of our being an archipelagic nation and its implications in our day-to-day lives and most especially in policymaking. So far, we don’t have that, hence the difficulty not only for the people to be involved but also for policymakers to appreciate the imperative of a more holistic approach to it,” he added.

Carpio said in the TV interview when the Americans arrived in the Philippines in 1874, they adopted the Spanish map of the region, which included Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands.

After the Spanish-American War in 1898, which ended Spanish colonial rule, Spain sold the Philippines to the US for US$20 million as stipulated in the Treaty of Paris, excluding Scarborough Shoal and the Spratlys. In 1900, Spain and the US signed the Treaty of Washington to include areas not covered under the Paris deal.

“So it’s clear since ... Spanish time, the American regime, and the Philippine republic, the Scarborough Shoal and Spratly Island were included in the Philippine territory,” Carpio insisted.

In addition to the Philippines and China, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam also have competing claims in the South China Sea.

Tensions between the Philippines and China over the South China Sea dispute have led to multiple clashes and triggered diplomatic protests from Manila.

When Marcos Jnr won the 2022 Philippine presidential election, he did not follow the pro-China foreign policy of his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte and instead leaned closer to the US.

In February last year, Marcos Jnr gave the United States access to military sites across the country under the bilateral Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) to boost the Philippines’ defence capabilities and response to natural disasters.

The agreement has led to a larger deployment of American soldiers and their equipment in the Philippines, such as during bilateral military exercises, including in April this year when the US deployed its highly advanced Typhon missile system.

China’s solar power prowess can truly shine in energy-starved Africa

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3269381/chinas-solar-power-prowess-can-truly-shine-energy-starved-africa?utm_source=rss_feed

Compared to electric vehicles (EVs), China’s production overcapacity in solar panels may be more glaring. The country commands 80 per cent of the solar photovoltaic (PV) value chain and its five-fold expansion in module manufacturing capacity during 2022 and 2023 precipitated a 40 per cent price decline last year. Long before the US moved to lock out Chinese EVs, it had imposed heavy tariffs on Chinese solar panels – in 2012.

But the industry’s supply-demand balance must be understood in the context of its sustained high growth.

The last shakeout in China’s industry kicked off in 2013 when Suntech Power Holdings defaulted on its bond payments, later becoming bankrupt. Since then, demand has exploded. The global installed capacity for solar power has expanded about tenfold and is expected to double in the next three years. Now, any excess production capacity can reasonably expect to be digested. In a reverse of market dynamics, demand will expand to meet ever cheaper supply.

This is because solar power benefits from a powerful positive feedback loop. As solar panel deployment increases, economies of scale kick in, driving down manufacturing costs. These lower prices make solar energy more accessible and attractive, boosting demand. Increased demand fuels more investment and innovation, making solar technology even more efficient and affordable. This self-reinforcing cycle propels the exponential growth of solar power.

Given solar power made up less than 6 per cent of global electricity generated last year, the greatest growth is still to come. Solar power is expected to generate more electricity than gas-fired power plants in 2030 and coal-fired ones by 2032 – and could become our biggest electricity source in a decade.

But two key obstacles stand in the way of even faster adoption of solar power: storage and long-distance transmission.

In China, the growth of energy storage systems – from power generators to industrial users – has been accelerating. Globally, battery storage costs have fallen by 99 per cent in the last three decades; battery technologies are set to evolve alongside solar power in a reinforcing ecosystem. There are grandiose plans to send solar and other forms of renewable energy between countries, such as to Britain from Morocco, and to Singapore from its Southeast Asian neighbours. China, which is expanding its long-distance power grid, started up the world’s largest solar plant last month, in Xinjiang.

But regulatory frameworks and market-based pricing mechanisms are just as important. For much of the West, solar power is just another option in the green energy transition. But for many in the energy-poor Global South, it represents the initial access to grid electricity.

In Africa, for instance, solar power can fuel industrial development without incurring the devastating pollution costs of Europe and the United States. The scalability of solar power also creates opportunities for distributed power solutions without the need for massive investments in grid infrastructure.

About 43 per cent of Africa’s population, or 600 million people, lack access to reliable electricity, which is also the main business constraint cited by 40 per cent of African companies in a survey. Unsurprisingly, renewable energy mini-grids have mushroomed in Africa with the growth of the distributed renewable energy (DRE) sector. Large factories are getting “inside the fence” captive power; more than 400 million Africans access electricity via solar home systems.

In April, the World Bank and African Development Bank announced a plan to provide electricity access to at least 300 million people in Africa by 2030, mostly through DRE systems. If successful, Africa could become a world leader in the new paradigm of distributed power, bypassing years of uncertain waiting for state grids to expand.

For China, this could be a pivotal moment to transform its role in Africa’s burgeoning solar energy market. It could move beyond supplying equipment to embrace a role as a developer and operator of solar energy projects, capitalising on its complementary strengths in solar PVs, batteries and mobile payment.

The doors to the US market may be closed but China can still shape development in a most important growth market in Africa. As margins in the solar supply chain become razor thin, solar energy operations can take their place as a much more profitable and sustainable business. It could even become the cornerstone of the Belt and Road Initiative in Africa, from powering mines to energising industrial parks, to create integrated industrial ecosystems.

Solar energy operations not only promise to be more economically viable, they also have social impact. And the modular and scalable nature of solar installations allows for adaptive deployment, ranging from small off-grid systems to large utility-scale projects. The much shorter implementation times offer quicker returns on investment. It also allows for greater private-sector involvement and reduces dependence on state entities, streamlining project development and increasing efficiency.

In Africa, solar energy operations are far more likely to require partnerships between Chinese, international and African business entities in collaboration with, rather than led by, state actors. This business-led approach – emphasising collaboration, innovation and community empowerment – would be a fundamental departure from previous state-driven Belt and Road Initiative projects.

To be successful, Chinese companies would need to develop new competencies in navigating the regulatory environment, managing stakeholders, developing innovative business models and mastering intercultural partnerships.

By making a decisive shift from infrastructure construction to spearheading the continent’s green electrification, China can catalyse Africa’s sustainable industrialisation.

This business-driven approach to distributed solar power has the potential to illuminate millions of lives and energise economies – cementing China’s role as Africa’s indispensable partner. In doing so, China will not only help unlock Africa’s vast potential but also show a new course for inclusive South-South cooperation.

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Floods move to China’s drought-hit farmland as Dongting Lake wall repair holds

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3269743/floods-move-chinas-drought-hit-farmland-dongting-lake-wall-repair-holds?utm_source=rss_feed

Emergency forces sealed the main dyke breach at China’s second-largest freshwater lake on Monday night, with a secondary flood defence line being put to the test, according to local authorities.

Dongting Lake, in the central province of Hunan, burst its embankment on Friday, flooding more than 47 sq km (18 square miles) including the town of Tuanzhou where at least 7,000 residents were evacuated, with no reported casualties.

By Saturday, the breach had widened to 226 metres (741ft). Work to seal the dyke was progressing at an average rate of 4 metres per hour by midnight on Sunday, according to mainland media reports.

Hunan vice-governor Zhang Yingchun said on Sunday that an emergency barrier in the embankment had failed on Friday afternoon, less than two hours after it was set up to contain a water release caused by an erosion-related incident.

To seal the breach, mechanised operations built up the dyke from both sides, while rocks and other materials were dumped into the water from barges without interruption throughout the repairs, according to state broadcaster CCTV.

At a press conference on Monday, Zhang said nearly 500 personnel were involved in the repairs, along with more than 3,000 dump trucks and 85 vessels of all types.

Heavy rainfall had more than doubled the surface area of Dongting Lake in the previous week, with Hunan still in its main flood season. Most of the province’s rivers flow into the lake, which also acts as a drainage basin for the Yangtze River.

With a high risk of heavy rain to come, water resource experts warned that the lake would flood Tuanzhou town again if the breach were not sealed, according to a Xinhua report.

Water Resources Commission director Liu Dongshun said on Monday that the Yangtze River is facing more rainfall, while water levels at the Three Gorges Reservoir have remained high, posing a challenge to flood prevention tasks.

Seepage erosion has also been detected on the Qiantuanjian embankment, less than 2km (1.2 miles) from the breach at Tuanzhou, in Yueyang city’s Huarong county. Emergency repair efforts are under way, according to CCTV.

The Qiantuanjian embankment acts as a secondary flood defence line for Qianliang Lake Town after the breaching of the Tuanzhou dyke and has been undergoing reinforcement in recent days, CCTV said.

In 1996, floodwaters breached the Qiantuanjian embankment, claiming 17 lives and inundating 120,000 mu (8,000 hectares) of farmland. According to the local government, the devastation affected 65,000 people and led to direct economic losses of 2.36 billion yuan (US$324.5 million).

Also in Yueyang, the flood control and drought relief headquarters ordered the immediate evacuation of affected residents in four townships on Tuesday morning, after seepage was reported at a dam in Pingjiang county.

Central China’s grain-producing Henan province and Shandong province in the east are facing heavy rainfall and floods, after suffering from the effects of an extreme drought in June.

On Monday evening, the Shandong weather bureau issued a rainstorm red alert – the most severe warning in China’s four-tier system – and forecast more than 5-8cm (2-3 inches) of rain per hour for multiple towns in the southern part of the province.

In Linyi, the most severely affected city, cumulative rainfall reached 28.82cm (11.34 inches) by Monday evening in the week since flood season began – nearly double the same period in previous years.

According to CCTV, more than 3,600 people were affected by the rains, with nearly 2,000 moved to safety from the city’s low-lying areas and geological disaster hazard spots.

In Jining city, in Shandong’s southwest, around 2,400 residents have been evacuated so far after heavy rainfall led to a partial collapse of the Sihe dam, CCTV said.

Heavy rainfall has also hit Heze city, which is still recovering from a powerful tornado that killed five people and left more than 83 injured on Friday.

Rainstorm red alerts were also issued in parts of Henan. The provincial government’s water resources department raised the emergency response level on Tuesday as the Jialu River exceeded the warning level.

Most of Henan’s more than 112 million mu (18 million acres) of cultivated land is at risk of waterlogging, while autumn crops in most areas are at a critical stage of seedling management, Xinhua said.

Russia and China peace missions prompt EU members to seek ways to punish Hungary

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3269669/russia-and-china-peace-missions-prompt-eu-members-seek-ways-punish-hungary?utm_source=rss_feed

European Union members were looking for ways to punish Hungary on Monday after the country’s leader, Viktor Orban, continued his self-described “peace mission” to Beijing under the banner of Budapest’s presidency of the bloc.

It came after a controversial visit to the Kremlin last week, where he met Russian President Vladimir Putin and called for an immediate ceasefire in the war in Ukraine, launched by Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

Hungary took up the six-month presidency, a rotating and largely administrative role, on July 1.

While the position bestows no foreign policy authority, Orban visited Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan and Beijing in quick succession and on each occasion, posted images using the official logo of Hungary’s EU leadership.

On each stop, he has called for an immediate end to hostilities – departing from the EU’s official position of considering Russia to be the aggressor and that peace must be made on Ukraine’s terms.

“He has no mandate on these visits to represent the EU,” European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer told reporters on Monday.

The rotating presidency gives each EU member state a turn at setting legislative agendas and chairing meetings in Brussels, where diplomats thrash out policy minutiae.

The presidency confers no control over EU policy or foreign affairs, but can play a guiding role in prioritising certain legislative points.

At every stop on Orban’s tour, fury has spread like wildfire through the Belgian capital. Ambassadors plan to grill Hungary’s representatives in Brussels on Wednesday, a diplomatic source said.

“There is growing concerns in the capitals about the self-attributed role of Mr Orban in the so-called peace mission, where it should be clear he is only representing his own country,” the diplomat explained.

The Hungarian leader “has intentionally left a lot of ambiguity, while for example displaying the logo of the presidency in his dramatic communications”, the diplomat added.

On Monday, some member states were “seriously considering gathering a majority” to come up with a way to punish Budapest for abusing the terms of the rotating role, a senior EU official said, with the European Commission’s legal service also preparing to give its opinion.

Orban’s gambit came on the day Chinese military personnel were in Belarus, an ally of Russia’s, to conduct “anti-terrorist training” close to Poland’s border.

The cumulative effect is a “a message for the region that China is looking at these countries – Belarus, Russia, Hungary, Serbia – with great interest”, said Csaba Káncz, a Hungarian geopolitical analyst.

Patience on the continent is also wearing thin over Budapest’s blocking of more military support for Ukraine through the European Peace Facility, which has been agreed by the other 26 capitals.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Hungary has been the most pro-Russian voice among EU members and has held up various sanctions packages targeting the Kremlin.

“He wants to weaken the EU from the inside,” said Peter Kreko of Budapest-based think tank Political Capital, of Orban. “He is frustrated by how Brussels treats him.”

Kreko pointed to a litany of grievances Orban held with the EU bureaucracy, including an excessive deficit procedure, “huge fines” for the treatment of refugees, the withholding of EU funds and “lots of criticism”.

“He is 100 per cent abusing the role,” said Kreko of how Orban was handling the presidency. “He pretends that he’s representing the European Union, but does not even inform them about his plans on where he is going.”

After Orban met Putin on Friday, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the Hungarian leader had “not received any mandate from the EU Council to visit Moscow”.

“Hungary is now the EU member state serving the rotating presidency” of the council until December 31, 2024, continued Borrell in a statement.

“That does not entail any external representation of the union which is [the] responsibility of the president of the European Council at the head-of-state or government level and of the high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy at [a] ministerial level.”

During his trip to Beijing, Orban posted a picture with Chinese President Xi Jinping bearing the official Hungarian presidency’s logo.

“President Xi made it clear to me today that #China will continue its efforts aimed at creating the conditions for #peace. We are not alone! Peace mission to be continued,” Orban wrote on X.

The language contrasted sharply with words used by the EU’s ambassador to China on Sunday.

“When we look across the Atlantic, we can see our allies, the United States, helping,” said Jorge Toledo at a Tsinghua University event. “When we look East and at China, we are seeing a China that is not helping.”

According to people briefed on the Orban-Xi meeting, the Hungarian leader dismissed the EU’s ongoing support for Ukraine.

He was said instead to have thrown his weight behind China and Brazil’s “joint proposal for peace negotiations with the participation of Russia and Ukraine”, launched in May.

“That is very much out of line,” the senior official said. “I think people are taken aback by how brutal the first week [of the presidency] has been.”

As Orban met Xi, news was emerging of a major Russian missile attack across Ukraine that killed at least 31 people. One missile struck a large children’s hospital in Kyiv.

“I wonder how the peace dove feels today seeing the attacks on Kyiv,” the official quipped.

Sources in Budapest and Brussels said the next stop on Orban’s self-described “peace mission” would be a tête-à-tête with ex-US president Donald Trump this week on the margins of the annual Nato summit in Washington.

In an interview with German newspaper Welt before he left for China, Orban was defiant.

“War does not fall from the sky. War is the result of the decision of certain people,” he said in response to a question about Russia wanting to retain control of occupied Ukrainian territories.

“How are China, the United States and the EU going about it? China has a peace plan. America has a war policy. And Europe, instead of having its own strategic approach, is simply copying the American position.”

Sebestyén Hompot of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies suggested the tour was broadly aimed at the right-wing populist group his Fidesz party helped form in the European Parliament this week.

Patriots for Europe, the new far-right group, is now the chamber’s third-largest.

“This is part of building his image among other populists in Europe,” Hompot said. “We can count on Orban taking every opportunity to emphasise his role as a leader of the alternative, populist right in Europe, to reform in his view, the EU.”

Demining diplomacy: to counter China’s Cambodia sway, Japan touts landmine clearance

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3269722/demining-diplomacy-counter-chinas-cambodia-sway-japan-touts-landmine-clearance?utm_source=rss_feed

Japan’s offer to spearhead demining efforts in Cambodia and position Phnom Penh as “a hub for international cooperation” on removing landmines signals its intent to strengthen ties with a nation seen firmly within China’s orbit.

Analysts say the timely proposal aims to cement Tokyo’s influence in the region as the Southeast Asian nation undergoes a generational leadership transition.

During a weekend visit to Phnom Penh, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa declared her country would back the creation of an international team to clear Cambodia’s minefields. She also announced Tokyo would supply major demining equipment to Ukraine as its war with Russia grinds on.

“We will position Cambodia as a hub for international cooperation on humanitarian mine action and aim to achieve zero mine victims in the world,” Kamikawa told reporters on Saturday, underscoring Japan’s humanitarian objectives. In meetings with Cambodian ministers, she pledged financial support to develop the country’s marine transport and other critical infrastructure.

The Japanese initiative comes as Cambodia navigates a delicate political shift, with long-time Prime Minister Hun Sen having recently ceded power to his son, Hun Manet. Analysts view Japan’s demining offer as an opportunity to deepen ties with the new government and counter China’s regional influence. Japan also pledged to help establish direct shipping routes connecting Cambodia to Europe and North America, further bolstering economic ties.

“Japan knows full well that Cambodia is within China’s sphere of influence and that is likely to limit how much can be done,” said Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, an international relations professor at the University of Tokyo. “But Japan has had a long and good relationship with Cambodia.”

“It will be difficult to peel Cambodia away from China completely but Japan intends to show Phnom Penh what it can offer and how that can benefit the nation,” he told This Week in Asia. “And some of these things, such as providing advanced demining equipment, are things that China cannot offer so Japan does have an edge.”

Even as Western nations withdrew election monitors from Cambodia last year over reports of political intimidation, Japan maintained its presence. “Japan’s logic is that if it were to pull out, that would allow China to step in and fill the vacuum,” said Ben Ascione, an assistant professor of international relations at Tokyo’s Waseda University.

“Japan is aiming to build on its long history of cooperation with Cambodia, which was famously the first place that Japanese troops were dispatched [overseas] since the end of World War II when members of the Self-Defence Forces served as election monitors in the 1990s.”

While Phnom Penh will maintain its historically close ties with Beijing, Hun Manet is also seeking to diversify his country’s strategic partners, Ascione said.

“The new prime minister is not looking to replace China as a partner but to diversify and bolster its cooperation with France, Japan and other nations.”

Japan’s demining initiative provides a prime platform for Tokyo to signal its commitment to forge deeper ties with the Cambodian government. “It’s a good fit because Japan has the technology and Cambodia has the problem,” Ascione said.

He pointed to the Japanese Navy’s successful demining efforts in the Middle East after the first Gulf War, which earned the country plaudits for its contribution to regional peace.

“Japan is a world leader in demining technology and mines are still a huge problem in Cambodia, just as they will be in Ukraine for many years after the war is over, so this sort of cooperation is win-win for both sides.”

While Singapore scrutinises, Hong Kong wins back wealthy Chinese

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3269728/while-singapore-scrutinises-hong-kong-wins-back-wealthy-chinese?utm_source=rss_feed

Hong Kong is winning back wealthy Chinese by rolling out the red carpet for the rich while rival Singapore scrutinises foreign money.

Hong Kong is expected to welcome about 200 high-net worth individuals this year after five years of millionaires skipping town, according to data provided by intelligence firm New World Wealth and immigration consultancy Henley & Partners, thanks to initiatives including family office tax concessions and visa and residency programmes.

At the same time, fallout from a blockbuster S$3 billion (US$2.2 billion) money laundering case has put Singapore’s family offices and wealthy immigrants under the microscope.

It’s a shift from the pandemic years when Hong Kong’s strict quarantine and political upheaval led to mainland Chinese flocking to Singapore. Now, private bankers, service providers and insurers are saying Hong Kong business is picking up, while Singapore’s stepped-up money laundering rules are putting some customers off.

Hong Kong’s assets under management grew 2.1 per cent to HK$31 trillion (US$4 trillion) last year. Driven by a strong performance of private banking and wealth management, net fund inflows jumped more than 3 times to nearly HK$390 billion last year, Financial Secretary Paul Chan wrote in his blog this month. In 2022, private banking and wealth fund inflows slumped about 80 per cent.

Private bankers and service providers who were interviewed for this article requested not to be named because the information discussed was private.

In Singapore, the fallout from the money-laundering case means some banks are redoing their know-your-customer process, and rich Chinese are under a microscope, according to two private bankers. Their clients are frustrated with the process and the questions being asked, they said.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore in April introduced a digital platform to share customer information to combat money laundering. Since then, a service provider in Hong Kong said it received more than 15 inquiries from wealthy Chinese seeking to move or set up family offices in the city. Half those inquiries already resulted in actual business, they said.

“For many of the mainland billionaires, because they don’t like the arbitrary government interventions or government checks or threats to their personal wealth, that’s why they wanted to move money out of China,” said Zhiwu Chen, a professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong. “If Singapore would do as many checks and tighter regulations as the mainland, then why would they want to go there?”

Chen said he knows billionaires who have “warmed up” to basing more of their family office business in Hong Kong as their enthusiasm for Singapore has waned.

In Hong Kong, business at the China desks of private banks has picked up while the pace of growth at the same groups in Singapore has slowed, meaning less money is moving to Singapore, according to two senior private bankers.

Hong Kong has benefited from the reopening of its borders in 2023. The city has efficient connections to Shenzhen and the surrounding Greater Bay Area via its high-speed rail line. That’s attractive for wealthy Chinese who want to be able to closely monitor onshore businesses.

“Despite the political changes in Hong Kong and a number of challenges associated with that, there remain meaningful reasons for wealth and business owners to develop and maintain connections to Hong Kong,” said Philip Marcovici, who consults global families and financial institutions on wealth and taxation.

The city’s introduction of the top talent visa programme targeting high-income earners and university graduates is paying off, with more than 68,000 applications approved since its introduction in 2022. 95 per cent of those are from mainland China, according to government data.

One of the recipients is Wang, a tech worker from Chongqing in southwest China. Having a Hong Kong identity card allows him to travel more easily to the United States and other places for work, he said.

