• Why won’t the US, wary of China’s ambitions in the South China Sea, join a UN agreement on ocean rights?
• China aims to bring mega computing network online by next year in data power push
• Amid US tech war, Premier Li Qiang urges China to focus on application of core technologies
• China, eager for exchanges, pledges return to pre-pandemic flight pattern
• Beijing calls for halt to Myanmar fighting after stray artillery fire injured five in Chinese border town
• China hits out at US ‘harassment’ of Chinese students at American border
• Big tipper: China taxi driver pulls out all the stops to find, refund drunk woman passenger who overpaid fare by US$24,000
• Chinese scientists think diamonds might be present on mysterious planet Mercury
• China seeks European approval of C919, wants its home-grown jet to compete with Boeing and Airbus abroad
• Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai loaned at least HK$5 million to anti-China group, prosecutors allege in national security trial
• China’s propaganda chiefs told to ‘sing loudly about bright economic prospects’
• Pro-Haley ad puts words in DeSantis’s mouth as rivals trade China barbs
• Chinese workers see biggest drop in hiring salaries on record
• So grown up: China boy, 10, stands in for dead father at parent-child nursery school sports day, brings joy to little sister
• South China Sea: Beijing steps up military patrols as US and the Philippines conduct more drills in disputed waterway
• Hong Kong will seek support of mainland China to expand scale of cross-border data coming into city, Paul Chan says
• Taiwan elections: mainland Chinese reporters on short-term permits can ‘only observe’ as island votes for new president
• [World] A restless Gen Z is reshaping the Chinese Dream
• Risk of censorship to China’s AI leadership ambitions is overblown
• China, in search of new growth drivers, considers urban residency reforms
• ‘Guilty until proven innocent’: Chinese firm challenges US law on Uygur forced labour
• China maths genius monk who returned to secular life gets married, says he is better suited to ‘down-to-earth’ life
• Is Russia’s economy holding up well against Ukraine-war induced sanctions? China is watching and keen to know how

Why won’t the US, wary of China’s ambitions in the South China Sea, join a UN agreement on ocean rights?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3247072/why-wont-us-wary-chinas-ambitions-south-china-sea-join-un-agreement-ocean-rights?utm_source=rss_feed

US President Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, a former Republican vice-presidential candidate-turned-right-wing firebrand, have never agreed on much. Same for Democratic senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, Hillary Clinton’s presidential running mate in 2016, and Bill Cassidy, his Republican colleague from Louisiana.

But when it comes to an international convention governing who has rights to what parts of the oceans – including critical minerals and other potential riches beneath the surface – these politicians have, at one time or another, been on the same page.

In the decades since most countries ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), China’s military presence throughout the Indo-Pacific has grown. Naval clashes between China and the Philippines, an American ally, have fuelled the ire of Democrats and Republicans against Beijing.

Serving as the basis for a key 2016 arbitral ruling against the Chinese government’s extensive claims in the South China Sea, Unclos has consistently had the US Navy’s full support.

Yet the odds of a bipartisan US Senate resolution in the current congressional session to finally ratify the treaty appear slim, despite Unclos’ inclusion of principles long championed by the American government.

The resolution was introduced by Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono and her fellow Democratic senators Kaine, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski joined Cassidy on the Republican side.

Washington’s participation in Unclos negotiations stretching from the 1970s to the 1990s meant that “we were a very strong presence in obtaining all of the US goals”, said James Kraska of Harvard Law School and the Naval War College.

“We achieved our goal for transit passage through international straits, primarily so that US ballistic missile submarines … don’t have to be on the surface and share their flag, which is essential for strategic stability [and] the US alliance system,” he added.

The 2016 ruling had seemed to settle a dispute between China and the Philippines over which side had rights to fish around Scarborough Shoal, some 220km (120 nautical miles) off the coast of the Philippines’ largest island of Luzon.

China’s PLA hails ‘constructive’ US talks, but hits out at Pentagon budget

It also struck at the heart of Beijing’s efforts to ring-fence a huge portion of the ocean for its own military outposts, fishing fleets and exploration rigs.

“There is no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to resources within the sea areas falling within the ‘nine-dash line’,” the ruling stated, referring to the country’s ambiguous claims over roughly 90 per cent of the South China Sea.

The tribunal further ruled that China’s reefs and holdings in the Spratly Islands, including Taiping Island, were “legally ‘rocks’ that do not generate an exclusive economic zone [of 200 nautical miles] or continental shelf”.

Beijing quickly dismissed the ruling, and in the years since has clashed with neighbours including the Philippines and Vietnam over territorial rights in the area. As these run-ins began straining China’s ties in the region, then-foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian called the ruling “an invalid waste of paper”.

In many of these instances, Washington has weighed in on the side of Beijing’s opponents, only to have Chinese officials deflect with a fact that, for many, undercuts the official American position: the US is one of only three UN member states to have signed but not ratified Unclos.

Throughout the 1980s, several provisions that former US president Ronald Reagan’s administration opposed were largely eliminated, including the transfer of seabed-mining technology to all members and production-control mandates.

By 1994, during the Bill Clinton administration, the State Department determined that being left out of Unclos would work against Washington’s interests. Clinton signed the agreement and sent it to the Senate for ratification, just one month before that year’s midterm elections.

Republicans won control of the Senate that year, handing the chairmanship of the chamber’s foreign relations committee to the late Jesse Helms, a strident critic of the United Nations.

During Helms’s tenure, the matter did not return to the Senate, where international treaties require a two-thirds majority approval.

Is Beijing warming to South China Sea code of conduct?

One reality of Unclos could not be adapted to the wishes of many Republicans like Helms: dispute resolution through the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Itlos).

The current tribunal comprises 21 independent members elected by secret ballot, including one nominated by China.

Itlos can determine, among other points, whether a dispute involves military activities, which it will not adjudicate. This can be contentious given that Washington does not consider its navy’s freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea as such. However, Beijing does.

American resistance to such supranational authority, particularly among Republicans, has only hardened. Washington follows a policy of Unclos compliance based on “customary international law” without official accession.

This policy has worked in America’s favour for years, according to Stephen Groves of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.

“Beijing famously lost a major Unclos arbitration case to the Philippines regarding China’s chronic treaty violations in the South China Sea,” Groves said in a June 2022 commentary.

“Did China respect the arbitral tribunal’s decision and reform its behaviour? Of course not. Nor will it, regardless of US ratification.

“Even if US membership in Unclos could magically curb China’s maritime transgressions, ratification comes with significant costs.”

Ratification “would expose the nation to international lawsuits, including specious suits attempting to fleece the United States for its alleged contributions to global climate change”.

Critics of Unclos also insist that because the treaty is based on the “customary international law” recognised by Washington, the framework is redundant.

Will more assertive Philippine approach to South China Sea pay off?

Those favouring ratification counter that ratification would undercut Beijing’s argument that Washington only sides with China’s neighbours when doing so is convenient.

They further point to Russia’s extensive claims to vast stretches of the Arctic – now more easily navigable owing to climate change, making mineral exploration easier – as other pressing reasons to sign on.

Russia’s extended territory there as proposed in several submissions to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) dating back to 2001 would encompass 70 per cent of the Arctic Ocean beyond what falls within its exclusive economic zone. CLCS operates under Unclos auspices.

As Alaska’s governor in 2007, Palin, now a commentator on right-wing media, wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations committee to “put my administration on record in support of the convention as the predicate for asserting sovereign rights that will be of benefit to Alaska and the nation”.

While the threat of a “hot” versus cold war between the US and China over conflicting territorial claims has steadily boosted the rationale for supporting the resolution, a culture clash in the US has worked against Hirono, Cassidy and the other sponsors, who apparently do not want to conflate the two.

Backers of Unclos ratification have used the US Navy’s warnings in their resolution to strengthen their argument.

These include testimony by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations, and John Aquilino, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2021 that “it would make our position much stronger if we were signatories”.

Nevertheless, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee remains silent about Unclos. A response to an emailed query said only the committee had “nothing to contribute to this story at this time”.

Beijing, Manila dispute details of latest South China Sea military encounter

The committee members not sponsoring the resolution declined to answer queries from the Post, except Todd Young, whose staff said the Indiana Republican “has not taken a position”.

The resistance has much to do with the isolationist sentiment that brought former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee Donald Trump to power in 2017, according to Holly Doremus of the University of California, Berkeley’s law school.

The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a block on new judges to the WTO’s appeal court as well as unrelenting scorn directed at the World Health Organization, another UN body, during the coronavirus pandemic all underscore this political orientation.

“This is one of many things that’s got caught up in the culture wars,” Doremus said. “The expectation was that it would be ratified because the military was on board … but these concerns about global entities controlling the conduct of the United States got in the way.”

John Bellinger advocated ratification while serving as legal adviser for the State Department and the National Security Council during the administration of George W Bush and as a witness for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2012.

“Unfortunately, the Senate is unlikely to vote to approve the Law of the Sea Convention any time soon,” he said in an emailed response to questions from the Post.

“The convention has always been controversial among some Republicans, who believe it infringes on US sovereignty, and there are far fewer internationally minded Republicans in the Senate than 15 years ago.”

And lawmakers are not the only ones who appear gun-shy in commenting on Unclos. Companies with a stake in deep-seabed mining rights have been reluctant as well.

Indonesia’s South China Sea remarks show a ‘level up’ of support for claimants

Near-misses between warships aside, the global race for critical minerals and Washington’s bilateral interest in sourcing them raise the stakes when it comes to international agreements over these rights.

“The minerals which are required for the new economy, the green economy, the defence industry, which are critical for advanced technologies, many of them are in super-high concentrations on the seabed,” Kraska explained.

“It’s impossible to go it alone in this area because all these companies that are capable of doing it like Northrop Grumman or [RTX division] Hughes or one of these major defence contractors that are capable of getting together a billion dollars to go exploit a deep-seabed mining site will not do so without … legal surety,” he said.

The US has one of the longest coastlines, giving the country a combined exclusive economic zone, as defined by Unclos, that is roughly double the size of California.

That said, US mining companies have yet to announce any major deep-seabed projects in these areas, and the industry is not showing any signs of agitation.

The National Mining Association, which represents a US subsidiary of British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Group, among dozens of others, said: “Our focus is on US domestic mining and the extensive untapped reserves that exist inside the US, not seabed mining.”

Neither Northrop Grumman nor RTX, formerly Raytheon, responded to requests for comment. The US Chamber of Commerce also did not respond.

Without clear signals from Congress, the Biden administration has moved ahead with one initiative that would align with Unclos membership. Last month the State Department released the geographic coordinates defining the outer limits of America’s continental shelf “in accordance with customary international law and [Unclos]”.

With uneasy eye on China, India and Philippines vow stronger cooperation

The area, delineated using Unclos measurement standards, amounts to about 1 million sq km spread across seven regions, including one in the western Pacific Ocean near the US territories of Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

While Washington’s demarcation fits with Unclos, the US will not be able to obtain an arbitral ruling to legitimise it internationally without ratifying the treaty.

“There’s a belief behind [congressional resistance to Unclos] that … it’s better for us to go our own way and ignore what the rest of the world wants,” Doremus said.

“But the world really has changed over the past 20, 25 years in that respect with the rise of China militarily with the availability of subsea resources.

“Maybe that makes the calculus matter, but I think the reason I raised the culture war point is to say this is not necessarily a rational decision for many US lawmakers.”

China aims to bring mega computing network online by next year in data power push

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3247292/china-aims-bring-mega-computing-network-online-next-year-data-power-push?utm_source=rss_feed

A nationwide computing power mega project in China will be up and running by next year, the National Data Administration (NDA) has said, as Beijing seeks to boost support for artificial intelligence and other digital technologies in its competition with the United States for hi-tech dominance.

The integrated computing power network will bring national computing hubs together into a pool of general-purpose, intelligent and supercomputing power to be used by regional data centres and the “Eastern Data and Western Computing” project, launched in early 2022.

C2NET admits first provinces in its drive to pool national computing power

The network is intended to address regional imbalances in digital resources – between the more prosperous areas of eastern China and the energy-rich west – according to the NDA, which was set up in October to improve support for the digital economy.

“The computing power gap between the east and west has narrowed in recent years, but there are still problems to be addressed,” state news agency Xinhua on Wednesday quoted an unnamed NDA official as saying.

The problems centre on imbalances in the distribution of general computing, intelligent computing and supercomputing power across national computing hubs.

Other issues include inadequate security in data centre clusters, as well as limited dispatching ability and low network transmission quality, which restrict data processing workloads in the east from being shifted to data centres in the west, according to the official.

“Better synergy between eastern and western regions, as well as governments and companies, is needed to improve China’s technological prowess,” the official said.

The directive to “thoroughly implement” the Eastern Data and Western Computing project and speed up construction of a nationwide integrated computing power network was issued by Beijing last week.

Under the order, the National Development and Reform Commission, the NDA, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the National Energy Administration will work together to ensure that national computing hubs contribute most of the country’s computing power by 2025.

How China’s national computing network will be a game changer

The agencies must also make certain that the network’s core technology will be reliable and secure, the computing centres are highly efficient, and that at least 80 per cent of their power is provided by green energy.

Under the mega project, China has established eight national computing hubs, in the western province of Gansu, southern province of Guizhou, northwestern autonomous regions of Inner Mongolia and Ningxia, as well as four in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta region, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area and the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle.

Computing power is the pillar of the digital economy and is key to developing large language models, the technology used to train AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT.

Amid US export controls on chipmaking equipment, China has aimed to achieve total computing power of more than 300 exaflops by 2025, a rise of more than half from 2023, according to an action plan released by the MIIT last year.

An exaflop is a unit of measurement for a computer’s speed. A computing system of 1 exaflop can complete 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second. By 2022, China’s computing power had reached 197 exaflops, ranking it second globally after the US, the MIIT said, without giving the number for the US.

China and the US were the top two countries listed on the 2022-2023 global computing power index, released by Tsinghua University, International Data Corporation and China’s leading big data provider Inspur last year.

The index is compiled to forecast technological trends by tracking the development of comprehensive computing power, computing efficiency, applications and infrastructure in 15 countries representing technological leaders, followers and starters. The US topped the list last year, followed by China, Japan, Germany, Singapore and Britain.

Amid US tech war, Premier Li Qiang urges China to focus on application of core technologies

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3247299/amid-us-tech-war-premier-li-qiang-urges-china-focus-application-core-technologies?utm_source=rss_feed

Premier Li Qiang pushed for “more and better” market applications of core technologies amid China’s self-reliance drive during a two-day tour of Hubei province this week, with the world’s second-largest economy in urgent need of stabilisation to quell investor concerns and lift market confidence.

“We must expedite the development of productivity driven by emerging technology, and kick-start a robust economic start of the year,” he said in a statement following the tour of the central province on Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Hubei is a key part of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, which is one of President Xi Jinping’s key regional development strategies. It includes 11 provinces and municipalities, and accounts for over 40 per cent of China’s population and economic size.

“We need to improve collaboration between academia and business, by introducing more precise and supportive measures, thus fluidly turning scientific research into market production,” the premier said after visiting HGLaser Engineering and semiconductor manufacturer Yangtze Memory Technologies Corporation (YMTC) in the provincial capital of Wuhan.

Time to open its doors wider, or will China fall into a middle-technology trap?

Given the escalating containment efforts by the United States, Beijing is continually seeking to tackle choke points with home-grown technology.

Development was also mentioned as China’s biggest priority for 2024 at the tone-setting central economic work conference in mid-December.

HGLaser introduced China’s first fully domestically produced chip-cutting machine in July, according to the WeChat account of Donghu New Technology Development Zone in Wuhan.

But unlike China’s leading memory chip maker, YMTC, HGLaser has not been sanctioned by the US. YMTC was added to the US trade blacklist in December 2022.

During his two-day tour, Li also inspected Wuhan University’s laboratory on high-resolution Earth observation and the BeiDou navigation system.

The home-grown BeiDou system, which is China’s equivalent to the US’ Global Positioning System (GPS), can be applied to agriculture, forestry and meteorology.

China, though, has long suffered from loose cooperation between academia, including universities and research institutes, and enterprises focused on market applications.

The cooperation issues include poor communication and insufficient resource sharing, which creates obstacles affecting the transformation of inventions in China.

‘Important milestone’: China’s GPS-like BeiDou navigation system hits new height

As of the end of 2022, only 3.9 per cent of inventions at Chinese universities were industrialised, according to the latest data available by the China National Intellectual Property Administration, compared to around 50 per cent in the US.

Li also visited water conservancy projects and a chemical company focusing on green development in Yichang, as well as a battery industrial estate set up by Guangdong Brunp Recycling Technology, a subsidiary under China’s leading lithium battery maker, Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL).

CATL is a supplier to several carmakers, including Tesla, BMW and Volkswagen.

The premier also encouraged companies to promote China’s sustainability by focusing on the circular economy to drive companies up the value chain.

The circular economy model seeks to minimise wasting resources and environmental impact by extending the life cycle of products.

China, eager for exchanges, pledges return to pre-pandemic flight pattern

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3247301/china-eager-exchanges-pledges-return-pre-pandemic-flight-pattern?utm_source=rss_feed

China will intensify its efforts to bring international flights to pre-pandemic levels in 2024, with a particular focus on more direct trips to and from the United States and streamlined procedures for entry, its civil aviation regulator said on Thursday.

The declaration came as international exchanges remain at severely diminished levels one year after the country reopened its borders, undermining Beijing’s endeavours to fight decoupling and drive its economic recovery.

According to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), direct flights between China and the US have increased to 63 per week after President Xi Jinping and his counterpart Joe Biden met in San Francisco in November.

That weekly tally, however, is still a sharp drop from the 345 weekly trips on offer before the Covid-19 pandemic. No official data is available for passenger turnover.

China-Europe air travel volume for 2023, meanwhile, has only recovered to 60 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

The United States and the European Union are two major export destinations for Chinese products.

Speaking at its annual work conference, CAAC officials estimated that the number of international flights could rise to 6,000 per week by the end of this year from the current 4,600.

That would represent a return to about 80 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

“We’ll enhance international cooperation to boost the recovery of international markets,” they said.

Authorities have said they will promote the optimisation of visa and entry-exit policies, as well as improve customs clearance for international passengers.

China flight expansion should clear inbound travel for arrival next year

Cooperation with countries included in China’s Belt and Road Initiative will also be expanded, they added, and more overseas stopovers will be pursued for Chinese carriers.

Passport holders from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia have been permitted to visit China without a visa for up to 15 days starting in December. The country has also developed several visa-free schemes to attract foreign tourists, including an agreement with Thailand to permanently waive visa requirements for each other’s citizens from March.

The world’s second-largest economy has made a near-full recovery in its domestic travel market, with air passenger traffic last year 1.5 per cent higher than 2019.

China’s air passenger traffic, domestic and international, reached 620 million people last year, representing 93.9 per cent of total traffic in 2019. That figure could rise to 690 million in 2024.

Beijing mentioned increasing “the number of international flights” at a top-level political meeting in July 2023, as the recovery had not yet matched expectations. International travel is considered essential for fostering people-to-people connections – particularly in attracting foreign capital.

Beijing calls for halt to Myanmar fighting after stray artillery fire injured five in Chinese border town

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3247311/beijing-calls-halt-myanmar-fighting-after-stray-artillery-fire-injured-five-chinese-border-town?utm_source=rss_feed

China has renewed its call for a ceasefire in northern Myanmar after five people were injured after stray artillery fire hit a town on the Chinese side of the border during fighting between the military junta and rebel forces.

Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Thursday Beijing “strongly deplored” the incident, adding that China would do what was necessary to protect the lives and property of its citizens.

“We have already lodged a serious protest with the relevant parties and we once again asked all parties in the conflict to stop fighting immediately and take concrete actions to avoid similar appalling incidents from disrupting the tranquillity of the Chinese-Myanmar border,” Wang said.

The incident happened on Wednesday when shells fired from northern Myanmar hit Nansan, a town in Yunnan province, which lies around 2.5km (1.6 miles) from the border. The five people injured in the incident are now being treated in hospital.

One resident of the village said his office windows had been shattered by an explosion, while a nearby mobile phone shop had been badly damaged.

“I ran out [of the office] after I heard the explosion,” said the man, who requested anonymity. “I clearly saw a crater in front of a mobile phone shop and the explosion slightly injured a delivery man and a local resident. Later I saw three [other] people being taken into an ambulance.”

China navy makes Myanmar ‘show of friendship’ amid border fighting

He added that the ceiling of the mobile phone shop had caved in and its walls were riddled with holes.

A shop owner who lives nearby said: “We were terrified [by the explosion] and worried about our safety. We just want to live safely and we should not be victims of the conflicts across the border.”

The military junta is facing the most serious challenge to its rule since it seized power in a coup in 2021, with insurgencies flaring up in different parts of the country.

The fighting in northern Myanmar started in late October, when an alliance of three rebel armies representing different ethnic groups launched an offensive against the government in Shan state.

China has previously urged all parties to stop fighting and has been working with both sides to broker a ceasefire.

Nansan has been caught in the crossfire during previous bouts of fighting in northern Myanmar, including another incident that injured five people in May 2015.

China hits out at US ‘harassment’ of Chinese students at American border

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3247303/china-hits-out-us-harassment-chinese-students-american-border?utm_source=rss_feed

China has accused US authorities of harassing Chinese students at the border, saying “tens” of Chinese nationals are being denied entry to the US each month.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Thursday that Chinese students with valid travel documents and visas had been consistently mistreated by US border authorities.

Wang said Chinese students heading to the US had long been subjected to “politically motivated” “abusive suppression and persecution, frequent interrogations, detentions, forced confessions, inducements and even deportations”.

“In recent months, tens of Chinese personnel travelling to the US, including overseas Chinese students, have been forced to return to China each month,” he said.

“This is typically selective and discriminatory and amounts to political law enforcement. China is strongly dissatisfied with this and firmly opposes it.”

The ministry also urged the US to cancel a “mistaken” executive order that prevents postgraduate students and researchers allegedly linked to the Chinese military from entering the US.

The order – Presidential Proclamation 10043 – was introduced on national security grounds during the Donald Trump presidency in 2020.

Wang said the order undermined an agreement in November between the presidents of China and the US to step up people-to-people exchanges.

“[The denials are] seriously poisoning the atmosphere for bilateral people-to-people exchanges and contradicting the consensus that the two leaders made about strengthening and facilitating people-to-people exchanges,” he said.

Since Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden met in San Francisco last year, China and the US have stepped up interactions between people from the two countries, with Beijing easing visa applications for American tourists. The number of direct flights is also rising.

Can China-US people-to-people cooperation resume if academic swaps are curbed?

But academic exchanges have yet to recover.

Global Times, a nationalist paper affiliated with People’s Daily, reported on Thursday there had been a rise in cases of “unprovoked and rude interrogation or deportation” of Chinese students at the US border.

The report said that in one case a researcher with the US National Institutes of Health was “interrogated” at Dulles International Airport in Virginia in November and told that their F-1 student visa had been voided. A postgraduate student at Yale University reported a similar incident in December.

Big tipper: China taxi driver pulls out all the stops to find, refund drunk woman passenger who overpaid fare by US$24,000

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3246355/big-tipper-china-taxi-driver-pulls-out-all-stops-find-refund-drunk-woman-passenger-who-overpaid-fare?utm_source=rss_feed

A concerned taxi driver who went out of his way to look for a passenger who had accidentally overpaid her fare by a staggering 170,000 yuan (US$24,000) because she was drunk, has won praise on mainland social media.

Du Liming, who works for an affiliate of Guangzhou Public Transport Group, eventually succeeded in finding the passenger, surnamed Chen, after persevering with his search for five days.

The incident occurred at about 3am on December 14 after Chen’s friend had to help her into Du’s cab following a night out.

At the end of her journey, Chen swiped the QR code on her payment card for the fare that should have been 60 yuan (US$8).

It was not until the end of his shift that Du looked at the Alipay account he seldom used for fare payments and was shocked to see the additional amount of 170,000 yuan.

“At first I thought I had read the number wrong, ” he said.

After checking again, Du went to the nearest police station, called his company and also contacted Alipay as well as leaving messages for Chen.

“But nobody contacted me,” Du said.

The empathetic driver was eager to find the owner because he had misplaced valuable belongings before and could remember how awful that felt.

“Losing things, particularly a large sum of money, is very worrying, so I wanted to find the customer as soon as possible, ” he said.

In the days that followed, Du waited anxiously to be contacted and also continued to do whatever he could think of to try and locate Chen.

He even sought help from the local media, which ran a news story about the search for his unlucky passenger that went viral online.

Fortunately, the friend who had helped Chen into Du’s car saw the news story and told her. They met the next day and Du was able to return Chen’s money.

Many on mainland social media were impressed with the taxi driver’s empathy and determination to do the right thing.

“Du is so kind,” one said.

“Du seemed more anxious than Chen. What a great man,” another wrote.

Heartwarming stories involving taxi drivers are well received on mainland social media.

In December 2018, a driver in Beijing became an internet celebrity when it was revealed that he takes his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, to work with him every day.

Also, in August 2015, a cabby in southeastern China found about 300 gold necklaces left in his taxi and handed them in to his company, receiving huge praise online.

Chinese scientists think diamonds might be present on mysterious planet Mercury

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3247277/chinese-scientists-think-diamonds-might-be-present-mysterious-planet-mercury?utm_source=rss_feed

The planet Mercury could be hiding a glittering secret behind its unusually dark colour, according to a study by researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, southern China.

The scientists said their observations and modelling suggested that the graphite content that gave the planet its distinctive appearance could be much lower than previously estimated, with diamonds and other carbon forms possibly also present.

If previous estimates of carbon levels on the planet’s surface were accurate, a substantial portion of the element must be present in other forms, such as tiny diamond particles and amorphous carbon, which has no crystalline structure, they said.

The study, published by the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy on Thursday, was based on previous research in the United States into data collected by Nasa’s Messenger, the first spacecraft to orbit the planet.

Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system, only slightly bigger than the moon. It is also the closest planet to the sun – an average 77 million kilometres (50 million miles) from Earth – and the least studied because it is so difficult to reach.

China shows full structure of Tiangong space station in first panoramic images

The Messenger probe took nearly seven years to reach the planet, entering orbit around Mercury in 2011, and ended its mission in 2015.

In 2016, a team from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory determined that carbon was likely to be responsible for Mercury’s dark appearance – a reflection of its geochemistry and key to revealing its origin and evolution.

The carbon probably originated deep below the planet’s surface, “within an ancient, graphite-rich crust that was later buried by volcanic material”, according to the US study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience.

But the latest research suggests the carbon detected by the Messenger mission “may not entirely occur as graphite”, the Chinese scientists said.

“Our results indicate that most carbon on Mercury may occur in forms other than intergrain graphite and that carbon did not entirely drain from the mantle during magma ocean crystallisation,” they wrote.

The researchers noted that the previous study had explained Mercury’s “mysteriously low surface reflectance” on the graphite form of carbon accounting for up to 4 per cent of the weight of deposits covering the planet’s bedrock.

However, their study showed that “a combination of less than 1 per cent [in weight] of microcrystalline graphite and similar amounts of metallic iron is adequate for explaining [the phenomenon]”, they said.

“Crystalline graphite in the hypothesised primary crust may have undergone intensive metamorphism or destruction by post-differentiation surface processes, such as impact bombardment, magmatism and space weathering.”

According to the paper, carbon on Mercury “may mainly occur as nanophase diamonds due to the long-term impact of metamorphism or as amorphous carbon due to space weathering of graphite, both of which are efficient darkening phases”.

Graphite – which is used in pencil leads – is the most stable form of carbon on Mercury’s surface. With extremely high pressure and temperatures of less than 3,000 degrees Celsius (5,432 Fahrenheit), it can be converted into diamond. The reverse occurs between 1,000-1,600C (1,832-2,912F).

Lead author Xiao Zhiyong, a professor with Sun Yat-sen University’s school of atmospheric sciences, said most of Mercury’s graphite may have been transformed into other forms of carbon after more than 4 billion years of weathering.

“If the primary crust of Mercury was made of graphite, we can imagine that the continuous evolution in 4.56 billion years – with countless impact events, mixing and destruction – would have seen most of the early graphite undergo phase changes and become other forms, including diamond,” he said.

Xiao said he was looking forward to the findings of the second mission to Mercury, set to arrive at the planet in December 2025. The high-resolution data it collected could help scientists identify and study meteorites on Earth that had come from the planet, he said.

According to Xiao, meteorites that originated on Mercury could serve as direct evidence of the composition of the planet’s surface until it becomes possible to retrieve samples from the planet itself.

European-Japanese spacecraft BepiColombo captures images of Mercury

The European-Japanese mission BepiColombo left Earth in 2018. It will be the second mission to orbit Mercury and the most advanced, according to the European Space Agency, which said learning more about the planet would shed light on the entire solar system’s history.

According to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, once in orbit the probe will observe planetary characteristics such as magnetic fields and plasma environments.

These observations would enable a better understanding of the magnetosphere near the sun and the process of how planets like the Earth were formed, it said.

China seeks European approval of C919, wants its home-grown jet to compete with Boeing and Airbus abroad

https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3247291/china-seeks-european-approval-c919-wants-its-home-grown-jet-compete-boeing-and-airbus-abroad?utm_source=rss_feed

China said it would promote the certification of its domestically built narrowbody passenger jet in Europe this year, as part of efforts to receive more international recognition for the C919 and compete with Boeing and Airbus.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) told an annual industry working conference in Beijing on Thursday that it would increase its efforts to work with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to allow its “domestic civil aircraft to go abroad”, according to CAAC News, a publication owned by the Chinese aviation regulator.

The C919 has been operating commercially in China since May last year, but it has only been certified by the Chinese regulator.

Manufactured by the state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), the C919 has been designed to compete with Boeing’s 737 and Airbus’ A320.

The CAAC has bilateral aviation-safety agreements with the EASA and the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States for certification validation that would allow Chinese-made aerospace products to be exported to the US and the European Union based on mutual recognition of the respective processes.

Under the agreements, regulators would work together to validate the airworthiness of an aircraft design, known as a type certification.

Last month, Comac general manager Zhou Xinmin said that China needs to “further enhance the aircraft airworthiness certification capabilities” to support domestic made planes to “go overseas”.

On Thursday, the CAAC also said this year it would prioritise reviews of “national key models”- the domestically designed CJ-1000 engine, which is being developed for the C919 and the AG600, the world’s largest amphibious aircraft.

“The civil aviation industry [in China] adheres to self-reliance, openness and inclusiveness,” the CAAC said.

The regulator added that the industry would focus on solving numerous bottlenecks and “choke points” concerning technical equipment, production processes and key operation systems that are “controlled by others” to reduce risks in the long-term development of the industry.

The C919 counts many foreign companies as its suppliers for key components, with its engine made by CFM International, a joint venture between the US’ GE Aerospace and France’s Safran Aircraft Engines.

On Tuesday, the Shanghai-based China Eastern Airlines said it had received its fourth C919 jet.

Along with semiconductors, civil aviation manufacturing has been named as a strategic industry for China’s economic growth that the government would support and promote, according to guidelines published by the National Development and Reform Commission last week.

Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai loaned at least HK$5 million to anti-China group, prosecutors allege in national security trial

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3247253/hong-kong-media-tycoon-jimmy-lai-loaned-least-hk5-million-anti-china-group-prosecutors-allege?utm_source=rss_feed

Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying loaned at least HK$5 million (US$640,205) to an anti-China campaign and connected its members to overseas politicians with the aim of exerting foreign political pressure on mainland China and Hong Kong, prosecutors said on Thursday.

The prosecution focused on the “Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong” (SWHK) group on the sixth day of the Apple Daily tabloid founder’s national security trial at West Kowloon Court, alleging that the campaign was masterminded and financed by Lai behind the scenes.

Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Anthony Chau Tin-hang said that since the 2019 anti-government protests, the group had created a “cohesive network” with prominent political figures from the United States, Britain and Japan, with the help of Lai and his right-hand man, Mark Simon, a former US intelligence agent.

Chau argued the group had attracted sanctions from abroad and urged foreign countries to sever mutual legal assistance and extradition agreements with Hong Kong, adding that its “hostile activities” had continued after the national security law took effect in June 2020.

Lai, 76, has pleaded not guilty to two conspiracy charges of foreign collusion under the Beijing-decreed security law, and a third conspiracy offence based on colonial-era sedition legislation.

Wearing a brown jacket, the businessman nodded and smiled at his family sitting in the public gallery on Thursday.

The SWHK group, according to the prosecution, had launched anti-government propaganda on social media and published articles condemning Beijing, the Hong Kong government and the city’s police to further Lai’s chi bao strategy – allegedly to instigate “administrative and economic turmoil in China”.

A screenshot of the group’s website displayed in court showed it had urged the government of New Zealand to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and mainland officials, and suspend the export of arms and crowd control weapons to the region.

Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai set up English Apple Daily to win US support, court hears

Similar calls were made to the US and Canada in a series of overseas newspaper advertisements, the court heard, some of which were also published by Apple Daily.

Chau described Lai as the mastermind and sponsor of the group who was “at the highest level of command of the syndicate”, with Simon allegedly acting as Lai’s “agent” who carried out the former’s instructions and vetted requests for financial support.

Wayland Chan Tsz-wah, a paralegal, was called a “middleman” who received instructions from Lai and Simon and relayed them to activists Andy Li Yu-hin and Finn Lau Cho-dik, who were said to be the group’s leaders on the surface.

Li was one of 12 Hongkongers caught in mainland waters while trying to flee to Taiwan in 2020. Lau fled to the UK that same year and has been on the national security police wanted list since July last year.

Chau added that the “Fight for Freedom” group had sponsored Hong Kong students of higher institutions to travel to at least five cities, including Washington DC, London and Berlin, to meet foreign politicians in a bid to convince them to support the 2019 social unrest.

The group also allegedly invited 19 overseas political figures to Hong Kong to observe the district council election in 2019, including Lord Alton, member of the House of Lords in the UK and Luke de Pulford, founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

They both had a meeting with Li along with the city’s former No 2 official, Anson Chan Fang On-sang, and Martin Lee Chu-ming, founding chairman of the Democratic Party, in the W Hotel in Hong Kong, the court heard.

Chau added the media tycoon told Li to maintain close relationships with politicians in the US, the UK and Japan.

Regarding his connections with the US, the prosecution said Li met US senator Rick Scott to lobby country based on the alleged police brutality. Li was also requested to conceal the identity of Lai and Simon as his backers.

Upon invitation by former chief secretary Chan, Li in 2019 also had a lunch gathering with Andrew Heyn, then British consul general in Hong Kong and other politicians, including lawmaker Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, the court heard.

The Jimmy Lai trial so far: daily updates on his Hong Kong national security case

Later in the same year, Chan also invited Li to her office to discuss the protests for half an hour, the prosecution said.

Media tycoon Lai also arranged “middleman” Chan’s meeting with Benedict Rogers, founder of Hong Kong Watch in the UK, Chau added.

Lai’s assistant Simon in May 2020 also instructed SWHK to join the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China in the UK, comprised of legislators from different countries, Chau said. The group later became the secretariat of the alliance.

The media tycoon also promoted the alliance on his account on Twitter, now known as X, even after the promulgation of the national security law in June 2020, to support engaging the international community in launching hostile activities against the mainland and Hong Kong, the prosecution said.

After the enactment of the security law, Li continued to assist the alliance by editing its website and publishing articles, it added.

China’s propaganda chiefs told to ‘sing loudly about bright economic prospects’

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3247256/chinas-propaganda-chiefs-told-sing-loudly-about-bright-economic-prospects?utm_source=rss_feed

The president’s chief of staff has urged propaganda officials to talk up China’s economic prospects, part of efforts to boost public confidence amid a slowdown.

Cai Qi made the remarks at an annual gathering of the nation’s propaganda chiefs in Beijing on Wednesday, state news agency Xinhua reported.

“[We should] continue to strengthen positive publicity and public opinion guidance, and sing loudly about China’s bright economic prospects,” Cai was quoted as saying.

He told the hundreds of officials to focus on building confidence in China’s future economic situation and to ensure the ruling Communist Party’s propaganda, ideology and cultural work “always progresses in the right direction”.

Li Shulei, who heads the party’s propaganda department, said there should be more efforts to guide public opinion and present China’s image on the world stage more effectively, as well as to prevent and resolve “ideological risks”, according to the report.

It comes as Beijing has been trying to stamp out negativity about the economy and revive confidence amid a sluggish post-pandemic recovery and exodus of foreign capital.

In December, at the annual central economic work conference in Beijing, President Xi Jinping called for officials to promote a more positive image of the economy and its “bright” outlook.

Efforts to avert bad news have intensified in the past year, as the economy struggled to find its footing following the easing of tough pandemic restrictions that had suppressed growth.

A worsening property sector, record-high youth unemployment and a rapidly ageing population are among the challenges Beijing is facing.

Rising tensions with the United States – including over trade issues – and a de-risking approach proposed by the European Union to reduce reliance on China’s supply chain have added to the country’s economic woes.

The top spy agency last month called on the public to be cautious about a “false narrative” that was “discrediting” China’s economy. In an article on its official WeChat social media account, the Ministry of State Security said China was grappling with a “complex and uncertain” external environment and that the economy was a major battleground between rival powers.

It said attempts to spread the narrative that China is in economic decline were part of efforts to contain and suppress its growth.

What is China’s youth unemployment rate and why does it cover ages 16 to 24?

Discussion about mounting local government debt, wealth inequality and the exchange rate of the yuan – which slumped to a 16-year low against the US dollar in September – are regularly silenced on Chinese social media.

Beijing also stopped publishing its monthly youth unemployment data in August after it reached a record high, with more that one in five people in China aged 16 to 24 out of work.

Pro-Haley ad puts words in DeSantis’s mouth as rivals trade China barbs

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/01/04/pro-haley-ad-puts-words-desantiss-mouth-rivals-trade-china-barbs/2024-01-03T21:43:55.844Z

“DeSantis called China ‘Florida’s most important trading partner.’ DeSantis even allowed a Chinese military contractor to expand just miles from a U.S. naval base.”

— Voice-over on a campaign ad by SFA Fund, a super PAC that backs former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley (R), released Jan. 2

In the battle between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley to emerge as the main Republican alternative to Donald Trump, both sides have lobbed hyperbolic and false claims about their rival’s record on China. We’ve repeatedly given Pinocchios to super PACs associated with these candidates for filling the airwaves with absurd charges and countercharges. We even included DeSantis and Haley — and Trump — on our list of Biggest Pinocchios of 2023 for China-related claims.

It’s a new year, but the attacks haven’t stopped. This ad — which opens with the assertion that “Ron DeSantis is lying because he’s losing” — appears designed to counter specific attacks made by the DeSantis campaign, using examples that mirror those used against Haley.

For instance, DeSantis has charged that Haley actively recruited Chinese companies to South Carolina when she was governor — a claim backed up by news articles and video of Haley celebrating those deals. (The Haley campaign says the threat perception posed by China has changed since Haley was governor from 2011 to 2017.) A super PAC associated with DeSantis also has run ads claiming that Haley made a serious national security blunder when as governor she welcomed a Chinese fiberglass factory to her state. The ad falsely suggested the factory was designed to spy on a military base five miles away.

So this ad tries to turn the table — claiming that DeSantis said China was Florida’s most important trading partner and that he allowed a Chinese company to expand near a military base. Neither claim is true.

The Facts

“DeSantis called China ‘Florida’s most important trading partner’ ”

The ad runs this quote with an image of DeSantis laughing. But the source for the quote in the ad is listed as “EnterpriseFlorida.com accessed 11/1/2023.” That language suggests the quote is recent — but the Enterprise Florida Inc. (EFI) website doesn’t exist anymore and you can find it only by searching the Wayback Machine run by the Internet Archive. That’s because DeSantis last May signed legislation that folded elements of Enterprise Florida, a public-private partnership designed to attract foreign investment, into a new agency.

We located this quote on an archived 2021 webpage, but it is not anything that DeSantis said. It’s lifted from boilerplate marketing language: “Asia and Florida share bilateral merchandise trade of over U.S. $30 billion annually, with the region now representing about one-third of Florida’s total trade with the world. China remains Florida’s most important trading partner and export destination in the region, but commercial ties with India, Vietnam, Malaysia and other countries in South East Asia have grown significantly in recent years.”

DeSantis became governor in 2019, and Enterprise Florida’s 2020 annual report describes how in 2019 the agency attended nine international trade shows and made presentations at three seminars “positioning Florida as an ideal business destination for Chinese companies.” Before Enterprise Florida was liquidated, DeSantis chaired the board.

But after the coronavirus pandemic emerged from China in 2020, DeSantis supposedly soured on the outreach to Beijing. The governor’s office told RealClearPolitics that in 2020, when DeSantis “realized the extent of EFI’s engagement with Chinese trade,” the governor “compelled EFI to shut down all such ties with Chinese companies.” However, in signing the legislation, DeSantis made no mention of China — and the chief sponsor of the bill has said he was motivated by the fact that the agency had “overpromised and under-delivered for years.”

In a statement, SFA Fund defended the use of the quote, saying that because DeSantis was chairman of Enterprise Florida, “this ultimately means that Enterprise Florida’s statement about China’s importance as a trading partner was a statement that DeSantis not only encouraged, but essentially gave breath to until it was no longer politically beneficial for him to do so.” The Enterprise Florida website was scrubbed just before Haley and DeSantis met in the November Republican primary debate, which SFA suggests is suspicious but which the governor’s office says was a coincidence as the replacement agency went online.

In any case, the ad is misleading viewers by putting old marketing copy in the governor’s mouth. He never said this.

“DeSantis even allowed a Chinese military contractor to expand just miles from a U.S. Naval base.”

The word “allowed” is doing a lot of work here. The source for this claim is a November New York Post article reporting that DeSantis “stayed quiet” when Cirrus Aircraft, a Minnesota-based personal aircraft manufacturer, added two locations in the Orlando area in 2022. China Aviation Industry General Aircraft, a unit of China’s state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation, in 2011 bought a controlling interest in Cirrus from Bahraini investors.

At one location, Kissimmee Gateway Airport, the company performs maintenance services, while the office, at Orlando Executive Airport, is for sales. The New York Post noted that the sales location was 12.7 miles away from the Naval Air Warfare Center Training Systems Division, a research and development arm of the Navy. The Orlando Business Journal quoted a company official as saying 30 jobs in total would be added.

DeSantis may have been mum on the deal, but it’s hardly the sort of investment that might earn the notice of a governor in a state as large as Florida.

Moreover, there is a big difference between this deal and the one that is the centerpiece of the DeSantis attack on Haley’s involvement with Chinese companies.

Haley in 2016 actively recruited the fiberglass company, a partially state-owned enterprise called China Jushi, as she has acknowledged. The South Carolina Coordinating Council for Economic Development, which is chaired by the state’s governor-appointed commerce secretary, provided about $7 million in incentives to facilitate the Jushi deal. Under the contract with Richland County, China Jushi would receive almost 200 acres of county-owned land free of charge if promised investments were made.

Haley greeted the announcement with a news release that called the deal “a huge win for our state.” On Facebook, she declared: “Get excited! China Jushi is creating 400 new jobs” and investing $300 million “right here in Columbia!”

By contrast, DeSantis appears to have had nothing to do with the Cirrus expansion. In fact, the first mention of the deal in the media was that a mystery firm was arriving. “Anonymous company seeks ground lease at Kissimmee Airport,” headlined the Orlando Business Journal. Our search of news reports could not find any connection between DeSantis or his administration and the expansion; PolitiFact reported similar findings.

As for a Cirrus sales office being located nearly 13 miles from a naval facility, that’s not a problem. The Navy center is not on a list of about 200 sensitive military facilities that would require government approval for land purchases by foreign entities within one mile of the facilities. Neither is Fort Jackson in South Carolina, which is five miles from the China Jushi factory.

The Pinocchio Test

This ad is an especially desperate attempt to muddy the waters. Some of DeSantis’s attacks on Haley’s recruitment of Chinese companies has been misleading or unfair, but that’s no excuse for inventing quotes or suggesting DeSantis had a role in a company’s expansion in Florida. SFA Fund earns Four Pinocchios.

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Chinese workers see biggest drop in hiring salaries on record

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3247233/chinese-workers-see-biggest-drop-hiring-salaries-record?utm_source=rss_feed

Wages offered to Chinese workers in major cities declined by the most on record, underscoring persisting deflationary pressures and sluggish consumer confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.

Average salaries offered by companies to new hires in 38 key Chinese cities fell 1.3 per cent to 10,420 yuan (US$1,458) in the fourth quarter of 2023 from a year ago. That was the worst drop since at least 2016, according to data from online recruitment platform Zhaopin compiled by Bloomberg.

It was also the third straight quarter of decline, the longest run since data on yearly changes were first available in 2016.

In Beijing, the wages decreased 2.7 per cent from a year ago in the fourth consecutive quarter of contraction. Salaries in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou fell 4.5 per cent.

The data highlights the mounting deflation risks faced by China going into 2024, which weigh on its growth outlook. A gloomy job market means residents could pare back their spending, adding to downwards pressure on consumer prices that are already falling at the steepest pace in three years.

It also bodes ill for the property market, which is extending its worst slump in history. With an uncertain income outlook, households could continue to delay their home purchases and avoid taking out mortgages.

China saw widespread salary cuts in various sectors last year including technology, finance and among local government workers, a result of regulatory crackdowns and strained public finances. Beyond that, companies are also under pressure from weak domestic and overseas demand for their products.

Entry-level salaries have been falling in the so-called new-economy sectors, including electric vehicles, batteries, and solar and wind power. The average salary fell 2.3 per cent to 13,758 yuan in December from a year earlier, according to data from a private survey by Caixin Insight Group and Business Big Data Co.

A breakdown of the official jobless rate showed more than one in five young people could not find a job as of June, before the statistics authorities stopped publishing the numbers. That was in part due to companies’ increasing preference for experienced workers, who appear to have accepted lower wages and longer working hours due to concern over their job prospects.

The government says it is ironing out complexities in the jobless data.

A consumer confidence index compiled by the National Bureau of Statistics shows sentiment hovered around a historical low as of November, the most recent month for which data is available.

The index takes into account peoples’ assessment of their income, employment and willingness to spend. It shows confidence is yet to improve from the levels seen in 2022, when lockdowns due to Covid-19 were still in place.

So grown up: China boy, 10, stands in for dead father at parent-child nursery school sports day, brings joy to little sister

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/social-welfare/article/3246346/so-grown-china-boy-10-stands-dead-father-parent-child-nursery-school-sports-day-brings-joy-little?utm_source=rss_feed

A thoughtful 10-year-old boy in China who played the role his late father would have for his sister, 6, on sports day at her kindergarten, has touched mainland social media.

Video clips of the boy participating in a father-child event with his sister went viral after their mother, surnamed Xu, posted them on December 23.

Their father died of leukaemia two years ago, and while Xu told her son shortly after his death, she felt her little daughter was too young to understand.

Instead, she told the girl her father was sent to work in Shanghai, while the rest of the family must continue living in their hometown in eastern China’s Anhui province.

Xu, a primary school teacher, has been a lone parent to her two children and also a caregiver for her late husband’s parents for the past two years.

The proud mother said her son worked incredibly hard at the sports’ day to help his sister win the events.

“You have a dad. I have a brother,” the sister told her classmates, provoking an outpouring of emotion on social media.

“I was moved to tears,” one person on Douyin wrote.

“The boy has given all his strength and love to his sister. She is not short of love, despite having no dad,” said another.

A third person said schools should take into account different family set ups in such situations.

“Events that require parents to attend could upset children of single parents, or those whose parents work far away,” she said.

In September, online observers were moved by a boy, 8, who tied himself to his little sister, 3, with toy string while waiting for their abused mother to have a medical check-up at a hospital in southwest China’s Yunnan province.

Before their mother left, she asked the boy to look after his sister, who had fallen asleep on a bench, because she was worried she might be abducted.

The tired boy also fell asleep but kept a tight hold on the toy string attached to his sibling’s wrist.

In December, another touching incident that moved many happened in the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu following the 6.2-magnitude earthquake, when a girl, 10, was seen feeding her unwell brother, 3, before eating anything herself.

South China Sea: Beijing steps up military patrols as US and the Philippines conduct more drills in disputed waterway

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3247237/south-china-sea-beijing-steps-military-patrols-us-and-philippines-conduct-more-drills-disputed?utm_source=rss_feed

The Chinese military is conducting patrols in the South China Sea as the US and the Philippines hold their second joint drills in less than two months amid heightened tensions in the disputed waters.

The People’s Liberation Army’s Southern Theatre Command said it had sent its navy and air force to the South China Sea for routine patrols to monitor activities that “disrupt” the region.

“Troops in the theatre remain on high alert at all times, resolutely safeguarding national sovereignty, security and maritime rights and interests. Any military activities that disrupt and create hotspots in the South China Sea are fully under control,” according to a statement on the theatre’s official WeChat account on Wednesday.

The patrols were intended to run on Wednesday and Thursday, the statement said.

They coincide with two-day joint US-Philippines military drills being conducted in the same area, the second in two months as the two allies increased defence coordination in the region to jointly face China.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his Philippine counterpart Enrique Manalo last week held a phone call in which Blinken reaffirmed US commitment to military cooperation with the Philippines.

The Philippine media outlet GMA Network said China had deployed a Type 052D guided-missile destroyer and a Type 054A frigate to shadow the Philippine and American navies on Wednesday, triggering warnings from one of the Philippine patrol boats.

The patrol boat had issued five messages but received no response from the Chinese side, the report said.

Will Manila’s plans to build in South China Sea escalate tensions with Beijing?

The Philippine military said it had deployed two helicopters and four ships while the US Indo-Pacific Command sent multiple combat aircraft and four vessels – including an aircraft carrier, a guided missile cruiser and two destroyers – from its Carrier Strike Group 1 for the joint mission.

The Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff General Romeo Brawner said the joint mission with the US marked a “significant leap” in their alliance and interoperability.

“Our alliance is stronger than ever, sending a message to the world. We are advancing a rules-based international order and a free and open Indo-Pacific region in the face of regional challenges,” Brawner said, according to a Philippine military statement.

China and the Philippines have been locked in growing tensions over disputed reefs in the South China Sea that are claimed by both sides.

The patrols came as the Philippines said it would send additional floating assets to the Scarborough Shoal on Wednesday, days after China warned there would be a “resolute response” following a Philippine Congress funding allocation to build a “permanent structure” in the Second Thomas Shoal.

South China Sea: Beijing, Asean claimant states risk further conflicts in 2024

As it attempted to reinforce its sovereignty claim, Manila has increased its activity around the disputed reefs, including carrying out supply missions to its troops and fishermen regularly operating in the area.

These missions have often prompted blockades from China, including the use of water cannons and a floating barrier to deter them.

The obstructions resulted in two ship collisions last year. The two countries blamed each other for the incidents.

Hong Kong will seek support of mainland China to expand scale of cross-border data coming into city, Paul Chan says

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3247243/hong-kong-will-seek-support-mainland-china-expand-scale-cross-border-data-coming-city-paul-chan-says?utm_source=rss_feed

Hong Kong will seek the support of the central government to expand the scale of data coming into the city to cover places beyond the Greater Bay Area in a bid to drive development in the innovation and technology sector, the finance chief has said.

Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po on Thursday also said the city would look into the possibility of introducing a platform where information could be traded and a framework on guidelines for good data governance in collaboration with mainland China.

“In the future, we will further seek support from central ministries and commissions to explore expanding the geographical area and scale of data coming to Hong Kong, and look into the feasibility of [setting up] a framework of cross-border data governance and data trading,” said Chan at a digital economy summit.

Chan announced the plans weeks after Hong Kong and the mainland launched a pilot scheme to facilitate data sharing in the bay area in certain industries by adopting a standard contract to ensure compliance and security of cross-border data transfers.

The bay area refers to Beijing’s initiative to integrate Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland China cities into an economic powerhouse.

Beijing has been promoting data trading, which typically involves business intelligence, advertising, demographics, research and market data. The first big data exchange on the mainland was set up in Beijing in March 2021, while a marketplace in Guiyang sealed the country’s inaugural deal involving personal information last May.

Deal on data transfer boosts Hong Kong’s role in the Greater Bay Area

The financial chief said greater access to mainland data would cement Hong Kong’s position as a global data hub, which would help promote local research and developments in artificial intelligence, big data and healthcare, thus enhancing the city’s appeal as a base for the innovation and technology industry.

Chan said Hong Kong must catch up in the digital economy in view of the fast-evolving competition, conceding that “there was a lot yet to be done with a lot of room for improvement in relevant policies”.

“If we don’t move forward quickly, we will fall behind others,” he added.

HKMA to launch pilot scheme for Hong Kong banks to share account data

The first phase of the cross-border pilot scheme involves the banking, credit referencing and healthcare sectors. Hong Kong’s Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau and the Cyberspace Administration of China signed a memorandum of understanding for the initiative in June last year.

Former chief executive Leung Chun-ying, also a vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the nation’s top political advisory body, at the same event said that the arrangement marked a key milestone in development as it reduced the compliance hurdles associated with large data transfers and expedited the filing process.

HKMA to launch pilot scheme for Hong Kong banks to share account data

“Going forward, we should not underestimate the difficulty of the next steps in enabling the information data flow. But if the problems are resolved, the information flow can unleash a great deal of productivity,” Leung told reporters at a press conference.

He said he hoped that closer collaboration between Hong Kong and the mainland in matters related to the digital economy would enable the nation’s “great value for money” digital industry to expand its reach beyond the country through the city’s extensive global connectivity.

The former chief executive added that some countries were “thinking too much due to political reasons” and had become wary of the nation’s technologies, but it could still tap into other markets of great potential, such as Southeast Asia.

Taiwan elections: mainland Chinese reporters on short-term permits can ‘only observe’ as island votes for new president

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3247177/taiwan-elections-mainland-chinese-reporters-short-term-permits-can-only-observe-island-votes-new?utm_source=rss_feed

Reporters from around the world are converging on Taiwan as the island prepares to vote for a new president in less than 10 days. However, those coming in from mainland China face especially strict barriers on reporting on the January 13 presidential and legislative elections.

A Taiwanese immigration official, who declined to be named, said mainland journalists on short-term permits “can only observe” but are not allowed to write anything about the elections, even if they clear the application process to visit the island.

The rule, which was not in place during previous elections held every four years, caused a mainland Chinese reporter of the South China Morning Post to cancel plans to fly to Taiwan.

Journalists of non-mainland background from the same organisation, however, were not affected. The rule also does not affect mainland reporters currently based in Taiwan, who are allowed to cover the election.

The reporting restriction, which appears to specifically target mainland citizens, comes against the backdrop of a spike in distrust and hostility between Taipei and Beijing in the lead-up to the widely watched election.

Who is running in Taiwan’s presidential race and what does it mean for Beijing?

The move has also raised questions about freedom of the press in the democratically governed island, which is also one of the key talking points in the campaign language of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

Observers put the latest events down to cross-strait distrust or the Taiwanese ruling party’s lack of confidence.

A Beijing-based scholar, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, said the lack of mainland election observers suggested a “deep-rooted distrust” across the Taiwan Strait.

A politician from the mainland-friendly opposition party Kuomintang (KMT) suggested the reporting restrictions indicated the DPP’s lack of confidence.

“If I were the DPP, I would allow mainland journalists to report in Taiwan,” the KMT politician said. “Why don’t they have such confidence?”

Taiwanese leader weighs in after DPP’s Lai faces new independence row

According to the immigration official in Taipei, mainland Chinese media outlets “are permitted to post their reporters in Taiwan for up to six months on a rotation basis. They are free to go anywhere in Taiwan”.

But this relates to official arrangements for long-term stationing of reporters in Taiwan, not short-visit permits granted for election coverage.

Official figures from Taipei show eight mainland media organisations sent 15 journalists to Taiwan for long-term stays in the first eight months of last year, after a dip in their numbers from 2021 amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

“As for individual reporters, they can only apply to visit with an invitation from an institution or organisation in Taiwan. But after they are allowed in, these people can only observe – they are not permitted to report or cover news events,” the immigration official said, adding that this was a reciprocal arrangement with Beijing.

More than 235 overseas journalists from 113 media organisations gathered in Taiwan to cover the last presidential elections in 2020, according to figures from local authorities.

Another Taiwanese immigration official said the rule relating to special permits was implemented because of the “sensitivity” of the elections.

Under this rule, entry to the island is not guaranteed as the Taiwanese government must work on a case-by-case basis, with decisions depending on “national security considerations”, the official added.

In September, the Taipei-based Commercial Times reported that a veteran mainland journalist had their permit application rejected by Taiwanese authorities and was told to apply after January.

Also, for the first time in decades, no academics from mainland China will travel to Taiwan to observe the elections this year, the Post has learned.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, which charts cross-strait policy, said the restriction had been imposed by Beijing. “According to our understanding, disapproval by the mainland authorities is the major reason [the academics] cannot visit this year,” a council spokesman said on December 7.

But the mainland’s corresponding Taiwan Affairs Office denied Beijing had any role in this, with a spokeswoman accusing Taipei of inciting anti-Beijing sentiment as an election ploy.

The elections will take place against a backdrop of years of strained cross-strait relations, since Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning DPP was first elected president in 2016.

Her tenure has been marked by increased engagement with Washington and other Western governments, prompting Beijing to step up military, political and economic pressure on the island, particularly in the past year.

Beijing urges Taiwan to ‘stand on right side of history’ ahead of elections

Beijing, which sees Taiwan as breakaway territory awaiting reunification, sees such moves as a challenge to its sovereignty. The US, along with most countries, does not regard Taiwan as an independent state but is opposed to any change of status quo by force.

Officials in Beijing have portrayed the coming elections as a choice between “war and peace”, urging Taiwanese voters to “stand on the right side of history” and warning of the risk of war if the DPP stays in power.

Taipei, meanwhile, has warned Beijing not to interfere in the elections, either through military threats or economic pressure. It has also accused Beijing of running disinformation campaigns aimed at swaying the vote.

Vice-President William Lai Ching-te, the DPP presidential candidate, is the clear favourite in the race. Almost all opinion polls have consistently placed Lai ahead of the main opposition Kuomintang’s Hou Yu-ih and Ko Wen-je of the smaller Taiwan People’s Party.

Taiwan elections: Beijing accuses DPP of ‘hyping’ PLA threat to win votes

The attitude to journalists from the other side has always been seen as a bellwether of relations across the Taiwan Strait.

In 1987, a Taiwanese newspaper sent two reporters on assignment to mainland China, defying a KMT government ban on formal contact with Beijing. It was the first such interaction since the two sides split in 1949, when the Communists’ victory in the Chinese civil war saw the then-ruling KMT flee to Taiwan.

“Their small step will lead to a giant step in history,” the newspaper, the Independence Evening Post, said at the time.

Four years later, two reporters from mainland state media agencies Xinhua and China News Service visited Taiwan to report on an incident involving disputes between the two sides’ fishermen.

Formal cross-strait media exchanges were gradually established in the early 2000s, but have gone through ups and downs in keeping with political relations.

With tensions growing in recent years, a wider range of people-to-people exchanges have also been affected.

Under Tsai’s predecessor, the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou, mainland reporters would visit Taiwan for one-time trips or short-term election coverage, as they could apply to visit as tourists and Taiwanese authorities would turn a blind eye to their reporting work.

However, this stopped when Beijing imposed restrictions on individual mainland tourists visiting Taiwan in 2019, with Taipei also imposing similar curbs on solo travellers from the mainland.

Mainland reporters have not been able to visit Taiwan as tourists since then.

[World] A restless Gen Z is reshaping the Chinese Dream

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-67779222?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA

Risk of censorship to China’s AI leadership ambitions is overblown

https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3246922/risk-censorship-chinas-ai-leadership-ambitions-overblown?utm_source=rss_feed

The Communist Party’s stringent censorship regime has often been cited as a hindrance to China’s ambitions of global artificial intelligence (AI) leadership. Such assessments, however, are overblown.

The argument goes that tight party controls over the information space would hinder the development and roll-out of large language models (LLMs): advanced AI models designed for natural language processing.

Notably, it is difficult to control the output of these models, and relatively simple to “trick” them into spewing unwanted words and phrases, such as criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Censorship has thus often been framed as a key determinant in the US-China race for global AI leadership.

What this framing misses, however, is that censorship constrains only one application of LLMs: public-facing chatbots. In reality, the myriad applications of the technology that would provide the bulk of the economic and military gains from AI are not subject to the so-called political alignment problem.

An example is Huawei’s Pangu Mine Model – a mining-specific model created with Shandong Energy Group that enhances activities such as rock burst prevention and tunnelling by making them safer, reducing labour intensity and increasing efficiency.

One capability involves analysing camera signals on the ropes fastened to the tail of a mine car and generating alarms when anomalies are detected. Such functions do not run a risk of subverting the party line because they have no “output” in the traditional sense.

Nor is the model subject to China’s measures on generative AI, which call for models to embody “core socialist values” and not contain any content that subverts state power.

Arguably more than with chatbots, it is industry-oriented LLMs that will enable China to reap the economic advantages it hopes to gain from AI. Such applications could alleviate problems related to China’s slowing economic growth and ageing population (Huawei’s Pangu model, for example, has reduced the workload of rock burst prevention personnel by 82 per cent). More broadly, they would provide a more resilient and productive economic base.

Both Baidu and Alibaba have developed industry-specific models across a variety of sectors. According to a Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence employee I spoke to, companies are channelling their energy not into creating chatbots, but into industry-facing models that boost productivity and thus the economy.

Another aspect of the censorship discussion invokes the constraints censorship has imposed upon tech companies in the past. To be sure, censorship poses a thorny problem for companies. In October, iFlyTek saw its shares tumble after social media users accused one of its devices of generating an essay that criticised Mao Zedong. But other examples are less compelling.

For example, some have cited the case of bike-share company Bluegogo’s bankruptcy after a promotion using tank icons around Tiananmen Square appeared on its app. But Bluegogo’s collapse was due more to structural forces – the bike-sharing sector was a bubble filled with too many players.

Economic and structural factors arguably pose a larger challenge to Chinese tech companies. The Chinese semiconductor industry lags behind the cutting edge, and access to hardware from abroad has been hampered by the Biden administration’s export controls.

Chinese researchers also trail behind their American counterparts when it comes to fundamental breakthroughs, and, to make matters worse, most top-tier Chinese researchers leave China for the US. More than censorship restraints, it is these underlying forces which will constrain China’s AI development.

Furthermore, the Chinese government’s approach to censorship in this social media era is not indicative of its approach to AI products, towards which the Communist Party sees a different calculus between information control and development. Unlike social media, AI has been identified by the government as a core industry, and it has poured billions of yuan into research, education and development.

In conversations with employees at Chinese tech companies, I’ve found a consensus that the government’s approach towards AI has been much more lenient than towards social media, with a focus on trying to promote the technology rather than inhibit its uses.

Why many in China see AI as a force for good

Therefore, they view government censorship and regulations in the realm as not being particularly onerous. This more lenient attitude is apparent in the edits made to the country’s generative AI regulations: the finalised version of the rules, released in July, walked back a variety of provisions concerning training data and accuracy of output that had been present in the April draft.

Finally, China has a track record of beating the West’s pessimism. US president Bill Clinton said China’s efforts to build a censored internet would amount to “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall” – but the Chinese technology ecosystem did just that. If history is any guide, Chinese AI companies are likely to find creative ways to produce output in line with the party’s stance.

Moreover, the main players in the Chinese LLM ecosystem are tech companies with long experience of navigating the country’s sophisticated information controls, whether through their search engines or social media platforms. Many such companies are outsourcing compliance with data regulations and censorship for LLMs to the same companies that ensured their social media platforms did not generate content that violated the Communist Party’s information controls.

In short, characterising censorship as an insurmountable hurdle to China’s AI ambitions disregards the nuances within China’s technology landscape. In particular, it overlooks or underestimates the vast potential of industry-oriented LLMs, the other structural and underlying forces that determine China’s capabilities, the importance of the AI industry to the government’s agenda, and the ingenuity of Chinese companies.

China, in search of new growth drivers, considers urban residency reforms

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3247164/china-search-new-growth-drivers-considers-urban-residency-reforms?utm_source=rss_feed

As it searches for new sources of growth to offset shortfalls beget by a shambling property market, China is pondering the consumption potential of rural migrants – a group so large it is more than double Japan’s entire population – though even a maximalist expansion of urban residency may only partly resolve the challenges the country presently faces.

Compared to previous rounds of government intervention that boosted industrial productivity around the new millennium and turbocharged the purchase of urban housing in the 2010s, analysts warned a similar initiative taken now would have comparatively diminished impact, given current predispositions for belt-tightening among local authorities to control runaway debts.

Changing the status of migrant workers would necessarily include alterations to the hukou, China’s system of household registration initially designed to control population flows. That arrangement, a legacy of an earlier era, has been singled out by some as a persistent source of distortion for the country’s economic fundamentals.

Cai Fang, a prominent labour economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an adviser to the central bank, has argued further reform to the system could unleash more than 2 trillion yuan (US$281.1 billion) in consumption.

Even without an increase of incomes, he said, it would raise migrant workers’ spending power by 30 per cent because of improvements to their social safety net.

“China accounts for 17.8 per cent of the global population, yet contributes only 12.8 per cent of global consumption,” Cai wrote in a December article published on the website of the Chinese Economists 50 Forum, a Beijing-based think tank.

“If migrant workers can be converted to urban residents, it would help to fill that gap.”

Presently, access to government services is restricted outside one’s place of registration, which is generally determined by the legal residence of a person’s parents at the time of birth.

Rural hukou holders, entitled to fewer benefits compared to their urban brethren, have in the past switched their residency through attaining a college education, marrying or buying homes in cities.

Former finance minister Lou Jiwei has also encouraged changes to the system, theorising once rural residents have access to government services in the cities, they can securely purchase homes there. This, he suggested, could stimulate consumer demand by almost 30 per cent.

“Farmers can also freely transfer their land and houses in the countryside, which can provide them with initial assets to buy property in the cities,” Lou said at a conference in Beijing late last month.

“The government should consider taking the first steps in reforming the counties around big cities, which produces fewer social conflicts but has a greater effect.”

China’s growth after its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 can be partly credited to the mass emigration of farmers to coastal cities, which fuelled a precipitous rise in labour productivity. In the 2010s, further urbanisation was accompanied by a frenzy of property purchases – itself a precondition for hukou transfers in many Chinese cities.

Will urbanisation be China’s new economic engine as population shrinks?

Although urbanisation was listed as one of the country’s economic priorities for 2024 during last month’s central economic work conference, Beijing’s decision-makers are shifting focus to equanimity in public services and the development of small cities.

Premier Li Qiang stressed “people-centred” urbanisation, a re-emphasis on resident quality of life over more quantitative metrics of achievement, during a recent visit to Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality – two regions which account for around one-tenth of the Chinese population.

“We should prioritise transforming the agricultural population into [urban] citizenship, accelerate urbanisation by using counties as important carriers, build up coordinated development of large, medium and small cities, and improve [their] economic and demographic carrying capacity,” he said at a meeting with local cadres.

China’s “first-tier” cities maintain rigorous standards for new residents and are generally only open to those with high-level skills, world-class education or sizeable investments. As such, their populations remain fairly stable or even in decline. Beijing, for instance, saw its residential headcount fall to 21.8 million in 2022 for a sixth consecutive year of decrease.

In 2022, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported that 65.22 per cent of China’s population lived in cities. However, when based on residency alone, that ratio drops to 47.7 per cent – a figure with space for improvement in terms of growth capacity.

The pace of urbanisation has also slowed. Last year, according to NBS data, China’s urban resident population reached 920 million – an increase of only 6.46 million from 2021, the smallest such uptick in 42 years. By the end of last year, the number of migrant workers living in cities had fallen by more than 530,000.

In its midterm assessment of the country’s development plan for 2021-2025, top economic planner the National Development and Reform Commission said the urbanisation ratio has already reached the five-year target of 65 per cent.

With that goal reached, the present task is to help integrate the rural population living in cities, currently estimated at 250 million. With access to public services of equal quality to their urban counterparts, this demographic would, in theory, find it easier to loosen their purse strings.

As the property market continues to languish, Beijing has promoted three major projects as the foundation for a new real estate development model – affordable housing, emergency public facilities and urban villages. But questions linger over whether such a large investment can be sustained as local debts mount, and if so, whether it will be enough to fill the gaps generated by private sector inactivity.

“Urbanisation is not simply about getting the agricultural population into the cities, but about ensuring their equal treatment with urban residents, such as equal access to insurance, pensions, employment, healthcare, and education resources for future generations,” said Zhao Xijun, a finance professor at Renmin University in Beijing.

The tight budgets of local governments, given their sky-high debts and already considerable levels of expenditure, reduce the likelihood China will provide equal social services to migrant workers unconditionally.

“China is unable to completely abolish the hukou system … before 2050 because this would require more money than even the central government could afford,” he said.

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‘Guilty until proven innocent’: Chinese firm challenges US law on Uygur forced labour

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3247203/guilty-until-proven-innocent-chinese-firm-challenges-us-law-uygur-forced-labour?utm_source=rss_feed

In recent years, the US has sought to block Chinese imports deemed to contain content produced with forced labour from the country’s Xinjiang region – but at least one Chinese company is fighting back.

Ninestar, a Chinese laser printer manufacturer, sued in the US Court of International Trade in August after the company and its seven subsidiaries were blacklisted under the Uygur Forced Labor Protection Act, which was enacted by Congress in 2021 to block goods made in Xinjiang from the US.

Once a company is added to the UFLPA entity list, it cannot export any products to the US unless it proves to federal authorities that no forced labour was involved in its supply chains.

Now the legal battle between the Chinese firm and the US government is heating up in part over who shares the burden of proof and the reliability of evidence.

How are Xinjiang goods still reaching the US 2 months into ‘forced labour’ law?

The rapid developments are unfolding amid a “strategic derisking” effort by the US government to cut the world’s second largest economy out of critical supply chains and restrict China’s access to cutting-edge technology by placing dozens of Chinese companies on a separate Commerce Department sanctions list.

Protecting national security from what many officials in the administrations of Trump and current US President Joe Biden have called the “pacing threat” that China presents remains at the forefront of these actions. With human rights at its core, the UFLPA has a somewhat different focus, aiming to ensure that American entities are “not funding forced labour” in China.

Though cumbersome, there are administrative routes available for companies to get themselves removed from both lists. There have been instances of entities being dropped from the Commerce Department list in the past, but it is rare for the UFLPA since supply chains are complex.

Experts say that other sanctioned companies were closely watching the developments in Ninestar’s case, which may have wider implications on how these lists are updated and how the UFLPA is implemented.

Ninestar accuses the Forced Labour Enforcement Task Force, a multi-agency body led by the US Department of Homeland Security, of acting in an “arbitrary and capricious manner in violation of US law”, arguing that the listing decision was taken “without offering any explanation or justification”.

Ninestar contends its listing violated the US Administrative Procedures Act (APA), a federal statute that requires government departments and independent agencies to provide reasons for their decision.

In a December filing, Ninestar claimed that the government’s decision lacked evidence, “applied low standard of proof” and its basis was “retroactive”. The company also requested the court to suspend the implementation of the government’s action against it.

The Department of Justice had argued that the trade court lacked authority to rule on the matter. However, the court found in November that the company would probably win the argument that the case was within its jurisdiction.

Jason Kenner, who leads the litigation team at Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg, a Washington-based law firm that specialises in international trade, called that finding “a signal from the court that it believes that it has jurisdiction to review this matter”.

He cautioned, however, that the government’s motion to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction is still pending.

A hearing scheduled on Ninestar’s request for a preliminary injunction is scheduled for later this month.

Citing Ninestar’s case, Husch Blackwell, another Washington law firm, said in its international trade outlook for 2024 that it expected “challenges regarding the government’s implementation of the UFLPA in the year ahead”.

Since the UFLPA’s enactment, the firm noted, both domestic importers and foreign exporters had “struggled” with a “lack of transparency” in its application.

US demands release of Uygur scholar reportedly given life sentence by China

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – the Homeland Security agency that administers the law – “typically does not share” the information on which it bases its decision to detain goods, the law firm said.

On Wednesday, the US Justice Department asked the court to dismiss Ninestar’s case and deny its request for temporary relief, arguing that the forced labour task force’s “reasonable cause” standard, was consistent with the UFLPA and akin to standards applied by the Commerce and Treasury departments in their entity lists.

The Justice Department contended that the UFLPA was “directed to foreign relations with China” and designed to strengthen existing prohibitions on the entry of good made with forced labor.

Court filings by the government highlight UFLPA’s “rebuttable presumption” clause that requires enforcement authorities to presume that all goods “mined, produced, or manufactured” in whole or in part in Xinjiang are made with forced labour and prohibited from entering into the US unless proved otherwise. The law also provides no “specific procedural requirement” to add new entities on the list.

“Congress did not specify a particular burden of proof in the UFLPA for the [task force’s] choice to list entities”, the DOJ said in its Wednesday filing, adding that “ultimate burden” was rather on the party claiming that forced labor was not used.

It argued that since it’s “extremely difficult” to obtain reliable information from China or about Chinese individuals and entities due to the country’s strict laws, a “threshold higher than reasonable cause would undermine the effectiveness of the UFLPA”.

The US government also asserted that the decision to blacklist Ninestar was based at least in part on confidential information that cannot be shared with the importer. It argues that the UFLPA does not mandate either the release of evidence or prior notification.

Ninestar, however, maintains that such presumptions create a business environment of “guilty until proven innocent” that “undermines fair competition and choice for American consumers”.

Kenner said that the government’s administrative record filings in the case claim that much of the information is “law-enforcement sensitive”, which can include “personal information of whistle-blowers, and there is always a fear that there could be retaliation against them if their names get out there.

US law to fight forced labour takes effect, banning imports from Xinjiang

“Second, by providing law enforcement sensitive information, the government could be concerned that it could tip the government’s hand on how it is collecting information, which would make it easier for wrongdoers to evade our detection,” he said.

But since the APA requires agencies provide an adequate explanation for their actions, “those two arguments are kind of butting heads here,” Kenner said.

Analysts said that a ruling by US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit against the CBP in another case last year could have implications for Ninestar.

The court in August had found the CBP had violated due process by taking enforcement action against Royal Brush Manufacturing, a maker of art and beauty brushes, without disclosing the basis for those actions.

The company was alleged to have shipped pencils from China through the Philippines to avoid antidumping duties.

“While that case involved a non-UFLPA trade proceeding, the court’s decision raises important questions as to whether CBP is violating importers’ due process rights by making admissibility decisions under the UFLPA without disclosing the basis for those decisions,” Sidley Austin, the law firm representing Ninestar, said at the time.

According to CBP data, the number of shipments that were detained and denied under UFLPA increased more than 50 percent in 2023 from the year earlier. From October 1, 2022, to September 30, 2023, CBP detained more than 4,000 shipments with a combined value of more than US$1.4 billion.

The number of restricted companies on the UFLPA entity list totalled 30 by the end of 2023.

Kenner said that if the court decides that listing Ninestar without giving the company an adequate explanation violated the APA, “customs is going to have to rethink what it shares prior to [a] listing decision”.

China maths genius monk who returned to secular life gets married, says he is better suited to ‘down-to-earth’ life

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3246339/china-maths-genius-monk-who-returned-secular-life-gets-married-says-he-better-suited-down-earth-life?utm_source=rss_feed

A former maths genius who grabbed public attention in China last year for returning to secular life after years as a practising monk is in the spotlight again after becoming married.

Liu Zhiyu won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2006 and was declared a genius by China’s prestigious Peking University, before even taking an entrance exam, according to Jiupai News.

On graduating from the university in 2010, Liu made the surprise decision to decline a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), instead devoting himself to Buddhism and becoming a monk in Longquan Temple near Beijing.

Liu, 35, said he chose Buddhism and gave up mathematics because researching the subject was “a path to loneliness” and he wanted to “explore his own heart”.

In September last year, when Liu announced he was returning to secular life, he explained that he had realised his heart was “closer to the wider public”.

“I’d like to be a part of society. I think I am more suitable for the down-to-earth life,” he said.

Earlier this month, Liu, who is now a team leader at a psychological consultation company announced on social media that he has married and that his wife also adheres to the Buddhist faith.

Liu revealed that his partner, who has not been identified in reports, is the only woman he has ever had a relationship with and that she has taught him how to be a good husband.

For example, she educated him on how to buy suitable gifts.

Liu confessed that initially he gave his wife outdated clothes and shoes, but now he chooses chic and useful presents such as jewellery, flowers and a house sweeping robot.

“I’ve never met a person like her. She understands and supports me completely. I can share all my thoughts and feelings, my joy and sorrow with her,” Liu said.

He has also changed his mind about not having a baby because he is aware he needs to share such major life decisions with his wife.

“I need to respect her opinion,” he said.

Liu continues to follow basic Buddhist principles, such as not eating meat, not lying and being humble.

Recently he published a book titled Every Step is Accountable, in which he shares the knowledge he gained as a monk, and aims to help people seek enlightenment in everyday life.

He said he is now generally content with his life.

“I will give an 8 out of 10 score to assess my life. I deduct 2 points because I am too busy,” Liu said.

“I am an ordinary person. I aspire to be true to myself and I hope people will accept this version of me,” he added.

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Is Russia’s economy holding up well against Ukraine-war induced sanctions? China is watching and keen to know how

https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3247154/russias-economy-holding-well-against-ukraine-war-induced-sanctions-china-watching-and-keen-know-how?utm_source=rss_feed

Having all majored in Russian, William Liu and his classmates from college enjoyed a bumper year in 2023 after their businesses made considerable inroads into Russia following the invasion of Ukraine a year earlier.

From machinery and cars, to medical devices and home appliances, Chinese products have flooded the vast market to the north, filling the void left by Western companies who withdrew following the outbreak of war in February 2022.

“Two years ago we were concerned about the possible colossal damage on the economy, but it turned out Russia has held up well so far,” Liu said.

Nearly two years into the war, Russia appears to have defied the Western sanctions that could have strangled its economy.

It did suffer a mild recession, with a 2.1 per cent drop in economic growth in 2022, but it was considerably better than the contraction of between 10 and 15 per cent predicted at the start of the war.

Moscow said its economy rose by 5.5 per cent in the third quarter of 2023 year on year, and Russia is expected to see full-year growth of 3.5 per cent.

The European Commission also upgraded its forecast to a rise of 2 per cent from the previous estimate of a contraction of 0.9 per cent. The bloc expects Russia’s economy to expand by 1.6 per cent this year, and in 2025.

According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland, China, India, South Korea and Turkey were the top four buyers for Russian coal as of November since the EU imposed sanctions in 2022.

‘A decent level’: Putin extols China trade as US$200 billion target shattered

The data showed China, India and the European Union (EU) were the top buyers of Russian crude oil, while the EU also led the purchases of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG), followed by China and Japan.

But despite the expected uptick in economic growth, headwinds are expected to continue, and central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina has warned that Russia must be prepared for more sanctions from the West.

Russia is also still facing capital exodus, high inflation and a shrinking workforce.

And despite many differences in the two economies, Russia’s economic performance since the war started may still offer some references for China, which has upped the ante in its economic and technological rivalry with the United States

China is also seeking to strike a balance between a push for self-reliance and increased integration with the global market.

Oleg Deripaska, the former richest man in Russia and founder of aluminium producer Rusal, said in an interview with China’s Phoenix Weekly magazine in early December that Russia’s experience could provide China with a reminder to diversify its trade, making the domestic economy more resilient to guard against possible sanctions.

And according to Liu, Chinese manufacturers should strive to expand the domestic market as quickly as possible, outside semiconductors and other high-end technologies, that would take considerably more time.

“If there is anything that China can draw from, it is the need to keep leading companies and key parts of supply chains within China in the worst-case scenario of a big power play, such as a war,” he said.

Escaping possible sanctions can only be achieved once there is room for trade volumes from new markets and industries and support from resource-rich partners, a lesson that many Chinese industry insiders like Liu and Russian insiders see in Russia.

Russia is resource rich in terms of oil, natural gas, coal, metals and woods, and it is a major supplier of crops and fertilisers, but it is heavily reliant on imports for everything from manufacturing equipment to consumer goods.

China also has high overseas reliance on resources and energy to fuel its economic growth, but it is facing growing challenges caused by geopolitical complications and the Western-led realignment of global supply chains as part of efforts to reduce over-reliance on the Chinese market.

Beijing has long aimed to diversify its imports of energy and resources, while aiming to increase self-reliance by expanding domestic exploration and mining of precious metals and marine resources and via green energy transition.

China, Russia to strengthen ‘no-limits’ partnership, pledge to cooperate on AI

It has also doubled down on security efforts on almost all economic fronts, becoming alert to increasing risks caused by global market turbulence and geopolitical complications, particularly growing US-led restrictions and containment efforts.

China is aiming to expand the potential of a resilient and large domestic market, backed by a burgeoning middle class of at least 400 million people, as a key pillar for its dual-circulation strategy.

The strategy places a greater focus on the domestic market, while becoming less reliant on its export-oriented development strategy, but without abandoning it altogether.

China is also aiming to further integrate into the global market, with a particular focus on rules, industrial standards and high value-added sectors.

In terms of banking and finance, Russia has been able to weather the storm created by the Western sanctions, and become more self-contained.

Russia has also managed to diversify its economic relations and find alternative sources for imports, as well as its exports, said Anna Kireeva, an associate professor in Asian and African studies at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations.

Such diversification “is likely to stay at least in the medium term, and more likely in the long term as well,” Kireeva said.

“However, Russia still faces challenges, such as building up and upgrading its own production capacity and technologies under the framework of import-substitution policy or constructing new infrastructure to expand its export capacity in order to avoid infrastructure bottlenecks in the Far East,” she said.

Kireeva said China needs to seek indigenous technologies, reduce dependence on technological transfers from the West and expand the use of the Chinese yuan in the global payments network.

Amid their respective tensions with the US-led West, trade between China and Russia under their so-called the no-limits partnership have soared since the Ukraine war started.

Total bilateral trade stood at US$218.2 billion in the first 11 months of 2023, up by 26.7 per cent from the previous year, already exceeding the target of US$200 billion set for 2023.

During the same period, China’s exports to its northern neighbour soared by 51 per cent, while its shipments to other trading partners fell, including a drop of 13.8 per cent to the US and a fall of 11 per cent to the EU.

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If the momentum continues, trade between Russia and China for the whole of 2023 is on course to reach a record high of US$240 billion.

“It is very impressive,” said Gong Jiong, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing.

Russia is, Gong added, quickly catching up with South Korea and Japan in terms of trade value with China, and it may surpass the two Asian heavyweights “within one year or two”.

To cope with the impact of the next round of sanctions, the Russian Ministry of Finance said in mid-December that it would abolish the export duty on oil from the start of January, while also cutting the tariffs on LNG exports.

But Gong said that it remains to be seen whether Russia can sustain its economic growth over the long run.

China’s economy, he added, is significantly more integrated into the global economic system, and Beijing should properly manage relations with its major trading partners.

It is important to avoid decoupling, to stay neutral in international affairs and to maintain friendly relations with resource-rich countries, while striving to consolidate economic links with the Western nations, Gong said.

“Markets on both sides are important.” he said. “Equally important, it is necessary to be self-reliant and continue to diversify suppliers.”

Economists and policy advisers also said unwavering openness is still important, and is the core to China’s strategic goal of becoming a medium-developed country.

China is aiming to fulfil its target of reaching the per capita income level of a medium-developed country by 2035 – with a per capita gross domestic product of at least US$20,000.

“Let’s not exaggerate Russia’s situation, while China is still firmly committed to openness,” said Zheng Yongnian, a prominent political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

“Energy, military and food, Russia’s self-sufficiency is an inherent advantage, China is difficult in this regard.”

In addition, China is a highly market-oriented country, unlike Russia, he added.

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“Those who don’t open up will only fall behind in the long run,” said Zheng.

China’s top leaders have repeatedly pledged to further open up to the rest of the world in trade, standards and rules, and have been pushing to join the high-level Asia-Pacific trade pact, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Beijing is also aiming to boost global cooperation in technology and innovation, and attract more international experts.

Aleksei Chigadaev, a former visiting lecturer in comparative area studies at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, said China also needs to be better prepared to handle unexpected risks.

“China’s economy needs controlled economic shocks – bankruptcies of major companies followed by legal proceedings, and the closure of inefficient banks,” said Chigadaev.

“This could serve as a demonstration that during complex geopolitical moments, governments won’t have the luxury of manually solving problems, and entities will need to find solutions independently.

“You’re on your own. Sink or swim. China enjoys more friendly regimes than Russia and possesses a more developed transportation and financial infrastructure, making sanctions less effective.”

Russia relies mainly on oil and mineral resources, while China boasts a vast array of goods influencing markets globally, including the US and the EU, he added.

“Sanctions against Russia are a shot in the arm, affecting ordinary consumers in the EU due to rising fuel costs. Sanctions against China, however, are a frontal assault,” Chigadaev said.

Additional reporting by Mia Nulimaimaiti