• Biden, China“s Xi will discuss communication, competition at APEC summit
• Six people arrested in China’s Hubei province over ‘baby-trafficking ring’
• How Chinese aggression is increasing the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait
• Concerns growing over the new moon space race between China and the U.S.
• China’s power, America’s rise in STIs, AI and stardom, and spicy-chicken wars | Podcasts

Biden, China“s Xi will discuss communication, competition at APEC summit

https://reuters.com/article/apec-usa-biden-xi/biden-chinas-xi-will-discuss-communication-competition-at-apec-summit-idUSKBN3281IT

The White House said on Monday President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping will discuss strengthening communication and managing competition when they meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in the San Francisco Bay area on Nov. 15.

Biden believes there is no substitute for face-to-face diplomacy to manage this complex relationship, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters.

"We anticipate that the leaders will discuss some of the most fundamental elements of the U.S.-PRC bilateral relationship, including the continued importance of strengthening open lines of communication and managing competition responsibly so that it does not veer into conflict," Sullivan told reporters.

"The way we achieve that is through intense diplomacy. That's how we clear up misperceptions and avoid surprises," Sullivan said, adding Biden "comes into this summit on a solid footing."

Sullivan also said the U.S. is looking for specific outcomes from the meeting on November 15, he said.

The face-to-face meeting will take place for the first time in a year on Wednesday, with the high-stakes diplomacy aimed at curbing tensions between the world's two superpowers.

The meeting is also expected to cover global issues from the Israel-Hamas war to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, North Korea's ties with Russia, Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific, human rights, fentanyl, artificial intelligence, as well as "fair" trade and economic relations, senior Biden administration officials said.

Six people arrested in China’s Hubei province over ‘baby-trafficking ring’

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/13/six-people-arrested-in-hubei-province-china-baby-trafficking-ring

Six people have been arrested in central China’s Hubei province over alleged involvement in a baby-trafficking ring linked to a hospital in one of the province’s biggest cities.

The allegations about Xiangyang Jianqiao hospital first came to light on 6 November via a Weibo user by the name of Shangguan Zhengyi, who describes himself as an “anti-trafficking volunteer”. Shangguan posted a series of claims about the hospital’s director, Ye Youzhi, whom he accused of colluding “with online intermediaries” to sell birth certificates for 96,000 yuan (£10,750).

After selling a birth certificate, the hospital would follow the “normal” registration process for new babies, including issuing vaccination booklets and assisting with household registration requirements, Shangguan claimed.

Shangguan, who says he worked undercover for the hospital for a year, also accused Ye of brokering the sale of babies and facilitating surrogacy arrangements, which are illegal in China. He said that a baby girl was sold in September for 118,000 yuan and later registered in Sichuan province. It is not clear how many babies are believed to have been trafficked through the hospital.

Ye was among those arrested, according to a notice from the Xiangyang municipal government posted on Sunday. Her medical licence has also been revoked. As well as the six people who have been formally arrested, four suspects have been detained without charge.

After Shangguan publicised his allegations, Chinese media reported that Ye, 55, a gynaecologist and obstetrician, has been involved in a number of medical scandals. In 2010, she was convicted of performing gender-selective abortions and sentenced to five months in prison.

The Guardian was not able to contact Xiangyang Jianqiao hospital. Its WeChat account has become inactive and its website is no longer online. The local health authority said on 7 November that the obstetrics department of the hospital had been suspended.

Shangguan did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

Trafficking has long been an issue of concern in China. During the era of the one-child policy, a cultural preference for boys led to baby girls being abandoned or sold through underground networks. Years later, a surplus of men of marrying age fulled an industry of trafficking girls and young women to be their brides.

In recent years the authorities have emphasised their crackdown on trafficking rings, especially after the case of the chained woman emerged last year. In January 2022, a video of a woman surnamed Yang, who was chained by her neck to a concrete wall, went viral. The authorities said that she had been trafficked twice as a bride in the 1990s.

In September, Yu Huaying, a woman in Guizhou province, was sentenced to death after being found guilty of abducting and trafficking 11 children in the 1990s.

The cases often prompt huge outpourings of online anger, which the authorities struggle to contain. One of the most famous recent cases was that of Sun Haiyang, a man who spent 14 years looking for his son, Sun Zhuo, who had been abducted as a four-year-old. The father and son were reunited in 2021, with the story having been adapted into a film, Dearest, which drew widespread attention to the case. Last month the kidnapper was sentenced to five years in prison, a sentence that Sun – and many people online – said was too light.

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

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How Chinese aggression is increasing the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/13/china-biden-xi-meeting-apec-taiwan/2023-11-06T07:03:50.012Z

TAIPEI, Taiwan — China’s increasingly aggressive activities around Taiwan — and its refusal to speak to the U.S. military through channels designed to avoid conflict — is fueling fears that the United States could be drawn into a third major war in the world.

Reestablishing those communication channels will be high on the agenda when President Biden talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week, their first meeting in a year. But China is being deliberately unpredictable and incommunicative, analysts say, to keep the U.S. military off guard in the Pacific and to warn against American attempts to help defend Taiwan.

“It’s reached a very, very high level of tension” said Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities, a think tank. Without a breakthrough that eases mistrust, the current “fairly acute crisis” will continue. “War could essentially happen any time,” he said.

Xi and Biden are due to meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, part of a broader effort to reset relations that have rapidly deteriorated amid heated technology competition, a rogue balloon and increasingly brazen Chinese military activity in the South China Sea and around Taiwan.

At the same time, as it tries to intimidate Taiwan, the Chinese military has conducted more than 180 risky intercepts against U.S. surveillance aircraft in the Pacific in the past two years, more than in the previous decade.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., said Friday that he had written to his Chinese counterpart urging the resumption of military communication channels that Beijing severed in retaliation for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei last year.

It is “hugely important” to “ensure there is no miscalculation” between the militaries, he said.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan reiterated this Sunday. “The president is determined to see the reestablishment of military-to-military ties because he believes it’s in the U.S. national security interest,” he said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Chinese military provocations are becoming existential for Taipei. Beijing claims Taiwan, an island that has never been governed by the Chinese Communist Party, as its territory, and top American intelligence officials say Xi has ordered his military to be ready to invade the island by 2027.

Taiwan urges China to stop ‘destructive’ military sorties as tensions mount

This has become more than theoretical over the past 14 months, since Pelosi visited and lauded Taiwan’s democratic system, which Beijing viewed as encouraging “separatist forces” in Taiwan.

China retaliated by severing important channels of military-to-military communication and by ordering fighter jets and warships in large numbers to menace Taiwan. That has continued for more than a year. Beijing sent 336 aircraft to the edges of Taiwanese airspace in September alone, prompting Taiwan’s defense minister to warn that the scale and pace of drills were “getting out of hand.”

Fighter jets that once stayed on China’s side of the Taiwan Strait have been crossing the median line, an unofficial border down the middle of the 110-mile-wide strait, with greater frequency and are venturing past Taiwan’s southern tip to the relatively less-defended east coast. On Sept. 17, a record 103 Chinese warplanes flew near Taiwanese airspace in a 24-hour period.

China sent a drone all the way around Taiwan for the first time in April, and this has quickly become a regular maneuver, with China sending unmanned aircraft to encircle the island five times since.

Chinese aircraft carriers are making themselves at home on the other side of the island, in the Pacific Ocean, which the United States has long considered its military purview. There, they launch jets at Taiwan’s east coast and practice repelling the United States should it one day come to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion.

The September drills were the largest in the waters to Taiwan’s east for nearly a decade, with 17 warships including the Shandong aircraft carrier holding large-scale exercises stretching from the Philippines Sea to near the American territory of Guam.

Barely a month later, the Shandong strike group again sailed through the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines, marking its third entry into the Pacific this year.

For Taipei, the frequency of Chinese drills over the last year confirms Beijing’s disregard for long-standing norms of standard military behavior in the region. Without those tacit agreements, it’s easier for accidents to happen and harder to contain fallout if they do.

“They don’t want us to be able to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?’” said Michael Allen, managing director of Beacon Global Strategies, a strategic advisory firm. “They for sure want us to be more nervous, more destabilized and to panic.”

There is also a political component to all this military coercion: Aside from wearing down Taiwanese defenses, it creates psychological pressure on the island’s 23 million inhabitants to give in to Beijing’s demands for unification.

Beijing is saber rattling, analysts say, partly to try to influence the Taiwanese presidential election in January. Leading the polls is Lai Ching-te, vice president of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which historically supported formal independence from China. The Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, which favors more trade and closer relations with Beijing, is trailing behind.

Then there’s the problem of trying to parse China’s intentions when its huge drills increasingly look like the first stage of an assault on Taiwan.

A U.S. military intelligence assessment, revealed in the Discord leaks, described how the United States’ Indo-Pacific Command now considers it harder to distinguish between Chinese military coercion and the full-scale mobilization that would presage an invasion.

China’s increasingly frequent entries aim to erode the U.S. Navy’s ability to come to Taiwan’s defense if it came under attacks from China — something Biden has repeatedly said he believes it should do. The United States does not have a formal defense treaty with Taiwan, but it is committed to providing Taiwan, through arms sales and military aid, with weapons to defend itself.

China’s exercises are meant to demonstrate to the United States and its allies that China is ready to fight off the U.S. Navy in the region, said Chieh Chung, an associate research fellow at National Policy Foundation, a Taiwanese think tank. They are designed to “convey a strong sense of protest” against American involvement to defend Taiwan, he said.

While Washington is pushing Beijing to restore military communications, analysts say China may be reluctant to talk as part of a strategy to wear down Taiwan and keep the United States guessing.

“It’s almost like they want us to be unsettled,” said Allen, who was a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee between 2011 and 2013.

One way China has injected even greater uncertainty is by increasingly incorporating civilian ships, including ferries and cargo vessels, into its military exercises. Analysts say China would need these ships to move the huge numbers of troops necessary for an invasion.

In late September, Taiwan took the unusual step of announcing that it was actively monitoring an “abnormal” drill on the Chinese side of the Taiwan Strait.

The exercise involved at least 12 commercial ships rerouted from their usual routes to practice loading and unloading amphibious forces onto the coast of Fujian, the Chinese province closest to Taiwan, according to J. Michael Dahm, a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a think tank.

Satellite imagery analyzed by Dahm suggested that this year’s exercise involved significantly more general cargo ships than in the past. It focused on having amphibious forces get on and off ships moored offshore, a practice that would let troops disembark without needing to dock in Taiwan.

However, China probably remains years away from being capable of using civilian ships to support a successful cross-strait invasion, Dahm said.

Despite the Chinese efforts at unpredictability, the sheer scale of mobilization necessary to invade Taiwan means a sneak attack would be very difficult without American intelligence catching wind of Chinese plans.

But Beijing can hope to numb Taiwan and get a jump-start on the United States by constantly practicing ever more realistic invasion scenarios.

“These drills keep getting bigger and bigger,” said Tom Shugart, adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “As the number and frequency continues to grow, it naturally becomes that much harder to know whether next time is the real thing.”

Concerns growing over the new moon space race between China and the U.S.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/china-nasa-moon-landing-first/2023-11-02T17:47:59.414Z

The stakes of the modern moon race are different from the Cold War contest between the Soviet Union and the United States, where the goal of the sprint to plant a flag in lunar soil was to claim moral and technological dominance for a political system.

That motive still exists in the U.S.-China rivalry, but now both countries are working toward building an enduring presence on the moon and in cislunar space, the real estate between the moon and Earth. And who gets there first could set precedents for the next phase of lunar expeditions — where countries would mine resources such as water, establish settlements and pursue scientific discovery.

“It would be bragging rights for China,” Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, said in an interview. “It would be a feather in their cap. And, of course, we intend for that not to happen.”

The tension comes at a time when several countries are flying spacecraft, without astronauts, to the moon and building coalitions to get there. In August, India became the first country to have an uncrewed spacecraft successfully touch down near the moon’s south pole, where there is water in the form of ice. That followed a failed attempt by Russia days before. Israel and Japan have also recently tried and failed to land robotic spacecraft on the lunar surface.

If China were to be the first to land its astronauts, sometimes known as taikonauts, it could gain the advantage in “establishing the rules of the road for how this new era of exploration will work,” said Todd Harrison, a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“We want to be there establishing precedent for mining of materials on the moon and how that’s done for making claims to materials and property rights,” he said. “We want to do that in a way that’s consistent with our values and our economic system. And if China gets there first, they will get to set precedent that’s based on their values and their economic system.”

China’s space program got a late start; it didn’t launch a human to space until 2003, three decades after the United States last sent a human being to the moon. But it has built a slow and steady cadence of missions since that have propelled China into the top ranks of space powers, with a continuously inhabited space station in low Earth orbit and a robotic landing on Mars in 2021.

The moon has been of particular interest. After sending a spacecraft to orbit the moon in 2007 and again in 2010, China landed the Chang’e-3 spacecraft in 2013, becoming the first nation to soft-land on the lunar surface after the United States and the Soviet Union. In early 2019, China became the first country to land a spacecraft on the moon’s far side. And in 2020 it brought back samples from the lunar surface, in another impressive demonstration of its growing prowess and ambition.

China has now landed spacecraft on the lunar surface successfully three times this century, while the United States has not landed there since Apollo 17, the last of the Apollo missions, in 1972.

“The Chinese know that simply getting there themselves will not somehow make them the ‘winner’ in the ongoing, renewed space competition,” said Dean Cheng, a senior adviser to the China program at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “However, what China does seem to be trying to do is to make clear that it will be a major player, if not the major player, in defining the norms and standards for future space activity in the cislunar volume of space.”

To counter that, the United States has built an international coalition tied to its lunar campaign by developing the Artemis Accords, a legal framework that establishes rules for the peaceful use of space and would govern behavior on the surface of the moon.