Many of his friends were worried about the future direction of Chinese government policy during Covid and sought residence elsewhere, looking for more neutral ground amid rising geopolitical tensions. While there’s a narrative that Hong Kong is becoming more like mainland China, he says it remains more open, particularly for capital flows.

“Hong Kong is still a good place for businesspeople,” he said, particularly “if you want to travel a lot or move your money freely.”

According to the two senior private bankers, revenue in Hong Kong already grew by double digits this year, driven by Chinese clients. Most clients have assets of US$5 million to US$10 million and are not in the ultra-rich category, another private banker said.

It’s still difficult for Chinese nationals to move money offshore and billionaire wealth creation is hampered by a sluggish market for initial public offerings in Hong Kong.

But Chinese money that was going to Singapore is now headed to Hong Kong, another senior banker said. That’s supported by data including sales of insurance products popular with wealthy Chinese from the mainland, which jumped 63 per cent to HK$15.6 billion in the first quarter compared to same period in 2023.

In June 2021, the government set up the Family Office Hong Kong team to encourage the growth of the city’s wealth management industry. Since then, about 64 family offices have been established or expanded their business, with 49 coming from the mainland, according to government data.

Still, revelations from Singapore’s money laundering scandal are also triggering concerns in Hong Kong that some of the new arrivals have something to hide.

A plan that offers residency to people who invest HK$30 million in Hong Kong has attracted over 250 applications since its March launch through the end of May. According to official data, nearly 200 are from Guinea-Bissau and Vanuatu, countries where cash for residency programmes have been used by financial criminals.

Chinese nationals holding passports from Vanuatu, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Turkey were among those convicted in Singapore’s money laundering scandal. “It creates doubts about money laundering,” said Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific at Natixis SA.

Hong Kong’s financial secretary Chan wrote in his blog in July that more than 340 applications have been received for the residency plan since launch and if approved, they are likely to bring more than HK$10 billion to Hong Kong.

To be sure, Singapore remains a popular destination for migrating millionaires. Its forecast to welcome a net 3,500 millionaires this year, the third most globally, according to Henley & Partners.

But Hong Kong’s population of millionaires is finally forecast to rebound after losing about 500 to migration in 2023, according to Andrew Amoils, head of research at New World Wealth, Henley’s research partner.

“Despite a tough past decade, Hong Kong is still one of the world’s top millionaire hubs,” said Amoils. There is “definitely a turnaround there,” he said.

*Surname only at interviewee’s request

How to apply: mainland China multi-entry permit for Hong Kong permanent residents

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3269710/how-apply-mainland-china-multi-entry-permit-hong-kong-permanent-residents?utm_source=rss_feed

Hong Kong permanent residents with foreign passports will be able to apply for a new five-year multi-entry travel permit to enter mainland China starting on Wednesday.

Permit holders may stay on the mainland for up to 90 days per visit for short-term purposes, such as investment, visiting relatives, tourism, business, seminars and exchange, according to the National Immigration Administration’s announcement on July 1. Currently, most non-Chinese nationals with permanent residency need to apply for separate visas to visit the mainland.

The Post unpacks what you need to know about permit application procedures.

Applicants should obtain a “Notice of Application for Access to Information” from the government website before filling in an online application and making an appointment through the processing authority China Travel Service (CTS) Hong Kong.

The document proves applicants’ Hong Kong permanent residency status and nationality information and is valid for six months before the application.

Non-Chinese nationals under the age of 11 who have not applied for a permanent identity card are required to obtain the notice, which will be made available within 10 working days upon receipt of a request, according to the city’s Code on Access to Information.

A source familiar with the matter has said applicants need to present the document issued by the Immigration Department when they process their application in person at CTS service centres.

Applicants may submit in-person applications at the service centres in Central, Kowloon Bay, Kwai Chung, Sha Tin, Tuen Mun and Mong Kok. Opening hours are 9am to 5pm from Monday to Saturday.

Applicants must book an appointment in advance on CTS website and submit their personal information online.

These online bookings have been available since the Hong Kong government announced the new visa on July 1.

The source said applicants could fill in the application form and make an appointment through the CTS website while waiting for their Notice of Application for Access to Information.

However, if they do not receive the notice by their appointment date, they will need to reschedule their booking, the source said.

Eligible residents need to fill in an application form with a recent photo within six months via the CTS website.

They are also required to have a Hong Kong permanent identity card, a passport valid for at least six months, as well as nationality certificates.

Applicants under 18 must be accompanied by their legal guardian with identity documents and papers that prove their relationship.

They will receive an email notification upon the preliminary verification of the submitted data and then be asked to select a specific CTS service centre and appointment time.

The information provided by the applicant online will be printed and verified during on-site processing, and the signed confirmation will serve as the official application form.

Applicants will need to submit their full name, date and place of birth, nationality, occupation, Hong Kong or Macau telephone number and relevant residential documents issued by authorities.

They will also need to provide details about their passports and any visas issued by mainland authorities.

The application form on the CTS website will also ask for emergency contacts from Hong Kong, Macau or the mainland.

CTS Hong Kong chairman Perry Yiu Pak-leung said the permit would be issued within 20 working days after the application was accepted.

He added the entire application procedures were similar to the current process of applying for a return-home permit online, but without a “fast pass” arrangement.

The first application will cost HK$260 (US$33), with renewals or replacements on the mainland costing 230 yuan (US$32).

Applicants must provide a photo that is a full-face coloured picture with white background, without a hat or glasses. The photo must be taken over the past six months.

Applicants may use the instant photo service provided in the lobbies of the CTS service centres. The photo will be immediately transmitted to an inspection system for approval.

Digital photos that pass the requirement will be directly uploaded to the processing unit and printed as physical copies. Applicants can then proceed with the application process by presenting the qualified bar code from the printed photo.

Photos taken elsewhere will need to passed by the inspection system before the application may proceed.

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Philippines denies South China Sea damage claims, says ‘it’s China’ that harmed corals

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3269718/philippines-denies-south-china-sea-damage-claims-says-its-china-harmed-corals?utm_source=rss_feed

The Philippines rejected on Tuesday China’s accusation that its grounded warship on the contested Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea had damaged the coral reef ecosystem in the area, laying the blame for damaging the marine environment on Beijing.

The Philippine task force on the South China Sea in a statement called for an independent, third-party marine scientific assessment of the causes of coral reef damage in the South China Sea.

“It is China who has been found to have caused irreparable damage to corals. It is China that has caused untold damage to the maritime environment, and jeopardised the natural habitat and the livelihood of thousands of Filipino fisherfolk,” the task force said.

On Monday, China’s Ministry of Natural Resources said in a report that the Philippine warship has been “illegally beached” around Second Thomas Shoal near what it calls Nansha Islands for a long time, “and it has seriously damaged the diversity, stability and sustainability of the reef ecosystem”.

The Philippines and Beijing have been embroiled in confrontations at the Second Thomas Shoal where Manila maintains a rusting warship, BRP Sierra Madre, that it beached in 1999 to reinforce maritime claims. A small crew is stationed on it.

China has in turn dredged sand and coral to build artificial islands in the South China Sea, which it says is normal construction activity on its territory, but which other nations say is aimed at enforcing its claim to the waterway.

A report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies last year found China’s construction activity buried more than 4,600 acres (1,861 acres) of reef.

China claims almost all of the vital waterway, where US$3 trillion worth of trade passes annually, including parts claimed by the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

But The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2016 found China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea had no legal basis. Beijing does not accept the ruling.

The Philippine task force, which warned of attempts by “Chinese experts” to sow disinformation and conduct malign influence, said it has evidence that China has been responsible for “severe damage to corals” in several areas in the South China Sea, including in Scarborough Shoal and Sabina Shoal.

Last year, the Philippines said it was exploring legal options against China, accusing it of destruction of coral reefs within its exclusive economic zone in the South China Sea, an allegation rejected by Beijing as an attempt to “create political drama”.

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To counter China, NATO and its Asian partners are moving closer under US leadership

https://apnews.com/article/nato-japan-south-korea-australia-new-zealand-6c3d9aa6fccc1253ca99ee140073f95cPeople walk inside of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, which has been decorated with signage in preparation for the NATO Summit, Monday, July 8, 2024. New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Australia are sending leaders or their deputies to the NATO summit in Washington this week as the military alliance shows growing interest beyond Europe and the Western Hemisphere. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

2024-07-09T04:07:50Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the third year of the war in Ukraine, NATO is set to deepen relations with its four Indo-Pacific partners, which, although not part of the military alliance, are gaining prominence as Russia and China forge closer ties to counter the United States and the two Koreas support opposing sides of the conflict in Europe.

The leaders of New Zealand, Japan and South Korea for the third year in a row will attend the NATO summit, which starts Tuesday in Washington, D.C., while Australia will send its deputy prime minister. China will be following the summit closely, worried by the alliance’s growing interest beyond Europe and the Western Hemisphere.

“Increasingly, partners in Europe see challenges halfway around the world in Asia as being relevant to them, just as partners in Asia see challenges halfway around the world in Europe as being relevant to them,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week at the Brookings Institution.

America’s top diplomat said the U.S. has been working to break down barriers between European alliances, Asian coalitions and other partners worldwide. “That’s part of the new landscape, the new geometry that we’ve put in place.”

Countries with shared security concerns are strengthening ties as competition escalates between the United States and China. Washington is trying to curb Beijing’s ambition to challenge the U.S.-led world order, which the Chinese government dismisses as a Cold War mentality aimed at containing China’s inevitable rise.

On Monday, Beijing responded angrily to unconfirmed reports that NATO and its four Indo-Pacific partners are expected to release a document laying out their relationship and ability to respond jointly to threats from cyberattacks and disinformation.

Lin Jian, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, accused NATO of “breaching its boundary, expanding its mandate, reaching beyond its defense zone and stoking confrontation.”

The war in Ukraine, which has pitted the West against Russia and its friends, has bolstered the argument for closer cooperation between the U.S., Europe and their Asian allies. “Ukraine of today may be East Asia of tomorrow,” Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told the U.S. Congress in April.

The U.S. and South Korea accused Pyongyang of supplying Russia with ammunition, while Russian President Vladimir Putin visited North Korea last month and signed a pact with leader Kim Jong Un that envisions mutual military assistance.

South Korea and Japan, meanwhile, are sending military supplies and aid to Ukraine. The U.S. also says China is providing Russia with machine tools, microelectronics and other technology that allow it to make weapons to use against Ukraine.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will bring to Washington “a strong message regarding the military cooperation between Russia and North Korea and discuss ways to enhance cooperation among NATO allies and Indo-Pacific partners,” his principal deputy national security adviser, Kim Tae-hyo, told reporters Friday.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said discussions would “focus on our collective efforts to support the rules-based system.”

The partnership does not make NATO a direct player in the Indo-Pacific but allows it to coordinate with the four partners on issues of mutual concern, said Mirna Galic, senior policy analyst on China and East Asia at the U.S. Institute of Peace. For example, she wrote in an analysis, they can share information and align on actions such as sanctions and aid delivery but do not intervene in military crises outside of their own regions.

