• [Sport] China Open: World number one Aryna Sabalenka progresses to quarter-final
• Closure of maternity wards fuels Chinese debate over population decline
• China to double size of space station, touts alternative to NASA-led ISS
• US budget fight could create opening for China in the Pacific
• Communist rappers are luring young disgruntled Chinese | China
• [World] How China is fighting in the grey zone against Taiwan

[Sport] China Open: World number one Aryna Sabalenka progresses to quarter-final

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/67015133?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

World number one Aryna Sabalenka progressed to the quarter-final of the China Open with a straight-set victory over Italy's Jasmine Paolini.

The Australian Open winner will face 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina in the last eight.

Meanwhile, US Open champion Coco Gauff saved four set points to beat Veronika Kudermetova 7-6 (7-5) 6-2.

The victory marks Gauff's 15th consecutive win - the longest winning run of any player on the WTA Tour this year - surpassing Polish world number two Iga Swiatek's run of 14 victories which came earlier this year.

"I'm really happy with how I've been able to troubleshoot and problem-solve," Gauff said after the win. "I played a good match overall."

The American 19-year-old's last loss came in Montreal in August against compatriot Jessica Pegula, with her winning run including a maiden WTA 1000 title in Cincinnati and a first Grand Slam title at Flushing Meadows.

Since her Wimbledon first-round loss to Sofia Kenin, Gauff has won 21 out of 22 matches.

The win over Kudermetova books her 11th quarter-final of the year, where she will meet Greek sixth seed Maria Sakkari, who beat China's Wang Xinyu 6-4 2-6 6-3.

Gauff beat Sakkari in the final of the Cincinnati Masters and said she is "one of the most athletic players on the Tour" before their match on Friday.

France's Caroline Garcia beat Ukrainian Anhelina Kalinina 6-3 6-2 and will face four-time Grand Slam champion Swiatek in the quarter-final.

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Closure of maternity wards fuels Chinese debate over population decline

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/05/closure-of-maternity-wards-fuels-chinese-debate-over-population-decline

A number of hospital obstetrics units in China have closed, prompting discussion about the effects of China’s dramatically falling birth rate.

Several hospitals in Zhejiang province have reportedly closed or downsized their obstetrics units, along with hospitals in Jiangsu and Guangdong.

China’s birth rate fell to a record low in 2022, with just 9.56m births, a drop of nearly 10% compared with 2021. That meant the population shrank for the first time since 1961, a year of mass famine in China. The slump is fuelling a demographic crisis in China, with an ageing and shrinking population that threatens to derail the country’s GDP growth. This year India officially overtook China to become the world’s most populous country.

China’s leaders are keenly aware of the problems caused by a greying population, and officials have introduced a range of measures to try and boost the birth rate. The one child policy was scrapped in 2016, with families now allowed to have up to three children. With young people increasingly putting off or deciding against childrearing altogether, the three child policy is more of an ambition than a limit. Sichuan province has abandoned limits on birth registration altogether. Some local authorities offer cash subsidies for second and third children.

These policies have had little impact on the birth rate, which is in stubborn decline. The number of new births a year has nearly halved since 2016. Young women in particular often feel that the costs of raising a child are too high and that their own economic prospects are gloomy, not to mention that of the next generation. Urban, educated women are also increasingly resistant to accept the patriarchal family norms that come with having a child.

The recent hospital closures have not been officially linked to falling birth rates. In April, a health centre in Guangxi province said that it would stop offering deliveries in the obstetrics and gynaecology unit because of the increasing number of high-risk pregnancies in the district. Last month, the Second hospital of Yinzhou, a district in the eastern city of Ningbo, announced that it would no longer be offering maternal diagnosis and treatment services. The local health bureau later clarified that the obstetrics unit was being integrated with a newly-built women’s and children’s health centre at the Affiliated People’s hospital of Ningbo University, about 6 miles away. The bureau said that the number of obstetrics beds in Yinzhou had increased to 237 between 2022 and 2023.

In some cases, hospitals blamed a lack of staff rather than a lack of babies for the winding down of obstetrics services, which cover pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period. Two clinics in Huizhou, and one in Guangzhou, have suspended overnight services in their maternal health wards because of a lack of obstetricians and gynaecologists, according to the Paper.