So far, 31 countries have signed the accords, the most ambitious international space policy since the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Under the Artemis Accords, countries exploring the moon would be required to, for example, share scientific research and be open and transparent about where they are operating and what they are doing. In the past several years, NASA — having pulled off feats such as the James Webb Space Telescope and restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil — has become a tool of diplomatic power that the White House is eager to leverage.

“Now, when we go abroad, generally people want to see us,” Nelson said. In his conversations with national security adviser Jake Sullivan, it was clear to Nelson that Sullivan “understands that space might be one of his foreign policy tools.” And that would help, he said, “as a bulwark against the expansionism and aggressiveness of China.”

Shortly before India’s successful moon landing, it signed the accords. China, however, is not a signatory, and NASA is effectively barred from partnering with China on space missions over concerns about China stealing technology.

“Today, it’s not a race to the moon,” said Harrison of CSIS. “It’s a race about the race. It’s about how you get there, and the partnerships you build to get there, and the precedents that are set. That’s different than back in the ’60s when it was about planting a flag. Now, it’s more complicated, and more is at stake.”

Both China and the United States are aiming to build settlements at the moon’s south pole, where there is water, in the form of ice, in the permanently shadowed craters. While no country can claim sovereignty on the moon, China could say, “we’re not claiming territory, but here’s a keep-out zone and no one can land within so many miles,” Harrison said. “That would be an extension of what they’ve done in the South China Sea, building up islands out of sand and then claim an exclusion zone.”

In 2019, Vice President Mike Pence pushed NASA to meet his ambitious 2024 moon landing timeline “by any means necessary” in order to beat China, which he said was trying “to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world’s preeminent spacefaring nation.” That deadline won’t be met. But NASA has made some progress.

Late last year, NASA successfully completed the Artemis I mission, the first in its renewed lunar effort, sending the Orion crew capsule, without anyone on board, on a trip around the moon. By the end of next year, or early 2025, it intends to fly the Artemis II mission, sending Orion past the moon again, this time with a crew of four: three NASA astronauts — Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman — as well as a Canadian astronaut, Jeremy Hansen.

But the timeline for a human landing, known as Artemis III, is uncertain. NASA is depending on SpaceX to use its Starship rocket and spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface. But the vehicle has flown only once, in April, and had to be destroyed when it started tumbling out of control a few minutes into flight. Recently, the Federal Aviation Administration completed its investigation, but it is waiting on a separate investigation by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into the environmental impacts of the launches before issuing SpaceX a launch license.

SpaceX has been pushing the regulatory agencies to move faster because it needs to launch Starship many times, including an uncrewed test mission to the moon, in order to prove to NASA that the vehicle is safe and reliable enough for human spaceflight. SpaceX also intends to refuel Starship in low Earth orbit before going to the moon, a challenging task that has not been accomplished before and would require a fleet of tanker spacecraft.

Testifying before a Senate subcommittee, William Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president for build and flight reliability and a former top NASA official, said that if the delays continue, “eventually, we will lose our lead and we will see China land on the moon before we do.”

Recently, NASA’s inspector general cited the return to the moon as the space agency’s biggest challenge. “NASA officials are concerned that the technical difficulties associated with SpaceX’s Starship ... will delay the mission currently scheduled for December 2025 to sometime in 2026,” the IG said in a report. “The extent of delays will depend on when SpaceX can resume flight testing.”

NASA does, however, have a pair of robotic missions to the moon scheduled for the next few months. In the first, Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company, would send its Peregrine lander to the moon, on a mission slated to launch in the wee hours of Christmas Eve. It would carry a suite of scientific instruments and other payloads from six countries. If successful, it would be the first commercial spacecraft to land on the lunar surface and the first for the United States since the Apollo program.

It would be followed by Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company that intends to fly its uncrewed lander in January.

But China is not standing still. Next year, it intends to fly its Chang’e-6 mission, which would visit the moon’s far side again, this time to collect and return samples to earth. Chang’e-7 would land near the moon’s south pole in 2026 as part of an effort to eventually build a settlement China calls the International Lunar Research Station.

China’s power, America’s rise in STIs, AI and stardom, and spicy-chicken wars | Podcasts

https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/11/13/chinas-power-americas-rise-in-stis-ai-and-stardom-and-spicy-chicken-wars

A selection of four essential articles read aloud from the latest issue of The Economist. This week, our cover story in most of the world asks: how scary is China? Also, we investigate why sexually transmitted infections are on the rise in America (11:15). Our cover story in Europe and Britain ponders how artificial intelligence will transform fame (15:35). Plus, South Africa’s spicy chicken wars (24:05). Runtime: 29 min

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