The NATO summit will allow the United States and its European and Indo-Pacific allies to push back against China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, according to Luis Simon, director of the Centre for Security Diplomacy and Strategy at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

“The fact that the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific alliances are structured around a clear anchor — U.S. military power — makes them more cohesive and gives them a strategic edge as compared to the sort of interlocking partnerships that bind China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” Simon wrote in a commentary last week on War On the Rocks, a defense and foreign affairs website.

Beijing is worried by NATO’s pivot to the east, said Zhu Feng, dean of the School of International Studies at Nanjing University in eastern China. Beijing has insisted that NATO not interfere in security affairs in the Indo-Pacific and that it should change its view of China as a strategic adversary.

“NATO should consider China as a positive force for the regional peace and stability and for global security,” Zhu said. “We also hope the Ukraine war can end as soon as possible ... and we have rejected a return to the triangular relation with Russia and North Korea.”

“In today’s volatile and fragile world, Europe, the U.S. and China should strengthen global and regional cooperation,” Zhu said.

NATO and China had little conflict until tensions grew between Beijing and Washington in 2019, the same year the NATO summit in London raised China as a “challenge” that “we need to address together as an alliance.” Two years later, NATO upgraded China to a “systemic challenge” and said Beijing was “cooperating militarily with Russia.”

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, leaders of Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand attended a NATO summit for the first time, where statements noted the geopolitical challenges China poses. Beijing accused NATO of “cooperating with the U.S. government for an all-around suppression of China.”

Now, Beijing is worried that Washington is forming a NATO-like alliance in the Indo-Pacific.

Chinese Senior Col. Cao Yanzhong, a researcher at China’s Institute of War Studies, asked U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last month whether the U.S. was trying to create an Asian version of NATO by emphasizing partnerships and alliances. They include a U.S. grouping with Britain and Australia; another with Australia, India and Japan; and one with Japan and South Korea.

“What implications do you think the strengthening of the U.S. alliance system in the Asia-Pacific will have on this region’s security and stability?” Cao asked at the Shangri-la Dialogue security summit in Singapore.

Austin replied that the U.S. was simply working with “like-minded countries with similar values and a common vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Beijing has its own conclusion.

“The real intent of the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy is to integrate all small circles into a big circle as the Asian version of NATO in order to maintain the hegemony as led by the United States,” Chinese Lt. Gen. Jing Jianfeng said at the forum.

___

AP researcher Chen Wanqing in Beijing contributed to this report.

English of self-taught China courier dazzles Cadillac boss so much he joins delivery rounds

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3269275/english-self-taught-china-courier-dazzles-cadillac-boss-so-much-he-joins-delivery-rounds?utm_source=rss_feed

A humble courier in China who spent nearly a decade diligently teaching himself English did such a good job that he impressed the vice-president of a luxury car company.

Yi Xun, 39, from Hunan province in central China, shares his delivery route experiences in English on Douyin and has attracted 1.25 million followers.

The tiny attic in his home, with its bare brick walls and room for only one person, is his classroom.

Starting from scratch, Yi bought a phonetic chart, piles of exercise books and watched countless online teaching videos.

He delivers meals by day and studies English at night. He also keeps learning materials in his delivery box.

“When I’m waiting for orders, I watch English videos on my phone, and I listen to English songs with my earphones while riding my motorbike,” he said.

His dream is to take the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam and leave his courier job to become a bilingual tour guide.

“I believe knowledge changes destiny,” he said.

In China, food delivery workers earn between one and nine yuan (14 US cents and US$1.2) per order, depending on the delivery distance.

On June 17, Yi posted a video of himself wearing his yellow delivery uniform, standing in front of a Cadillac worth about 300,000 yuan (US$41,000) and saying: “Only 400,000 more deliveries until I can afford this Cadillac. Let’s keep going.”

In the video, he wipes the Cadillac badge with a tissue and says admiringly in English: “Congratulations to this person for becoming a distinguished Cadillac owner.”

The video went viral on mainland social media, attracting 2.6 million likes on Douyin.

Cadillac’s vice-president, Tim Heile, responded with a video encouraging Yi to continue pursuing his dreams.

“I love your passion for Cadillac, this is amazing. Keep on chasing your dreams. All greatness always comes for daring to begin with,” Heile said.

A few days later, the executive flew to Hunan to meet Yi and joined him in his work, experiencing the challenges of being a food delivery man.

He delivered food to the sixth floor using only stairs because there was no lift in the building.

After completing it, he was out of breath and said: “That was exhausting. I’m really tired.”

He then gave Yi a travel voucher for a family trip and a model car, and invited him for a ride in a Cadillac.

Yi’s story resonated on mainland social media.

“Rewards and opportunities always come to those who are bold and hardworking. I’m waiting for the day you become a bilingual tour guide,” one online observer wrote on Weibo.

North Korea’s shifting satellite allegiance to Russia signals China’s waning influence

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3269585/north-koreas-shifting-satellite-allegiance-russia-signals-chinas-waning-influence?utm_source=rss_feed

Pyongyang’s recent switch from a Chinese to a Russian satellite to broadcast its state television highlights Beijing’s weakening influence over North Korea, analysts say.

Closer ties between Pyongyang and Moscow could be a “burden” for Beijing, which does not want to be portrayed as the “leader of an axis,” they said.

Meanwhile North Korea and Russia have stepped up their diplomatic and military collaboration on the Ukraine war.

According to global TV and radio satellite data intelligence website LyngSat, North Korean state-run broadcasters, such as Korean Central Television, started transmitting its overseas broadcast through a Russian satellite, Ekspress 103, from June 20, leaving ChinaSat 12 satellite by July 1.

A South Korean ministry of unification official announced on Monday that North Korea had switched the transmission of its state TV broadcasts from a Chinese to Russian satellite, complicating the monitoring of Pyongyang’s broadcasts.

Government agencies and media in Seoul have monitored North Korean state media, which is one of the limited outbound sources of information from the reclusive state.

Kang Jun-young, a professor of Chinese studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, said the satellite switch meant science and technology cooperation between North Korea and Russia was intensifying.

“Pyongyang is also sending a message to China that it is inevitable for North Korea to strengthen cooperation with Russia because of Beijing’s lukewarm support of the country.”

Moscow and Pyongyang are both isolated by international sanctions. Their closer relationship has drawn accusations of dealing arms, including that ammunition from North Korea is supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in exchange for Russia providing aid and suspected technological aid for North Korea’s satellite development programme.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang in June, where he met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and signed a “treaty on the comprehensive strategic partnership” that calls the other signatory to come to their aid if either is under attack.

Putin’s visit followed Kim’s trip to Russia’s far east in September last year when he visited Russian aerospace and weapons facilities.

Cho Han-bum, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Russia and North Korea’s new treaty on comprehensive strategic partnership was “quite a burden” for China.

“Because, until now, North Korea’s only ally was China and, in fact, only China had been able to intervene in North Korea in times of emergency. However, after this treaty, which is evaluated as a paramilitary alliance treaty … Russia can now intervene,” Cho said.

“So, it is true that China’s exclusive influence over North Korea has been reduced. And given that North Korea’s dependence on China is almost 95 per cent in terms of trade volume, as North Korea-Russia trade and North Korea-Russia relations expand, North Korea will have more relative autonomy in terms of diplomacy and security from China.”

According to Cho, North Korea’s switching out satellite channels from entirely Chinese to Russian will weaken its dependence and “symbolically represents weakening dependence on China”.

Beijing has remained mostly silent over the Moscow-Pyongyang military ties. On the new treaty between the two countries, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said the summit was a bilateral exchange between Russia and North Korea, but did not elaborate further.

While Chinese President Xi Jinping has met Putin several times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Beijing has said it is not supplying arms and dual-use components to support the Russian military.

Xi’s last meeting with Kim was in June 2019 when he visited North Korea.

Ramon Pacheco Pardo, an international relations professor at King’s College London, said North Korea had traditionally played the Soviet Union and China against each other, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China had the “upper hand” over Russia in terms of influence over North Korea.

“But it seems that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed the situation, since for the first time Russia is in need of something that North Korea is willing to offer: munitions and weapons,” Pacheco Pardo said.

“Thus, I think that Kim Jong-un will play this to his country’s advantage, seeking to extract as much from Moscow as possible while showing to China that, at least for now, its relationship with Russia is stronger.”

Pacheco Pardo said while China would try to maintain a degree of influence over North Korea, Beijing will not “go overboard” in the face of closer ties between Moscow and Pyongyang.

“China doesn’t seem to be comfortable in being portrayed as the leader of an axis also including Russia, North Korea or Iran,” Pacheco Pardo said. “Beijing probably thinks that the relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang is based on mutual, short-term interests that will weaken once Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is over.”

Cho echoed the view that the close relations between North Korea and Russia could be “temporary” because of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which has become an unlimited war of attrition.

He said China would view the close ties between the two countries as “uncomfortable” but it would need Russia to contain Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Cho said Beijing would hope to recover its influence over Pyongyang after the Ukraine war ended.

“Because North Korea has been preparing for an all-out war for a long time, it has an ammunition inventory and production system in place. So, the reason Russia signed a de facto paramilitary alliance with North Korea is because of Russia’s urgency,” he said.

“China has the industrial potential that North Korea needs, not Russia. So, despite the close ties between North Korea and Russia, the need for North Korea-China relations still remains for North Korea. China also needs to manage North Korea as a strategic asset.”

David Maxwell, vice-president of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Strategy, said North Korea would continue to try to improve relations with Russia but the ties would remain “transactional” – and would result in strengthening another alliance.

“All of these activities have the opposite effect of what North Korea and Russia, and even China, are trying to do because their activities drive the US, the ROK [Republic of Korea] and Japan closer together,” said Maxwell, who is a retired US Special Forces colonel.

“And so I think that rather than weaken the alliances, it just makes them stronger.”

Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said although North Korea and China were trying to avoid exposing each other’s disharmony to the outside world, their recent actions “clearly” exposed differences in their positions.

“China doesn’t want to directly intervene in the war in Ukraine, and in an intensifying strategic competition with the US, the relationship with European countries is important,” Park said. “For those European countries, the war in Ukraine poses an existential threat.

“China is trying to distance itself from North Korea and Russia, and so, China has [said it is] resolutely opposed to the so-called new cold-war structure.

“North Korea, on the other hand, disagrees. Kim Jong-un himself has said more than once that a new cold war has arrived in order to continue building a camp based on the solidarity between North Korea, China and Russia. In such a situation, China’s support is not at the desired level.”

South China Sea: Philippines coastguard appeals to Virgin Mary for divine intervention

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3269685/south-china-sea-philippines-coastguard-appeals-virgin-mary-divine-intervention?utm_source=rss_feed

Dozens of devotees gathered at a major Catholic cathedral outside Manila on Sunday, praying for divine intervention – with the help of a 17th century icon of the Virgin Mary – to address China’s aggression in the West Philippine Sea, Manila’s name for the parts of the South China Sea it claims.

The prayer service at the International Shrine of Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage in Antipolo city came amid rising tensions between the Philippines and China in the disputed waters. In recent months, these confrontations have even led to a Filipino sailor losing a thumb.

During the Sunday mass, the head chaplain of the Philippine Coast Guard, Lowie Palines, urged the congregation to pray for “our seas given to us by God”.

To bolster their maritime defence, he said the coastguard had asked the cathedral to create two replicas of the revered Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje, a 398-year-old brown Madonna carving from Mexico that once protected Spanish galleons on the perilous Manila-Acapulco trade route centuries ago.

The Catholic Church has a long history of invoking the Virgin Mary during times of crisis, Priest Robert Reyes told This Week in Asia.

“In different times in the history of the Church, Mary appeared and was involved in different crises that communities went through. And because of those crises, she was given specific titles,” Reyes said on Monday.

The Antipolo Cathedral’s icon, known as Our Lady of Peace, is just “one of the many titles given to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the son of God”, he said.

Another Mary statue, called Our Lady of Fatima, was carried by priests during the Philippines’ 1986 People Power Revolution and was credited with helping make the revolt peaceful and bloodless.

When he journeyed to the disputed Scarborough Shoal with the “Atin Ito” Coalition to distribute relief goods to fishermen in May, Reyes said he brought along with him the Stella Maris statue, or Mary as the Star of the Sea, which traditionally protects seafarers.

On his next trip, he plans to bring a replica of the Our Lady of the Holy Rosary of La Naval de Manila – a gold and ivory Marian figure said to have miraculously prevented Dutch invaders from conquering Manila in 1646.

However, Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, cautioned on Monday against the church adding “further fuel to the tension”.

“We are not political leaders, we are spiritual and moral leaders, and we know that our compatriots, people in the country are getting tense,” he said, adding: “Nobody wants a war”.

But others have been vocal in advocating for greater church involvement in the South China Sea conflict.

Last month, Archbishop Socrates Villegas, a former conference president, penned a pastoral letter entitled “Lord Save us! We are perishing!” warning of “insidious attempts by a foreign power that governs by an ideology that recognises no God and keeps all religion and the practice of faith under the heavy heel of its totalitarian boot to ‘trample our sacred shores’,” referencing the Philippine national anthem.

“Not only are our maritime zones usurped, and our fishermen evicted from their fishing grounds,” decried Villegas, the former right-hand man of the late Cardinal Jaime Sin. “Our marine environment is relentlessly wrecked as China endeavours to convert features into islands and militarised platforms.”

He stressed that the geopolitical situation has become “a profoundly moral issue” as many Filipino fishermen have been deprived of their livelihoods and forced “to rummage through the leftovers of Chinese poachers and encroachers”.

The Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, echoed the call for peaceful resolutions during a press briefing in Manila on July 2, stating that conflicts including in the South China Sea must be resolved peacefully and encouraging “parties in conflict to abide by international law”.

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[Sport] Chinese electric car maker agrees Turkish factory deal

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp08d1nq1y3o

Reuters

Republic of Türkiye Directorate of Communications

Kimchi-gate: China-South Korea culinary row breaks out over what to call spicy side dish

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3269677/kimchi-gate-china-south-korea-culinary-row-breaks-out-over-what-call-spicy-side-dish?utm_source=rss_feed

A heated international row has broken out over the most unlikely of culinary matters, kimchi.

Netizens in South Korea are demanding the Chinese word used for the spicy food be changed from la bai cai to xinqi to properly reflect their cultural identity.

Their calls have sparked a fierce backlash in China, with some people even calling for sanctions on cabbage exports from the mainland to South Korea.

The traditional Korean side dish made from fermented cabbage, salt and hot peppers, is served with almost every meal in the country and holds significant cultural importance.

Kimchi is also popular in other Asian countries, and has diverse names such as la bai cai (spicy white cabbage) and pao cai (fermented vegetables).

The recent controversy emerged from a Netflix reality show, Super-Rich in Korea, which debuted in May and showcases the extravagant lifestyles of wealthy individuals from Singapore, Italy and Pakistan who are living in South Korea.

In episode six, while the cast members were preparing kimchi, the Chinese subtitles translated it as la bai cai, leading to objections from Koreans.

They argued that this translation has Chinese cultural implications, prompting an online petition demanding Netflix correct the subtitles.

Professor Seo Kyung-duk of Sungshin Women’s University in the country’s capital Seoul also wrote to Netflix, demanding they rectify the error to “prevent global audiences from misunderstanding Korean history and culture”.

Known for addressing cultural debates between China and Korea, Seo has often faced criticism for his one-sided and aggressively anti-China stance.

For example, on January 28, he posted on X, calling for a change to the English term for the Chinese Spring Festival to Lunar New Year, arguing that the festival is celebrated in several Asian countries, not just China.

In response to the kimchi controversy, Netflix explained that la bai cai was initially chosen to facilitate better understanding because it is more familiar to overseas Chinese speakers.

However, it has updated the translation to xinqi, as recommended by the Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in 2021.

Despite the change, the term xinqi remains largely unknown to most Chinese speakers, who are more accustomed to la bai cai.

The kimchi issue is not new, at a press conference in January, Hua Chunying, Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of China, addressed it.

“Fermented vegetables are not unique to a few countries and regions. In China, it is called pao cai, while on the Korean peninsula and among the Korean ethnic group in China, it is known as kimchi.

“While they share similarities, they differ in ingredients, taste and preparation methods,” she said.

The minister emphasised the importance of maintaining friendly academic exchanges on culinary topics, urging parties to avoid biases that could lead to conflict.

This issue is further complicated by the fact that a significant portion of kimchi consumed in South Korea is made from Chinese-imported cabbages because they are cheaper.

A 2016 report from the World Institute of Kimchi stated that 89.9 per cent of food bought by South Korean restaurants was imported from China.

This fact has sparked further outrage on mainland social media.

“South Korea is so strange. They import their cabbage from China but claim kimchi as their own speciality,” one online observer said.

“They eat imported cabbage from us and then make such a fuss. We should stop supplying them with cabbage and see what they do. Or maybe, given the drought in Shandong province this year, double the price of exported cabbage,” said another.

“Isn’t it made from white cabbage? Isn’t it spicy? Then what’s wrong to call it ‘spicy white cabbage’? It’s far more straightforward and easy to understand,” another person chimed in.

China’s third plenum: implications for solar power, copper, steel, oil refining and grains

https://www.scmp.com/business/commodities/article/3269689/chinas-third-plenum-implications-solar-power-copper-steel-oil-refining-and-grains?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese commodities markets entered the second half with a bearish tilt, raising expectations that next week’s big policy meet in Beijing will show how the government plans to approach problems around overcapacity and faltering demand.

The third plenum is typically a forum for longer-term political and economic reforms, and the general sense among observers is that major initiatives are unlikely this time around. But tweaks to the policy framework could still be consequential.

There’s a view that China is likely to provide more support for its economic recovery, but investors do not have a clear idea of how raw materials-heavy it will be, said Paul Bloxham, HSBC Holdings’ chief economist for global commodities. “We are watching and waiting to see what gets delivered in the property, infrastructure and manufacturing sectors,” he said.

China is the world’s biggest importer of commodities and its dominant supplier of clean energy, so decisions taken in Beijing ripple across the world. Policies that address the energy transition, President Xi Jinping’s “new productive forces” in hi-tech industries and unified national markets are likely to have a direct impact on commodities supply and demand. Other areas that could provide cues for bulls and bears alike include the housing crisis, tax and debt issues, and rural reform.

The solar sector is going through a rough patch. Excess capacity and fierce competition have pushed prices to record lows. At the same time, the grid is struggling to cope with all the electricity generated by China’s world-beating roll-out of renewable energy. Solving the industry’s problems has become a leading priority for Beijing, which is counting on solar as one of the “new three” drivers of economic growth.

If the plenum focuses on unifying China’s highly regional markets, then the electricity grid would be a great place to start. A lot of China’s solar power comes from mega-bases in the interior, far from the country’s major cities. Nationwide trading that allows clean power to be delivered to where it’s needed, based on market prices, would help solve the industry’s issues with bottlenecks and wastage.

That could mean more spending on grid connections, which would also help raise demand for metals like copper and aluminium.

Copper has retreated from a record high in May after buyers in China balked at higher costs while the economy is gripped by factory deflation and a protracted property crisis. The pullback in prices has restore consumption to some degree. But to sustain that, the market may need to see more evidence that copper demand is central to Beijing’s plans to revive the economy.

Citigroup expects the plenum to deliver greater support from investment in the grid and clean energy, as well as more help for the property market. For all of copper’s green credentials, housing is still a major source of consumption, including from the appliances that often accompany a home purchase.

Xi’s plan to nurture emerging tech-heavy industries that will help China pivot from the old economy to the new could also be a focus. In the transport sector, that means electric vehicles, for sure, said Li Xuezhi, head of Chaos Ternary Research Institute. But measures to foster growth in the so-called low-altitude economy – drones and even flying cars – as well as more prosaic initiatives, like digital traffic management systems, would also boost demand for metals like copper and tin, he said.

The steel market remains a bastion of the old economy and has taken one of the biggest hits from the nation’s real estate woes. Even more property support at the plenum would hardly move the dial, because steel demand relies on new construction rather than cheaper mortgages or clearing unsold homes. And China simply does not need as many houses as it used to.

But restructuring the country’s finances away from heavily indebted local authorities could deliver a win for the market, according to Vivek Dhar, an analyst at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “A shift toward more central government debt and less local government debt opens up more spending potential,” he said.

That could mean more powder for state spending on public works – catnip to steel markets – although it must be said that Beijing has so far avoided the massive splurges that have characterised previous downturns. And infrastructure spending is becoming less steel intensive as the economy matures in any case.

Few markets are as threatened by China’s swing to clean energy as crude oil. The nation’s rapid acceptance of electric vehicles (EVs) means demand in the world’s top importer may already have peaked. Further policy support for EVs will not be popular among oil refiners staring at unprecedented overcapacity.

But the plenum could have another nasty surprise under the bonnet. Beijing may be considering measures to raise funds by broadening the tax take, an unwelcome development for the shadier corners of the industry that have already drawn scrutiny over their tax affairs, said Amy Sun, a project manager at GL Consulting in Guangzhou.

China’s independent refiners, or teapots, have a history of skirting taxes to shore up their razor thin margins. About 40 per cent of petrol and diesel sold by teapots wasn’t properly taxed last year, according to research from China National Petroleum Corp., the nation’s biggest oil company.

Reform would “motivate local authorities to monitor tax compliance by the independent refiners, leaving limited space for tax evasion,” Sun said. That could crush profits even further in a sector that accounts for about a quarter of the nation’s oil processing. The upshot may be fewer teapots, according to Sun – and a solution of sorts to the nation’s capacity glut.

Rural reform and food security continue to top Beijing’s agenda. The long view is that, as vast as the country is, it does not have enough farmland relative to the number of its citizens. China has just 7 per cent of the world’s arable land but feeds about 20 per cent of the global population, according to research from JPM Morgan Chase & Co., with any shortfalls made up by imports.

But there are short-term stresses that Beijing may need to address. Farmers have seen their incomes slump as ample supply combines with poor demand to weaken prices for staples like wheat and corn. At the same time, an increasingly erratic climate – in recent weeks there have been floods in the south and drought in the north – poses a longer term threat to domestic output, which could force the country to lean more heavily on imports.

Freeing up more arable land, giving farmers the financial backing to take advantage, and buttressing the country’s ability to swiftly recover from extreme weather events, could all be among measures announced at the plenum.

Chinese developers scramble as OpenAI blocks access in China

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/09/chinese-developers-openai-blocks-access-in-china-artificial-intelligence

At the World AI Conference in Shanghai last week, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies, SenseTime, unveiled its latest model, SenseNova 5.5.

The model showed off its ability to identify and describe a stuffed toy puppy (wearing a SenseTime cap), offered feedback on a drawing of a rabbit, and instantly read and summarised a page of text. According to SenseTime, SenseNova 5.5 is comparable with GPT-4o, the flagship artificial intelligence model of the Microsoft-backed US company OpenAI.

If that wasn’t enough to entice users, SenseTime is also giving away 50m free tokens – digital credits for using the AI – and says that it will deploy staff to help new clients migrate from OpenAI services to SenseTime’s products for free.

Chinese attempts to lure domestic developers away from OpenAI – considered the market leader in generative AI – will now be a lot easier, after OpenAI notified its users in China that they would be blocked from using its tools and services from 9 July.

“We are taking additional steps to block API traffic from regions where we do not support access to OpenAI’s services,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg last month.

OpenAI has not elaborated about the reason for its sudden decision. ChatGPT is already blocked in China by the government’s firewall, but until this week developers could use virtual private networks to access OpenAI’s tools in order to fine-tune their own generative AI applications and benchmark their own research. Now the block is coming from the US side.

Rising tensions between Washington and Beijing have prompted the US to restrict the export to China of certain advanced semiconductors that are vital for training the most cutting-edge AI technology, putting pressure on other parts of the AI industry.

The OpenAI move has “caused significant concern within China’s AI community” said Xiaohu Zhu, the founder of the Shanghai-based Centre for Safe AGI, which promotes AI safety, not least because “the decision raises questions about equitable access to AI technologies globally”.

But it has also created an opportunity for domestic AI companies such as SenseTime, which are scrambling to hoover up OpenAI’s rejected users. After warnings about OpenAI’s decision circulated last month, Baidu offered 50m free tokens for its Ernie 3.5 AI model, as well as free migration services, while Zhipu AI, another local company, offered 150m free tokens for its model. Tencent Cloud is giving away 100m free tokens for its AI model to new users until the end of July. “Competitors are offering migration pathways for former OpenAI users, seeing this as an opportunity to expand their user base,” said Zhu.

One consequence of OpenAI’s decision may be that it accelerates the development of Chinese AI companies, which are in tight competition with their US rivals, as well as each other. China is estimated to have at least 130 large language models, accounting for 40% of the world’s total and second only to the US. But while US companies such as OpenAI have been at the cutting edge of generative AI, Chinese companies have been engaged in a price war that some analysts have speculated may harm their profit margins and their ability to innovate. Still, Winston Ma, a professor at New York University who writes about Chinese technology, said OpenAI’s departure from China comes “at a time when Chinese big tech players are closing on performance gap with OpenAI and are offering these Chinese LLM models essentially free”.

“OpenAI’s departure is a short-term shock to the China market, but it may provide a long-term opportunity for Chinese domestic LLM models to be put to the real test,” said Ma. Until now, Chinese companies have focused on the commercialisation of large language models rather than advancing the models themselves, he added.

Chinese commentators have been keen to brush off the impact of OpenAI’s decision. State media outlet the Global Times said it was “a push from the US to hamper China’s technology development”. Pan Helin, a digital economy researcher at Zhejiang University who sits on a government technology committee, described the development as “a good thing for China’s large-scale model independence and self-reliance”, according to Chinese media.

But there are signs that the US restrictions on China’s AI industry are starting to bite. The online video giant Kuaishou recently had to restrict the number of people who could access its new text-to-video AI model, Kling, because of a lack of computing capacity caused by a shortage of chips, according to a report in The Information. And there is now a booming hidden market for US semiconductors, as companies find ways to circumvent the sanctions. Being blocked from US software may inspire similar creativity.

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South China Sea: is Beijing abusing Philippines talks to mask its ‘policy of aggression’?

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3269649/south-china-sea-beijing-abusing-philippines-talks-mask-its-policy-aggression?utm_source=rss_feed

Despite pledges to de-escalate tensions in the South China Sea, analysts and sources familiar with Beijing and Manila’s negotiations allege that China is exploiting the bilateral talks as a strategy to legitimise its control over disputed maritime territory in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

Following the latest round of the China-Philippines Bilateral Consultation Mechanism (BCM) on the South China Sea, held in Manila on July 2, the Philippine government acknowledged that “significant differences remain” between the two countries’ positions.

The Philippine foreign ministry vowed to be “relentless in protecting its interests and upholding its sovereignty, sovereign rights and jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea” – the local designation for the parts of the South China Sea claimed by Manila.

In contrast, China’s foreign ministry said the two sides had a “candid and constructive exchange of views” during the BCM, while reasserting Beijing’s sovereignty over the Spratly Islands, including the Second Thomas Shoal – territory that falls within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, according to a 2016 international arbitral ruling.

The ruling by the United Nations International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) rejected China’s expansive “nine-dash line” claims over much of the South China Sea. However, Beijing has dismissed the tribunal’s decision as illegitimate, since it did not participate in the arbitration, and maintains its sovereignty assertions over areas within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

A senior government source familiar with the negotiations, speaking anonymously as they were not authorised to discuss the matter publicly, accused China of trying to “impose a habit and status quo on Filipinos that it is right for them to be [within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone], and that we have to ask their permission and coordinate with them” regarding the Second Thomas Shoal.

The source said the Philippine government’s diplomatic objective is to “resolve the dispute”, but asserted that China’s true goal is to compel Manila to accept the status quo in which Beijing controls and occupies parts of Philippine territory.

In 1999, the Philippines grounded the World War II-era BRP Sierra Madre warship on the Second Thomas Shoal to serve as a military outpost strengthening its position in the disputed region. The outpost has recently become a flashpoint between the two countries.

A routine resupply mission to the outpost turned violent on June 17 when Chinese vessels allegedly rammed a Philippine special forces boat, causing a soldier to lose his thumb in the chaos.

Beijing alleges the resupply missions are intended to reinforce the Philippines’ position on the shoal and claims they violate a “secret” agreement made with Manila earlier this year, as well as Asean’s 2002 declaration that all parties should maintain the status quo in the South China Sea.

Manila has denied entering any agreement with China, noting the BRP Sierra Madre’s 1999 beaching predated the Philippines’ signing of the Asean declaration.

The senior government source accused China of a pattern where “they come, use force, occupy, the tension goes up, then they apply diplomacy … to deflect international tension, and then tension goes down. But at the end of the day, they are there, and the new status quo is generated.”

The source argued this aligns with China’s “policy of aggression” – seizing features in the Paracel Islands from Vietnam in the 1970s, where “more than 50 died, and the world did not complain”, and now attempting to control the Second Thomas Shoal, Scarborough Shoal and Sabina Shoal, all within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

Another government source pointed to Mischief Reef as an example of China normalising its territorial seizures. In 1994, China told the Philippines it was building a fishermen’s shelter, but by 1995 it had transformed the site into a reinforced bunker, despite Manila’s protests. Today, it is a sprawling military island with a runway, radar equipment, anti-aircraft weapons and missile defences.

Lucio Blanco Pitlo, president of the Philippine Association of Chinese Studies and Research fellow at Asia Pacific Pathways to Progress, told This Week in Asia that while Beijing had indeed used negotiations to consolidate control over Mischief Reef, China’s “near control” of Scarborough Shoal resulted from the Philippines filing its arbitration case with ITLOS.

He noted that Beijing’s attempts to seize the shoal occurred between the Philippines filing its case in 2013 and the 2016 decision.

“China pounced on the Philippine arbitration to justify controlling though not yet physically occupying” Scarborough Shoal, Pitlo said. “Portraying the Philippine move as lawfare, China capitalised on it to form new land in the sea.”

He explained that once a feature in the South China Sea is occupied, the only way to dislodge the occupier is “through force or deception”. So claimants invest in building infrastructure and fortifying outposts to cement their control, “make new facts on the ground” and deny rivals opportunities to “upset the status quo”.

Chester Cabalza of the International Development and Security Cooperation think tank in Manila said China had agreed to the BCM because Manila was getting stronger, backed by the US and its allies. He suggested that binding terms should have been agreed upon to hold Beijing accountable for any breaches.

Cabalza also noted that China’s post-BCM statement effectively claimed ownership of the entire West Philippine Sea, which he called “false and disinformation”.

China says grounded Philippine warship harms Second Thomas Shoal marine life and must be removed

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3269665/china-says-grounded-philippine-warship-harms-second-thomas-shoal-marine-life-and-must-be-removed?utm_source=rss_feed

The Philippine warship grounded 25 years ago at the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea has caused serious harm to the marine environment there and must be removed immediately to stop the damage, the Chinese government said on Monday.

The investigation report released by China’s Ministry of Natural Resources concluded that the BRP Sierra Madre, which the Philippine navy ran aground in 1999 to serve as an outpost in the disputed waters, has “seriously damaged the diversity, stability and sustainability of the coral reef ecosystems”.

It was Beijing’s latest statement regarding the South China Sea hotspot where clashes have occurred repeatedly between China and the Philippines for more than a year.

“The Philippines should remove the warship and eliminate the source of the pollution to avoid persistent and cumulative harm to the coral reef ecosystem of Renai Reef,” the ministry said, referring to the reef by its Chinese name.

“Only by eliminating the source of pollution can we avoid continuing and cumulative harm to the Renai Reef coral reef ecosystem,” Xiong Xiaofei, chief scientist of the South China Sea Ecological Centre, operated under the ministry’s auspices, was quoted by China’s state media as saying.

China claims nearly the entire South China Sea but the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam claim various overlapping areas.

The latest conclusion is based on assessments that used satellite sensing technology and on-the-spot studies conducted from April to June this year, the ministry said.

It found severe destruction of coral cover, disruption of the ecological balance of the benthic invertebrate population, heavy metal contamination, active phosphate and oil pollution, and human waste such as fishing nets, especially in waters surrounding the Sierra Madre.

The US transferred the retired World War II warship to the Philippine navy in 1976, which used it as a transport up through the 1990s. Its grounding, the report concluded, had caused “fatal damage to the coral reef ecosystem”, which would not recover unless the Sierra Madre is removed. Rusting of the ship’s hull and the discharge of human waste by Philippine soldiers stationed on it caused “long-term hazards to the healthy growth of the coral”.

The Second Thomas Shoal, known in the Philippines as the Ayungin Shoal, is within the 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone of the Philippines but also claimed by China.

Since early 2023, there have been repeated incidents over Manila’s replenishment for troops stationed on the vessel. China has blocked Philippine resupply efforts to the outpost, leading to confrontations between the two sides.

Beijing said it had a “gentleman’s agreement” with the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, who made improving ties with China a priority during his tenure, about the replenishment arrangement.

However, Duterte’s successor, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr, who took office in 2022 has denied such a deal existed, and tensions between Beijing and Manila have escalated.

The most recent and serious confrontation occurred on June 17, when, according to Manila, a Chinese coastguard vessel rammed a Philippine resupply ship, injuring eight Philippine sailors, including one who lost his thumb.

China rejected that account, saying Philippine vessels attacked Chinese boats.

Crying shame: China father tells daughter, 3, to fill bowl with tears as TV punishment

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3269042/crying-shame-china-father-tells-daughter-3-fill-bowl-tears-tv-punishment?utm_source=rss_feed

A father in China has attracted controversy for telling his three-year-old daughter to fill a bowl with her tears as punishment for watching too much television.

The incident happened last month when the father, who lives in Yulin, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in southern China, was preparing supper and told his daughter to come to the dining table, Yantai TV reported.

The father, who was not identified, realised the girl, nicknamed Jiajia, was so engrossed in a television show that she had not heard him.

In a rage, he switched off the television, which made his daughter burst into tears.

He then brought a big empty bowl to her and said: “You can watch TV again when your tears fill up this bowl.”

A viral video filmed and released on Douyin by her mother, showed the little girl holding the bowl under her face to collect her tears, and squeezing her eyes in an effort to produce more.

More than 10 seconds later, she told her parents her hands were exhausted from holding the bowl and said: “It is impossible for me to manage this task.”

Her father then told her to smile for him. The image of the girl grinning with tears on her face amused her parents, the mother said.

The clip of the tearful girl trended on mainland social media, receiving 220,000 likes on Douyin alone.

While many people said Jiajia was an adorable child, others left comments criticising her father.

“When you are old and cannot take care of yourself, your daughter will give you a bowl and tell you to fill it with your tears before you can have food,” one online observer said.

“Educating the kid like this will make them develop negative character traits. Kids have learned that they can solve the problem through extreme means,” another person said.

Stories about harsh parenting are popular in China.

In 2022, a father in central Hubei province asked his rebellious 11-year-old daughter to dig for lotus roots in the blazing sun for hours so she would realise the value of academic study.

Other parents adopt the opposite approach by overindulging their children.

Earlier this year, a father in Shanxi province, central China, knelt before his teenage daughter in the street and apologised because he could not afford to buy her an iPhone.

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Unemployment in China

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/series/3269159/unemployment-china?utm_source=rss_feed

China professor spots boy reading Murphy’s Law book on train, asks him to visit top university

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3269271/china-professor-spots-boy-reading-murphys-law-book-train-asks-him-visit-top-university?utm_source=rss_feed

A seven-year-old boy on a crowded train in China, who was reading about a subject considered far beyond his age group, was spotted by a professor from Peking University, who invited him to visit the institution.

Sitting on the floor, the boy, who has not been identified, was deeply engrossed in a book titled Murphy’s Law, a psychological text famous for producing the saying, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”.

The book outlines a range of psychological and sociological principles.

He caught the attention of another passenger, Zhao Baisheng, a professor and doctoral supervisor at Peking University’s Institute of World Literature in the School of Foreign Languages.

Struck by the boy’s concentration and what he was reading, Zhao initiated a conversation.

“What grade are you in, young boy?” Zhao asked.

“He is about to move from first to second grade,” replied the boy’s mother, who was standing nearby.

“That is impressive. I need to learn from you,” Zhao said.

Zhao discussed educational subjects with the boy’s mother and then invited them to visit Peking University.

“The little boy was thrilled to hear that my mentor is a Peking University professor,” recalled a student who was with professor Zhao at the time, and who shared the story on Douyin.

Unfortunately, the boy’s family was only visiting Beijing from their hometown in Hebei province, northern China, for four days, and did not have time to make a trip to the university.

“I hope my child will meet the professor through his own efforts,” said the mother, who is encouraging her son to study hard so he can earn a place at Peking University.

The story resonated widely online.

“The child will surely be inspired and strive harder. A beam of light has shone on him, showing him the way,” said one online observer.

“Such positive, intangible guidance has great power. Perhaps many years from now, the little boy will arrive at Peking University with his enrolment letter,” another person said.

Others criticised the inaccurate reporting of some mainland media.

After the video was posted on Douyin, some media outlets said that a Peking University professor had “recruited a student” on the subway, sparking online controversy.

On July 3, Zhao clarified to the mainland news outlet Hongxing News that there was no “recruitment”, emphasising that he was merely inspired by the child and wanted to encourage him.

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Japan wants answers over Chinese buoy found in remote contested waters

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3269635/japan-wants-answers-over-chinese-buoy-found-remote-contested-waters?utm_source=rss_feed

A mysterious Chinese buoy detected in waters claimed by Japan has set off alarm bells in Tokyo, with analysts warning it could be part of a broader campaign to challenge the country’s maritime claims.

The buoy was discovered last week near Okinotorishima, a tiny remote atoll 1,730km south of Tokyo and the southernmost feature claimed by Japan. Though China and other have argued that the coral reef does not qualify as an island under UN definitions, Japan insists it can use the outpost to extend its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

Underscoring the political tensions, Japan said it was not informed about the buoy’s placement and has demanded an explanation from China on its purpose. Though analysts believe it is likely a weather monitoring device, they warn it could also have other tracking capabilities.

“It is regrettable that a buoy was placed without providing details of its purpose,” Tokyo’s top government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi said on Friday, vowing that Japanese authorities would closely monitor the situation.

Experts say the dispute over Okinotorishima underscores the broader challenges Asian nations face in defining and defending their maritime boundaries in an era of growing competition over strategic waterways and resources.

“Japan is ticked off about this, but there is an argument that it does not have a particularly strong case,” said James Brown, an international-relations professor at Temple University’s Tokyo campus.

He pointed out that a nation’s EEZ is not sovereign territory, but rather an area off its coast where it has exclusive rights to economic activities.

“But others are free to enter those waters and, by some interpretations, other countries are even able to carry out military exercises in those waters, for example,” he said.

The debate centres around whether Japan can claim the waters 370km in every direction around Okinotorishima as its EEZ. The tiny atoll is largely submerged at high tide, with only two small islets measuring just 9.4 square metres remaining above the water line – and even those were built up with concrete by Japan, Brown told This Week in Asia.

“This is not an island by any stretch of the imagination, and when Japan criticises China for building on islands in the South China Sea and claiming those … it’s easy to see why Tokyo can be accused of hypocrisy,” he said.

In response to Tokyo’s protests, observers say Beijing is likely to argue that it has the right to station the device in the area to carry out research.

China’s position is that Okinotorishima does not meet the United Nations’ definition of an island large enough to support human habitation, meaning Japan has no claim to the surrounding 400,000 sq km of ocean. This view is also supported by South Korea and Taiwan.

Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor of politics and international relations at Tokyo’s Waseda University, said Beijing has likely paid close attention to recent deep-sea research confirming the presence of an estimated 230 million tonnes of polymetallic nodules containing valuable minerals like cobalt, nickel, and manganese in nearby waters.

“China is interested in securing access to these critical minerals and will be closely monitoring Japanese research and, in the future, recovery efforts from the seabed,” Shigemura said.

The buoy could be equipped to gather weather data as well as information on ocean conditions, which would be valuable intelligence for the Chinese military, the professor suggested.

“Japan is very angry that the buoy was placed there without China even telling Tokyo, but there is not much that Japan can do other than filing a diplomatic complaint because, under international law, what they have done is not illegal.”

Brown echoed this assessment, saying he would be “astonished” if Japan tried to claim the buoy was engaging in illegal economic activities and that Tokyo had the legal right to remove it.

“The priority for Japan is to maintain stable relations with China, and the last thing they want right now is to provoke a diplomatic crisis [over this incident],” he said.

Brown said the potential for a maritime clash to derail bilateral relations was demonstrated in 2010, when the captain and crew of a Chinese fishing trawler were arrested by the Japanese coastguard after entering Japan’s EEZ around the Chinese-claimed Diaoyu Islands, which Tokyo administers and calls the Senkakus.

This incident caused a sharp downturn in China-Japan relations, with Beijing demanding the release of the fishermen and cancelling planned high-level talks. Protests also erupted in Chinese cities, targeting Japanese diplomatic facilities and businesses.

Brown said he thought it was likely that Tokyo would respond to the latest incident “with just a diplomatic protest”.

“From the [perspective of the] Chinese side, the main role of this buoy is political,” he said. “It is a way of saying that even though Japan claims those waters as its EEZ, China is within its rights to carry out scientific research.”

If Tokyo were to make a scene about the incident it could prompt China to place additional monitoring buoys within areas claimed by Japan, Brown cautioned.

If China is looking to undermine Japan’s maritime claims “a buoy can function in much the same way as sending coastguard vessels into waters around the Senkaku Islands,” he said. “It becomes a permanent incursion.”

Chinese spa worker pleads not guilty to ‘murder for hire’ plot in New York

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3269686/chinese-spa-worker-pleads-not-guilty-murder-hire-plot-new-york?utm_source=rss_feed

A Chinese national appeared in a New York court on Monday charged with offering cryptocurrency, cash and sexual favours in an alleged plot to kill her lover’s wife and daughter – only to discover that the “murder for hire” website was a scam.

Spa worker Yue Zhou, 42, was arrested last month in Virginia and transferred to New York on Wednesday after allegedly attempting to arrange the murders on the dark web. She pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn federal court and did not request bail.

If convicted, she could face 10 to 12 years in prison and deportation. Her lawyer could not be reached for comment.

According to a law enforcement official who asked not to be identified, Zhou is a Chinese national who was living in New York City’s Flushing neighbourhood illegally at the time of the alleged offences.

District attorney Breon Pearce told the eastern district court that Zhou’s “depraved plan was only thwarted because the website she used to set up the murder-for-hire was a scam”.

“Although the scheme involved newer technologies like the internet and bitcoin, the end result would have been age-old cold-blooded murder,” Pearce said.

According to prosecutors, Zhou went shopping on the website between late March and early April 2019 for a hitman to kill her then-lover’s wife. At the time, Zhou was “emotionally invested” in the relationship and expressed a desire to marry and have children with her lover, they said.

Using the online name “Bigtree”, Zhou allegedly contracted with a middleman in Brooklyn to transfer US$5,000 in cash to a bitcoin exchange service in Ukraine and, once delivered, placed the order to have the wife murdered, prosecutors said.

Zhou also reportedly provided detailed descriptions of the potential victim, her home address, work schedule and ideal times to target her so that the husband would have an alibi for the murder.

According to prosecutors, Zhou was not initially aware that the website was a fake and that there was no hitman.

At some point, Zhou asked the website to arrange a hit on her second potential victim – the romantic partner’s adult daughter from an earlier marriage, according to messages prosecutors obtained between Zhou and the website administrator.

Zhou also contacted the daughter directly in December 2019 with the threatening messages: “I will cut your body into hundred pieces” and “I know where you live. I watch you all time”.

It was not immediately clear whether the website was set up by authorities or was a commercial operation, nor whether Zhou’s lover knew about the plot and was being indicted separately. It was also unclear what charges, if any, the website administrator faces.

At some point after making the US$5,000 payment, Zhou became suspicious that the website was a scam and sent several “disturbing” messages to the administrator, threatening physical and sexual violence against him and his family, prosecutors said.

Arguing that Zhou should be denied bail, the prosecutors said that it also appeared she had stalked both of her potential victims.

“Based on her concerted and painstaking efforts to kill numerous people, there is no reason to believe that the defendant would not resort to threats and possible action against potential witnesses, victims, and others who have cooperated with the government in their investigation,” they said.

Zhou is also alleged to have sent a text message in February 2021 to the daughter’s neighbour, offering to pay US$10,000 and provide sex if the neighbour killed the daughter and disposed of her body.

“Throw her body into the lake. I really don’t want to see her again,” Zhou allegedly wrote, apparently frustrated that things weren’t going to plan, according to prosecutors.

Based on mobile phone location data, the text messages were sent from Zhou’s phone in Cheyenne, in the US state of Wyoming, where she was allegedly staying at the time, prosecutors said.

“For the past several years, the defendant has worked for short periods of time at multiple spas around the country that are connected to illicit sex work, including a spa in Cheyenne,” court documents said.

“The Cheyenne spa was the subject of a raid by local law enforcement for prostitution-related offences” as was a spa in Maryland where Zhou worked in 2024, they added.

“Little did she know, the website she allegedly thought she was using to solicit a hitman was a farce,” said special agent-in-charge Ivan Arvelo with the US Department of Homeland Security. “And the crimes of which she is accused soon caught up to her.”

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Lay-offs by China’s top firms in key industries show unemployment biting through economic turmoil

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3269641/lay-offs-chinas-top-firms-key-industries-show-unemployment-biting-through-economic-turmoil?utm_source=rss_feed

Amid China’s ongoing economic struggles, unemployment remains a headache for Beijing. In this eight-part series, we examine the range of unemployment issues facing the world’s second-largest economy, from young people and the inevitable “curse of 35”, to gig workers and political implications. Read the previous story .

Broad lay-offs across major Chinese sectors illustrate how the nation’s economic slowdown is taking a toll on its workforce – with key industry players almost universally reducing headcounts and slashing salaries.

According to a comprehensive Post review of annual reports from 23 Chinese firms –comprising the top five companies by market cap in each of the real estate, internet, automotive and financial industries, as well as three prominent electric-car makers – 14 downsized their workforces in 2023 while others cut staff-related expenses to rein in costs.

“With low profit margins amid a sluggish economy, private companies are understandably adopting workforce reductions,” said Ding Shuang, chief economist for Greater China with Standard Chartered. “State-owned enterprises, on the other hand, may resort to payroll adjustments to save money.”

China’s economic growth, which is widely expected to be around 5 per cent this year, has tapered off in recent years relative to an annual growth rate that had been nearly twice as fast. In a 10-year period from 2002-11, the economy never dipped below 9 per cent growth, and in half of those years it was in the double-digits.

But for years, the property market, once a growth engine, has been grappling with a debt crisis. Internet companies have shifted their focus to profitability amid slowing revenue growth. Automotive and solar panel manufacturers face a brutal pricing war due to domestic overcapacity driven by fierce competition. And financial firms are feeling the pinch, as well.

In China’s property sector, all five market-cap leaders that the Post reviewed saw a decrease in employee numbers in 2023. Poly Real Estate, China’s biggest developer by market capitalisation, cut 16.3 per cent of employees, or 11,000 jobs, in the past year. Greenland Holdings, a Shanghai-based real estate corporation, also saw a decrease of 14.5 per cent in staff to nearly 60,000 by the end of 2023.

Developers have been facing significant financial pressure since 2021, after the government released new regulations to impose debt limits on them. Despite a series of rescue packages launched by Beijing to invigorate demand and lift the property market, real estate investments and sales remain sluggish.

Meanwhile, the internet sector, which is traditionally a significant source of jobs, has experienced a similar trend amid cost-cutting efforts. E-commerce giant Alibaba downsized by 12.8 per cent, or 20,000 jobs, in the 2023 fiscal year, following a 7 per cent cut in the previous year. Last year saw the biggest workforce culling by the company in a decade, according to its annual reports. Alibaba is the owner of the South China Morning Post.

The number of employees in Tencent declined by 2.8 per cent, or about 3,000 in the past year, and the company hasn’t stopped its lay-off pace. In the first quarter of 2024, the company further reduced its headcount by 630.

Gone are the days when internet firms set ambitious business targets and rapidly expanded. Just three years ago, about 27 per cent of China’s working-age population was said to be employed by internet platform companies – from the operators of online services from social media to video gaming, e-commerce and food delivery – according to a report by the China Information Economics Society, a think tank.

But today, many are paying the price for such aggressive expansions. A recent example was video game developer Perfect World, which kicked a new round of staff cuts at the end of June, according to local media reports. The lay-offs came after a 112 per cent plunge in the company’s net profits in the first quarter of 2024.

Perfect World joined bigger industry peers in cutting costs. Earlier this year, ByteDance, Xiaomi, JD.com, Kuaishou Technology, Didi Chuxing, Bilibili and Weibo all announced lay-off plans.

In the financial industry, where most of the leading players are owned by the state, brokers and funds have largely been cutting compensations and benefits, rather than resorting to large-scale lay-offs.

Such decisions underpin the “iron rice bowl” mentality that draws young people to state jobs. And such positions have grown so attractive that in some parts of China getting a government job is said to be like “getting a passport to love and marriage”.

China International Capital Corporation (CIIC) said it cut staff-related costs by 43.4 per cent more in the first quarter of 2024, compared with a year prior.

At the same time, other top securities brokerage firms, including Citic Securities, CSC Financial, and Guotai Junan Securities, saw a cut in labour costs.

In the automotive industry, amid a bruising pricing war, China’s biggest homegrown EV makers, including Li Auto, Xpeng, and Nio, all reported cuts in human resource costs.

After an ambitious 62 per cent workforce expansion in 2023, Beijing-based Li Auto has laid off 18 per cent of its employees since May – more than 5,600 – as sales fell short of expectations, according to the 21st Century Business Herald.

Guangzhou-headquartered Xpeng reduced its headcount by 14.4 per cent in 2023, during which the company saw a 10 billion yuan net loss, according to its annual report.

Shanghai-based Nio said in its first-quarter report that operating expenses dropped 25.5 per cent from the previous quarter. The cut was attributed to “decreased personnel costs in research and development functions in the first quarter of 2024”.

With an EV-purchase subsidy having been lifted by the government at the end of 2022, automotive manufacturers are facing an increasingly competitive market. All three of the premium EV car makers reported a month-on-month decrease in revenue of more than 35 per cent in the first quarter of 2024.

EV giant BYD, alone among major automakers, aggressively expanded in 2023, growing its workforce by more than 130,000 employees, a 23 per cent increase from the previous year.

Elsewhere, in the photovoltaic (PV) industry, China’s Longi Green Energy Technology, the largest maker of solar panel materials in the world, will lay off 5 per cent of its workforce, as reported by local media Yicai in March. The company reported a net loss of 2.3 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2024, following a 942 million loss in previous quarter.

China added nearly 217 gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity in 2023, a 147 per cent increase from the previous year, contributing to more than half of the world’s new PV capacity in the last year.

However, facing competition and export curbs from Western countries, Chinese companies in the PV sector, including Tongwei, JinkoSolar and Longi, all reported profit slides in the first quarter.

The persistent trend of lay-offs and staff-related reductions across China will cast a further pall over domestic demand as consumers are likely to adopt a more cautious approach to spending due to the lack of confidence in stable income growth, according to Ding.

China is grappling with deflationary pressure as domestic demand remains weak. The consumer price index – a key gauge to inflation – has been around net zero since last April.

“To mitigate the lay-off trend, the key is to revive the economy through the creation of a fair and supportive investment environment for the private sector,” Ding said. “With enough confidence, investors will use their own instincts to discover new promising industries, which will result in new job opportunities.”

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Tough-on-China bills eyed for passage before 2024 election: US House Speaker Mike Johnson

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3269674/tough-china-bills-eyed-passage-2024-election-us-house-speaker-mike-johnson?utm_source=rss_feed

US House Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday pledged to push through more China-targeted legislation before House members stand for re-election in November.

America’s top-ranking Republican said the measures could further restrict outbound investments in China, close a trade loophole for small parcels from the mainland and yield a biosecurity act prohibiting federal contracting with the country’s biotech firms.

“China poses the greatest threat to global peace. Congress must keep our focus on countering China with every tool at our disposal,” said Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, in remarks at the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“In the short time remaining in this Congress … the House will be voting on a series of bills to empower the next administration to hit our enemies’ economies on day one,” added the conservative congressman and ally of former US president Donald Trump.

The goal was to have the package of China-related legislation signed into law by the end of this year, he said.

“We will work aggressively toward that package. I am very hopeful that much of this can be bipartisan.”

Johnson was elected speaker of the House of Representatives in October. Compared to when he first came to the position, he has adopted a more hostile tone against China.

“Beijing is our number-one foreign threat,” he said on Monday. “They exploit every nook and cranny in our financial and economic systems.”

Johnson said he would continue the work of the House select committee on China in the next Congress.

One bill he has championed is a sanctions package meant to “punish the Chinese military firms that provide material support to Russia and Iran”.

The House was also working on a measure to restrict outbound investments in China, he added, noting it was slated to move this autumn.

In January, a House Financial Services subcommittee held a hearing exploring legislation to further limit American investment in Chinese tech sectors.

It followed US President Joe Biden’s executive order in August curbing US private equity and venture capital investments in Chinese companies covering semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum technologies and certain artificial intelligence systems.

The House would also vote on the Biosecure Act meant to “halt federal contracts with biotech companies that are beholden to adversaries and endanger Americans’ healthcare debt”, Johnson said.

The bill, introduced to the House in January by former Republican congressman Mike Gallagher, names Chinese genomics service provider BGI Group and biopharmaceutical firm Wuxi AppTec as companies of concern. It drew bipartisan co-sponsorship.

On trade and tariffs, Johnson said the House would “rein in the for any goods subject to section 301 trade enforcement tariffs”, referring to tariffs launched by the Trump administration.

“That will help stymie China’s attempts to exploit American trade,” Johnson added.

The long-time American trade provision allows companies to ship packages worth under US$800 to the US without paying tariffs. According to data cited by the House Ways and Means committee, 60 per cent of de minimis entries come from China.

China has witnessed a boom in small-item trade as sellers send parcels with a few items directly from local factories to shoppers overseas.