But several online commentaries have linked the news to China’s population struggles. In an article published on NetEase, a Chinese content provider, a blogger with the username “Say it quickly” wrote: “The deserted obstetrics departments means that fewer women are getting pregnant … [China’s] newborn population has been declining in recent years, and the situation is not optimistic”.

One obstetrician from the Harbin maternal and child care hospital told Chinese media: “In the past, the number of births might have been seven or eight, or 10 in a day, now it can be one every few days. If there is one a day, that’s great.”

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

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China to double size of space station, touts alternative to NASA-led ISS

https://reuters.com/article/space-exploration-china/china-to-double-size-of-space-station-touts-alternative-to-nasa-led-iss-idUSKBN31509P

China plans to expand its space station to six modules from three in coming years, offering astronauts from other nations an alternative platform for near-Earth missions as the NASA-led International Space Station (ISS) nears the end of its lifespan.

The operational lifetime of the Chinese space station will be more than 15 years, the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a unit of China's main space contractor, said at the 74th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Wednesday.

That would be more than the 10 years previously announced.

China's self-built space station, also known as Tiangong, or Celestial Palace in Chinese, has been fully operational since late 2022, hosting a maximum of three astronauts at an orbital altitude of up to 450 km (280 miles).

At 180 metric tons after its expansion to six modules, Tiangong is still just 40% of the mass of the ISS, which can hold a crew of seven astronauts. But the ISS, in orbit for more than two decades, is expected to be decommissioned after 2030, about the same time China has said it expects to become "a major space power".

Chinese state media said last year as Tiangong became fully operational that China would be no "slouch" as the ISS headed toward retirement, adding that "several countries" had asked to send their astronauts to the Chinese station.

But in a blow to China's aspirations for space diplomacy, the European Space Agency (ESA) said this year it did not have the budgetary or "political" green light to participate in Tiangong, shelving a years-long plan for a visit by European astronauts.

"Giving up cooperation with China in the manned space domain is clearly short-sighted, which reveals that the U.S.-led camp confrontation has led to a new space race," the Global Times, a nationalist Chinese tabloid, wrote at the time.

Tiangong has become an emblem of China's growing clout and confidence in its space endeavours, and a challenger to the United States in the domain after being isolated from the ISS. It is banned by U.S. law from any collaboration, direct or indirect, with NASA.

Russia, a participant in the ISS, has similar space diplomacy plans, suggesting that Moscow's partners in the BRICS group - Brazil, India, China and South Africa - could construct a module for its space station.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, said last year it was planning to build a space station comprising six modules that could accommodate up to four cosmonauts.

US budget fight could create opening for China in the Pacific

https://reuters.com/article/usa-shutdown-pacific/us-budget-fight-could-create-opening-for-china-in-the-pacific-idUSKBN315065

A 45-day stopgap measure passed by the U.S. Congress to avert a government shutdown has left potential funding shortfalls for strategic Pacific island states, which analysts and former officials say makes the U.S. allies economically vulnerable and possibly more receptive to Chinese approaches.

The Biden administration had hoped to see Congress endorse by Sept. 30 new 20-year funding programs for Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau, which after decades of relative neglect now find themselves at the center of a U.S. battle for influence with China in the Northern Pacific.

The sprawling but sparsely populated nations have ties with the U.S. governed by so-called Compacts of Free Association (COFAs), under which Washington is responsible for their defense and provides economic assistance, while gaining exclusive military access to strategic swathes of ocean.

The funding programs for the Marshall Islands and Micronesia were due for renewal by Sept. 30, and by the end of fiscal 2024 for Palau, and Washington agreed this year on a new package of $7.1 billion over 20 years, subject to Congressional approval.

The stopgap "continuing resolution" (CR) that prevented a federal government shutdown does not include approval for this new program, however, and while it maintains federal services to the COFA states, it leaves holes in other parts of their budgets.

"While keeping the services going is an important assurance, the CR will make things quite difficult in the Marshalls (which has an election on November 20) and Palau (election next year)," said Cleo Paskal, an expert on the COFA states with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.

"Both are countries that recognize Taiwan and are key components of U.S. defense architecture in the Pacific," she said. "Watch for increased (Chinese) political warfare spin around the U.S. being an unreliable partner."

