• Why Trump, US elections may buoy China’s chances as it seeks to gain trust in more ‘rational’ Europe
• China and Saudi Arabia looking to boost air passenger links
• Chinese tech giant Lenovo doubles down on AI after world’s largest PC maker posts first quarterly revenue growth since late 2022
• China’s Latin American investments downshift to smaller, more strategic projects
• China’s support for Russia ‘very troubling’, says US ambassador as anniversary of Ukraine war looms
• China urgently needs to issue ‘most effective’ cash coupons to boost insufficient consumption, economist says
• Could China’s economy-boosting infrastructure plans throw a contradictory monkey wrench in the works?
• China revamps discipline inspection rules to ensure Xi Jinping’s instructions are carried out
• Chinese developer Sunshine 100 says it is assessing impact of liquidation order against controlling shareholder Joywise Holdings
• China’s ‘envoys of friendship’ to return to US zoo as Beijing restarts panda diplomacy
• Some Indonesian Chinese wary of Prabowo Subianto amid painful memories of 1998 riots
• Tech war: Nvidia sampling alternative AI chips to China as US restrictions take a toll there
• Singapore Airshow: Chinese officials make investment pitches in C919’s afterglow
• ‘Three or four nothings’: China tradition of elaborate weddings rejected by growing numbers of young people who opt for no-frills simplicity
• Philippines watching 2024 US presidential race closely, seeks to strengthen ties, as China relations sour, envoy says
• Chinese scientists produce powerful microwave chip for electronic warfare using diamond
• South China Sea: Manila could file case against Beijing over possible cyanide use by Chinese boats
• China starts drafting bill to boost private sector and tackle sluggish post-Covid economy following major setbacks
• China social media praises Taiwan singer over his reluctance to see wife endure pain of childbirth, comments attract 270 million views online
• Chinese research ship set to dock at Maldives port amid India’s security concerns
• China’s coastguard claims it drove off Philippine ship from disputed Scarborough Shoal
• China plans to send San Diego Zoo more pandas this year, reigniting its panda diplomacy
• Some high-speed rail services between Hong Kong and mainland China’s Tianjin and Guangzhou cancelled over bad weather
• China sex scandal teacher suspended after husband exposes affair with 16-year-old student, 2.5 billion view story of forbidden love online
• China food security: inflated crop yields threaten ‘rigour, authority’ of scientific research
• Cargo ship fractures bridge in Guangzhou, southern China, sending vehicles into the water below
• Leaked files from Chinese firm show vast international hacking effort
• Growth in CO2 emissions leaves China likely to miss climate targets
• Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds
• An online dump of Chinese hacking documents offers a rare window into pervasive state surveillance
• Cost of raising children in China is second-highest in the world, think-tank reveals
• As China powers ahead on electric vehicles, it is also flagging likely health hazards at battery plants
• Chinese team’s memory leap shrinks data centre storage capacity into DVD-sized disk
• Beijing to make it easier for solo travellers from mainland China to visit Hong Kong: source
• China benefits from global stability even as it tries to undercut it, US official says
• China warns localities not to use fines for funds, pledges ‘strict’ regulation

Why Trump, US elections may buoy China’s chances as it seeks to gain trust in more ‘rational’ Europe

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3252883/why-trump-us-elections-may-buoy-chinas-chances-it-seeks-gain-trust-more-rational-europe?utm_source=rss_feed

Europe’s strategic understanding of China is becoming more “rational”, the top Chinese diplomat has said, and analysts believe European concerns over the US election outcome could be a window for Beijing as it seeks to gain trust on the continent.

This came as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi continued to pitch his country as a reliable partner for Europe and a “stabilising force” in global affairs.

Wang held a flurry of meetings this week with his European counterparts on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, with the US presidential elections and the war in Ukraine looming large over the annual forum in the German city.

Leaders including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell committed to “oppose” decoupling from China, according to Chinese readouts of their meetings with Wang.

As Europe reels from Trump threat, Ukraine and Middle East, Wang heads to Munich

“The European side has a positive attitude towards strengthening exchanges between China and the EU at all levels and is very enthusiastic about deepening practical cooperation,” Wang said upon his return to China on Wednesday.

The Chinese foreign minister’s trip to Europe had also taken him to Spain and France after Germany.

“I feel that Europe’s rational understanding of China is increasing, and it believes that China’s development is in line with the logic of history. Europe should not be afraid of this, let alone reject it,” Wang said.

Observers said concerns over US elections later this year could work to China’s benefit as it seeks to gain Europe’s trust to defend a multipolar international system amid geopolitical rivalry with the United States.

Ding Chun, a Fudan University professor specialising in European studies, said the uncertainty of the US elections and the fast-changing geopolitical environment could drive Europe to form a more rational approach towards China.

“One of the biggest variables for [Europeans] right now, or what they are most worried about, is actually the outcome of the election in the United States … it will affect the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine conflict,” Ding said.

Fears that Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump may return to the White House are mounting in Europe.

The former president has opposed fresh funding for Ukraine, and said earlier this month he would encourage Russia to “do whatever” it wanted to any Nato ally that failed to meet its financial obligations.

Trump has long complained about the lack of defence spending by other Nato countries and repeatedly threatened to pull the US out of the alliance, sparking fears over emboldening Russia.

European leaders condemned Trump’s comment. France and Germany also appeared to try to reassure Ukraine of Europe’s unwavering support by signing new security pacts and promising more long-term funding. Meanwhile, Republicans continue to block new aid for Ukraine in Congress.

Ding said Europe was preparing for a possible Trump presidency, which was expected to worsen US relations with Europe.

European measures taken include adjusting its policy towards China, which it regards as a rival, a competitor but also a partner that has an “irreplaceable” role in global governance, he said. China also shares a common goal in defending multilateralism, in contrast to the unilateralism and protectionism championed by Trump.

“[The EU] may also be afraid that if it treats China as primarily a rival, like the United States currently tends to do, it might push China completely towards Russia. This is something it might not be able to afford,” Ding said.

China’s relations with European countries have been strained in recent years over Beijing’s close relations with Moscow as the Russian military operation in Ukraine enters its third year.

Despite taking a neutral stance on the conflict, Beijing has yet to condemn the Russian invasion. There is also speculation that it is considering sending weapons to Moscow, a claim Beijing has denied.

‘We don’t sell weapons to conflict zones’: China makes pledge to Ukraine in Munich

Meanwhile, Europe has faced increasing pressure from the US to form a united front to counter China’s influence around the world.

Wang Yiwei, a European studies specialist at Renmin University, said Europe recognised the importance of “strategic autonomy” and was not willing to blindly follow US policy towards China.

In a meeting with Wang Yi in Paris on Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said France adhered to “strategic autonomy” and was willing to strengthen coordination with China to safeguard peace and stability in the face of global challenges, according to a Chinese foreign ministry readout.

Macron has championed strategic autonomy for the EU – the idea that the bloc should become more powerful on the world stage and operate independently in a wide range of areas, from military operations to industrial policy. He has urged the bloc not to become a “vassal” of the US or get caught up in its escalating tensions with China.

“Europe is very aware that the United States is guiding [Europe] towards a direction of confrontation with China, but Europe is not willing to completely follow the United States,” Wang at Renmin said.

He said while Europe recognised the need to continue practical cooperation with China in areas where this was possible, China’s ties with Russia and trade disputes with Europe continued to strain ties.

On Wednesday, the EU for the first time included four Chinese companies in its sanctions list over their roles in aiding Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the EU is weighing various measures to address a €400 billion (US$430 billion) trade deficit with China, including an anti-subsidy probe into cheap Chinese electric vehicles flooding European markets.

However, Ding said China and Europe had a mutual “understanding” to not let specific disputes dominate overall ties.

“As long as you are not countering each other strategically, or if you want to use [these disputes] as a leverage … you can always find a solution to it accordingly.”

China and Saudi Arabia looking to boost air passenger links

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3252882/china-and-saudi-arabia-looking-boost-air-passenger-links?utm_source=rss_feed

China and Saudi Arabia have pledged to increase civil aviation cooperation in their latest effort to forge closer ties.

Song Zhiyong, the head of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, told his visiting Saudi counterpart Abdulaziz Al-Duailej that Beijing would provide active support to airlines seeking to increase the number of flights and routes between the two countries.

Chinese leader ‘personally intervened’ to secure Saudi-Iran deal

Currently Saudia, the national carrier formerly known as Saudi Arabian Airlines, operates direct flights from Riyadh and Jeddah to Beijing and Guangzhou. Last July, Beijing certified Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport as a welcoming destination for Chinese tourists.

Song said there was “great potential” for cooperation in areas such as aircraft maintenance, airport construction and green and innovative development.

The two signed a memorandum of understanding and hailed the “new steps forward” in the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries. At a later symposium the Saudi delegation was introduced to major Chinese aircraft maintenance companies.

Song said the two countries share the same civil aviation development goals, while Al-Duailej said Saudi Arabia is willing to actively learn from China’s experience in civil aviation to develop its own industry under its Vision 2030 plan, according to the Chinese embassy in Riyadh.

China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner and the kingdom is one of its main oil suppliers.

In recent years, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have stepped up trade and investment and sought to develop their relationship in other areas, including security and diplomacy, as their relations with Western countries soured.

Xi offers support to embattled Saudi crown prince

Xi visited the kingdom in late 2022 and last year Beijing brokered the re-establishment of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arabia and its regional rival Iran.

The People’s Liberation Army started carrying out joint exercises with the Saudi military in 2019, including a 17-day exercise in October last year. The Chinese air force was also invited to perform at the Riyadh Air Show earlier this month.

Chinese tech giant Lenovo doubles down on AI after world’s largest PC maker posts first quarterly revenue growth since late 2022

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3252871/chinese-tech-giant-lenovo-doubles-down-ai-after-worlds-largest-pc-maker-posts-first-quarterly?utm_source=rss_feed

Lenovo Group, the world’s largest personal computer (PC) maker, said it is doubling down on various artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, including new computing devices and services that support the technology, after reporting a 3 per cent year-on-year increase in revenue in the December quarter.

The Beijing-based tech giant on Thursday said its revenue reached a better-than-expected US$15.7 billion, up from US$15.2 billion in the same period last year and ahead of analysts’ US$15.4 billion average forecast, amid a recovery in global demand to halt the company’s string of quarterly sales decline since late 2022.

Net income attributable to shareholders fell 23 per cent to US$337 million, which was down from US$437 million a year ago and below analysts’ average estimate of US$309 million.

“Looking ahead, our commitment to AI innovation, our pocket-to-cloud computing capabilities, full stack portfolio of smart devices, smart infrastructure, smart solutions and services, combined with our partnerships with other key leaders in AI, will ensure that we are well-positioned to capture the tremendous opportunities in AI,” Lenovo chairman and chief executive Yang Yuanqing said in the company’s earnings webcast on Thursday.

Lenovo’s sharpened focus on AI reflects efforts in the global PC industry to integrate the technology into their products and services, responding to a projected shift in demand to machines that can run generative AI tasks locally.

That trend is expected to stimulate another industry refresh cycle, as users require devices designed for more creativity and productivity, according to Yang.

Shipments of AI PCs, built with specific semiconductors designed to run generative AI tasks locally, are forecast to grow to more than 167 million units by 2027, up from nearly 50 million projected this year, according to a report by tech research firm IDC earlier this month. IDC predicted AI PCs to represent almost 60 per cent of the industry’s worldwide shipments in 2027.

Lenovo, which operates in more than 180 markets worldwide, is rolling out its first-generation AI PCs in the first half of this year, according to executive vice-president Luca Rossi, who also heads the company’s Intelligent Devices Group. He said Lenovo’s portfolio of AI devices will “dramatically expand” from the second half of 2024 through 2025.

Company executive vice-president Kirk Skaugen, who also serves as president of the enterprise-focused Solutions and Services Group (SSG), said on the same webcast that the company expects to double its market share in AI servers this year.

Lenovo’s SSG achieved record revenue of US$2 billion and record operating profit, with more than 20 per cent in operating margin, in the December quarter.

The company’s shares in Hong Kong closed up 3.27 per cent to HK$8.84 on Thursday after reporting its latest quarterly earnings.

Following its announcement last August of an additional US$1 billion investment over three years to accelerate AI deployment for businesses around the world, Lenovo on Thursday said it was continuing to add more resources. It said research-and-development headcount was up more than 25 per cent year on year, “with R&D expenses-to-revenue ratio for its full [financial year to March] on track to hit an all-time high”.

ChatGPT frenzy to lift PC sales as hardware makers bet on AI

Earlier this month, Chinese internet search and AI giant Baidu said its generative AI technology will be integrated into new smartphones under Lenovo’s Moto brand, according to a Reuters report.

Smartphone shipments of Lenovo in the December quarter were up 32 per cent year on year amid increased demand across markets in the Asia-Pacific, North America and the Middle-East-and-Africa region, according to the company’s financial results announcement on Thursday.

Lenovo’s “AI for All” strategy received a major push in January at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, where the company unveiled a line-up of more than 40 new devices and solutions powered by AI. These included Lenovo devices under its Yoga, ThinkBook, ThinkCentre and Legion sub-brands for consumers and businesses.

Last October, semiconductor design firm Nvidia and Lenovo announced a new collaboration in which the computer giant will deliver fully integrated systems that “bring AI-powered computing to everywhere data is created, from the edge [of a network] to the cloud”, enabling enterprises to easily deploy generative AI applications.

China’s Latin American investments downshift to smaller, more strategic projects

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3252865/chinas-latin-american-investments-downshift-smaller-more-strategic-projects?utm_source=rss_feed

Over the past two decades, China’s presence in Latin America has been synonymous with major infrastructure projects and the exploitation of natural resources. A recently published study suggests, however, that the wind is now blowing in a different direction.

Following the failure of some Belt and Road Initiative investments in the region and a slowdown in China’s economy, data analysed by the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, indicates that Chinese money is now flowing into other areas – away from large projects and towards smaller, more strategic ones in line with Beijing’s economic growth objectives.

According to the Inter-American Dialogue report, China invested an average of US$14.2 billion annually in Latin America between 2003 and 2022; in that last year, though, investments fell to US$6.4 billion.

Margaret Myers, one of the study’s main researchers and director of its Asia and Latin America programme, said that the years of large, high-risk projects have led to a reorganisation of priorities in Beijing. She believes that the Chinese economic slowdown has led several companies, whether state-owned or private, to favour smaller investments, with faster returns and requiring fewer operating costs, such as building roads, bridges, railways, or airports.

Myers cited the Coca Codo Sinclair dam, a project in Ecuador financed and built with Chinese money. The dam, announced in 2010 as a flagship belt and road infrastructure project in Latin America, cost US$2 billion, of which US$1.7 billion was financed by a loan from the Export Import Bank of China.

The project was touted by Rafael Correa, then the Ecuadorian president, as the most ambitious and comprehensive infrastructure project in the history of his country’s energy industry. Opened in 2016, the dam was also seen as a key part of a green energy transition plan, as it would significantly reduce Ecuador’s dependence on thermoelectric energy generated by fossil fuels.

Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the inauguration ceremony of the project and proudly referred to it as an example of a China willing to cooperate “in light of the principles of cooperation such as equality, mutual benefit, win-win, flexibility, pragmatism, openness, and inclusiveness”.

The problems that the project brought in the following years not only challenged this view, but also caused mistrust towards belt and road projects across the region.

China’s rivalry with US ‘greatly affecting capital flows’ into Latin America

Local media discovered that the contract signed with the Chinese prohibited Ecuador from choosing the company building the dam. The loan was granted on the condition that Sinohydro, a state-owned engineering company based in Beijing, would commission the construction.

Shortly after the inauguration, though, several structural flaws were discovered and local engineers responsible for operating the structure began to find cracks – first dozens, then thousands.

By 2022, almost 18,000 had been identified, making it virtually impossible to use the dam as planned. The problems were so extensive that when it was fully activated, the dam caused a short circuit in the country’s power grid, leaving entire towns without electricity for days.

Moreover, the dam cost Ecuador dearly. The country is still paying for the loan by exporting oil to China at discounts of up to 80 per cent. Faced with such failure, several Latin American governments have been reluctant to cooperate with Beijing on other mega-projects, forcing China to adapt.

“Some of the projects that China financed in the region have been viewed positively, but others, like this one in Ecuador, have also generated extensive controversy,” Myers said.

“So China has decided to prioritise projects in the so-called new infrastructure sectors, very much intended to try not to generate the same level of controversy as some of these larger-scale projects, where there is a lot of room for very impactful error.”

The term “new infrastructure” is not new, she noted. It emerged in 2018, was included in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, and covers sectors such as information technology, fintech, electric car manufacturing and other sectors that rely heavily on innovation and technology.

Myers said that Beijing has reaffirmed its belief that high-value-added sectors are more beneficial to the modernisation of the Chinese economy and more sustainable in the long term.

By exporting tech to developing countries, Beijing can also gain important market share by offering projects at competitive prices and with significant benefits, even if China’s presence in these sectors raises eyebrows from Western partners, who often mention the potential national security risks involved.

“In Latin America, there is a lot of resistance to the introduction of technologies that in some cases are significantly more expensive,” Myers noted.

“When Latin American countries do a cost-benefit analysis, they generally conclude that they would like to pursue opportunities with Chinese providers of wide-ranging technologies,” she said.

One vivid example of this shift is the significant increase in Chinese investment in the electric vehicle industry in the region, which reached US$2.2 billion in 2022, representing about 35 per cent of the total value of Chinese foreign direct investment that year.

It has become increasingly common to see cars from Chinese EV brands such as BYD and Great Wall Motor (GWM) on the streets, thanks to billion-dollar investments by these companies, often accompanied by involvement in related sectors like battery manufacturing and the mining of lithium and rare earths.

Chinese carmaker BYD launches virtual showrooms in Latin America push

The China-Brazil Business Council (CBBC) also noted the trend: a September report pointed out that the volume of Chinese investment in Brazil – traditionally one of the largest recipients of state and private funds from China not only in Latin America but worldwide – fell by 78 per cent between 2022 and 2023. However, the largest announced projects were related to the EV industry.

Last year, BYD and GWM bought manufacturing parks in Brazil that had been abandoned by Western brands such as Ford and Volvo. Since then, according to Tulio Cariello, research director at CBBC, the sector has gained momentum and is starting to attract more Chinese players.

He said that an emerging industry in Brazil was eager to electrify various sectors of the economy, from public transport to construction machinery. The demand has attracted companies such as Higer Bus, a Chinese maker of electric buses based in Suzhou.

Higer Bus is present in several Latin American countries such as Costa Rica, Paraguay, Colombia, and Venezuela. A factory will soon be fully operational in Brazil and the company is already planning to build a second one this year.

“The most important thing in this industry is that once investments are announced, they bring further benefits. Because it’s not enough to just build a new factory, you also need to bring various advanced machines and train staff for the operational phase,” Cariello said.

“It’s an investment that prioritises profitability and viability.”

Given the growing need for technologies that are free of American patents, for example, Chinese companies have increasingly invested in research and development.

For example, Cariello said, since 2022 Volvo – originally a Swedish car manufacturer whose main shareholder now is the Chinese group Geely – has steered most of its investments in Brazil into research.

“In general, this new era of investments shows a predominance of private companies, many of them producing goods with very high added value and technology,” he said, adding that the new priorities challenge the stereotype of Chinese products in Latin America, which are still considered inferior and of low quality.

William Tang, operations manager at the logistics company Cai Niao in Brazil, said that Beijing has a clear interest in encouraging expansion of technology companies abroad. Cai Niao is part of the Alibaba Group, which also owns the South China Morning Post.

“If growth opportunities within China are limited, the goal will be to be a leader abroad,” he said.

Tang added that he helped develop a logistics company, sales platform, new warehouses and technologies, including beepers, to track and confirm deliveries of Brazilian imports from China.

The success has spurred Cai Niao to introduce more innovations from China, including smart lockers, parcel-sorting robots and automated distribution centres, which it has subsequently licensed to local businesses, including a leading cleaning products company and a major manufacturer of household appliances.

China resets relations with belt and road partners through green investment push

To some, though, the new investment trend is also cause for concern. Francisco Urdinez, a China scholar at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, said that Beijing, faced with the need to revive economic growth at home, is tending to reduce loans through its development banks and focus on commercial loans, which usually come with higher interest rates.

There is therefore less room for loans that are primarily motivated by diplomatic objectives or political alliances. This could put Latin America in a tricky position, Urdinez said, since many countries rely on Chinese money to drive their infrastructure agenda.

“For a long time, Chinese credit was a concrete alternative to the lack of Western investment and a way for governments in the region to create job opportunities and economic growth for many regions,” he said.

“The absence of this is a problem because the West has no interest in filling this gap. It seems that we are moving towards a ‘new normal’, which is the worst-case scenario for the region: less Chinese investment while Western investment remains low.”

Urdinez also feared that the entry of Chinese players into strategic technology sectors like data processing and 5G would make Latin American countries increasingly exposed to external pressure, particularly from the US, which has urged its allies to reduce reliance on Chinese networks that might be security risks.

He contended that the world is moving towards a new model of “capitalism with flags” – where investments are associated with countries with opposing interests and smaller nations are forced to take sides.

The outlook could create an opportunity for Western partners to reestablish a presence in the region, particularly the United States.

“But this hinges on loan availability, including whether the World Bank collaborates on projects jointly funded by the Development Bank of Latin America or the Inter-American Development Bank,” Urdinez said.

“And if that scenario doesn’t materialise, a void would remain. Neither China nor the US would be able to enhance their positions in the region. Consequently, we would then find ourselves isolated.”

China’s support for Russia ‘very troubling’, says US ambassador as anniversary of Ukraine war looms

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3252896/chinas-support-russia-very-troubling-says-us-ambassador-anniversary-ukraine-war-looms?utm_source=rss_feed

The American ambassador to China has described the country’s support for Russia as “very troubling” as Western countries step up their efforts to pressure China to do more to end the war in Ukraine.

Nicholas Burns said the United States was disappointed that China continued to provide political and diplomatic support to Russia as the two-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine neared.

“We are very concerned by the actions of Chinese companies that fuel Russia’s defence industrial competence,” he said, adding that Washington has aired these concerns with Beijing.

“China’s silence on the existential issue of Ukrainian sovereignty and independence is deafening. Its support to Russia is very troubling indeed.”

China and Russia announced a “no-limits” partnership just days before Russia invaded in February 2022.

Since then China has not condemned Russia’s actions and has moved closer to Moscow while insisting it is neutral in the war.

Ukraine, desperate for troops, mulls unpopular plan to expand draft

In October, when President Vladimir Putin visited China, his counterpart Xi Jinping vowed to defend “fairness and justice and push forward the common development of the world” with Russia.

Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations that Chinese companies have been supplying weapons and other equipment to help Russia’s war effort, but this week saw three companies from mainland China and one from Hong Kong being blacklisted by the European Union.

Last week, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi repeated Beijing’s denials, telling his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba that China “does not sell lethal weapons to conflict areas or parties to conflicts”.

Burns was speaking at an event jointly organised by the Polish, Ukrainian and European Union embassies in Beijing.

Britain’s ambassador Caroline Wilson told the event that Beijing’s “actions need to match [its] words” and expressed concern about the “diplomatic and practical support” for Moscow that was “sustaining Russia’s war effort”.

“China needs to stop such support and China needs to hear Ukraine’s voice,” she said, arguing it needed to engage with Kyiv more closely than it has done up until now.

Wilson also told the event: “China needs to meaningfully engage as well with Ukraine’s peace efforts.

“Russia sought to isolate Ukraine but Putin’s invasion has done precisely the opposite. One thing is very, very clear from today, that Ukraine is far from alone.”

Ukraine’s ambassador Pavlo Riabikin appealed to other countries to take part in a peace conference his country is organising with the help of Switzerland.

China urges France to play ‘constructive role’ as trade, Ukraine cloud EU ties

“To protect peace, guarantee [the] implementation of the UN Charter and the rule of law, we have to stand united. Only together, can we stop the war and bring peace,” Riabikin said.

Earlier this month Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis said he had sought Chinese help with the peace conference, adding that he had been given clear indications during a trip to China that his hosts wanted the war to end.

China urgently needs to issue ‘most effective’ cash coupons to boost insufficient consumption, economist says

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3252843/china-urgently-needs-issue-most-effective-cash-coupons-boost-insufficient-consumption-economist-says?utm_source=rss_feed

China should refrain from low efficiency infrastructure investment, and instead learn from other economies and issue cash coupons to consolidate consumption growth and drive up the overall economy, a prominent economist said.

Teng Tai, director at the Wanb Institute in Beijing, said that China should learn from the likes of the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore.

“The most effective way to encourage consumption is to issue cash [coupons],” he said in an interview with Chinese media Yicai published earlier this week.

“As long as a person has money, they’ll spend. A one-dollar cash coupon will multiply to three to five dollars of spending.”

The call came ahead of the “two sessions” annual parliamentary gatherings next month, when Beijing is expected to announce China’s growth target for 2024, and how it plans to sustain a solid recovery after recording upbeat 5.2 per cent expansion last year.

“Compared with Europe, the US and Australia, China is in more urgent need to issue cash coupons,” Teng added.

He said money saved from eliminating inefficient infrastructure can be turned into disposable income, which stood at 52 trillion yuan (US$7.2 trillion) in China in 2022.

This was regarded as “a low level”, that accounted for 43 per cent of China’s gross domestic product, Teng added.

China’s Lunar New Year holidaymakers head to distant travel destinations

China’s per capita disposable income stood at 39,218 yuan (US$5,455) in 2023, compared with the US$61,242 in the US.

“We have to admit that consumption is not another style of waste. Consumption is where an economic circle starts and ends. The insufficient consumption has been one of the blocking points in the economic circle. We have to address them,” Teng said.

A recovery in consumption was a major source of growth in China’s post-pandemic rebound last year.

Chinese consumption performed better than expected over the recently-concluded Lunar New Year holiday, with domestic tourism and box office and services industry sales all growing at a double-digit pace from the previous year.

But analysts also noted a meaningful decline in average spending, which is indicated by a drop of 9.5 per cent in tourism revenue per person compared with the pre-pandemic level in 2019.

“The sustainability of this robust spending pattern remains a key variable in the macro outlook,” Louise Loo, lead economist at Oxford Economics, said on Monday.

“More policy easing is clearly necessary, amid a persisting property downturn and still weak consumer confidence.”

Beijing has so far failed to heed to continuous calls from economists to issue cash coupons and consumption vouchers as part of proposals to stem the risks arising from a sluggish post-pandemic recovery.

Christopher Beddor, deputy China research director at Gavekal Dragonomics, said that there is a constant argument about focusing on the supply side to create jobs, which is the “only” sustainable way to boost incomes and spending.

“Top policymakers are fundamentally very sceptical about providing cash to households … They have also occasionally voiced worries about ‘welfarism’, and some Chinese economists have argued that stimulating through infrastructure building at least creates lasting assets,” he said.

Markus Rach, an associate professor of marketing at Shenzhen Technology University Business School, referenced Hong Kong’s experience of issuing consumption vouchers last year and said that “the expiry date” set for using the perk was “the best incentive” for consumers to act.

“I, however, argue that neither [cash or consumption voucher] schemes generate any lasting impact on [the] economy, and thus at best deflects from the issue at hand,” he added.

“Only fixing the true issues leading to a reduction in household spending (thus increase in savings) are likely to boost economic deficits.”

Could China’s economy-boosting infrastructure plans throw a contradictory monkey wrench in the works?

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3252875/could-chinas-economy-boosting-infrastructure-plans-throw-contradictory-monkey-wrench-works?utm_source=rss_feed

While China is pinning hopes on an economic resurgence being fuelled by infrastructure projects across the country, recent industrial indicators suggest that such engines for growth may not yet be firing on all cylinders.

Japan’s Komatsu, one of the world’s top makers of construction machinery, has reported that its excavator operation hours in China during January declined by 11.4 per cent from December. And the firm’s overall equipment-operating time for all of last year saw a 3.2 per cent drop from 2022, when China’s stringent pandemic policies were still in place.

The numbers, which could point to a slowdown in growth from China’s traditional economic engine, emerged as Beijing has been asking provincial officials to cultivate “new productive forces” in discussions about how to revitalise and transform the economy, largely by supporting technological innovations at local levels.

Yet, infrastructure still appears to be a main focus of investment, despite attempts to boost resources in “new strategic industries” and “hi-tech manufacturing”, according to provincial-level meetings that have been taking place over the past month.

China’s growth being held back by ‘protectionism’ at local level, Beijing told

Speaking to the Post on Thursday, economist Yu Miaojie, who is also the president of Liaoning University, noted how China’s leadership has identified “investment” as a major accelerator for its economy. Therefore, Yu expected that policy would remain focused on “increasing government spending and lowering taxes”.

Guangdong, which boasts China’s largest provincial economy, has set a 2024 budget of 598.6 billion yuan (US$83.3 billion) for major infrastructure projects, including roads and bridges, while earmarking 150 billion yuan for projects in “new strategic industries”, including information technology, biotechnology, hi-tech manufacturing and new materials.

Peng Peng, executive chairman of the Guangdong Society of Reform, said Guangdong’s plan showed how local governments are still relying heavily on infrastructure for economic growth.

“When there are no fundamental changes to the economic outlook, stability in terms of growth and expectations could be more important than anything else,” Peng said.

“Industry-focused investments also tend to be allocated for mega projects, showing that they are government-led areas of focus,” Peng added. “On the other hand, there is still not enough private investment in these areas.”

Zhejiang province in eastern China has disclosed that 87 large-scale manufacturing projects, at a total cost of 181.3 billion yuan, will come from private enterprises this year. And it said that the number of projects backed by private companies has reached “a new high” in terms of proportion of investments.

Meanwhile, some provinces in China’s central and western regions have plans to invest in energy storage, as the nation has put added emphasis on the need to develop green tech and industries tied to renewable energy.

The two biggest industry-based investments in Shaanxi province’s 3.96 trillion yuan annual budget were both energy-transition projects that each cost more than 100 billion yuan.

Among Anhui province’s 460 budgeted projects, 55 per cent fall under the category of new strategic industries.

Beyond China’s boondoggles, where will investments go when even water is a risk?

He Jun, a senior analyst with Beijing-based public policy consultancy Anbound, said that while local governments attempt to ramp up hi-tech investments, there is still a long way to go before fundamental structural changes are realised.

“While the proportion of hi-tech manufacturing is increasing … basic infrastructure investment still takes up a larger proportion of the overall investment structure. So, as we see some changes in the investment structure, we should also see that government-led investments tend to have strong inertia,” He said.

Meanwhile, He said that as private and foreign enterprises still lack confidence in China’s economy, this looks to also affect their “quality of investment”.

“If the government continues to be the main leader in investment projects, this must be a problematic approach, and the investment outcome would therefore be limited,” He said.

Since last year, Beijing has launched policies to support provincial economic growth, such as by speeding up its issuance of the 1 trillion yuan worth of additional sovereign bonds for local governments to support major investment projects.

Peng said that Beijing’s approach to invigorate local economies would continue to face a dilemma of driving growth and creating more local debt.

China’s Ministry of Finance said in November that the outstanding debt held by local governments had reached a record high in October, surpassing 40 trillion yuan. The previous record high was about 30 trillion yuan, reached in 2021.

“Avoiding the continuous expansion of local government debt while wanting to drive the economy through investment is, in itself, a conflicting approach,” Peng said. “The current pressure is especially daunting given the lack of momentum in economic growth and [diminished] confidence in investment.

“The government needs to get its priorities straight.”

China revamps discipline inspection rules to ensure Xi Jinping’s instructions are carried out

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3252866/china-revamps-discipline-inspection-rules-ensure-xi-jinpings-instructions-are-carried-out?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s ruling Communist Party has revamped a set of rules to bolster its discipline inspections, making it a top priority to check whether cadres have fully implemented instructions from President Xi Jinping.

The party’s Central Committee has released revised regulations on inspection work and issued a directive asking all regions and government agencies to strictly comply, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

According to Xinhua, the revisions were approved at a January 31 meeting of the party’s 24-member Politburo and circulated within the party on February 8.

Chinese leaders hint at increased focus on politics for coming year

The revised regulations include a new clause that defines inspection work as the “political supervision” of party organs from the top down, according to the full text released by Xinhua.

A newly added paragraph at the beginning of the document states that the inspection work’s “fundamental task is to resolutely safeguard the core status” of Xi, as well as his authority and leadership.

Another new section explains that the party’s inspection team shall, as its top priority, check on the implementation of “major decisions and arrangements of the party’s Central Committee, especially the implementation of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important speeches and important instructions”.

The revisions also removed three articles detailing specific corruption and disciplinary issues to watch for, which had been a top priority in the previous version, and summarised them in a single paragraph that appears after the section about implementing Xi’s instructions.

Xie Maosong, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Strategic Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the revisions made it clear that inspection work was now largely focused on how closely China’s different regions and government departments were following and executing Xi’s grand plan.

“Beijing has learned a lot in the inspection work of the past decade and clearly wants to make sure previous cases in which the local government ignored Xi’s repeated instructions do not happen again,” said Xie, who is also a senior fellow at the Taihe Institute, a Beijing think tank.

Discipline inspection, which involves sending teams of senior inspectors to screen local disciplinary problems, has been a powerful tool for the party under Xi’s leadership since 2012.

The practice gives corruption busters access to various state and party organs and state-owned enterprises so they can proactively search for leads on corruption. It has been credited by Beijing for uncovering many high-profile corruption cases.

The rules on discipline inspection were last revised in 2017.

“The focus has clearly been changed to checking on the political and work alignment of regions and government departments,” Xie said, noting that the revisions added that a key principle of inspection work was to “focus on the party’s central task and serve the big plan”.

He said that meant that when Beijing issues new directions, its inspectors will make sure party and state organs recalibrate their work, leading them in the right direction

‘Long and arduous’ road ahead for China’s attempt to discipline party ranks

The new code casts the inspection net wider. Under the revised rules, key state-owned enterprises, especially financial institutions, and state-run tertiary institutions will be targets for inspection, along with party committees in government agencies.

It also gives the inspectors much wider access to local government departments – including those for propaganda, security, auditing, finance, statistics and petitions – to support inspection work when necessary.

Tsinghua’s Xie said this showed Beijing was determined to get accurate information and curb inflated official statistics.

“That is why the new code asked the inspectors to go directly to the ground for information, so they can spot misleading numbers from local governments and rectify them accordingly,” he said.

The party made falsification of data a disciplinary violation in December, and last month Beijing sent stern warnings calling the practice “the biggest corruption in the statistical sphere”.

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Chinese developer Sunshine 100 says it is assessing impact of liquidation order against controlling shareholder Joywise Holdings

https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3252867/chinese-developer-sunshine-100-says-it-assessing-impact-liquidation-order-against-controlling?utm_source=rss_feed

Embattled mainland Chinese property developer Sunshine 100 is evaluating the impact of a winding-up order for its controlling shareholder, whose beneficiaries include its chairman and executive director, according to a filing with the Hong Kong exchange.

Sunshine 100 said it had recently been informed of the winding-up order, issued by a Hong Kong court dated January 17, against Joywise Holdings, which holds 64.77 per cent of the developer’s shares.

The Beijing-based developer said it “is assessing the impact that the winding-up order against Joywise may have on the business operation and financial position of the company”.

“Shareholders of the company are reminded that the order is made against Joywise and not the company,” Sunshine 100 said.

Joywise is held by family trusts whose beneficiaries include Sunshine 100’s chairman and executive director, Yi Xiaodi, executive director Fan Xiaochong and non-executive director, Fan Xiaohua.

The winding-up petition was filed by Haitong International Securities with a Hong Kong court in August last year, after Joywise was unable to repay Haitong HK$386.8 million (US$49.45 million) by June. The loan was extended in 2019, with Joywise pledging 964.8 million shares of Sunshine 100 to Haitong, according to the developer’s filing in August.

China South City stock sinks 37% to record low after bond default warning

About 80 per cent of Sunshine 100’s projects are residential developments in second-tier Chinese cities such as Chengdu, Nanning and Wuhan. The developer first defaulted in 2021 when it was unable to meet the payment of Singapore-listed US$170 million notes as well as interest amounting to US$8.9 million.

The default was expected to trigger cross-defaults of other notes too, it said.

In October last year, Sunshine 100 said it was unable to pay US$120 million plus accrued interest of US$38.4 million on a note it issued in February 2021.

China property defaults won’t stop banks lending to troubled developers: Goldman

As of June last year, its total loans amounted to 27.39 billion yuan, dominated both in the yuan and US dollars, Sunshine 100 said in its latest financial report.

The developer’s losses widened by more than a quarter to 1.1 billion yuan from 837.8 million yuan, with revenue falling by 5 per cent to 1.13 billion yuan, in the six-month period ending in June last year.

Sunshine 100 made its initial public offering in 2014, with US private-equity firm Warburg Pincus as one of its largest backers.

China’s once-mighty developers face brutal years after end of ‘golden age’

Analysts have been expecting more winding-up petitions by creditors, after a court issued a liquidation order against China Evergrande Group in January following its failure to reorganise about US$20 billion of offshore debt. The case is being viewed as the biggest corporate collapse among Hong Kong-listed entities, based on Evergrande’s US$337 billion of total liabilities.

Last week, Nanjing-based developer Redsun Properties said the Bank of New York Mellon (London branch) had filed a winding-up petition against it for failing to repay at least US$228.5 million.

Meanwhile, other mainland developers such as CIFI Holdings and R&F Properties have ramped up asset disposals to trim debts.

CIFI agreed to sell a 60 per cent stake in 16 parcels of land in Sydney for an estimated loss of A$11.1 million (US$7.3 million), while R&F Properties also approved the sale of the Nine Elms development in London for a token sum of HK$1 plus debt, with the buyer, London One Limited, which is solely owned by Hong Kong tycoon Cheung Chung Kiu, assuming at least US$800 million in debt.

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China’s ‘envoys of friendship’ to return to US zoo as Beijing restarts panda diplomacy

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3252870/chinas-envoys-friendship-return-us-zoo-beijing-restarts-panda-diplomacy?utm_source=rss_feed

China has reached a deal to send new pandas to the United States, following a promise made by Chinese President Xi Jinping last November.

The China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA) has reached an agreement with San Diego Zoo in the US and Madrid Zoo in Spain for “a new round of international cooperation on panda conservation” based on previous cooperation and the interest to protect endangered species, according to its official WeChat account.

Similar talks were also under way with the National Zoo in Washington and a zoo in Austria, the CWCA added.

Giant pandas at China base to shut out tourists every Monday from Christmas Day

It also said the US-China agreement includes stepped up efforts to monitor and evaluate the animals’ health, on-site inspections and evaluations, sharing resources and knowledge, expanding ecology awareness and promoting friendship between China and other countries.

The deal came months after a dinner address by Xi to US business leaders in San Francisco in November, in which he called the country’s panda’s “envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples”, adding that Beijing was ready to continue the lending programme with the US.

Zoo Atlanta is the only US facility still hosting pandas, but the programme will expire at the end of this year, with all four pandas expected to be returned to China, the zoo said last year.

Beijing has been lending pandas to the US and other nations for decades as a gesture of friendship that has become known as “panda diplomacy” to soften its image on the global stage and strengthen ties with other countries.

In 1972, Ling Ling and Xing Xing (Hsing Hsing) were sent to the US after the historic meeting between president Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong that paved the way for the normalisation of relations.

The US, Austria, Spain and other countries were the first to cooperate with China on giant panda protection, the CWCA said. The efforts have resulted in 28 cubs being successfully bred.

While the giant pandas remain beloved attractions in zoos around the world, several of the animals in the US have been returned amid rising tensions over the past few years.

San Diego Zoo returned its charges in 2019 and another one departed Memphis last year.

‘Sad to see them go’: UK’s only pandas return to China after 12 years

The last three giant pandas in Washington were flown back to China in November. The trio – Mei Xiang, Tian Tian and their three-year-old cub Xiao Qi Ji – were sent to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, home to most of the nation’s giant pandas.

On Thursday, foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said that since the 1990s, China has carried out giant panda conservation cooperation with 26 institutions in 20 countries, leading to improvements in giant panda conservation research, international cooperation in the protection of endangered animals, and enhancing friendships between China and other countries.

“We look forward to a new round of international giant panda protection cooperation with relevant countries, which will further expand scientific research results on the protection of giant pandas and other endangered species, and promote people-to-people bonds and friendship,” she said.

Some Indonesian Chinese wary of Prabowo Subianto amid painful memories of 1998 riots

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3252754/some-indonesian-chinese-wary-prabowo-subianto-amid-painful-memories-1998-riots?utm_source=rss_feed

Prabowo Subianto’s projected victory in Indonesia’s recent presidential election is considered polarising among some sections of the country’s ethnic Chinese minority, given the alleged involvement of senior military officers during the tragic 1998 riots including the former general.

While some Chinese-Indonesians said they had opposed Prabowo on this ground, others, especially those from younger generations, were willing to look past the country’s dark history and hope that its political and economic stability would continue.

Quick count results from the February 14 election showed Prabowo winning with an estimated 58 per cent of the national vote – the final results are expected to be announced by March 20 at the latest. It was his third presidential bid after losing two bitterly fought campaigns against outgoing president Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi.

Suwondo, who wished to be identified by his first name only and is a Chinese Indonesian resident of Depok, a satellite city of Jakarta, said he voted against Prabowo in the 2014, 2019 and last week’s elections.

“Back then [in 2014 and 2019], we voted for Jokowi to prevent Prabowo from winning,” said Suwondo.

Prabowo’s presidency: new chapter in Indonesia-China ties or business as usual?

The 65-year-old retiree said many Chinese Indonesians suspected that the former general played a key role in the May 1998 riots, which occurred at the height of the Asian Financial Crisis and led to the resignation of the dictator Suharto, who was Prabowo’s father-in-law at the time.

After his re-election in 2019, Widodo surprised many by inviting his former rival to join his cabinet as defence minister. Their political alliance grew stronger after Widodo’s eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka became the former general’s vice presidential running mate in October.

Many believe Widodo’s enormous popularity and his tacit endorsement of Prabowo and Gibran’s ticket were crucial to the pair’s electoral victory.

“So it’s a great irony that Prabowo is going to be president, thanks to the man we elected to prevent him from becoming one in the first place,” said Suwondo.

Chinese Indonesians make up somewhere between three and five per cent of Indonesia’s population of 278 million. No data has been released breaking down the voter demographics of the February 14 election. According to an exit poll conducted by the newspaper Kompas, there was a significant variance in voting preferences among different generations, with more younger voters picking Prabowo by proportion.

Among Gen Z voters under the age of 26, 65.9 per cent voted for Prabowo, while 43.1 per cent of baby boomers aged 56-74 years supported him.

During the 1998 riots, thousands of Chinese-owned homes and businesses were attacked, looted and set ablaze across the country, notably in major cities like Jakarta, Solo and Medan.

“The most traumatic part was the rape of our women during the racially motivated attacks,” Suwondo said.

In the aftermath of the riots, a report was released by a government-mandated fact-finding commission.

The Joint Fact Finding Team (TGPF), which comprised senior figures from the government, the military and others, said victims of the riots had suffered from “material loss … death at the time of the riot [burned, shot, assaulted, etc], loss of job, assault, kidnapping, and … the targets of sexual assault acts.”

TGPF identified “85 sexual assaulted victims” including “52 raped victims” based on witness accounts and investigations. “Although not all of the sexual violence victims were ethnic Chinese, most of the sexual violence victims were indeed ethnic Chinese females.”

Witnesses spoke of “mobs spurred on to riots by military-looking men” but no proof has been unearthed by the TGPF on the individuals who engineered the riots.

According to the final report by TGPF issued on October 23, 1998, the riots across the country resulted in 1,300 deaths, with Jakarta suffering the worst death toll at 1,190. The latter figure differed significantly from the ones submitted by Indonesian authorities. The Jakarta Police reported 451 deaths in the capital while the military said there were 463 deaths in the city.

Prabowo has always maintained he was not responsible for the May 1998 riots. However, he did admit to his involvement in the kidnapping of student democracy activists that same year, which resulted in the then-general’s dismissal from the military.

Prabowo had said on several occasions that he abducted the activists “on the order of his superiors” and that he was merely “carrying out orders as a soldier”. The Honours Committee of the Indonesian Armed Forces (ABRI) in August 1998 only mentioned Prabowo’s role in the kidnapping of activists, not the riots.

While anger over the events of 1998 remains for Chinese-Indonesians like Suwonodo, memories of the tragedy are fading away, at least for younger generations in the community.

Kevin Tan, a 35-year-old entrepreneur in Surabaya who runs an export-import business in Surabaya, said he had voted for Prabowo in the recent election.

“I voted for 02 [Prabowo-Gibran’s number on the ballot paper] because Jokowi’s son Gibran was his vice-presidential candidate.”

“I started my business back in 2017 and grew it to its current size when Jokowi was president,” he said. “So I will always associate my success with Jokowi. It may sound irrational but I feel a sense of jodoh with Jokowi.”

Jodoh in the Indonesian language roughly translates to destined affinity or serendipity.

Kevin said his wish was for Widodo to be allowed a third term but since that was not allowed under the country’s constitution, Gibran’s candidacy was “the next best thing”.

Asked if he was aware of the accusation against Prabowo over his possible involvement in the 1998 riots, he said he was but that it was not enough to sway his vote.

“That’s all in the past and I wasn’t voting for him anyway. I feel reasonably confident Jokowi’s influence will keep Prabowo on the right path.”

Another Chinese-Indonesian, Handoko Wuryono, a 25-year-old resident of Semarang, said he also voted for Prabowo-Gibran, but for slightly different reasons.

‘Very popular’ Joko Widodo to continue political dynasty with Prabowo win

“I think 02 was the best deal because Prabowo has his party in parliament and won’t be a puppet,” said Handoko, who is a finance manager at a national retail chain.

During the election, Prabowo defeated former Jakarta governor and opposition candidate Anies Baswedan and former Central Java governor Ganjar Pranowo, who was running on the ruling party’s ticket.

Handoko said he never considered voting for Anies as he was “just a smooth talker”.

Suwondo, who voted for Ganjar, said Anies was also a “problematic figure” for most Chinese Indonesians of his generation. “We can’t forget his role in the downfall of Ahok back in 2017,” he said, referring to former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama by his popular nickname.

Ahok, a Chinese-Indonesian Christian, was running against Anies in the 2017 gubernatorial election when he made a public comment about a verse in the Koran.

His comment angered hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who accused him of blasphemy and took to the streets in Jakarta to protest.

With Prabowo set to be president, what ‘surprises’ are in store for Indonesia?

Ahok ultimately lost the election to Anies, whom many criticised for having capitalised on “identity politics” against his opponent throughout his campaign. Charged by the prosecution for his “blasphemy against Islam”, Ahok was later convicted in a trial and sentenced to two years in jail.

“Ahok represented the hope of equality for us Chinese-Indonesians and Anies was partly responsible for squashing that hope,” Suwondo said.

But for 29-year-old Surabaya-based Chinese-Indonesian Augusta, who wished to be identified by her first name only, Anies’ action in the 2017 election was “a minor sin” compared with Prabowo’s past “transgressions”.

“It’s my mindfulness of history that compelled me to choose Anies over the others,” she said, adding she had found Anies’ manifesto to be the “soundest vision” for Indonesia.

Augusta, who is a tattoo artist, also said she was “appalled” when she learned many of her friends who are Chinese-Indonesians had voted for Prabowo.

“I hope I’m wrong, but I see him as the harbinger of our regression into the old autocratic days of [President] Suharto, who was his father-in-law once.”

Is Israel hampering Indonesia’s efforts to join the OECD?

Augusta said she had always admired Widodo’s achievements as president but the political manoeuvres he used to pave the way for his son’s candidacy were a concern.

“It was obvious Gibran couldn’t have circumvented the law on the minimum age for VP candidates if Jokowi hadn’t done some tinkering so his candidacy was morally if not legally flawed,” she said.

Gibran, the 37-year-old mayor of Solo, did not meet the minimum age of 40 constitutionally required of presidential or vice-presidential candidates. But an October ruling by the Constitutional Court, chaired at the time by Widodo’s brother-in-law, created an exception to the rule for those who had already been elected to office. The verdict led to accusations of nepotism and abuse against Widodo.

During their election campaigns, the three rival teams had attempted to woo Chinese-Indonesian voters with their outreach efforts.

Muhaimin Iskandar, Anies’ running mate and chairman of the Islam-based National Awakening Party, held an event celebrating the Lunar New Year in Jakarta in early February. Ganjar’s team sent the presidential candidate’s son, Alam Ganjar, to attend an event for the Chinese-Indonesian community in Surabaya. Gibran also attended several events related to Lunar New Year celebrations.

‘We refuse to work with it!’: Indonesians push back on country’s digital dreams

Some Chinese-Indonesians, like 27-year-old Jakarta resident Tommy Gunawan, chose not to vote in this election.

“Numerically, we are probably the smallest minority group in the country. I don’t think we matter that much,” said the owner of a hobby shop.

He argued that Chinese-Indonesians are usually treated as an “afterthought, except every five years” during an election season.

“I had better things to do than go to the voting station. I still have to pay my bills regardless of who becomes our president.”

Tech war: Nvidia sampling alternative AI chips to China as US restrictions take a toll there

https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3252826/tech-war-nvidia-sampling-alternative-ai-chips-china-us-restrictions-take-toll-there?utm_source=rss_feed

US chip giant Nvidia said it has started shipping alternative samples of permissible AI chips to Chinese customers, as Washington’s restrictions on sales of advanced chips to the mainland begin to take a toll on its business in China.

Nvidia reported upbeat results for its fourth quarter ended January 28 on the back of robust demand worldwide for its data centre graphics processing units (GPUs), with revenue up 265 per cent year on year to US$22.1 billion, including US$18.4 billion generated from the data center segment.

But China was an exception. “Growth was strong across all regions except for China, where our data center revenue declined significantly following the US government export control regulations imposed in October,” Nvidia’s chief financial officer Colette Kress said in an earnings conference call with analysts on Tuesday.

Semiconductor giant TSMC to build second plant in Japan with new investor Toyota

Kress said Nvidia has started shipping alternative GPUs that do not require a licence for the Chinese market under the tighter export regime, adding that the firm has not received licences from the US government to ship restricted products to China.

She expects China to represent a mid-single-digit percentage of its data centre revenue in the next quarter, flat with the fourth quarter.

Nvidia has been among the most-affected US companies after the US Commerce Department tightened export controls in October, citing national security concerns.

While Nvidia’s net profit skyrocketed 581 per cent to US$29.8 billion in the 12 months ended January 28, its prospects in China remain under a cloud. The trade sanctions prevent Nvidia from exporting to China its advanced GPUs, such as the A100 and H100, which have become sought-after for artificial intelligence (AI) training. Its tailor-made A800 and H800 GPUs, developed as workarounds for Chinese clients in 2022, were blocked by the updated US controls last October, leading to new alternatives such as the H20, L20 and L2 GPUs.

“At the core, the US government wants to limit the latest capabilities of Nvidia’s accelerated computing and AI to the Chinese market,” Jensen Huang, the company’s billionaire chief executive, said on the call.

He added that following the October restrictions, Nvidia has “reconfigured its products in a way that is not software hackable in any way”, which took some time. He added that Nvidia is sampling products with customers in China.

Nvidia has started to take pre-orders for its H20, a GPU that can be used by China-based customers for AI training, with a single card price range between US$12,000 and US$15,000, the Post reported previously.

China, including Hong Kong, was Nvidia’s third-largest single market after the US and Taiwan in its financial year 2023. Greater China, which includes Taiwan, accounted for 21.5 per cent of its total revenue, down from 26 per cent in the previous year.

Singapore Airshow: Chinese officials make investment pitches in C919’s afterglow

https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3252853/singapore-airshow-chinese-officials-make-investment-pitches-c919s-afterglow?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s local governments took to the stage at the Singapore Airshow on Thursday to attract foreign investment to the country’s burgeoning aerospace industry, riding the jet stream from the maiden appearance of the home-grown C919 passenger plane.

Officials from Langfang, a city in Hebei province near national capital Beijing, and Taicang of the eastern Jiangsu province, gave presentations at the international aviation event, pitching the advantages of China’s aviation sector to attendees.

Their calls for further investment came after the narrowbody C919 passenger jet, manufactured by Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac), made its first flight outside China for the show.

Qian Lili, deputy director of Taicang’s investment promotion bureau, said that the global aviation industry is entering “a period of transformation” as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, geopolitical tensions and heightened demand for sustainable development. The city is home to some of the C919’s suppliers.

“Taicang focuses on the high-end, intelligent and green development [of aviation],” Qian said at the China-Singapore Bilateral Aviation Forum, adding that the government is offering a range of benefits to spur activity, including rent reimbursement for talented individuals in the workforce.

Aircraft engines, critical components, materials and airborne systems are all areas of interest for the city, Qian added.

“Taicang will try its best to optimise its business environment,” Qian said. “And [we will] make Taicang one of the best destinations for aerospace investment and development.”

Ding Ling, vice-mayor of the Langfang government and director of the management committee for the Beijing Daxing International Airport Economic Zone, said the city is preparing 20 million yuan (US$2.8 million) for an “industry guidance fund” to finance companies that will help the region meet its goal to build a 100-million-yuan aerospace industry.

As China pivots towards self-reliance and seeks to reduce imports of advanced technology, many local governments have been spending heavily on infrastructure and offering funds to help the country upgrade its manufacturing capability. Aerospace, an investment-heavy sector which has traditionally depended on globalised supply chains, is a major venue for this policy.

The C919, which was designed to compete with Boeing’s 737 and Airbus’ A320, took 15 years to build and was the beneficiary of sizeable government largesse. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a US-based think tank, estimated in 2020 that Comac could have received as much as US$72.1 billion in state-related support.

China’s extensive use of industrial subsidies has been controversial among trading partners such as the US and Europe, who have said the practice is unfair to foreign companies and creates market distortions. The EU has begun two separate anti-subsidy investigations – one probing electric vehicle imports and another examining a contract for electric trains in Bulgaria.

Hurdles are also fast appearing as China hurries to grow its advanced technology supply chain to hedge against deteriorating relations with the US.

Washington has imposed export curbs on a number of sectors with aerospace applications, limiting activity related to technology which it claims could have both military and commercial uses.

The restrictions have added to foreign investors’ concerns over China’s staying power as a manufacturing hub.

Mabel Kwan, managing director at Alton Aviation Consultancy, said near-shoring strategies by multinationals in the aviation industry is on the rise following pandemic-era supply chain disruptions and changing geopolitical circumstances, but added such an approach is likely to bring about more costs in the short term.

“We definitely anticipate a high-cost environment, because there’s a reduction of skill, and there’s duplicated resources,” Kwan said.

‘Three or four nothings’: China tradition of elaborate weddings rejected by growing numbers of young people who opt for no-frills simplicity

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3251659/three-or-four-nothings-china-tradition-elaborate-weddings-rejected-growing-numbers-young-people-who?utm_source=rss_feed

A new simpler wedding trend that rejects traditional elaborate nuptials and abandons dowries and bride prices is on the rise among China’s younger generation.

The style, known as “three or four nothing weddings”, means downsizing lavish arrangements. That includes cancelling traditions such as the groom picking up the bride from her home to take to the couple’s new home and the newlyweds serving tea to their parents.

It could also include not hiring an emcee, as well as not inviting guests they barely know, and even forgoing bridesmaids and groomsmen.

Instead, young Chinese couples are choosing their own ways to wed.

A woman, surnamed Huang, whose wedding was in southeastern China’s Guangdong province in August 2023, told Chinese media outlet New Weekly that instead of her husband picking her up from her home, they took a city walk with friends.

City walk is an informal leisure activity that means roaming around a city freely without a destination, which became popular in post-Covid China last year.

Another woman from Shandong province, eastern China, who goes by the name @chaojiwudiluckygongzhu on Xiaohongshu, said she and her husband cancelled the traditional ceremony and hosted their own wedding.

“My father and my partner both love me, but I am an independent individual, and my life is in my own hands,” she said.

She said she did not want an emcee because they are mostly male, and are “not good at hosting from a gender-equal perspective”.

For many who choose “three or four nothing weddings” over traditional nuptials, it reflects a desire to ditch outdated patriarchal beliefs that the husband owns his wife who has been transferred from one man to another.

Some also discarded bride prices and dowries for the same reason.

Bride prices, traditionally paid by a man to a woman’s family and average 100,000 yuan (US$14,000) plus jewellery. Dowries, brought by the bride to the couple’s future home, are usually a car or household appliances.

In recent years, the government has discouraged expensive bride prices and wedding banquets by holding group weddings, suggesting women reject the prices, and create wedding venues that put spending caps on banquets.

Cost is the main reason young people are increasingly rejecting formal wedding customs.

Usually, a wedding in China costs 174,000 yuan (US$24,000), eight times the combined average monthly salary of a young couple, according to research published by Tencent Guyu Data in 2021.

Philippines watching 2024 US presidential race closely, seeks to strengthen ties, as China relations sour, envoy says

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3252860/philippines-watching-2024-us-presidential-race-closely-seeks-strengthen-ties-china-relations-sour?utm_source=rss_feed

The Philippines is closely watching the 2024 US presidential race but would view any change in leadership as an opportunity to renew the strengthening alliance between the two countries, Manila’s long-time envoy to Washington said on Thursday.

Security engagements between the defence treaty allies have stepped up considerably under US President Joe Biden and Philippine counterpart Ferdinand Marcos Jnr, with both leaders keen to counter what they see as mainland China’s aggressive actions in the South China Sea and near Taiwan.

The Philippines, a former US colony, is Washington’s closest ally in Southeast Asia and its proximity to Taiwan makes it crucial to US efforts to counter a potential invasion by mainland China of the democratic island it views as its own territory.

Beijing regards the island as a breakaway province to be brought under mainland control – by force, if necessary. Many countries, including the US, do not officially recognise Taiwan as an independent state but oppose the use of force to change the status quo.

“The only challenge that we face, especially for us in the embassy in Washington, DC, is what happens in November. It’s a concern for every country who would be the next president … everybody is preparing for that,” Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez told Reuters in a video interview.

Biden is likely to face Donald Trump, the Republican front runner to be the party’s presidential candidate, in a rematch in November’s presidential election.

“Any change is always something that we welcome,” Romualdez added.

“It gives us an opportunity to renew what we’ve already been saying, that our relationship with the United States is an important one, we value it, and we really hope that this is the same feeling that they have for us.”

PLA sends forces to monitor US-Philippines air patrols over South China Sea

Under Marcos, the Philippines nearly doubled the number of its bases accessible to US forces, including three new sites facing Taiwan, as it shifts its focus to territorial defence.

Military exercises have taken place regularly for decades, but manoeuvres have extended lately to include joint air and sea patrols over the South China Sea and close to Taiwan, actions mainland China has seen as provocations and “stirring up trouble”.

Beijing’s ties with Manila have soured amid repeated spats over disputed features in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, during which China’s coastguard has used water cannon to drive away Philippine vessels, disrupting fishing and resupply missions to troops in what Beijing sees as its territory.

The Philippines’ western allies and “like-minded” partners see China’s “aggressive behaviour as totally unacceptable,” said Romualdez, a cousin of the Philippine president.

He said it would not waiver in its is commitment to defend its sovereignty and sovereign rights in the South China Sea and “will not back down” over the Second Thomas Shoal, a submerged reef on which the Philippines grounded an old warship in 1999 to serve as a military outpost.

Despite other global challenges, the United States remains “committed to our mutual defence treaty, committed to our alliance,” Romualdez said.

That 1951 treaty binds both countries to defend each other in the event of attack, and Marcos last year succeeded in pushing Washington to make clear the extent of that security commitment.

Romualdez also said the relationship was expanding in economic areas too, with the United States due to send its first presidential trade mission to the Philippines next month, for which there was “very, very strong” interest from American companies.

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Chinese scientists produce powerful microwave chip for electronic warfare using diamond

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3252815/chinese-scientists-produce-powerful-microwave-chip-electronic-warfare-using-diamond?utm_source=rss_feed

High-power microwave weapons, radar and communication devices could get a significant boost in performance after a breakthrough by Chinese researchers in the manufacture of semiconductors. And the secret is diamond, also known as the “ultimate semiconductor”.

Scientists working for China’s largest electronic warfare weapon supplier said the gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors with diamond substrate that they have created have achieved a 30 per cent higher power density than any existing product.

Should these diamond-based chips, also known as fourth-generation semiconductors, be widely adopted, they could bolster the PLA’s capabilities in communication bandwidth, radar range and electromagnetic suppression, potentially giving them a decisive edge in electronic warfare, according to the scientists.

“These new devices have superior performance, including high power, high frequency and ultra-low energy consumption,” said the team led by Wang Yingmin, chief expert of the 46th research institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese academic journal Semiconductor Technology on January 31.

While other nations are still grappling with this technology in the lab, China has already smoothed out the kinks in the production line.

“A technological breakthrough of growing diamond directly on the GaN has been achieved in the industrial process,” the scientists said.

China already holds a dominant position in the global diamond industry, accounting for 95 per cent of world production. Last year alone, Chinese factories churned out over 16 billion carats of synthetic diamonds, a staggering amount equivalent to eight times the known total reserves of natural diamonds on Earth.

Once considered a rare and luxurious gem, diamonds have undergone a remarkable transformation into a cost-effective industrial material in China. An uncut lab-grown diamond now costs as little as US$1 in some Chinese online stores.

This falling price has paved the way for diamond’s application in the chip industry.

High electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) play a pivotal role in advanced radars and microwave weapons. These chips are capable of generating high-frequency and high-power electromagnetic waves. Currently, the state-of-the-art HEMT chips are fabricated using gallium nitride, a third-generation semiconductor material.

However, a significant challenge with gallium nitride is its tendency to generate considerable heat during operation, which often hinders efficient heat dissipation. As a result, in practical applications, “these devices can only achieve 20-30 per cent of their theoretical performance, far from their maximum efficiency potential,” wrote Wang’s team in their paper.

Diamond, known as the material with the highest thermal conductivity in nature, has a heat transferring efficiency more than five times higher than commonly used silicon carbide materials. It also exhibits excellent physical and chemical stability, making it suitable for use in weapons and equipment that often operate in extreme environments.

Over the years, scientists worldwide have conducted many studies on the application of diamonds in high-performance conductor devices. They found that the physicochemical properties of gallium nitride and diamond are quite different, making it difficult to tightly bond them together. If they are glued together using adhesive-like materials, their heat dissipation efficiency is significantly reduced.

Wang’s team adopted a novel approach, proposing the direct growth of diamonds over the gallium nitride. Once considered a far-fetched idea, the process of growing diamonds requires extremely high temperatures and pressures, conditions that can be detrimental to gallium nitride chips.

Nevertheless, the Chinese scientists claim to have overcome this substantial engineering hurdle. First, they planted diamond “seeds” at relatively low temperatures and pressures on the surface of gallium nitride. Then they increased the heat and pressure to grow the seeds into a centimetre-wide, high-quality layer of diamond crystal.

This seemingly simple process belies its complexity, as even minor deviations can lead to the formation of graphite impurities in the diamond, significantly compromising its heat dissipation properties.

Through meticulous experimentation, Chinese scientists and engineers have refined this process, suppressing impurity formation and enabling the large-scale production of high-quality diamond substrate gallium nitride HEMT devices.

“These products hold tremendous potential for application in the field of solid-state microwave power devices for the next generation,” Wang’s team said in their paper.

‘Nowhere to hide’: Chinese scientists claim breakthrough in new tracking device

In recent years, the Chinese military has already made some significant strides in electronic warfare capabilities, bolstered by the world’s foremost and extensive communication information technology industry.

A recently published paper reveals that the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) latest electronic warfare reconnaissance equipment, armed by artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies, has led the way in overcoming the challenges posed by vast information flow processing. This achievement has enabled real-time monitoring of high-frequency electromagnetic waves on the battlefield for the first time.

The integration of radars and antennas on newly commissioned Chinese warships also stands at a notably higher level than that observed on the main battleships of the US Navy. The colossal antenna masts atop the latest US Ford-class aircraft carriers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, reminiscent of those from World War II, have been subject to mockery as “clotheslines” on Chinese social media platforms.

Despite the US Navy’s extensive combat experience, its primary adversaries since the Cold War have predominantly been terrorist groups with minimal to non-existent retaliatory capabilities. Should they be pitted against opponents with comparable or superior technology, officers and sailors may encounter considerable pressure.

Reports indicate that the US Navy has publicly dismissed 18 frontline commanders due to a loss of confidence since last year, an unusually high tally. Many of these officers were engaged in military operations against China in sensitive waters, such as the South China Sea or the Western Pacific. Because no live ammunitions were used, some military experts speculate that the dismissal of certain US Navy commanders may be linked to a negative outcome of electronic warfare.

Meanwhile in China, the breakthrough in production technology for high-performance diamond semiconductors is poised to further bolster its current confidence in electronic warfare and reinforce its advantages in hi-tech industries, particularly in communications.

But China is not without competition. Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric announced in 2019 that it had developed diamond substrate gallium nitride HEMT devices in the laboratory, with plans for commercial production by 2025.

Nevertheless, even if other nations achieve similar technological feats, they may still face hurdles in competing with China in terms of production capacity and cost.

Diamonds have been hailed as the “ultimate semiconductor” material by some scientists because of their superior properties and hold vast potential for application in emerging fields such as next-generation processors and quantum computers. The Chinese government has been planning and investing in the artificial diamond industry for nearly two decades. In some provinces like Henan, large-scale production bases have been established with capacities far exceeding current diamond demand.

Some industry experts estimate that China can triple its diamond output if need be.

South China Sea: Manila could file case against Beijing over possible cyanide use by Chinese boats

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3252817/south-china-sea-manila-could-file-case-against-beijing-over-possible-cyanide-use-chinese-boats?utm_source=rss_feed

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr has pledged to take legal action against Beijing once it is proven that Chinese boats had used cyanide to “intentionally destroy” the fish-rich Scarborough Shoal in the disputed South China Sea.

Citing reports from Filipino fishermen, the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) last week said Chinese and Vietnamese trawlers have been using the toxic substance in the shoal, locally known as Bajo de Masinloc.

China has controlled the atoll since 2012 and deployed a flotilla of fishing boats to the area ever since.

“If we feel that there is enough ground to do so, we will [pursue charges],” Marcos said, adding that cyanide use in Philippine waters was not uncommon.

“I do know that there are cases of cyanide fishing, even before, here in the Philippines. But I think the reason that it has been more alarming is that it has become more prevalent,” he said.

How many submarines does Philippines need to deter Beijing in South China Sea?

Jonathan Malaya, a spokesman of the National Security Council, said BFAR would work on gathering more evidence to back its claim, which China dismissed as “sheer fabrication”.

“The Chinese government attaches great importance to the protection of ecological environment and conservation of fishing resources and resolutely fights against fishing activities that violate laws and regulations,” its foreign ministry said.

BFAR spokesperson Nazario Briguera accused the Chinese fishermen of using cyanide to “intentionally destroy Bajo de Masinloc to prevent Filipino fishing boats from fishing in the area”.

Malaya said BFAR’s findings, if substantiated, could be sent to the Department of Justice and the Office of the Solicitor General for building a case on environmental destruction before an appropriate international tribunal.

“The challenge here is to prove the responsibility for the coral degradation and the impact to the environment is coming from these specific people,” he said.

Is the Philippines becoming a US ‘proxy’ against Beijing in the South China Sea?

Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra agreed with Malaya, saying “any legal action must be supported by strong, solid and competent evidence that can withstand the scrutiny of any international tribunal”.

Cyanide fishing involves the sprinkling of the deadly chemical compound near coral reefs to stun fish so they can be easily caught.

Fisherfolk group Pamalakaya criticised BFAR for “failing” to rein in the controversial fishing practice, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported.

“Despite the evident poaching and other destructive fishing activities of foreign fishing vessels in the country’s territorial waters, the BFAR continues to fail to implement its own fishing laws to protect the marine resources and Filipino fisherfolk,” it said.

Scarborough Shoal has long been a key source of tension between the Philippines and China.

China’s coastguard drove away a BFAR vessel that it said “illegally intruded” into the waters adjacent to the shoal, state media reported on Thursday.

But a Philippine coastguard spokesman dismissed that claim.

“This statement is inaccurate. The BFAR vessel, BRP Datu Sanday, continues to patrol the waters of Bajo De Masinloc. Currently, the BFAR vessel is actively ensuring the security of Filipino fishermen in that area,” Commodore Jay Tarriela said on Thursday.

Last year, the Philippine coastguard removed a 300-metre-long barrier installed by China at the entrance to the strategic outcrop, which Manila says lies within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), a 370km stretch of water where coastal states have exclusive rights to fish and other resources.

Beijing claims sovereignty over almost the entirety of the South China Sea – where the Philippines and several other nations have competing claims – and has rejected a 2016 international ruling that ruled in favour of Manila and found China’s assertions have no legal basis.

China starts drafting bill to boost private sector and tackle sluggish post-Covid economy following major setbacks

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3252798/china-starts-drafting-bill-boost-private-sector-and-tackle-sluggish-post-covid-economy-following?utm_source=rss_feed

Beijing has started drafting a bill to promote the private sector in China’s latest attempt to revive its sluggish post-pandemic economic recovery and boost investor confidence following a recent stock market meltdown and a prolonged property market crisis.

The proposed bill, which debuted as the private economy promotion law, has been swung into the lawmaking process by the country’s top legislature, the justice ministry and top economic planner, China’s state broadcaster CCTV said on Wednesday.

The private economy promotion law aims to “respond to enterprises’ concerns” and use legal measures to “effectively implement equal treatment of state-owned and private enterprises,” the justice ministry was quoted as saying by the state broadcaster.

Neither specific clauses nor the lawmaking timeline were made public by CCTV.

Analysts predicted it would not greatly improve China’s business environment and that no particularly innovative measures would come out of the bill.

The private economy promotion law would focus on protecting the property rights of private enterprises and the rights and interests of entrepreneurs, ensuring fair participation and access to market and fair treatment in judiciary systems, the state broadcaster said.

The bill would also address the concerns of private companies, such as managing overdue payments to small and medium-sized enterprises.

China’s economic growth at risk from the ‘most significant crisis of our time’

Tan Tai, a Beijing-based lawyer specialising in commercial law, said the proposed bill appeared to be “old wine in a new bottle” and elements of the proposal could be traced in China’s constitution to the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Promotion Law as well as policies at the provincial level to promote the private sector.

Similarly, Max J. Zenglein, chief economist at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, said the proposed bill showed “a kind of a desperation” to improve sentiments. He said it might not contain “spectacularly new” items because it would be more of a continuation of measures that had been rolled out since mid last year.

In July, Beijing released a 31-point guide that listed policy solutions and promised political backing for private firms in the hope of boosting the private economy.

It has made an all-out effort to revive its economy since then, the most recent including making the largest cut to its key mortgage rate on Tuesday to shore up the crisis-hit property market.

The proposal comes just days ahead of the gathering of China’s top legislature, the NPC standing committee, which will gather for two days from Monday. Economic recovery is widely expected to be its central narrative.

Beijing has suffered a bumpy recovery since the country’s zero-Covid policy was abandoned in December 2022, with the private sector and wage earners particularly hard hit in the past year.

China’s national GDP grew 5.2 per cent in 2023 but it did not bring positive market sentiment as uncertainties still loom large with the property crisis, local government debts, US tech curbs and shifts in export supply chains amid heightened geopolitical tensions.

Tan said a law alone might have minimal effect in stabilising the downward trend of the private economy and it remained up to those responsible for bringing about laws and enforcing them to stop the slide.

For Zenglein, concrete measures are what count.

China’s middle class seek safe haven for wealth amid economic slowdown

“If you need to repeat things over and over again and have a new … x-point plan and a new law coming out – that shows that things are not really materialising,” he said.

The proposed bill is still in its infancy in China’s lawmaking process. After a draft comes out it has to go through review by relevant ministries and deliberations by the country’s legislature before coming into effect.

China social media praises Taiwan singer over his reluctance to see wife endure pain of childbirth, comments attract 270 million views online

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3251656/china-social-media-praises-taiwan-singer-over-his-reluctance-see-wife-endure-pain-childbirth?utm_source=rss_feed

Taiwan singer Jam Hsiao has gone viral on mainland social media after he said he could not bear the thought of his beloved wife suffering the pain of childbirth.

The Paper reported that Hsiao attracted attention for his views about childbirth after he shared them in an interview with Southern People Weekly on February 7.

The topic attracted 270 million views on Weibo.

Hsiao, 38, married his agent, Summer, who is 50, in October 2023. When sharing details of his happy marriage during the interview, he was asked whether the couple planned to have a baby.

He recounted his autobiography These Are The Days, in which he wrote that he did not want his future wife to endure the pain of labour.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Hsiao said.

He said he understood that giving birth is hard work, and had watched documentaries and television programmes that made it look as though it is the greatest pain a human can endure.

“I have always felt that women suffer too much pain while giving birth,” he said.

Hsiao said he did not mean to deny anyone the happiness of having a baby, and he was deeply aware many people did enjoy having and raising children. It is just not something he and his wife would consider.

Apart from concerns about the pain for Summer, Hsiao also worried about the social pressures on their children because of his fame.

“Your father is good at singing, why don’t you know how to sing? Your father plays basketball well, why are you poor at sports?” Hsiao offered examples of what he imagined his children would be asked.

The singer said he was not sure if he would change his mind about having children, but was adamant he would never want his wife to go through childbirth.

“If one day in the future we regret for not having a child, we might try to adopt,” Hsiao confided, adding he thinks that kind of love without a blood relationship would be the purest.

Hsiao’s views have won plaudits on mainland social media.

“What a great man. He loves his wife, and understands women,” one person said.

“It’s so touching. True love,” said another.

“It’s so rare to have such a man who puts himself in his wife’s place,” wrote a third.

“I’m envious of his wife,” another online observer chimed in.

Chinese research ship set to dock at Maldives port amid India’s security concerns

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/3252805/chinese-research-ship-set-dock-maldives-port-amid-indias-security-concerns?utm_source=rss_feed

A Chinese research ship is set to arrive in the Maldives on Thursday, global ship-tracking data showed, just three months after a similar vessel visited the Indian Ocean and sparked New Delhi’s security concerns.

The visit follows January comments by a US think tank that China’s navy could “leverage the insights gained from these missions” for deployment of naval forces, a claim Beijing calls part of a concocted image-smearing “China threat” narrative.

Xiang Yang Hong 03, owned by a research institute that reports to China’s natural resources ministry, is due to make a port call at Male, data from MarineTraffic showed, more than a month after leaving its southeastern home port of Xiamen.

The civilian ship spent more than three weeks surveying waters just outside the exclusive economic zones of India, the Maldives and Sri Lanka, the ship-tracking data showed.

China’s foreign ministry has said research by the vessel was “exclusively” for peaceful purposes to benefit scientific understanding.

Changing Delhi-Malé ‘dynamics’, troop withdrawal unlikely to affect partnership

In recent years, India has voiced concern about the presence of China’s research vessels in the Indian Ocean, even if they do not belong to the military.

An Indian security official has previously said the vessels were “dual-use”, meaning the data they gather can be used for both civilian and military purposes.

Xiang Yang Hong 03 has visited the Indian Ocean multiple times.

It sailed through the Sunda Strait in Indonesia in 2021, alarming Indonesian authorities, who said it had switched off its tracking system three times.

Chinese research vessels have also stopped in nearby Sri Lanka.

In 2022, Yuan Wang 5, a military vessel capable of tracking rocket and missile launches, arrived in Colombo, alarming India.

The last time a Chinese research vessel docked in Sri Lanka was in October 2023, reviving India’s concerns. But in January, the island nation imposed a year-long moratorium on foreign research ships, effectively denying China a port of call.

Xiang Yang Hong 03’s arrival follows a January visit to China by Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu that upgraded ties, with Beijing offering 920 million yuan (US$128 million) in “free aid”.

The Maldives has said the vessel would do no research in its waters, stopping only for personnel rotation and replenishment of supplies.

China’s coastguard claims it drove off Philippine ship from disputed Scarborough Shoal

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3252811/chinas-coastguard-claims-it-drove-philippine-ship-disputed-scarborough-shoal?utm_source=rss_feed

The Chinese coastguard said it drove off a Philippine vessel that had “illegally intruded” into waters near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea – a claim disputed by the Philippines.

In a statement on Thursday, the coastguard said it chased away the Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) ship – which it identified by the number 3002 – in accordance with the law. It did not give further details of the incident.

The BFAR vessel is the BRP Datu Sanday, a ship that has previously been used for resupply missions to disputed islands and atolls in the South China Sea, including Scarborough Shoal.

The Philippine coastguard on Thursday disputed the Chinese claim, saying the statement was “inaccurate” and that the Datu Sanday was still patrolling in waters near the shoal.

“Currently, the BFAR vessel is actively ensuring the security of Filipino fishermen in that area,” Commodore Jay Tarriela, a coastguard spokesman, said on X. “Some of our media friends are embedded on board the BFAR vessel, and their forthcoming reports upon completion of the mission will confirm the accuracy of our statement.”

Manila announced last week that Philippine coastguard and BFAR vessels would be sent to the shoal from this month “to protect the rights and safety of Filipino fishermen” in the waters.

That came after China’s coastguard last month said it had chased away four Filipinos who had “illegally” entered the waters.

How many submarines does Philippines need to deter Beijing in South China Sea?

Both China and the Philippines lay claim to Scarborough Shoal, a rich fishing ground in the middle of the South China Sea. The shoal is located around 220km (120 nautical miles) west of the Philippine island of Luzon and about 1,000km (590 nautical miles) east of China’s Hainan Island.

China took control of the shoal in 2012 after a tense-stand-off, prompting Manila to launch an international arbitration case over their maritime disputes. Beijing rejected the 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that its territorial claims to most of the South China Sea – within what it calls the “nine-dash line” – have no legal basis.

China’s sweeping claims to the resource-rich waterway are also contested by Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.

The latest incident comes as tensions have been rising over Scarborough Shoal.

The Datu Sanday was one of three Philippine vessels involved in a confrontation with the Chinese coastguard in December, when Manila accused the coastguard of using water cannon to “obstruct” the vessels, which were delivering fuel and food supplies to more than 30 Philippine fishing boats near the shoal.

China claimed the boats had “intruded” into the waters.

Filipino fisherman tells Chinese coastguard to ‘go away’ from disputed shoal

On Saturday, the Philippines claimed that Chinese fishermen were using cyanide to catch fish near and “intentionally destroy” Scarborough Shoal, an accusation Beijing has denied. Cyanide fishing can damage the ecosystem and has been banned in many places, including the Philippines.

Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army on Monday sent naval and air forces to monitor a joint air patrol involving Philippine fighter jets and a US bomber over the South China Sea.

China plans to send San Diego Zoo more pandas this year, reigniting its panda diplomacy

https://apnews.com/article/pandas-san-diego-zoo-california-china-6976587ee9992c861d9a56db0cb1ff89Bai Yun, the mother of newly named panda cub, Mei Sheng, gets a mouthful of bamboo during the cub's first day on display at the San Diego Zoo on Dec. 17, 2003. (AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi,File)

2024-02-22T04:03:09Z

SAN DIEGO (AP) — China plans to send a new pair of giant pandas to the San Diego Zoo, renewing its longstanding gesture of friendship toward the United States after nearly all the iconic bears on loan to U.S. zoos were returned as relations began to sour between the two nations.

San Diego Zoo officials told The Associated Press that if all permits and other requirements are approved, two bears, a male and a female, are expected to arrive as early as the end of summer, about five years after the zoo sent its last pandas back to China.

“We’re very excited and hopeful,” said Megan Owen of the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and vice president of Wildlife Conservation Science. “They’ve expressed a tremendous amount of enthusiasm to re-initiate panda cooperation starting with the San Diego Zoo.”

In November, Chinese President Xi Jinping raised hopes his country would start sending pandas to the U.S. again after he and President Joe Biden convened in Northern California for their first face-to-face meeting in a year and pledged to try to reduce tensions.

China is considering a pair that includes a female descendent of Bai Yun and Gao Gao, two of the zoo’s former residents, said Owen, an expert in panda behavior who has worked in San Diego and China.

Bai Yun, who was born in captivity in China, lived at the zoo for more than 20 years and gave birth to six cubs there. She and her son were the zoo’s last pandas and returned to China in 2019.

Gao Gao was born in the wild in China and lived at the San Diego Zoo from 2003 to 2018 before being sent back.

Decades of conservation efforts in the wild and study in captivity saved the giant panda species from extinction, increasing its population from fewer than 1,000 at one time to more than 1,800 in the wild and captivity.

The black-and-white bears have long been the symbol of the U.S.-China friendship since Beijing gifted a pair of pandas to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., in 1972, ahead of the normalization of bilateral relations. China later loaned pandas to zoos to help breed cubs and boost the population.

Demands for the return of giant pandas, known as China’s “national treasure,” grew among the Chinese public as unproven allegations that U.S. zoos mistreated the pandas flooded Chinese social media.

Fears over the future of so-called panda diplomacy escalated last year when zoos in Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., returned their pandas to China, leaving only four pandas in the United States, all at the zoo in Atlanta. That loan agreement expires later this year.

Many loan agreements were for 10 years and often were extended well beyond. But negotiations last year to extend the agreements with U.S. zoos or send more pandas did not produce results. China watchers speculated that Beijing was gradually pulling its pandas from Western nations due to deteriorating diplomatic relations with the U.S. and other countries.

Then on Nov. 15, 2023, a week after the National Zoo’s pandas departed for China, Xi spoke at a dinner in downtown San Francisco with American business executives and signaled that more pandas might be sent. He said he learned the San Diego Zoo and people in California “very much look forward to welcoming pandas back.”

“I was told that many American people, especially children, were really reluctant to say goodbye to the pandas and went to the zoo to see them off,” Xi said.

The San Diego Zoo continued to work with their Chinese counterparts even after it no longer had any pandas.

Owen said China is particularly interested in exchanging information on the zoo’s successful breeding of pandas in captivity. Giant pandas are difficult to breed in part because the female’s reproductive window is extremely narrow, lasting only 48 to 72 hours each year.

Bai Yun’s first cub, Hua Mei, was also the first panda born through artificial insemination to survive into adulthood outside of China, and would go on to produce 12 cubs on her own after she was sent to China.

Bai Yun, meanwhile, remained at the zoo where she gave birth to two more females and three males. With cameras in her den, researchers monitored her, contributing to the understanding of maternal care behavior, Owen said.

“We have a lot of institutional knowledge and capacity from our last cooperative agreement, which we will be able to parlay into this next chapter, as well as training the next generation of panda conservationists,” she said.

Chinese experts would travel with the bears and spend months in San Diego, Owen said.

She said the return of the bears is not only good for San Diego but the giant panda’s recovery as a species.

“We do talk about panda diplomacy all the time,” Owen said. “Diplomacy is a critical part of conservation in any number of contexts. .... If we can’t learn to work together, you know, in sometimes difficult situations or situations that are completely out of the control of conservationists, then we’re not going to succeed.”

Some high-speed rail services between Hong Kong and mainland China’s Tianjin and Guangzhou cancelled over bad weather

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/transport/article/3252780/some-high-speed-rail-services-between-hong-kong-and-mainland-chinas-tianjin-and-guangzhou-cancelled?utm_source=rss_feed

Some high-speed rail services between Hong Kong and two mainland Chinese cities have been cancelled for Thursday and Friday because of bad weather.

The Transport Department said the cuts included Thursday’s G305 Hong Kong-bound service departing Tianjin West station and G6506 heading to Guangzhou South from the West Kowloon terminus.

Cancellations for Friday will affect the G6505 service, from Guangzhou South to Hong Kong, and G306, departing West Kowloon for Tianjin West.

Number of Hong Kong high-speed rail passengers exceeds pre-pandemic levels

The MTR Corporation, which operates the high-speed rail services in Hong Kong, said it was informed by mainland authorities of the development, adding it was communicating with its counterparts across the border and would provide more details as soon as possible.

The 21 other services from Hong Kong to Guangzhou South on Thursday, as well as the 27 in the opposite direction on Friday, were unaffected. The high-speed rail also connects to Guangzhou East station.

The company reminded passengers to refer to the service’s official website at 12306.cn, as well as its own high-speed rail website and mobile app for more details.

Train information was also available at West Kowloon station, it said.

Hong Kong’s MTR Corp apologises after high-speed rail suspension sparks anger

Passengers may also apply for a refund within 30 days by using the official website or mobile app.

The Transport Department called on members of the public to take the East Rail line to cross the border at Lo Wu or Lok Ma Chau, or use other transport to travel to the mainland.

A large part of the mainland has recently been battered by rain, snow and freezing weather. In Tianjin, snowfall has prompted authorities to close all highways.

Provinces such as Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan and Shandong have also experienced severe snowfall, with freezing rain hitting Henan, Hubei, Hunan and Guizhou.

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China sex scandal teacher suspended after husband exposes affair with 16-year-old student, 2.5 billion view story of forbidden love online

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3252677/china-sex-scandal-teacher-suspended-after-husband-exposes-affair-16-year-old-student-25-billion-view?utm_source=rss_feed

The story of a woman secondary school teacher in Shanghai who was suspended after her husband exposed her alleged affair with a 16-year-old student in her class has gone super viral on mainland social media.

In the space of just 19 hours, the hashtag for the story topped Weibo’s trending list and had attracted 2.5 billion views and nearly 5 million shares by February 19.

On February 16, a man, surnamed Wu, who said he was the husband of the teacher called Zhang Yue, who is believed to be in her 30s, posted WeChat records of her flirting with a 16-year-old student.

According to screenshots circulating on mainland social media, Wu revealed that his wife, a chemistry teacher and first-year form tutor at the Shanghai No. 2 Secondary School, was “having sex with her 16-year-old student”.

The husband claimed that in the chat records between Zhang and the teenage boy, they allegedly discussed where they could date secretly, and the possibility of “getting a hotel room”.

The teacher also called the boy by his name in the messages, vowing to “control herself” until he becomes an adult, and instructing him to delete their chat records to prevent anyone from finding out about their relationship.

On February 19, the school announced it had suspended the teacher immediately, and was investigating the case.

A lawyer at Jiangsu FDDH Law Firm, Lan Tianbin, told the mainland media outlet Modern Express that the teacher had not broken the law if the student was over 16 years old.

Chinese law only bans sexual relations with minors under the age of 14.

However, Lan pointed out that it was against teachers’ professional ethics to have sex with their students.

China’s Ministry of Education clearly states that any form of sexual harassment or relationship between teacher and student is unethical behaviour, and the teacher may face dismissal as the most severe punishment.

Lan pointed out that the teacher’s husband broke the law by posting the chat records and revealing her name and that of the student, violating their privacy and reputation.

The online community has largely criticised the teacher for taking advantage of her student.

A website specialising in love and romantic relationships, Love Matters, claimed teachers who engage in relationships with students were using love as an excuse to “manipulate” them into having sex.

The United States strictly prohibits sex between teachers and students even at university, where most students are adults.

Last year, a teaching assistant in Kentucky, Ellen Philips, was charged with third-degree rape after having sex with multiple boys between 14 and 16. She faces a minimum of 10 years in jail, according to the New York Post.

In 2014, a female teacher from eastern China’s Jiangsu province was sentenced to three years in prison for having sex with her junior secondary school student who was below the age of 14.

China food security: inflated crop yields threaten ‘rigour, authority’ of scientific research

https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3252701/china-food-security-inflated-crop-yields-threaten-rigour-authority-scientific-research?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s increased efforts to seek technological advancement in agriculture to ensure food security could be undermined by exaggerated figures in crop yield tests, state media has warned.

While record-breaking yields of newly-developed food crop varieties have frequently hit the headlines in recent years, many of the results had been massaged for publicity purposes, said China Comment, a bimonthly magazine produced under the state-backed Xinhua News Agency.

Local authorities and agricultural companies fabricated results to either enhance their image or secure financial support as China, with 1.4 billion mouths to feed, has heavily invested in biotech research and seed development, according to the report published in the magazine’s first issue of 2024.

The criticism came as Beijing has placed a growing importance on food security, with President Xi Jinping labelling it as a “top national priority”, amid food export bans, geopolitical uncertainty and extreme weather events.

The report listed a series of falsified tests organised by unnamed organisations, involving some of the most high-profile species, including so-called seawater rice -which grows in salty, alkaline soil – and giant rice – with stalks that can reach around 2 metres (6.6 feet) tall.

“[For seawater rice], there ought to be very strict standards on freshwater irrigation and the use of barrier agents in formal tests, but some agricultural companies don’t follow these rules,” the report said.

To improve giant rice figures, some firms included straw and leaves in their yields, promoting the result as “total biomass” while playing down the very low quality rice output, the report quoted an industry insider as saying.

“Excessive production testing activities and lax supervision will inevitably undermine the rigour and authority of scientific research work, and also blotted out the factual basis for policymaking and situation analysis,” the report warned.

Salt can’t halt China’s food security push as saline soils yield vast harvests

Ma Wenfeng, a senior analyst with Beijing Orient Agribusiness Consultancy, said such a phenomena is largely the result of an exaggerated and grand style prevailing among officials that is reminiscent of the Great Leap Forward movement between 1958 and 1962, when fake production figures were common as officials tried to fulfil unrealistic goals.

“The culture of exaggeration and pleasing their superiors are creating a false impression about technological improvement,” he said.

Various crop yield records have been broken across China in the past couple of years, according to official media reports.

The most recent examples included a national record soybean yield – over 467kg (1,038lbs) per mu – achieved in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in September, and a world record peanut yield – over 865kg per mu – in Shandong province in the same month. A mu is a unit of area measurement used in China, with 15 mu equivalent to one hectare.

Zheng Fengtian, a professor at Renmin University’s School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development in Beijing, said while some test results may be true, “the question remains on how they will really benefit actual farming, as the yield may reduce from the laboratory to small-scale planting, and further to large-scale promotion”.

Fabricated test results, which are motivated by huge government investment in agricultural research, are made possible thanks to flawed assessment exercises, which often lack the engagement of third-party individuals or organisations, he added.

China has been a world leader in hybrid rice development and among the best performers in wheat production efficiency, but it relies heavily on imports for soybeans and corn, where per unit yields are just about 60 per cent compared to the United States, official data suggested.

China’s grain output increased to a record high of 695.41 million tonnes in 2023 amid a nationwide farmland reclamation drive.

In the same period, the world’s largest crop producer and consumer also imported over 59 million tonnes of grain, representing an increase of 11.1 per cent from the previous year.

Cargo ship fractures bridge in Guangzhou, southern China, sending vehicles into the water below

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3252765/cargo-ship-fractures-bridge-guangzhou-southern-china-sending-vehicles-water-below?utm_source=rss_feed

A cargo ship rammed into a bridge over the Pearl River in Guangzhou, southern China on Thursday morning, sending vehicles into the river below.

Authorities are on the scene managing traffic and investigating, but details of casualties remain uncertain.

Images shown on state broadcaster CCTV show the Lixinsha bridge in the city’s Nansha district fractured, with the ship apparently jammed beneath the structure.

Nansha, at the southern tip of the city in Guangdong province, is seen as a key zone for technological development in the Greater Bay Area.

The Pearl River connects Guangzhou to other GBA cities like Zhongshan and Hong Kong.

More to follow...

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Leaked files from Chinese firm show vast international hacking effort

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/21/china-hacking-leak-documents-isoon/2024-02-20T20:56:24.264Z

A trove of leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked hacking group shows that Beijing’s intelligence and military groups are carrying out large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies and infrastructure — exploiting what the hackers claim are vulnerabilities in U.S. software from companies including Microsoft, Apple and Google.

The cache — containing more than 570 files, images and chat logs — offers an unprecedented look inside the operations of one of the firms that Chinese government agencies hire for on-demand, mass data-collecting operations.

The files — posted to GitHub last week and deemed credible by cybersecurity experts, although the source remains unknown — detail contracts to extract foreign data over eight years and describe targets within at least 20 foreign governments and territories, including India, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Taiwan and Malaysia. Indian publication BNN earlier reported on the documents.

“We rarely get such unfettered access to the inner workings of any intelligence operation,” said John Hultquist, chief analyst of Mandiant Intelligence, a cybersecurity firm owned by Google Cloud. “We have every reason to believe this is the authentic data of a contractor supporting global and domestic cyberespionage operations out of China,” he said.

U.S. intelligence officials see China as the greatest long-term threat to American security and have raised alarm about its targeted hacking campaigns.

Experts are poring over the documents, which offer an unusual glimpse inside the intense competition of China’s national security data-gathering industry — where rival outfits jockey for lucrative government contracts by pledging evermore devastating and comprehensive access to sensitive information deemed useful by Chinese police, military and intelligence agencies.

The documents come from iSoon, also known as Auxun, a Chinese firm headquartered in Shanghai that sells third-party hacking and data-gathering services to Chinese government bureaus, security groups and state-owned enterprises.

The trove does not include data extracted from Chinese hacking operations but lists targets and — in many cases — summaries of sample data amounts extracted and details on whether the hackers obtained full or partial control of foreign systems.

One spreadsheet listed 80 overseas targets that iSoon hackers appeared to have successfully breached. The haul included 95.2 gigabytes of immigration data from India and a 3 terabyte collection of call logs form South Korea’s LG U Plus telecom provider. The group also targeted other telecommunications firms in Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal and Taiwan. The Indian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the documents.

ISoon clients also requested or obtained infrastructure data, according to the leaked documents. The spreadsheet showed that the firm had a sample of 459GB of road-mapping data from Taiwan, the island of 23 million that China claims as its territory.

Road data could prove useful to the Chinese military in the event of an invasion of Taiwan, analysts said. “Understanding the highway terrain and location of bridges and tunnels is essential so you can move armored forces and infantry around the island in an effort to occupy Taiwan,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a national security expert and chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank.

Among other targets were 10 Thai government agencies, including the country’s foreign ministry, intelligence agency and senate. The spreadsheet notes that iSoon holds sample data extracted from those agencies from between 2020 and 2022. The Thai Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Most of the targets were in Asia, though iSoon received requests for hacks further afield. Chat logs included in the leak describe selling unspecified data related to NATO in 2022. It’s not clear whether the data was collected from publicly available sources or extracted in a hack. NATO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Another file shows employees discussing a list of targets in Britain, including its Home and Foreign offices as well Treasury. Also on the list were British think tanks Chatham House and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“In the current climate, we, along with many other organizations, are the target of regular attempted attacks from both state and non-state actors,” said a Chatham House spokesperson, who said the group is “naturally concerned” about the leaks but has protection measures in place.

Asked about the leaked documents, the U.K. foreign office declined to comment.

The hackers also facilitated attempts to extract information from close diplomatic partners including Pakistan and Cambodia.

China encourages hacking rivalry

ISoon is part of an ecosystem of contractors that emerged out of a “patriotic” hacking scene established over two decades ago and now works for a range of powerful government entities including the Ministry of Public Security, the Ministry of State Security and the Chinese military.

According to U.S. officials, hackers with the People’s Liberation Army have breached computer systems in about two dozen key American infrastructure entities over the past year in an attempt to establish a foothold and be able to disrupt power and water utilities as well as communications and transportation system.

China’s model of mixing state support with a profit incentive has created a large network of actors competing to exploit vulnerabilities and grow their business. The scale and persistence of their attacks are headaches for American technology giants like X, Microsoft and Apple, which are now locked in a constant race to outsmart the hackers.

All software products have vulnerabilities, and a robust global marketplace rewards those who find back doors or develop tools known as exploits to take advantage of them. Many software vendors offer bounties to reward researchers who report security flaws, but government contractors in the United States and elsewhere often claim these exploits — paying more for the right to use them in espionage or offensive activity.

U.S. defense and intelligence contractors also develop tools for breaking into software, which are then used by federal officials in surveillance and espionage operations, or in offensive cyberweapons.

Chinese security researchers at private companies have demonstrably improved in recent years, winning a greater number of international hacking competitions as well as collecting more bounties from tech companies.

But the iSoon files contain complaints from disgruntled employees over poor pay and workload. Many hackers work for less than $1,000 a month, surprisingly low pay even in China, said Adam Kozy, a former FBI analyst writing a book on Chinese hacking.

The leaks hint at infighting and dissatisfaction in the network of patriotic Chinese hackers, despite the long-standing collaboration between groups.

Although it’s unclear who released the documents and why, cybersecurity experts said it may be an unhappy former employee or even a hack from a rival outfit.

The leaker presented themselves on GitHub as a whistleblower exposing malpractice, poor work conditions and “low quality” products that iSoon is using to “dupe” its government clients. In chats marked as featuring worker complaints, employees grumbled about sexism, long hours and weak sales.

Hackers for hire

Within China, these groups present themselves as essential to the Communist Party’s extensive campaign to eliminate threats to its rule from cyberspace.

China has in recent years escalated its efforts to trawl international public social media and trace targets abroad, though the crossover between public mass-monitoring and private hacking is often unclear.

ISoon has signed hundreds of deals with Chinese police that range from small jobs priced at $1,400 to multiyear contracts costing as much as $800,000, one spreadsheet showed.

The company’s leaked product manuals describe the services they offer and their prices, and boast about being able to steal data without detection. The product descriptions, targeted at state security clientele, at times use wartime language to describe a data-extraction mission underpinned by extreme threats to China’s national security.

“Information has increasingly become the lifeblood of a country and one of the resources that countries are scrambling to seize. In information warfare, stealing enemy information and destroying enemy information systems have become the key to defeating the enemy,” reads one document describing an iSoon package for sale that, it claims, would allow clients to access and covertly control Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail accounts by bypassing authentication protocols.

ISoon’s product manuals also advertise a $25,000 service for a “remote access” control system to obtain Apple iOS smartphone data from a target, including “basic mobile phone information, GPS positioning, mobile phone contacts” and “environment recording.”

One pitch advertised a service in which iSoon could efficiently conduct phishing campaigns against individuals or groups of Twitter users. Another outlined services that would allow the firm to remotely control targeted Windows and Mac operating systems.

Apple, Microsoft, Google and X, formerly Twitter, did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to striking long-term agreements, iSoon regularly worked on demand in response to requests from police in smaller Chinese cities and with private companies, according to pages of chat logs between the company’s top executives.

Sometimes the clients knew exactly what they wanted — for example, to find the identity of a specific Twitter user — but they also often made open-ended requests. In one exchange, employees discussed a request from a state security bureau in southern China asking if iSoon had much to offer on nearby Hong Kong. An iSoon employee suggested emails from Malaysia instead.

The scattershot approach appeared motivated in part by pressure from clients to deliver more and higher quality information. But despite the company boasting of cutting-edge capabilities, chats show that clients were regularly unimpressed with the hacked information.

ISoon repeatedly failed to extract data from government agencies, internal discussions showed, with some local authorities complaining about subpar intelligence.

Although some of iSoon’s services focused on domestic threats, the company often highlighted its ability to target overseas targets in the region — including government departments in India and Nepal, as well as in overseas Tibetan organizations — to attract clients. In December 2021, the group claimed that it had gained access to the intranet of the Tibetan Government in Exile, setting off a frantic search for a buyer. Some 37 minutes later, the company had found an interested client.

Another product — priced at $55,600 per package — is meant to allow control and management of discussion on Twitter, including using phishing links to access and take over targeted accounts. ISoon claims the system then allows clients to find and respond to “illegal” and “reactionary sentiments” using accounts that are centrally controlled by the client to “manipulate discussion.”

The documents show that iSoon met and worked with members of APT41, a Chinese hacking group that was charged by the U.S. Justice Department in 2020 for targeting more than 100 video game firms, universities and other victims worldwide.

Afterward, iSoon’s founder and CEO, Wu Haibo, who goes by the alias “shutd0wn,” joked with another executive about going for “41” drinks with Chengdu 404 — the organization APT41 is a part of — to celebrate them now being “verified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

But chat messages between executives from 2022 suggest that relations between the groups had soured because iSoon was late in paying Chengdu 404 more than 1 million yuan ($140,000). Chengdu 404 later sued iSoon in a dispute over a software development contract.

Wu and his team appeared blasé about the idea that they would one day be charged by U.S. authorities like APT41. In July 2022, an executive asked Wu whether the company was being closely watched by the United States. “Not bothered,” Wu replied. “It was a matter of sooner or later anyway.”

Neither iSoon nor Wu responded to emailed requests for comment.

Pei-Lin Wu and Vic Chiang in Taipei and Lyric Li in Seoul contributed to this report.

Growth in CO2 emissions leaves China likely to miss climate targets

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/22/growth-in-co2-emissions-leaves-china-likely-to-miss-climate-targets

China is off track on all of its core 2025 climate targets, despite the fact that clean energy is now the biggest driver of the country’s economic growth, analysis has found.

After years of extraordinarily rapid growth, China is now grappling with a slowdown that is causing ripples internally and internationally. The government has supercharged the growth of the renewable energy industry but it has imultaneously poured stimulus funds into construction and manufacturing, and continues to approve coal power.

China’s total energy consumption increased by 5.7% in 2023, in the first moment since 2005 that demand for energy grew faster than its GDP. China’s economy grew by 5.2% last year, a rate that would be rapid for most countries but is slow in comparison with previous rates of growth.

But carbon dioxide emissions have continued to grow, even as economic growth has slowed due to the fact that China’s economic growth during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has been highly energy intensive. Between 2021 and 2023, CO₂ emissions grew at an average of 3.8% a year, up from 0.9% a year between 2016 and 2020. GDP growth slowed slightly over the same period.

The findings were published in an analysis from Carbon Brief conducted by Lauri Myllyvirta, a lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

Under the Paris agreement, China’s climate pledges require a number of targets to be met by 2025; these include increasing the share of non-fossil energy sources to 20% and reducing the carbon intensity of the economy by 18%. Carbon intensity refers to how many grams of CO₂ are released to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity.

However, Myllyvirta’s analysis found that China was “way off track” on many of these targets, primarily because of the carbon intensity of recent economic growth. CO₂ emissions will have to fall by between 4% and 6% to meet the government’s 2025 target, Myllyvirta predicts.

Interactive

Part of the problem stems from the fact that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the government supported the economy by injecting stimulus measures into the construction and manufacturing sector, “shifting the pattern of growth into a more carbon-intensive direction”, said Myllyvirta. At the same time, many other countries targeted their stimulus measures towards households, driving up demand for consumer goods, resulting in an export boom from China.

It is not impossible to do, said Myllyvirta: “Optimistically, these distortions to the economic structure before and during zero-Covid could be reversed, and that combined with the clean energy drive could serve to bring down emissions rapidly.”

Around one percentage point of China’s CO₂ emissions growth last year came from manufacturing clean energy technologies, such as solar PV, electric vehicles and batteries. These products will ultimately lead to a net drop in emissions, although some of that will be felt outside China as goods are exported.

Part of the challenge in understanding China’s energy transition is that the numbers involved in every sector are of global significance. Despite the fact that, in 2023, China commissioned as much solar PV as the entire world did in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency, the rapid growth in energy demand in recent years has outstripped the clean energy additions.

On the current trend of increased energy demands, energy production from non-fossil sources would need to grow by more than 11% a year to meet the 2025 target. Currently, renewable energy production is increasing by an annual rate of 8.5%. Clean energy contributed $1.6tn (£1.26tn) to China’s economy in 2023, accounting for all of the growth in investment.

And on the target of reducing the carbon intensity of China’s economy by 18% by 2025, China has so far managed only a 5% reduction since 2020. That means that CO₂ emissions will have to come down in absolute terms from 2023 to 2025 to meet the target.

Interactive

According to the National Energy Administration, China’s installed capacity of renewable energy exceeded 1.45bn kilowatts in 2023, accounting for more than half of the country’s total installed power generation capacity.

But a separate report published on Thursday by CREA found that China approved 114 gigawatts (GW) of coal power in 2023, up from 104 GW in 2022. China’s share of global coal emissions surpassed 64% in 2023.

Since Xi Jinping, China’s leader, pledged to “strictly control” new coal power in 2021, the approval of new coal has actually increased rapidly. Nearly half of the growth in power generation between 2020 and 2023 came from coal. That is partly because some thermal power developers and government officials see this decade as a window of opportunity in which CO₂ emissions can continue to increase before 2030, when Xi has promised they will peak. Still, China is widely expected to meet that target by 2025.

Local governments, particularly mining provinces, often rely on investment in coalmines and thermal power sources to boost their GDP figures.

Myllyvirta said: “The major acceleration in coal consumption growth and in approvals of new coal power plants that has taken place since President Xi made these pledges in 2021 contradicts the commitments – and China needs to take determined action in 2024-25 to avoid failing to respect them.”

Climate change: China at risk of missing its goals unless it takes drastic action to rein in coal expansion, new research finds

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3252722/climate-change-china-risk-missing-its-goals-unless-it-takes-drastic-action-rein-coal-expansion-new?utm_source=rss_feed

China is at heightened risk of missing its climate targets and suffering major economic losses unless it takes decisive actions to put a halt to runaway coal power plant expansion and reform outdated power grid management, new research has found.

To fix challenges posed by an unchecked boom in construction of coal power plants initiated in the name of preventing periodic power shortages, Beijing must scrap policies that support coal power generation, according to climate analysts.

Last year, the Chinese energy sector’s carbon dioxide emissions increased 5.2 per cent, the same as gross domestic product, highlighting a failure to rein in energy-intensive growth, they estimated.

“Another year of rapidly rising emissions in 2023 leaves China way off track against its target of cutting carbon intensity by 18 per cent between 2021 and 2025,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). “As a result, carbon dioxide emissions would now need to fall by 4 to 6 per cent by 2025 to hit the goal.”

The approaching deadline for achieving peak carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 appeared to have led many developers to pursue a wave of carbon-intensive projects while the window is still open, said a joint report by CREA and Global Energy Monitor published on Thursday.

In April 2021, President Xi Jinping said China would “strictly control” coal-fired power generation projects, reach peak consumption next year and start phasing it down in 2026, as part of the nation’s goals for carbon emissions to peak before 2030 and to reach net-zero by 2060.

A policy document followed in October that year, in which China committed to raise the share of non-fossil energy consumption to 20 per cent by 2025 from 15.9 per cent in 2020, while slashing carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 18 per cent and energy usage intensity by 13.5 per cent from 2020 levels.

These targets are at risk of going “severely” off track, given approvals of new coal power plants increased fourfold in 2022-23, compared with the previous five-year period of 2016-20, the analysts said.

They pointed out that the nation’s carbon emissions intensity only fell 5 per cent between 2020 and last year. Meanwhile, energy usage intensity increased 0.5 per cent last year, the first time it has risen since at least 2005.

In particular, the growth rate of coal power generation accelerated to 4 per cent annually between 2021 and last year, from 3.5 per cent between 2016 and 2020, while growth in total coal consumption – in the power and non-power sectors – accelerated eight-fold to 3.8 per cent a year from 0.5 per cent.

New coal power projects with 114 gigawatts of generating capacity received government approval last year, up from 104GW in 2022. The total volume of 218GW in the past two years came close to the record of 233GW permitted in 2014-15.

Construction started on another 70GW of capacity, a sharp rise from 54GW in 2022. Some 47GW was commissioned, up from 28GW.

Building and maintaining this vast power capacity is a “major economic drag”, the analysts said, noting a Renmin University study cited by the People’s Daily in 2023 that estimated the national coal power assets to be at risk of losing 120 billion (US$16.69 billion) to 350 billion yuan in value if they are forced to run at low capacity or shut down in the future.

To reach the carbon intensity reduction target for next year, China’s coal consumption and carbon emissions must fall in absolute terms between last year and next year, which is a tall order, the analysts said.

An online dump of Chinese hacking documents offers a rare window into pervasive state surveillance

https://apnews.com/article/china-cybersecurity-leak-document-dump-spying-aac38c75f268b72910a94881ccbb77cbThe interior of the I-Soon office, also known as Anxun in Mandarin, is seen after office hours in Chengdu in southwestern China's Sichuan Province on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. Chinese police are investigating an unauthorized and highly unusual online dump of documents from a private security contractor linked to China’s top policing agency and other parts of its government. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

2024-02-21T19:29:19Z

Chinese police are investigating an unauthorized and highly unusual online dump of documents from a private security contractor linked to the nation’s top policing agency and other parts of its government — a trove that catalogs apparent hacking activity and tools to spy on both Chinese and foreigners.

Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon: ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests, such as Hong Kong or the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang in China’s far west.

The dump of scores of documents late last week and subsequent investigation were confirmed by two employees of I-Soon, known as Anxun in Mandarin, which has ties to the powerful Ministry of Public Security. The dump, which analysts consider highly significant even if it does not reveal any especially novel or potent tools, includes hundreds of pages of contracts, marketing presentations, product manuals, and client and employee lists.

They reveal, in detail, methods used by Chinese authorities used to surveil dissidents overseas, hack other nations and promote pro-Beijing narratives on social media.

The documents show apparent I-Soon hacking of networks across Central and Southeast Asia, as well as Hong Kong and the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.

The hacking tools are used by Chinese state agents to unmask users of social media platforms outside China such as X, formerly known as Twitter, break into email and hide the online activity of overseas agents. Also described are devices disguised as power strips and batteries that can be used to compromise Wi-Fi networks.

I-Soon and Chinese police are investigating how the files were leaked, the two I-Soon employees told the AP. One of the employees said I-Soon held a meeting Wednesday about the leak and were told it wouldn’t affect business too much and to “continue working as normal.” The AP is not naming the employees — who did provide their surnames, per common Chinese practice — out of concern about possible retribution.

The source of the leak is not known. The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A HIGHLY IMPACTFUL LEAK

Jon Condra, an analyst with Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company, called it the most significant leak ever linked to a company “suspected of providing cyber espionage and targeted intrusion services for the Chinese security services.” He said organizations targeted by I-Soon — according to the leaked material — include governments, telecommunications firms abroad and online gambling companies within China.

Until the 190-megabyte leak, I-Soon’s website included a page listing clients topped by the Ministry of Public Security and including 11 provincial-level security bureaus and some 40 municipal public security departments.

Another page available until early Tuesday advertised advanced persistent threat “attack and defense” capabilities, using the acronym APT — one the cybersecurity industry employs to describe the world’s most sophisticated hacking groups. Internal documents in the leak describe I-Soon databases of hacked data collected from foreign networks around the world that are advertised and sold to Chinese police.

The company’s website was fully offline later Tuesday. An I-Soon representative refused an interview request and said the company would issue an official statement at an unspecified future date.

I-Soon was founded in Shanghai in 2010, according to Chinese corporate records, and has subsidiaries in three other cities, including one in the southwestern city of Chengdu that is responsible for hacking, research and development, according to leaked internal slides.

I-Soon’s Chengdu subsidiary was open as usual on Wednesday. Red Lunar New Year lanterns swayed in the wind in a covered alleyway leading to the five-story building housing I-Soon’s Chengdu offices. Employees streamed in and out, smoking cigarettes and sipping takeout coffees outside. Inside, posters with the Communist Party hammer and stickle emblem featured slogans that read: “Safeguarding the Party and the country’s secrets is every citizen’s required duty.”

I-Soon’s tools appear to be used by Chinese police to curb dissent on overseas social media and flood them with pro-Beijing content. Authorities can surveil Chinese social media platforms directly and order them to take down anti-government posts. But they lack that ability on overseas sites like Facebook or X, where millions of Chinese users flock to in order to evade state surveillance and censorship.

“There’s a huge interest in social media monitoring and commenting on the part of the Chinese government,” said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow in the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund. She reviewed some of the documents.

To control public opinion and forestall anti-government sentiment, Ohlberg said, control of critical posts domestically is pivotal. “Chinese authorities,” she said, “have a big interest in tracking down users who are based in China.”

The source of the leak could be “a rival intelligence service, a dissatisfied insider, or even a rival contractor,” said chief threat analyst John Hultquist of Google’s Mandiant cybersecurity division. The data indicates I-Soon’s sponsors also include the Ministry of State Security and China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, Hultquist said.

LOTS OF TARGETS, LOTS OF COUNTRIES

One leaked draft contract shows I-Soon was marketing “anti-terror” technical support to Xinjiang police to track the region’s native Uyghurs in Central and Southeast Asia, claiming it had access to hacked airline, cellular and government data from countries like Mongolia, Malaysia, Afghanistan and Thailand. It is unclear whether the contact was signed.

“We see a lot of targeting of organizations that are related to ethnic minorities — Tibetans, Uyghurs. A lot of the targeting of foreign entities can be seen through the lens of domestic security priorities for the government,” said Dakota Cary, a China analyst with the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.

He said the documents appear legitimate because they align with what would be expected from a contractor hacking on behalf of China’s security apparatus with domestic political priorities.

Cary found a spreadsheet with a list of data repositories collected from victims and counted 14 governments as targets, including India, Indonesia and Nigeria. The documents indicate that I-Soon mostly supports the Ministry of Public Security, he said.

Cary was also struck by the targeting of Taiwan’s Health Ministry to determine its COVID-19 caseload in early 2021 – and impressed by the low cost of some of the hacks. The documents show that I-Soon charged $55,000 to hack Vietnam’s economy ministry, he said.

Although a few chat records refer to NATO, there is no indication of a successful hack of any NATO country, an initial review of the data by The Associated Press found. That doesn’t mean state-backed Chinese hackers are not trying to hack the U.S. and it’s allies, though. If the leaker is inside China, which seems likely, Cary said that “leaking information about hacking NATO would be really, really inflammatory” — a risk apt to make Chinese authorities more determined to identify the hacker.

Mathieu Tartare, a malware researcher at the cybersecurity firm ESET, says it has linked I-Soon to a Chinese state hacking group it calls Fishmonger that it actively tracks and which it wrote about in January 2020 after the group hacked Hong Kong universities during student protests. He said it has, since 2022, seen Fishmonger target governments, NGOs and think tanks across Asia, Europe, Central America and the United States.

French cybersecurity researcher Baptiste Robert also combed through the documents and said it seemed I-Soon had found a way to hack accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, even if they have two-factor authentication, as well as another for analyzing email inboxes. He said U.S. cyber operators and their allies are among potential suspects in the I-Soon leak because it’s in their interests to expose Chinese state hacking.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Cyber Command wouldn’t comment on whether the National Security Agency or Cybercom were involved in the leak. An email to the press office at X responded, “Busy now, please check back later.”

Western governments, including the United States, have taken steps to block Chinese state surveillance and harassment of government critics overseas in recent years. Laura Harth, campaign director at Safeguard Defenders, an advocacy group that focuses on human rights in China, said such tactics instill fear of the Chinese government in Chinese and foreign citizens abroad, stifling criticism and leading to self-censorship. “They are a looming threat that is just constantly there and very hard to shake off.”

Last year, U.S. officials charged 40 members of Chinese police units assigned to harass the family members of Chinese dissidents overseas as well as to spread pro-Beijing content online. The indictments describes tactics similar to those detailed in the I-Soon documents, Harth said. Chinese officials have accused the United States of similar activity. U.S. officials including FBI Director Chris Wary have recently complained about Chinese state hackers planting malware that could be used to damage civilian infrastructure.

On Monday, Mao Ning, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the U.S. government has long been working to compromise China’s critical infrastructure. She demanded the U.S. “stop using cybersecurity issues to smear other countries.”

___

Kang reported from Chengdu, China. AP journalists Didi Tang in Washington, D.C., and Larry Fenn in New York contributed to this report.

FRANK BAJAK Bajak is an Associated Press technology reporter who focuses on hacking, privacy, surveillance and military AI. twitter DAKE KANG Kang covers Chinese politics, technology and society from Beijing for The Associated Press. He’s reported across Central, South, and East Asia, and was a Pulitzer finalist for investigative reporting in China. twitter mailto

Cost of raising children in China is second-highest in the world, think-tank reveals

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/21/cost-of-raising-children-in-china-is-second-highest-in-the-world-think-tank-reveals

China is one of the most expensive places in the world to raise a child, outstripping the US and Japan in relative terms, a prominent Chinese thinktank has said.

A report released on Wednesday by the Beijing-based Yuwa Population Research Institute found that the average cost of raising a child in China until the age of 18 is 538,000 yuan (£59,275) – more than 6.3 times as high as its GDP per capita, compared with 4.11 times in the US or 4.26 times in Japan.

For children brought up in Chinese cities, the average cost rises to 667,000 yuan (£73,488).

In Australia, the researchers found that the cost of raising a child was 2.08 times as high as the average GDP per person. China is second only to South Korea – which has the world’s lowest fertility rate.

The report also addressed the opportunity costs, borne mainly by mothers, associated with having children. Between 2010 and 2018, the weekly time spent by parents on helping with their primary school-age children’s homework increased from 3.67 hours to 5.88 hours.

Mothers tend to suffer a loss in paid working hours and in leisure time as a result of raising children. Fathers only experience a loss in leisure time.

“Due to reasons such as the high cost of child-bearing and the difficulty for women to balance family and work, the Chinese people’s average fertility willingness … is almost the lowest in the world,” the researchers concluded. “Fertility willingness” refers to what people see as the ideal number of children, which in China is less than two, according to several surveys.

The research was led by Liang Jianzhang, a prominent businessman who is also a professor of economics at Peking University

Last year China’s population shrank for a second consecutive year, exacerbating the government’s concerns about supporting an ageing cohort of people with a shrinking number of workers.

The number of births in 2023 was just over 9 million, aabout half the number in 2016.

Women are increasingly inclined to delay or reject motherhood because of the negative impact it has on their careers and finances. In 2017, the government abandoned the decades-old one-child policy, and now encourages women to have up to three children. Some provinces have removed any restrictions on how many children a household can register.

Lijia Zhang, a writer who is working on a book about Chinese women’s changing attitudes towards marriage and motherhood, said that the high costs of education and housing made raising children financially difficult. “Many women I interviewed said they simply couldn’t afford to have two to three children. Some can manage one; others don’t even want bother with one.”

Zhang added: “Another equally important factor is changing attitudes. Many urban and educated women no longer see motherhood as the necessary passage in life or the necessary ingredient for happiness.”

Several local governments in China have introduced measures in attempts to boost the birthrate, from cash subsidies for extra children to discounts on IVF. Superstitious policymakers are hoping that the lunar dragon year – which began on 10 February – might lead to a rise in births as parents plan to have an auspicious dragon baby.

But so far government incentives have made little dent in the stubbornly falling birthrate.

The Yuwa report concluded: “The declining birthrate will have a profound impact on China’s economic growth potential, innovation vitality, people’s happiness index and even national rejuvenation … The fundamental reason why China has almost the lowest fertility rate in the world is that it has almost the highest fertility cost in the world.”

As China powers ahead on electric vehicles, it is also flagging likely health hazards at battery plants

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3252682/china-powers-ahead-electric-vehicles-it-also-flagging-likely-health-hazards-battery-plants?utm_source=rss_feed

Electric cars have in recent days notched up two significant wins in China’s cutthroat automotive market dominated by traditional fuel vehicles.

On Monday, new energy giant BYD fixed the price of its electric vehicles (EVs) below those of their petrol-guzzling counterparts for the first time.

Meanwhile, Huawei Technologies has been making waves since launching its new ultra-fast charging system in October, allowing EVs to run for a kilometre (0.6 mile) on just a one-second charge.

The moves are a testament to the explosive growth in China’s EV battery production capacity and rapid technological innovations.

Factors including extensive supply chains and a strong talent pool have seen China rise to become the world’s top EV battery producer, accounting for more than 60 per cent of the global market last year.

The industry has been hailed for its hi-tech and low-carbon image backed by advanced manufacturing.

But investigations by health authorities in various parts of China in recent years have found that EV battery production can involve high noise and dust levels, and the release of chemical toxins, laser radiation, and other harmful elements.

Their findings have shed light on the lesser-known health impact of the rapidly developing industry as China chases its zero-carbon goals.

Occupational disease risks have always been classified as “serious” in battery manufacturing, said a researcher at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Chongqing who did not wish to be named.

A 2019 study by researchers from institutions including the China Academy of Safety Science and Technology, a government-run work safety body, found battery manufacturing to be one of China’s top sectors with frequent incidents of “group poisoning” since the early 1990s.

However, the Chongqing CDC researcher emphasised that occupational health hazards were lower for EV batteries than for traditional products such as lead-acid batteries, thanks to the higher level of automation and more advanced technology at work.

The Post contacted China’s top EV battery makers CATL and BYD with a request to visit their factories. But it has yet to receive a response from CATL and was turned down by BYD.

BYD, which stands for Build Your Dreams, was born in 2003 and overtook Tesla as the world’s top producer of electric cars this year. It is also the No 2 global producer of EV batteries, behind CATL, or Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd.

Frontline workers exposed to the potential risks in the EV sector have expressed their concerns. On the online forum “Zhihu”, the Chinese version of Quora, many users have asked whether working in a power battery factory would harm their health.

One user shared in 2021 that she worked in a factory producing cathode materials for lithium batteries. Most of today’s all-electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries, though the exact composition often varies from that of batteries for consumer electronics.

The poster said her eyes and throat always stung from exposure to chemical dust, adding: “I don’t dare to stay [in the factory] any more.” She ended up quitting after just five months.

Noise levels are also a concern, with frequent or loud noise proven to induce anxiety or stress. Another user posting the same year said that after working in a noisy battery factory for three months, he suffered a nervous breakdown over health fears and some hearing loss because of the high decibel levels.

The findings of some scientists and public health workers justify such concerns.

A study published in the Chinese academic journal Occupational Health and Emergency Rescue in December identified potential occupational health hazards at a lithium battery manufacturing plant in Taixing, in eastern Jiangsu province.

The findings were based on an on-site investigation carried out by researchers from the local arm of the CDC, a national public health body.

The plant set up in 2016 produces 400 million amp-hours of power lithium batteries annually across four production lines – employing 114 workers in all.

Lithium battery production involves multiple steps, broadly including the processing of raw materials into electrode plates, and then turning those plates into unactivated battery cells. After charging and capacity testing, the batteries are packaged and stored.

The research team found several chemical hazards at the plant. For instance, workers producing electrode sheets faced risks such as suffocation from soot and graphite dust as they weighed, mixed and stirred the positive and negative electrode materials.

At the welding stations, where the sheets are cut and welded into battery cells as containers for electrolyte, the highest concentration of ozone was found to exceed the occupational exposure limit, a condition classified as a “moderate hazard” under national standards.

At the battery assembly workshop, according to the paper, the average ambient noise level was close to 90 decibels, where the permissible level is below 85, thus posing a “moderate risk”.

“The factory involves activities with a serious occupational risk, and the positions of workers exposed to ozone, hydrogen fluoride and noise warrant special attention,” the authors said, urging sustainable improvements in hazard prevention and emergency rescue facilities, and stronger individual protection.

Tesla to open US battery plant with equipment from China’s CATL

Other global EV battery manufacturers have also faced complaints of failing to meet worker health standards.

South Korea’s LG Energy Solution, which ranks third in the global energy battery market behind CATL and BYD, set up a factory called Ultium Cells in Ohio with General Motors in 2022.

The factory was fined US$270,000 by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in October. OSHA investigators found that the company had failed to train workers on safety and emergency procedures, and also failed to meet federal standards for the use of personal protective equipment, putting staff at risk.

SK On, another South Korean venture which ranks fifth by battery installation volume, had one of its American plants cited for six serious violations and fined US$75,000 by the US Department of Labour last month.

Problems flagged included an average noise level of more than 85 decibels per hour; failure to provide respiratory protection for workers handling nickel, cobalt and manganese; a lack of clean and disinfected masks and showers for workers exposed to corrosive materials, Korean paper Aju Business Daily reported in January.

Technological breakthroughs in producing batteries, especially lithium-ion cells with their higher energy density and longer life cycle, has largely powered the global EV revolution.

Although research into lithium batteries dates back to the 1960s, the technology was not broadly used until Japanese companies commercialised it in the 90s. By 2010, Japan and South Korea accounted for around 80 per cent of the global market share.

However, rivals in China soon began to make rapid inroads and are now unassailable market leaders.

Low-cost batteries from CATL – founded in 2011 – now power one in three EVs worldwide and supply brands from Tesla and BMW to Volkswagen and Ford.

Last year, six of the top 10 companies in terms of global battery usage were all Chinese, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the global lithium battery market, according to data from market trackers SNE Research.

Of these, CATL and BYD together account for more than half the market.

China also has the largest global share of the processing facilities for some key materials that go into EV batteries.

This includes 65 per cent of the world’s lithium, 74 per cent of cobalt and 42 per cent of copper processing units. It is also the only country that processes graphite, another major component of EV cells.

“Solar cells, lithium-ion batteries and EVs have become the ‘new three’ driving China’s exports”, Wan Gang, a former science and technology minister and key figure in China’s development of EVs, said in talking about the export market last year.

Chinese EV companies are also speeding up overseas expansion, with several announcing new lithium battery production lines, raw material production and other projects in countries such as Thailand, Europe and the United States in the past two years.

Domestically, many Chinese cities are looking at economic growth powered by the EV industry, including battery plants.

In the mega city of Chongqing, an economic powerhouse in southwestern China, EV battery companies are booming after the local government has set out automobiles, especially new energy vehicles, as a pillar industry.

“China has been carrying out supply-side reforms for the past 10 years or so,” the researcher at the Chongqing CDC said, adding that one of the main goals has been to upgrade the manufacturing industry. This has eliminated a lot of companies that were not up to national production standards.

However, some stages of production were still having an undesirable impact on individuals and society, the researcher said. For instance, the upstream section of the EV industry chain, where lithium ore is mined and related accessories are manufactured, still pose a threat to public health.

From fossil fuels to batteries, the automotive industry’s energy transition has become an irreversible global trend. But the journey has been fraught with controversy, with health risks in manufacturing just one problem.

The mining of lithium, for example, is said to cause significant environmental pollution and is highly water-intensive. In early 2022, a proposed BYD lithium project in Chile was suspended, partly due to opposition from local indigenous people and communities concerned about pollution and wetland degradation.

Chinese team’s memory leap shrinks data centre storage capacity into DVD-sized disk

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3252737/chinese-teams-memory-leap-shrinks-data-centre-storage-capacity-dvd-sized-disk?utm_source=rss_feed

Imagine a DVD-sized disk that could store more than 10,000 times the data of a Blu-ray Disc, a feat that could lead to vast savings of storage space and energy in an era of big data and artificial intelligence.

A research team in China says it has developed a technology that allows a massive data set – equal to about 5.8 billion indexed web pages – to be stored in a device the size of a desktop computer.

For perspective, if the data was stored using 1-terabyte hard drives, the devices would cover an area about the size of an average playground.

“This technology makes it possible to achieve exabit-level storage by stacking nanoscale disks into arrays, which is essential in big data centres with limited space,” the team wrote in an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on Thursday.

Power storage, smart-grid systems are key to China’s energy transition

The scientists are from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Peking University, as well as the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and Key Laboratory of Photochemistry, both under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In data storage units, 1,024 gigabytes equal 1 terabyte, and 1,024 terabytes form 1 petabit, while 1,024 petabytes make up 1 exabit.

The global data volume is projected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025, according to global market intelligence provider International Data Corporation. One zettabyte is 1 trillion gigabytes.

Optical data storage (ODS) is a light-based storage method commonly used in DVDs. It is cost-efficient and durable, but its capacity is limited since it usually stores data in a single layer.

In the new study, the Chinese team said they created a three-dimensional architecture to store data across hundreds of layers instead of one, resulting in optical data storage capacity reaching the petabit level for the first time ever.

The layers of the disk were just 1 micrometre apart, allowing it to remain as thin as a regular DVD. The scientists wrote and read the data using laser beams.

“The ODS has a capacity of up to 1.6 [petabits] for a DVD-sized disk area through the recording of 100 layers on both sides of our ultrathin single disk,” the researchers said, adding that it can store 24 times the data of today’s most advanced hard disk drives.

“It will thus become possible to build an exabit-level data centre inside a room instead of a stadium-sized space by stacking 1,000 petabit-level nanoscale disks together … resulting in a large number of cost-effective exabit data centres.”

Existing data centres require vast amounts of energy to operate, while internal devices generate immense heat, which requires even more power for cooling.

The International Energy Agency estimated that data centres across the world consumed about 1 per cent of total global electricity demand in 2022.

In China, the National Energy Administration said the total electricity consumption by the country’s data centres was 270 billion kilowatt-hours in 2022, almost triple the amount of power generated in the same year by the Three Gorges hydropower stations – the world’s largest power-generating facility. The consumption totalled about 3 per cent of China’s total electricity usage.

The team said the new technology could minimise the need for data migration, a tricky process that data centres must perform every three to 10 years, putting data at risk of tampering or loss.

One of the corresponding authors, Wen Jing, a professor from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, said the new technology would provide more energy-efficient data storage.

“Energy will only be needed when data is written onto or read from the disk, but not when storing data, thanks to the inherent properties of ODS,” Wen said.

“The disks are also highly stable so there are no special storage requirements. The new disk is expected to last 50 to 100 years, unlike a hard disk drive which requires data to be moved to a new device every five to 10 years,” she said.

Hard disk drives can also fail due to physical damage, such as being dropped or exposed to excessive humidity.

Wen said the new disks could someday allow individuals and families to set up their own databases with minimal fuss.

China launches nationwide survey on data resources, from AI firms to police

“It used to take a lot of space and investment to operate a database. But in the future, families could keep a disk to store a large amount of photos, videos and documents instead of saving them on many separate external hard disk drives,” she said.

While the production workflow of the new disks is compatible with existing DVD technology, Wen said the team will continue to improve the speed and reduce the energy needed to write and read data from the disk.

They will also work to make the device for accessing data on the disk more affordable, in hopes of making it commercially available in the near future, she said.

Beijing to make it easier for solo travellers from mainland China to visit Hong Kong: source

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3252755/beijing-make-it-easier-solo-travellers-mainland-china-visit-hong-kong-source?utm_source=rss_feed

Beijing could allow more mainland Chinese tourists to visit Hong Kong by expansion of its solo traveller scheme as it “responds proactively” to the city government’s request for more cross-border tourists, the Post has learned.

The news on Wednesday from a government source came after the city’s No 2 official Eric Chan Kwok-ki said at the weekend the city was in talks with mainland authorities on widening the scheme to allow more residents of second- and third-tier cities to visit Hong Kong, with the possibility of a multiple-entry arrangement.

The scheme allows people from some mainland cities to visit Hong Kong for leisure on an individual basis.

Mainland tourists have the reputation of being big spenders because of their fondness for the city’s wide range of luxury goods and duty-free shopping.

But they are now said to be now said to be looking for budget experiences instead of splashing out on high-end goods after the end of coronavirus restrictions and the reopening of the border.

That has meant city sectors dependent on tourism have still to see the expected economic benefits of their return, despite a resurgence in the number of mainland visitors over the Lunar New Year holiday.

Hong Kong recorded a total of around 1.43 million tourist arrivals between February 10 and 17, with 1.25 million – 87 per cent – from the mainland, city leader John Lee Ka-chiu said on Tuesday.

Hong Kong to get more than 1 million mainland China tourists over Lunar New Year

Lee added that about 157,000 mainland visitors came to the city every day over the Lunar New Year break, higher than the figure for the same period in pre-pandemic 2018.

Peter Shiu Ka-fai, the Liberal Party chairman and who represents the retail sector, said that if more mainland cities were included in the solo traveller scheme, it would help the city’s economy as spending by city residents was limited.

“If our capacity is capable, the more tourists we get, the help to our economy would be very large,” he said.

“This does not only apply to retail, food and beverage – even other industries would see this effect.”

Extended hours at mainland China border ease Hong Kong’s Lunar New Year travel woes

The solo traveller scheme was introduced in 2003 as Beijing’s support for Hong Kong as it struggled with an economic downturn amid the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

The scheme was a shot in the arm for the economy, but it fuelled cross-border tension and social problems in the city.

China benefits from global stability even as it tries to undercut it, US official says

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3252761/china-benefits-global-stability-even-it-tries-undercut-it-us-official-says?utm_source=rss_feed

China enjoys the best of both worlds, benefiting from the global stability that the United States has fostered even as it undermines that stability in areas where it suits its interests, a senior US State Department official said on Wednesday.

The comments by Daniel Kritenbrink, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, made at the start of a two-day Atlantic Council conference on China and the Global South come as the People’s Republic of China and the US vie for influence among developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

“The PRC has itself benefited from the stability and the opportunity that the international order provides. But unfortunately, the PRC often takes actions that undermine those principles, rather than reinforcement,” Kritenbrink said, citing Beijing’s expansion into the South China Sea, economic coercion of smaller states and programmes opposing “universal” human rights.

“The PRC has become more repressive at home and more aggressive abroad,” he told the conference. “The PRC is advancing an alternative vision for global governance.”

Panellists pushed back, however, including those from developing countries, arguing that the battle for influence is too often framed as a binary choice between Beijing and Washington – when the reality is more nuanced.

“The developing world conceals a multiplicity of interests,” said Bilahari Kausikan, chairman of the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. “We have concerns about both certain aspects of Chinese behaviour and certain aspects of American behaviour.”

Kritenbrink said that US policy toward the Global South is not defined in opposition to China, nor does it force countries to choose. Rather, he contended, it promotes the vision of “a world where rules, norms and institutions prevail over outdated and dangerous concepts of might making right”.

He added, however, that it would be naive to believe that China doesn’t enter into US calculations. “Of course, we can’t deny that strategic competition is also a critical part of this moment,” Kritenbrink, a former US ambassador to Vietnam, said.

“Our relationship with the PRC is one of intense strategic competition. At the same time, the United States is committed to managing this competition responsibly, so that it does not veer into miscalculation, or conflict.”

Kritenbrink criticised the major elements of China’s outreach – the Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, Global Civilization Initiative and the Belt and Road Initiative – as programmes that undercut collective defence and environmental standards and seek to reframe human rights as a privilege of the West.

Panellists at the conference said the “Global South” phrase is baggage-laden – a replacement for the now-discredited “Third World”. Countries concentrated in the southern hemisphere often have little in common other than some vague sense that the Global North is too dominant even as Beijing and Washington jockey for their loyalty – and UN votes.

“It doesn’t mean that these countries, however resentful they may be about different aspects of Western policy, are going to drink deeply of Chinese Kool-Aid,” Kausikan said.

But, he added, China “understands the mood that constitutes the Global South better than the West and avoids what I will call sanctimonious diplomacy, insisting that its interpretation of values is the only possible interpretation”.

China’s United Nations human rights review puts global divide on display

China’s recent economic slowdown – fuelled by a property crisis, rising youth unemployment, battered confidence and swooning financial markets – is likely to shift Beijing’s Global South emphasis, panellists said.

Since 2015, China’s spending on Belt and Road Initiative projects has been tapering off. Its slowing economy will also see it place more focus on less expensive programmes, experts said, including more training of foreign militaries, joint defence meetings, telecommunication infrastructure projects and use of the People’s Liberation Army in quasi-political foreign outreach roles.

“Because Chinese feel more cornered in a way, with reduced options, it’s going to use more diversity of tools for influence that are cheaper than just investing in big infrastructure projects,” Nadege Rolland, a China fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, said, adding that this would not change Beijing’s focus on countering the US.

“It’s not like these countries are pawns in the hands of Beijing, but Beijing certainly sees them as such and so it’s a very binary vision of the rejection of the existing order.”

China’s adaptive tactics are particularly evident in Africa, said Paul Nantulya, an African studies research associate with the US National Defence University.

“The Chinese side educates more African officers than any other industrialised country. And this becomes extremely important,” he said. “I don’t think that the Chinese government puts all its eggs in one basket.”

As the stakes and rhetoric mount between the world’s two largest economies, Kritenbrink said that Washington remains focused on convincing – not arm-twisting – developing countries with revitalised alliances, financing projects and ties involving the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Summit for Democracy, US-Pacific Island Country Summit and Africa outreach programmes.

“We don’t want countries to have to choose between us and the PRC,” he said. “But we want to help ensure that they have a choice and that they can make their decisions free from coercion.”

China warns localities not to use fines for funds, pledges ‘strict’ regulation

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3252728/china-warns-localities-not-use-fines-funds-pledges-strict-regulation?utm_source=rss_feed

Beijing issued stern words on Monday to curb excessive fees and fines levied by cash-strapped local authorities, stating overzealous charges would weaken business confidence and undermine efforts to bring the economy back on track.

In a directive posted on its website, the State Council, China’s cabinet, said the matter would affect trust in government, vowed to make the collection of fees “scientific and standardised” and pledged it would prevent abuses of power that deteriorate the business environment.

“[We’ll] resolutely prevent unreasonable growth in fine revenue and rigorously address issues of falsified or improperly managed proceeds,” it said.

“Meanwhile, we’ll prevent practices such as using fines to boost revenue, managing fines as a substitute for governance and profiteering through fines, and strictly regulate implementation.”

The cabinet said that enforcement standards should be strictly obeyed, while penalties must be based on legal provisions and the facts of the violation.

“It must align with the legislative purposes of administrative penalty laws and relevant legal norms,” it said.

China’s LGFVs must repay a record US$651 billion of bonds in 2024

The edict came as local authorities struggle with falling tax revenue and shrinking income from land sales. Local government debt amounted to 40.7 trillion yuan (US$5.7 trillion) by the end of last year – the result of a construction frenzy funded by financing vehicles, state-owned enterprises and banks starting in 2008.

Fines and administrative fees imposed by governments at different levels totalled 850 billion yuan in 2022, making up 4.2 per cent of China’s total fiscal revenue according to the central government’s fiscal budget report.

Luo Zhiheng, an economist with Yuekai Securities, said local authorities have been motivated to accrue more revenue through fines, with collections growing 25.9 per cent between 2020 and 2022.

The southwestern region of Guangxi, for instance, saw its revenues from fines account for 7.7 per cent of its 2022 budget revenue.

Although their proportions may appear small compared to tax revenue, Luo wrote in a note on Monday, “[China] must prevent fast-rising fines from affecting the business environment and undermining tax cut policies.”

Unreasonable fines were frequently reported during the years of the Covid pandemic, when financially strained local governments sought to bring in much-needed revenue.

‘Our debt burden is light’: China can assist local governments, PBOC chief says

In 2021, some 67.18 million yuan in indiscriminate charges were levied on 2,547 businesses in Bazhou, Hebei province over the course of two months. A year later, a grocer in Yulin of Shaanxi province was fined 66,000 yuan (US$9,172) by local authorities for selling 2.5kg of substandard celery for 20 yuan.

Incentives to impose fines have not abated since, as the property sector has suffered a prolonged slump. Consequently, land sale revenue, which usually accounts for more than a third of local government funds, fell by 13.2 per cent last year.

Beijing has asked both central and local government agencies to tighten their belts by prioritising the use of funds on supporting people’s livelihoods, pensions and construction projects.

Transfer payments from Beijing have already increased to make up for the shortfall, as the central government’s debt burden is much lower.

Authorities are expected to increase the fiscal deficit ratio and raise local bond quota at the full session of the National People’s Congress next month, when lawmakers convene to review and approve the government work report.