Paskal said Palau's funding under its existing COFA had dwindled as it approached its final year and it had been banking on funds from the new package to help cover budget deficits.

Paskal said Palau's economy had already taken bad hits from COVID-19 and Chinese economic interference aimed at pressuring it to switch diplomatic recognition from U.S.-backed Taiwan to Beijing.

There is no new money so far too for the Marshall Islands, which has yet to finalize new terms with Washington due to disagreements over how to address the legacy of massive U.S. nuclear testing there in the 1940s and 1950s.

Meanwhile, China is waiting in the wings with ready cash.

Roll Call, a news site covering the U.S. Congress, noted last week that Palau's Finance Minister Kaleb Udui told a congressional field hearing in August that Beijing had been trying to tempt locals to oppose U.S. plans to build an early-warning radar by offering to build a hotel and casino nearby.

The Washington embassies of Palau and the Marshall islands did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Biden administration has made renewing the COFAs a priority, and it has broad bipartisan support, but congressional infighting is not the only hurdle.

Howard Hills, a senior adviser to the U.S. COFA negotiating team from 2020 until retiring last month, blamed the Marshall Islands holdup on U.S. State Department lawyers who wanted to control how new funds were spent and objected to them being earmarked to address the nuclear legacy, fearing this could lay the U.S. open to more claims.

Asked to comment, the State Department said Washington was "working expeditiously to finalize negotiations" with the Marshall Islands and had had constructive conversations to that end "including at the Presidential level" at last week's U.S.-Pacific Islands Forum Summit.

Communist rappers are luring young disgruntled Chinese | China

https://www.economist.com/china/2023/10/02/communist-rappers-are-luring-chinas-disgruntled-youth

TO MARK CHINA’S National Day on October 1st, the Communist Youth League sent a message to its nearly 18m followers on Weibo, a microblog platform. “Today, as protagonists of this era, we will write new legends on this sacred land!” it urged. Attached was a music video, its lyrics suffused with similar patriotic rhetoric and interspersed with clips of speeches by Mao Zedong and the country’s current leader, Xi Jinping. So far, so predictable. The surprise was the singer and his style: a rapper whose early songs about drugs and violence were deemed unfit for public airing. GAI, as he is known, has turned a new leaf. He is now the league’s MC.

The Communist Party’s youth wing is a vast organisation that plays a big role in China’s political life. It indoctrinates people aged between 14 and 28 in the party’s ideology, provides a training ground for potential party members and helps the party to identify talent that can be groomed for high office. It also has an outward-facing task: spreading the party’s message among young people with no political ties. After he assumed power in 2012, Mr Xi clearly worried that the league was not up to the job. Officials admitted that it had become out of touch with young Chinese.

For the party, China’s youth are a growing problem. The economy is stagnating, unemployment is rife among the young and housing costs are sky-high. Late last year small youth-led protests broke out in several cities. They were aimed at Mr Xi’s draconian “zero-covid” regime (subsequently abandoned). With extraordinary bravery, a few demonstrators even called on Mr Xi to step down. He will be mindful of the pro-democracy turmoil of 1989, when some of the league’s cadres joined the protesters. That period of upheaval across the communist world haunts Mr Xi. He often harks back to the Soviet Union’s collapse, which he blames on a breakdown in ideological orthodoxy and discipline. “It doesn’t matter if the Communist Youth League makes a thousand mistakes,” he said in 2015, quoting Deng Xiaoping. “But one mistake it cannot make is to deviate from the party’s track.”

In June Mr Xi declared that since 2012, when he took power, the organisation had acquired a “brand new image”. But also that month the league’s chief, A Dong, said that amid “profound and complex changes” at home and abroad, “the overall fighting spirit and capabilities of the entire organisation urgently need to be improved.” This will involve pushing ahead with sweeping reforms that began in 2016. They range from cutting bloated management to beefing up the league’s grassroots presence and tightening controls over membership.

Honing the league’s propaganda skills is also a big part of this effort. People like GAI, whose real name is Zhou Yan, are helping. In 2018 Chinese netizens speculated that, after GAI’s rise to stardom on reality TV shows, his performing days on officially approved platforms might be numbered: that year the government reportedly ordered broadcasters not to use artists representing “hip-hop culture”, or even sporting tattoos (GAI has plenty of them: “Badkidz” says one in English). “Hip-hop’s prospects in China seem dim after Chinese rappers removed from TV shows”, said a headline in Global Times, a staunchly party-loving tabloid. The story noted GAI’s disappearance from the airwaves. But the newspaper’s prediction soon proved wrong. The league began to turn to rappers, including GAI, to make itself appear more in tune with the country’s youth.

Slick videos featuring these and other singers have been pushed out by the league through a plethora of social-media accounts. By August last year, the organisation’s central administration was running 26 of these with a total of more than 200m followers, according to China Youth Daily, the league’s newspaper. The league’s main account on WeChat had a following of 110m, making it one of the biggest accounts on social platforms, the report said. Online, the organisation began referring to itself as tuantuan (“league-league”). In Chinese, doubling a syllable makes a name sound cuter—pandas’ names are routinely formed this way.

Attack, attack

To Western ears, the rhetoric used by these accounts is often far from endearing. Mr Xi has pushed the new-look league to the front line of China’s online nationalism, using it to flood the internet with criticism of the West and anyone in China with negative views of the party. “Why can’t we voice our opinions?” he asked the league’s leaders in 2013. “Good prevails over evil. When positive voices online become powerful, the impact of negative public opinion can be reduced.”

League accounts have been used to heap vitriol on Western journalists, attack dissidents suspected of trying to foment a “colour revolution”, and to sow disinformation. In 2021 the league promoted a conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, was developed in an American military lab at Fort Detrick in Maryland. The hashtag the league created on Weibo to spread this story was viewed 1.4bn times—an average of once per person in China. In recent weeks the league’s accounts have whipped up public anger against Japan for releasing treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear plant, which was destroyed by a tsunami 12 years ago—ignoring support for the plan among many scientists elsewhere.

There is no doubt that nationalist rhetoric excites many young Chinese. It is less clear, however, how much the league’s online presence is helping it to recruit the kind of people it says it needs to create a reservoir of “healthy and vigorous new blood” for the party itself. Official statistics show that membership has fallen by nearly 20% since Mr Xi became China’s leader. Of Chinese aged 14 to 28, about one-third (nearly 74m people) are league members (league cadres can be older).

But this may not reflect any change in young people’s desire to join. Mr Xi’s reforms have aimed to make the league more elite. Teachers have been told not to sign up entire classes, as once was common (and is still the accepted practice for the Young Pioneers, a league-controlled organisation for children aged six to 14). Schools have been given quotas for how many students they can recruit.

The league is not trying to increase the ratio of members to non-members in its target age-group. Indeed, it has set a cap of 30% for 2025, which suggests that it plans little change. But it is trying to expand membership in private firms and NGOs. Among China’s 50m registered private firms, the league’s presence is still tiny. Between 2018 and January 2022, however, the number of league branches in such businesses more than tripled to above 300,000. In Yinchuan this year, league officials announced a plan to establish branches in all of the firms in the western city’s industrial parks by September. With the help of a recently developed database, known as Smart League Building, the organisation can keep much better tabs on such activity. All league members have to register their personal details on this system.

Mr Xi’s eagerness to boost the league’s influence may seem at odds with a common belief that at least part of his decade in power involved a struggle with senior leaders who had once served in senior roles in the league. Such officials are often referred to as members of the tuanpai, or “league faction”. Under Mr Xi they have become far more marginal at the top of the party hierarchy. But there is little evidence that the league has operated as a factional bastion—just that Mr Xi prefers to surround himself with former colleagues and underlings, and he has never served in the league. Jérôme Doyon of Sciences Po, a university in Paris, notes that the league’s administration is still a big source of recruitment for leadership positions in the provinces.

As Mr Xi sees it, the league has a crucial role to play. Even a decade ago he was warning its cadres of a global “clash of ideologies” involving ceaseless efforts by “domestic and foreign hostile forces” to Westernise and divide China. This was making it even more imperative, he said, to provide China’s youngsters with “strong guidance” on their ideals and beliefs. Which is why, between occasional outings to revolutionary sites and performing good deeds in their neighbourhoods, recruits can expect plenty of time in the classroom, studying the thoughts of Mr Xi. ■

[World] How China is fighting in the grey zone against Taiwan

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-66851118?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA