• Preparing for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight
• China-led team seeking elusive quantum of gravity finds first evidence of particles behaving like gravitons
• Indonesia’s president-elect Prabowo Subianto to visit China
• China’s central bank keeps ‘cautious’ in bond trade despite Xi Jinping’s mandate
• Chinese military’s security chief Wang Renhua elevated to top rank of general
• China’s excess clean energy production is ‘likely only temporary’, former central bank chief says
• China online dating celebrity who would ‘rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle’ reveals domestic violence hell
• Meetings with India could affect Bhutan’s border talks with China, analysts warn
• Cheap Chinese goods have become a double-edged sword for South Korea’s economy
• China reports more trips by foreign travellers in first 2 months of 2024 as visa-free policies take effect
• China’s approach to US relations now dominated by focus on ‘East v West’ civilisational differences, says leading Chinese scholar
• Former Australia PM Scott Morrison says China can be a democracy; Chinese people ‘care just as much about freedom as we do’
• Niger cosies up to ‘new friends’ China and Russia just days after sending US military packing
• Chinese education giant XJ International hit with winding up petition after defaulting on US$324 million bond
• China is all in on green tech. The U.S. and Europe fear unfair competition.
• Can you believe this young Chinese influencer ‘Little Fairy’ with 7.7 million fans pays US$13 million in taxes?
• South China Sea: Philippines fires back at ‘patronising’ Beijing as tensions escalate
• China Vanke boss acknowledges ‘pressure’ as 2023 profits slump amid liquidity distress rumours
• Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and China’s Xi Jinping allegedly had unwritten pact on South China Sea status quo
• Poll shows fewer than 3 in 10 Americans support TikTok bill that would force Chinese owner to sell the app
• China decries U.S. ‘bullying.’ But, to many, China is the bully.
• Elderly China father secretly uses surrogate to have baby girl after only daughter, 29, told him she would not have children
• China’s 5G market set to expand, fuel economic growth as tech solidifies status as pillar industry
• South China Sea: Beijing urges Southeast Asian nations to ‘cherish peace’ and help stop South tensions spiralling out of control

Preparing for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/03/29/us-china-taiwan-marines/2024-02-12T13:31:17.588Z

POHAKULOA TRAINING RANGE, Hawaii — The Marine gunner knelt on the rocky red soil of a 6,000-foot-high volcanic plain. He positioned the rocket launcher on his shoulder, focused the sights on his target, a rusted armored vehicle 400 yards away, and fired.

Two seconds later a BANG.

“Perfect hit,” said his platoon commander.

The gunner, 23-year-old Lance Cpl. Caden Ehrhardt, is a member of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, a new formation that reflects the military’s latest concept for fighting adversaries like China from remote, strategic islands in the western Pacific. These units are designed to be smaller, lighter, more mobile — and, their leaders argue, more lethal. Coming out of 20 years of land combat in the Middle East, the Marines are striving to adapt to a maritime fight that could play out across thousands of miles of islands and coastline in Asia.

Instead of launching traditional amphibious assaults, these nimbler groups are intended as an enabler for a larger joint force. Their role is to gather intelligence and target data and share it quickly — as well as occasionally sink ships with medium-range missiles — to help the Pacific Fleet and Air Force repel aggression against the United States and allies and partners like Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.

These new regiments are envisioned as one piece of a broader strategy to synchronize the operations of U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, and in turn with the militaries of allies and partners in the Pacific. Their focus is a crucial stretch of territory sweeping from Japan to Indonesia and known as the First Island Chain. China sees this region, which encompasses an area about half the size of the contiguous United States, as within its sphere of influence.

The overall strategy holds promise, analysts say. But it faces significant hurdles, especially if war were to break out: logistical challenges in a vast maritime region, timely delivery of equipment and new technologies complicated by budget battles in Congress, an overstressed defense industry, and uncertainty over whether regional partners like Japan would allow U.S. forces to fight from their islands. That last piece is key. Beijing sees the U.S. strategy of deepening security alliances in the Pacific as escalatory — which unnerves some officials in partner nations, who fear that they could get drawn into a conflict between the two powers.

The stakes have never been higher.

Beijing’s aggressive military modernization and investment over the past two decades have challenged U.S. ability to control the seas and skies in any conflict in the western Pacific. China has vastly expanded its reach in the Pacific, building artificial islands for military outposts in the South China Sea and seeking to expand bases in the Indian and Pacific Oceans — including a naval facility in Cambodia that U.S. intelligence says is for exclusive use by the People’s Liberation Army.

China not only has the region’s largest army, navy and air force, but also home-field advantage. It has about 1 million troops, more than 3,000 aircraft, and upward of 300 vessels in proximity to any potential battle. Meanwhile, U.S. ships and planes must travel thousands of miles, or rely on the goodwill of allies to station troops and weapons. The PLA also has orders of magnitude more ground-based, long-range missiles than the U.S. military.

Taiwan, a close U.S. partner, is most directly in the crosshairs. President Xi Jinping has promised to reunite, by force if necessary, the self-governing island with mainland China. A successful invasion would not only result in widespread death and destruction in Taiwan, but also have catastrophic economic consequences due to disruption of the world’s most advanced semiconductor industry and of maritime traffic in some of the world’s busiest sea lanes — the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. That would create enormous uncertainty for businesses and consumers around the world.

“We’ve spent most of the last 20 years looking at a terrorist adversary that wasn’t exquisitely armed, that didn’t have access to the full breadth of national power,” said Col. John Lehane, the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment’s commander. “And now we’ve got to reorient our formations onto someone that might have that capability.”

The vision and the challenge

The U.S. Marine Corps has a blueprint to fight back: a vision called Force Design that stresses the forward deployment of Marines — placing units on the front line — while making them as invisible as possible to radar and other electronic detection. The idea is to use these “stand-in” forces, up to thousands in theater at any one time, to enable the larger joint force to deploy its collective might against a major foe.

The aspiration is for the new formation to be first on the ground in a conflict, where it can gather information to send coordinates to an Air Force B-1 bomber so it can fire a missile at a Chinese frigate hundreds of miles away or send target data to a Philippine counterpart that can aim a cruise missile at a destroyer in the contested South China Sea.

The reality of the mission is daunting, experts say.

Even if you get Marines into these remote locations, “resupplying them over time is something that needs to be rehearsed and practiced repeatedly in simulated combat conditions,” said Colin Smith, a RAND researcher formerly with I Marine Expeditionary Force, whose area of responsibility includes the Pacific. “Just because you can move it in peacetime doesn’t mean you’ll be able to in warfare — especially over long periods of time.”

Though the Marines are no longer weighed down by tanks, the new unit’s Littoral Combat Team, an infantry battalion, will be operating advanced weapons that can fire missiles at enemy ships up to 100 nautical miles away to help deny an enemy access to key maritime chokepoints, such as the Taiwan and Luzon straits. By October, each Marine Littoral Regiment will have 18 Rogue NMESIS unmanned truck-based launchers capable of firing two naval strike missiles at a time.

But a single naval strike missile weighs 2,200 pounds, and resupplying these weapons in austere islands without runways requires watercraft, which move slowly, or helicopters, which can carry only a limited quantity at a time.

“You’re not very lethal with just two missiles, so you’ve got to have a whole bunch at the ready and that’s a lot more stuff to hide, which means your ability to move unpredictably goes down,’’ said Ivan Kanapathy, a Marine veteran with three deployments in the western Pacific. “There’s a trade-off between lethality and mobility — mobility being a huge part of survivability in this environment.”

Though NMESIS vehicles radiate heat, and radar emits signals that can be detected, the Marines try to lower their profile by spacing out the vehicles, camouflaging them and moving them frequently, as well as communicating only intermittently. Similar tactics are being tested by Ukrainian troops on the battlefield, where despite the number of Russian sensors and drones, “if you disperse and conceal yourself, it’s possible to survive,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.

But on smaller islands, there are fewer areas to hide, fewer road networks to move around on, “so it’s easier for China to search and eventually find what they’re looking for,” she said.

Lehane, the unit’s commander, says that the unit’s most valuable role isn’t conducting lethal strikes; it is the ability to “see things in the battlespace, get targeting data, make sense out of what is going on when maybe other people can’t.” That’s because the Pentagon expects, in a potential war with China, that U.S. satellites will be jammed or destroyed and ships’ computer networks disrupted.

China now has many more sensors — radar, sonar, satellites, electronic signals collection — in the South China Sea than the United States. That gives Beijing a formidable targeting advantage, said Gregory Poling, an expert on Southeast Asia security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The United States would have to expend an unacceptable amount of ordnance to degrade those capabilities to blind China,” he said.

The unit has been practicing techniques to communicate quietly. In a bare room of a cinder block building at its home base in Kaneohe, Hawaii, Marines in the regiment’s command operations center tapped on laptops on portable tables, plastic sheets taped over the windows. In the field, the gear could be set up in a tent, packed up and moved at a moment’s notice. Intelligence analysts, some of whom speak Mandarin, were feeding information to commanders on the range at Pohakuloa, practicing connections between the command on Oahu and the infantry battalion on the Big Island.

But exercises are not real life. Indo-Pacific Command is striving to build a Joint Fires Network that will reliably connect sensors, shooters and decision-makers in the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. But chronic budget shortfalls, and long-standing friction between the combatant commands and the services — each of which decides independently of the commands what hardware and software to buy — have slowed development.

Even when it is fully fielded, Pettyjohn said, “the question is, is this network going to be survivable in a contested electromagnetic space? You’re going to have a lot of jamming going on.”

Shoulder-to-shoulder in the Philippines

Last April, the Marines and the rest of the Joint Force tested the new warfighting concept with their Philippine partner in a sprawling, weeks-long exercise — Balikatan — which in Tagalog means “shoulder-to-shoulder.”

With a command post on the northwestern Philippine island of Luzon, the regiment’s infantry battalion and Philippine Marine Corps’ Coastal Defense Regiment rehearsed air assaults and airfield seizures to gain island footholds, which would then be used as bases from which to gather intelligence and call in strikes.

During one live-fire exercise, the 3rd MLR helped the larger U.S. 3rd Marine Division glean location data on a target vessel — a decommissioned World War II-era Philippine ship — which U.S. and Philippine joint forces promptly sunk. Soon, the Philippine Coastal Defense Regiment expects to be able to fire its own missiles, said Col. Gieram Aragones, the regiment’s commander, in an interview from his headquarters in Manila.

“Our U.S. Marine brothers have been very helpful to us,” Aragones said. “They’ve guided us during our crawl phase. We’re trying to walk now.”

The training goes both ways. The Philippine Marines taught their American counterparts survival skills, like finding and purifying water from bamboo, and cooking pigs and goats in the jungle.

China in recent years has intensified its harassment of Philippine fishing and Coast Guard vessels. As recently as Saturday, Chinese Coast Guard ships fired water cannons at a Philippine boat conducting a lawful resupply mission to a Philippine military outpost at a contested shoal in the South China Sea. Amid such provocations, Manila has stepped up its defense partnership with the United States. A year ago, Manila announced it was granting its longtime ally access to four new military bases.

Although the two countries are treaty allies, bound to come to each other’s defense in an armed attack in the Pacific, how far Manila will go to support U.S. operations in a Taiwan conflict is an open question, said CSIS’s Poling. “Part of the reason for all the military training, the tabletop exercises, and all these new dialogues taking place is feeling out the answer,” he said.

Aragones said it’s important for the United States and the Philippines to jointly strengthen deterrence. “This is not only an issue for the Philippines,” he said. “It’s an issue for all countries whose vessels pass through this body of water [the Chinese are] trying to claim.”

Evolution in Okinawa

Some 800 miles to the north, the Marines’ newest unit, the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment, was created in November. It was formed by repurposing the 12th Marine Regiment based in Okinawa, already home to a large concentration of U.S. military personnel in Japan — a source of tension with local communities dating back decades.

This unit is intended to operate out of the islands southwest of Okinawa, the closest of which are less than 100 miles from Taiwan. Over the years, Tokyo has shifted its military focus away from northern Japan, where the Cold War threat was a Soviet land invasion, to its southwest islands.

Recent events have vindicated that shift in Tokyo’s eyes. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s bellicose response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022 — in which the PLA fired five ballistic missiles into waters near Okinawa — rattled Japan. The number of days that Chinese Coast Guard vessels sailed near the Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Japan but claimed by China, reached a record high last year.

As a result, in the last year and a half, Tokyo has announced a dramatic hike in defense spending and deepened its security partnership with the United States, Philippines and Australia. Washington hailed Japan’s endorsement of the new U.S. Marine unit’s positioning in the Southwest Islands last year as a significant advance in allied force posture.

But resentment toward U.S. troops lingers in Okinawa, rooted primarily in the disproportionate burden of hosting a major U.S. military presence. The prefecture is home to half of U.S. military personnel in Japan, while making up less than 1 percent of Japan’s land mass.

“We are concerned about rising tensions with China and the concentration of U.S. military” on Okinawa and the Japanese military buildup in the area, said Kazuyuki Nakazato, director of the Okinawa Prefecture Office in Washington. “Many Okinawan people fear that if a conflict happens, Okinawa will easily become a target.”

He argued the best way to defuse the tension is for Tokyo to deepen diplomacy and dialogue with China, not military deterrence alone.

Other local officials are more receptive to a U.S. presence, arguing that Japan alone cannot deter China. “We have no choice but to strengthen our alliance with the U.S. military,” said Itokazu Kenichi, mayor of Yonaguni town on the island of the same name, the westernmost inhabited Japanese island — just 68 miles from Taiwan.

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces has begun to establish a presence on the islands, including a surveillance station on Yonaguni, where they conducted joint exercises with other U.S. Marines last month — an interaction that has begun to accustom residents to the Marines, Kenichi said.

Ultimately, how much latitude to allow the Marines will be a political decision by the prime minister and the Diet, Japan’s parliament.

On the range at Pohakuloa, Hawaii, the littoral combat team trained for a month. They flew Skydio surveillance drones over a distant hill. They practiced machine gun and sniper skills.

As the wind howled on a lava rock bluff one morning, Lt. Col. Mark Lenzi surveyed his gunners firing wire-guided missiles at targets 1,200 yards away. Lenzi, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said what’s different in the Pacific is that Marines won’t be fighting insurgents directly, but will be assigned to enable others to beat back the enemy.

“It takes the whole joint force” to deter in the Pacific, he said. “We train joint. We fight joint.”

These new forces will be at the heart of the “kill web,” he said, referring to the mix of air, sea, land, space and cyber capabilities whose efficient syncing is crucial if it comes to a battle over Taiwan.

“This one unit alone is not going to save the world,” said Col. Carrie Batson, chief of strategic communications for the Pacific Marines. “But it’s going to be vital in this fight, if it ever comes.”

Regine Cabato in Manila and Julia Mio Inuma in Tokyo contributed to this report.

China-led team seeking elusive quantum of gravity finds first evidence of particles behaving like gravitons

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3257232/china-led-team-seeking-elusive-quantum-gravity-finds-first-evidence-particles-behaving-gravitons?utm_source=rss_feed

A China-led team has detected the first experimental evidence for particles that behave like a graviton, a long-sought-after particle that gives rise to gravity, a fundamental force in our universe.

By putting a thin layer of semiconductor under extreme conditions and exciting its electrons to move in concert, researchers from eastern China’s Nanjing University, the United States and Germany found the electrons to spin in a way that is only expected to exist in gravitons.

Although the experiment did not confirm the existence of gravitons directly, it was the closest scientists had been and would open a new pathway to the search for gravitons in laboratories, the team reported in the journal Nature this week.

“Our work has shown the first experimental substantiation of gravitons in condensed matter since the elusive particle was conceptualised in the 1930s,” the study’s lead author Du Lingjie from Nanjing University told state news agency Xinhua on Thursday.

“The graviton is a bridge connecting quantum mechanics and general relativity theory. If confirmed, it will have huge implications for modern physics research,” he said.

The study was highly collaborative, according to the paper. Researchers at Princeton University prepared high-quality semiconductor samples, while the experiment was carried out at a unique facility that took Du and his team three years to build.

In Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, he described gravity as space-time distortions caused by mass and energy. Such a theory, which explains gravity beautifully at a large scale, poses challenges in quantum mechanics which governs the universe at the smallest scale.

As a result, the graviton was proposed as a particle dedicated to carrying gravity. If it existed, a graviton should be massless and travel at the speed of light – except that, so far, gravitons have never been observed in space.

When Du was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in 2019, his team discovered a special excitation phenomenon in quantum materials that led theoretical physicists to think it could point to the detection of gravitons.

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However, the requirements for conducting such experiments were high. The system needed to be placed in a powerful refrigerator where temperatures are near absolute zero, and exposed to a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s average magnetic field.

Some requirements could even appear contradictory. “For instance, we have to install windows on the refrigerator to make optical measurements, but the windows can cause the system’s temperature to [easily rise],” paper co-author Liang Jiehui, of Nanjing University, told Xinhua.

Du spoke to Xinhua about working in the team’s home-developed facility. “Working at minus 273.1 degrees Celsius, a special ‘microscope’ like this can capture particle excitations as weak as 10 gigahertz and determine their spin,” he said.

The researchers used a flat sheet of gallium arsenide semiconductor, which when subjected to low temperature and a magnetic field showed a phenomenon called the quantum Hall effect.

Electrons in the semiconductor started to interact with each other and moved in a highly organised fashion, like a liquid.

The team then shone a finely-tuned laser onto the material to study the potential excitation of the electrons. They found the electrons were doing a so-called type-2 quantum spin, which would only exist in gravitons.

They then measured the momentum and energy of the electrons, and confirmed evidence for them to behave in a graviton-like way.

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“It took us three years to build the experimental device. It was very challenging and we made it,” Du said.

“We look forward to using it to continue the hunt for gravitons. Hopefully, it will lead to more cutting-edge discoveries at the quantum frontier,” Du said.

Indonesia’s president-elect Prabowo Subianto to visit China

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257273/indonesias-president-elect-prabowo-subianto-visit-china?utm_source=rss_feed

China has invited Indonesia’s president-elect Prabowo Subianto for a three-day visit starting on Sunday.

Prabowo, whose victory is facing a legal challenge from the losing candidates, will be there at the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said on Friday.

The 72-year-old leader of the right-wing nationalist Gerindra Party was officially confirmed by the election commission last week as the winner of the Indonesian presidential election with just over 58 per cent of votes. He will assume office in October.

However, his two rivals, Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, have asked the constitutional court to re-run the poll by the end of April and disqualify him from the ballot.

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Prabowo currently serves as Indonesia’s defence minister, and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka is the son of President Joko Widodo.

The losing candidates accused the outgoing president, commonly known as Jokowi, of interfering in the election by tacitally supporting Prabowo and using the state apparatus to help his campaign, accusations he denies.

Prabowo lost two previous elections to Widodo in 2014 and 2019. The latter result triggered a deadly riot in central Jakarta that killed six and injured more than 200.

The former special forces general is a former son-in-law of the former president Suharto and has been accused of human rights violations in East Timor and playing a role in anti-Chinese riots that killed more than 1,000 people in 1998.

He was once banned from entering the United States over the accusations, which he has always denied.

Although Indonesia is not one of the countries that has challenged China’s territorial claims to most of the South China Sea, the two countries have their own dispute over waters off the Natuna Islands.

This area falls within Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone, which overlaps with waters that are included in the “nine-dash” line that forms the basis of China’s sweeping claims.

However, Beijing has built a strong relationship with Jakarta under Widodo. China is the largest trading partner and second largest foreign investor in Indonesia. The country is also China’s second largest investment destination in Southeast Asia after Singapore.

Some Indonesian Chinese wary of Prabowo amid memories of 1998 riots

Xi and Widodo have met frequently over the past 10 years and a Chinese firm built the high-speed rail line linking Jakarta with Bandung in West Java, which opened last year.

China has hailed the project, Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway, as a success for Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative, a project to boost infrastructure and connectivity in the region.

China’s central bank keeps ‘cautious’ in bond trade despite Xi Jinping’s mandate

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3257251/chinas-central-bank-keeps-cautious-bond-trade-despite-xi-jinpings-mandate?utm_source=rss_feed

Despite instructions from President Xi Jinping to resume the trading of central government bonds, China’s central bank is expected to take a cautious approach to mitigate unexpected consequences for inflation and the exchange rate, analysts said.

At the twice-a-decade financial work conference, held last October, Xi requested the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) gradually increase the buying and selling of central government bonds in the secondary market – a tactic that has gone unused for more than two decades – as a way to enrich the monetary policy toolbox.

The instruction, only made public earlier this week with the release of a new book, fuelled feverish speculation over an aggressive easing of monetary policy. The flurry of conjecture comes at a time when many observers are questioning whether China can achieve its 5 per cent target for economic growth this year while boosting the confidence of a sluggish private sector, resolving a crisis in the property market and handling the hefty debt loads of local governments.

Analysts said the president’s demand does not necessarily imply China will enter a round of quantitative easing (QE) in a similar fashion to Western central banks.

“It doesn’t mean that China is going to launch QE or roll out a major stimulus. The macro policy tone in 2024 is supportive but modest in scale,” said Wang Tao, head of Asia economics and chief China economist at UBS Investment Bank, in a note published on Thursday.

At the same conference, Xi also stressed the need to prevent financial risk and the importance of deleveraging.

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“It requires the money supply to be more precise and rational. The central bank’s resumption of trading treasury bonds will be more cautious, taking into account expectations of inflation and impact on foreign exchange rates,” Huatai Securities said in a research note on Thursday.

China has been dealing with capital outflows since the US Federal Reserve began its progressive increase of interest rates. This trend has also put downward pressure on the Chinese currency’s exchange rate with the US dollar, a tendency further compounded by concerns over weak growth momentum in the domestic economy.

“The central bank’s purchase of government bonds is not equivalent to QE,” Huatai Securities said. “Especially given that China’s central bank still retains ample room for normal monetary policy operations, quantitative easing is far from applicable.”

Beijing has refrained from flooding the market with liquidity to avoid the side effects it saw during a previous round of high-octane stimulus in 2009 and 2010, such as industrial overcapacity. It is now looking to innovative and hi-tech sectors to drive growth and keep the economy on a positive trajectory.

According to the PBOC’s balance sheet at the end of February, its holdings of central government bonds stood at 1.52 trillion yuan (US$210.2 billion), 3.4 per cent of the central bank’s total assets.

That share is far below the equivalent holdings of its major economy peers – 61 per cent in the US Federal Reserve, 78 per cent in the Bank of Japan and 58 per cent in the European Central Bank. Those three institutions have made frequent use of QE policy in economic and financial crises, boosting their balance sheets by buying long-term bonds or mortgage-backed securities to keep interest rates at low or negative levels and maintain credit demand.

But QE has also been deemed by some economists as a means of monetising government debt and undermining the independence of central banks. Others have gone so far to suggest ending QE can itself be a threat to financial stability.

Wang of UBS also said China’s policy intention is more about expanding the options and increasing the flexibility of the central bank in managing liquidity.

“The central bank needs more flexibility in managing liquidity and more tools to expand its balance sheet and the government bond market is deeper than before, which makes PBOC trading central government bonds and even local government bonds more necessary and feasible than before,” she said.

PBOC officials have repeatedly stated the bank’s toolbox is deep and effective enough to support the economy. Officials have already hinted at further cuts to banks’ reserve requirement ratio – the proportion of deposits banks have to keep in their coffers – to free up capital from within the banking system.

Dongwu Securities said in a note on Thursday that central banks in the US and Japan usually started large-scale treasury bond purchases “under obvious macroeconomic pressure” and “with no room for interest rate cuts”.

It cautioned purchases could lead to “path dependency” for the central banks, making it hard to change course once this approach is taken.

“Drawing on international experience, we believe the current situation has not reached a point that needs the central bank’s direct large-scale purchase of treasury bonds,” the firm said.

Chinese military’s security chief Wang Renhua elevated to top rank of general

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3257261/chinese-militarys-security-chief-wang-renhua-elevated-top-rank-general?utm_source=rss_feed

President Xi Jinping has promoted the PLA’s security chief to the rank of general, a departure from recent practice that comes amid a purge of military leaders.

Wang Renhua, head of the Central Military Commission’s Political and Legal Affairs Commission, was elevated to the highest rank for officers in active service on Thursday.

Wang, 62, is the third security chief of the People’s Liberation Army since a major overhaul of the military in 2015. He took up the job in late 2019 and was promoted to lieutenant general.

He becomes the first general to serve in this position since the overhaul – his predecessor Song Dan was a lieutenant general when he was security chief, as was Li Xiaofeng before him.

It comes as the ruling Communist Party is ramping up a campaign targeting corruption in the military. In December, nine PLA generals – including a number of senior members of the PLA Rocket Force responsible for China’s nuclear arsenal – were dismissed from the top legislature.

Meanwhile, Li Shangfu – who has not been seen in public since August – was sacked as defence minister and state councillor in October, without explanation. Li was also removed from the CMC last month.

Others include aerospace company chairman Feng Jiehong, who resigned from the legislature in February. Li Zhizhong, a lieutenant general who was deputy commander of the PLA’s Central Theatre Command, was also dismissed from the legislature.

Wang heads the commission that oversees the military’s courts, procuratorates and prisons. It is responsible for formulating laws and regulations related to the military, including those protecting the rights of personnel.

Lu Li-shih, a former instructor at the Taiwanese naval academy in Kaohsiung, said Wang’s promotion could give both him and the commission more power.

“[This] means the elevation of his commission and military courts and military prosecutors’ office – not just a promotion for [Wang],” he said.

Lu added that the promotion would also give the commission more authority in the trials of senior generals.

Xi – who is also chairman of the CMC – presented Wang with a certificate of order to elevate him to the top rank at a ceremony in Beijing on Thursday, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Xiao Tianliang, president of the PLA’s National Defence University, was also promoted to general, in line with past practice.

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Wang, who is originally from Sichuan province, has previously served as director of the political unit at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert, and as deputy head of the PLA Ground Force political work department. In 2017, he became chief of the graft-buster of the PLA Navy’s East Sea Fleet.

As PLA security chief, Wang is also a member of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, a party body that oversees all security-related matters.

Prior to the 2015 military overhaul, PLA security chiefs were generals who were also in charge of the CMC’s Commission for Discipline Inspection – the graft-buster responsible for investigating alleged wrongdoings by military officers.

Additional reporting by Amber Wang

China’s excess clean energy production is ‘likely only temporary’, former central bank chief says

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3257242/chinas-excess-clean-energy-production-likely-only-temporary-former-central-bank-chief-says?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s overcapacity in the clean energy sector will be temporary as long as global demand for green transitions holds up, according to two prominent Chinese former economic officials, who said that more market opportunities should be explored through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Last year China saw robust growth in installed capacity and exports of solar panels and wind turbines, as well as blockbuster shipments of electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries. But Beijing has been facing trade restrictions from both sides of the Atlantic over accusations that cheap Chinese exports are flooding international markets.

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China’s solar sector capacity utilisation hovered at just 70 per cent, according to former People’s Bank of China governor Zhou Xiaochuan, who spoke on Thursday at a panel discussion at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan.

Zhou said one of the factors contributing to excess capacity was slow progress in upgrading power grids and installing energy storage facilities.

“Overcapacity is likely only temporary since the world will need to further boost the development of clean energy in the future,” he said.

Zhou also rebutted Western claims that unfair trade practices and state-backed subsidies had been distorting markets for clean energy products.

While various levels of governments had stepped in with help in the early stages of industrial development, such as in research and development, he said government support has been withdrawn in recent years.

“Chinese solar firms now have hard-won expertise and global dominance through their own technological advancements and unbeatable cost controls,” Zhou said.

Chinese-made solar panels may see stronger demand in belt and road countries as Beijing ramps up exports of its tech-intensive and green products, as the United States and Europe close their doors, he added.

Zhou’s comments were echoed by Long Yongtu, a former Chinese deputy trade minister and chief negotiator who brokered the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Faced with overcapacity, domestic market saturation and intensifying competition, more Chinese firms should look abroad to tap potential markets, he said.

“In the first 20 years [since joining the WTO] the China growth story was about Chinese exports going global, and now Chinese companies need to go global … the heyday of double-digit export growth is long gone,” Long said during a separate panel discussion.

The European Union has started an anti-subsidy probe into Chinese EV exports, which could be a prelude to double-digit punitive tariffs. US officials, meanwhile, have ramped up warnings that China’s new energy products are a threat to national security and have indicated the possibility of high tariffs.

At a key economic conference in December, Beijing admitted that “overcapacity in some sectors” and a lack of demand had compounded difficulties on the road to economic recovery.

According to an industrial assessment seen by the Post, China used less than half of its overall passenger car production capacity of about 55 million vehicles in 2023.

In fact, China’s total automobile sector production capacity utilisation rate has hovered below 50 per cent since 2019, with just 20 of the country’s 77 carmakers reaching rates higher than 60 per cent, a level deemed to be a normal operation rate, according to the document.

China’s overcapacity is likely to top the agenda when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen travels to China, the Post reported earlier.

US tariffs on Chinese imports might increase in 2024, analysts say

Denis Depoux, global managing director at German consultancy Roland Berger, told the Post in Boao that moves by the EU to restrict Chinese imports would slow the bloc’s green transition and efforts to reduce emissions.

An additional seven terawatts of renewable energy capacity is needed in the next five years to stay in sync with Paris Agreement commitments to fight global warming, he said.

“So China’s excess capacity will be absorbed. If it’s not, the market will consolidate over time in a very dynamic environment with sustained demand. This is very different from commodities markets and situations that might have occurred in the past,” he said.

China online dating celebrity who would ‘rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle’ reveals domestic violence hell

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3256874/china-online-dating-celebrity-who-would-rather-cry-bmw-smile-bicycle-reveals-domestic-violence-hell?utm_source=rss_feed

An internet celebrity in China – who infamously said she would “rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle” on a TV dating show – has revealed that she has been a victim of domestic violence.

In 2010, at the age of 22, actress Ma Nuo became well-known nationwide for the controversial comment on the dating show, If You Are the One.

When a male contestant asked if she would like to ride bicycles with him, she responded with the BMW-bicycle remark which was interpreted online as a display of materialism.

In a recent interview with People Magazine, Ma explained that the broadcast did not include the man’s background as a wealthy second-generation student who was studying abroad and was “not a poor boy.”

She was tasked by the TV production crew to reject the man, and she used the quote she had read online just days before in her response as a joke.

This resulted in Ma being labelled a “gold-digger,” bringing her unexpected fame and job opportunities but also years of cyberbullying.

However, her public image took a significant turn recently when she became embroiled in a divorce case, accusing her husband of domestic abuse in court.

In January 2023, Ma was feeling societal pressure to marry by the age of 35, and hurriedly decided to tie the knot with Liu Wei, a man she had met during her live-stream where he generously spent 200,000 yuan (US$28,000) in just three months.

Their romance led to marriage after just five months together, prompting Ma to move from Beijing, where she had lived all her life, to Shanghai to be with Liu.

However, some hidden facts soon were revealed, such as Liu having a child from a previous marriage and debts totalling hundreds of thousands of yuan.

Ma believed they could work together to settle her husband’s debt, but was later shocked to find out the total debt amounted to 650,000 yuan, leading her to sell her property in Chongqing in southwestern China to clear it.

Their marriage further deteriorated due to domestic violence, leading Ma to take legal action.

During an online divorce court hearing on December 15, 2023, Ma disclosed that she had been virtually trapped in their rented home.

She was only able to escape because her husband’s violence drew the attention of neighbours who called the police.

She presented evidence such as medical and chat records showing her husband’s apologies, and a commitment letter written at a police station in which he confessed to assaulting her seven times.

Despite this, Liu denied the accusations. He only conceded that there were disputes and that he had smashed his phone.

He also argued that the medical records presented by Ma were not conclusive to prove that her injuries were inflicted by him. In addition, he expressed his reluctance to divorce.

In a recent communication between the couple in February, Liu, through his lawyer, demanded that Ma compensate him with 300,000 yuan (US$42,000) in exchange for agreeing to a divorce.

While the judgment of the court is still pending, the case has triggered an online discussion.

One online observer said: “She was truly born in the wrong era. Her remark wasn’t serious enough to deserve the intense cyberbullying she faced.”

“No matter what we think of this woman’s character, we can’t let domestic violence be overshadowed. Materialism is a moral issue, but domestic violence is a legal one,” said another.

While a third said: “Him saying she could not prove domestic violence made me furious! We need to focus more on why combating domestic violence is so challenging and why it’s so easy for abusers to escape the law.”

Meetings with India could affect Bhutan’s border talks with China, analysts warn

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257219/meetings-india-could-affect-bhutans-border-talks-china-analysts-warn?utm_source=rss_feed

Analysts are warning about potential “obvious and direct” impacts on China’s efforts to resolve its long-running border dispute with Bhutan after India moved to shore up its influence on the Himalayan kingdom.

Last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a break from his re-election campaign and visited neighbouring Bhutan, during which he reaffirmed a partnership that “is not limited to land and water”.

The trip was reciprocal – Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay travelled to New Delhi a week earlier – but it is not common for Indian leaders to visit a foreign country before a general election, which is due to start on April 19.

Tobgay, who returned to power after January’s election having previously served as prime minister from 2013 to 2018, promised to strengthen ties with India, Bhutan’s key trading partner.

But Lin Minwang, deputy director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said that the impact on Chinese-Bhutan border talks could be “obvious and direct”.

“We have seen some momentum since 2020 and the negotiations have achieved significant progress,” Lin said.

“The two sides are awaiting for an opportunity of breakthrough but now I think there could be some changes.”

It remains unclear how far the border negotiations have advanced. Neither Beijing nor Thimphu have disclosed details.

India-friendly Bhutan walks tightrope as it seeks to end border row with China

But in an interview with The Hindu last year, then-Bhutanese prime minister Lotay Tshering – considered a China-friendly figure – said that the two countries were “inching towards the completion” of a three-step road map on boundary delineation. A land swap involving the Bhutan-controlled Doklam area was among the proposals.

It was not the first time Beijing raised a land swap with Bhutan. In 1996, China proposed a “package deal” to trade Jakarlung and Pasamlung for a smaller tract of disputed area around Doklam, Sinchulumpa and Gieu, but Bhutan backed off. In 1998, the two sides instead signed an agreement to pause negotiations, pending further talks.

Lin said that the territorial disputes between China and Bhutan were “not that big in principle”.

“The core issue is if Bhutan has made up its mind to resolve the disputes – and if it is willing to defy India.”

India has been deeply wary of any land swap, which would give China a strategic advantage in the Doklam plateau. The plateau is close to the Siliguri Corridor a strip of land that is around 20km (14 miles) wide at its narrowest point that connects India’s northeastern states to the rest of the country.

Many in New Delhi worry that such a swap could expand India’s vulnerabilities to China, with the two Asian powers already at loggerheads over their disputed Himalayan borders.

In their recent visits, neither Modi nor Tobgay have publicly discussed the border negotiations, but have signed a number of deals to cooperate on energy and infrastructure.

During his two-day visit in Bhutan, Modi was given what Indian media described as a “unique” welcome, including a private dinner hosted by King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck at the Lingkana Palace. He was also the first foreigner to be honoured with the Order of the Druk Gyalpo, or Dragon King, Bhutan’s most prestigious civilian award.

Still, border issues were “clearly in the mind of Indian officials”, said Amit Ranjan, of the National University of Singapore’s South Asian Studies Institute.

Ranjan said that it remained to be seen if the current Bhutan government would change its border-dispute stance, but that recent progress in the talks, and the growing speculations of a developing diplomatic relationship between Beijing and Thimphu, indicated that China’s influence with Bhutan was coming closer to India’s.

“That’s a security concern for India, especially in Doklam,” he said, “and New Delhi may not accept” a land swap deal.

China and India hold further round of border talks

Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of Chinese studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said that Beijing’s recent construction of villages inside the disputed border zone would also draw suspicion from Bhutan and India.

Beijing has said these villages were part of a poverty alleviation plan, but Kondapalli was sceptical.

“Bhutan border and security is linked to Indian security,” he said, “so they need to coordinate.”

There are as yet no signs that Bhutan will dismiss India’s concerns. After Tshering’s comments on a possible land swap with Beijing, there were discussions in India about whether Thimphu was struggling to reach a deal without Delhi’s backing; the former prime minister had to clarify that there was no change in position by Bhutan.

To India’s dismay, while its relation with Beijing has soured since its own 2020 border stand-offs, China has steadily pushed for closer ties with other South Asian nations, including Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, hosting their leaders in Beijing and financing a number of infrastructure projects in the region.

Cheap Chinese goods have become a double-edged sword for South Korea’s economy

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3257236/cheap-chinese-goods-have-become-double-edged-sword-south-koreas-economy?utm_source=rss_feed

Cheap Chinese goods are flooding into South Korea amid the growing presence of Chinese e-commerce platforms, creating both favourable and unfavourable circumstances for the South Korean economy as it tries to lessen reliance on China, according to scholars and consumer groups.

China has been dumping goods on global markets to make its way out of weakened domestic consumer demand in the middle of an economic slump.

Under the circumstances, South Korea has emerged as the centre of transshipment of goods from China to third countries, mostly those in North America and Europe.

Long-delayed China-Japan-South Korea summit needed ‘as soon as possible’

On Friday, the Incheon International Airport Corp., said more than 98,500 tons of foreign-made goods were transported by air from the airport in 2023, up 43.1 per cent from 2022.

Of the goods, 99.6 per cent were originally shipped from China. North America accounted for 47 per cent of the final destinations, and Europe made up another 31 per cent.

“Such logistical importance of [South] Korea is a plus factor, especially considering China’s economic slowdown is likely to go for next couple of years and that Chinese manufacturers are likely to export more cheap goods,” Lee Hun-so0, an air freight logistics expert and professor at Korea Aerospace University, said.

He referred to the International Monetary Fund’s February report, which forecast the growth rate of the Chinese economy to decline further to 3.5 per cent by 2028 from 5.2 per cent in 2023.

“Although not intended, China’s export of low-priced items is certainly boosting [South] Korea’s logistics industry,” the professor added.

Apart from transshipments, Chinese online shopping platforms, like AliExpress and Temu, have been making rapid inroads into South Korea with a wide range of items that are offered cheaper than Korea-made goods. This includes a wide range of items, some popular ones being apparel, kitchenware, toys, electronic devices, sports equipment and construction tools.

Seoul probes data practices of Chinese e-commerce platforms AliExpress, Temu

The number of AliExpress users in South Korea surged to 8.18 million in February from 3.5 million a year earlier.

Regarding Temu, it only advanced to South Korea in July 2023, about five years after AliExpress did so. Nevertheless, Temu managed to attract more than 5 million in the first year of doing business in South Korea.

Consequently, China surpassed the United States to become the top direct purchase choice for South Korean online shoppers.

Out of the total 6.75 trillion won (US$5 billion) spent by South Korean shoppers on overseas direct purchases, China accounted for 3.28 trillion won, or about 48 per cent, in 2023.

The Korea National Council of Consumer Organisation, a Seoul-based advocacy group for consumers, assessed China’s “export of deflation” has a positive aspect for budget-conscious South Korean households in the era of high inflation.

While many South Koreans favour these Chinese online shopping platforms in the middle of the high cost of living, some experts warned that the shopping trend may deal a blow to South Korean manufacturers, as many are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and lag behind Chinese rivals in terms of cost competitiveness.

“SMEs may shut down operations and go bankrupt in the worst case, as the door is now open wider for more cheap Chinese goods to come into [South] Korea,” Jeong Eun-ae, a South Korea Small Business Institute researcher, said.

Dankook University business administration professor Jung Yeon-sung viewed that China may “exploit its leverage in [South] Korea’s online shopping market to take economic retaliation,” as witnessed in China’s sharp response to a US THAAD missile shield being deployed in Korea in 2017.

China reports more trips by foreign travellers in first 2 months of 2024 as visa-free policies take effect

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257249/china-reports-more-trips-foreign-travellers-first-two-months-2024-visa-free-policies-take-effect?utm_source=rss_feed

In the first two months of 2024, foreign passport holders made 2.95 million trips to or from China, a notable increase due in part to the country’s new visa-free entry policies, according to an official from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Shi Zeyi, deputy director of the ministry’s bureau of international exchange and cooperation, said on Friday that the figure was 2.3 times more than in the November-December period and 41.5 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.

“During the Spring Festival period, the effect of China’s visa-free entry policy showed and there was an increase in tourists from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Malaysia and Singapore,” Shi said, referring to the Lunar New Year holiday in February.

From February to April, Germany’s TUI Cruises will bring more than 10,000 tourists to China.

On March 10, the international cruise ship Zuiderdam, operated by Holland America Line, brought 2,013 tourists from 47 countries to the port of Dalian in northeast China. It was the first time a large cruise ship has visited northern China since 2019, Shi said.

In recent months, China has granted a series of visa exemptions to foreign travellers to encourage inbound travel as the country faces a tourism slump amid an economic downturn.

In November, China expanded its visa-free transit policy to Norway, bringing the number of countries covered to 54.

Citizens from these countries do not need a visa to enter China as long as they have booked an onward ticket to a third country or region.

Those passing through the cities of Changsha, Guilin and Harbin may stay for up to 72 hours, while those transiting through 20 other cities – including Beijing and Shanghai – may stay for up to 144 hours.

During that time, travellers are allowed to engage in tourist and business activities.

Foreign visitor numbers yet to reach China’s pre-pandemic levels, data shows

In December, China started allowing travellers from France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia to enter the country without a visa for 15 days for business, tourism, family visits and transit.

A mutual visa exemption agreement between China and Singapore came into effect on February 9, which was Lunar New Year’s Eve. The agreement allows citizens of the two countries to travel, visit family and go on business trips for up to 30 days.

According to Shi, China will take more steps to make travel easier for foreign visitors, including making the payment process at tourist attractions, performance venues and hotels more convenient.

China will also provide more tourism services and ramp up international advertising to push for more inbound travel, he said.

According to state broadcaster CCTV, China has mutual visa exemption agreements with 22 countries. More than 60 countries and regions give Chinese citizens visa-free access or visas on arrival.

China’s approach to US relations now dominated by focus on ‘East v West’ civilisational differences, says leading Chinese scholar

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257239/chinas-approach-us-relations-now-dominated-focus-east-v-west-civilisational-differences-says-leading?utm_source=rss_feed

Chinese thinking on relations with the United States is now dominated by a focus on “East versus West” cultural and civilisation differences, a shift that is making academic collaboration between the two sides more difficult, a leading Chinese international relations expert has said.

Wang Jisi, founding president of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University, also warned in an article for a US think tank that: “Not many US officials and observers have paid enough notice of changes in China’s ideological propaganda and the implications for its foreign policy and international studies.”

His article was one of 27 contributions by Chinese and American academics to a report titled US-China Scholarly Recoupling by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, which covered a range of topics from artificial intelligence to international relations.

“China’s current political and ideological debates with the United States are essentially defined in China along nationalist, cultural and civilisational queues – ‘the East versus the West’ – not between socialism and capitalism, between proletariat and bourgeoisie, or between worldwide proletariat revolution and imperialism in the traditional Marxist-Leninist conceptual framework,” Wang wrote.

The most notable change in China’s ideological thinking, Wang said, is the emphasis on President Xi Jinping’s theories. Although Marxism is nominally Beijing’s official ideology, Xi Jinping Thought is now “serving as the actual overarching, defining ideology”.

Narrative war: China’s TikTok users are being told that Aristotle did not exist

He said the other notable shift is the “absence of Leninism”, which could be related to the Leninist emphasis on violent revolution and other radical ideas that the ruling Communist Party “no longer holds”.

A third ideological shift, according to Wang, is an emphasis on “China’s civilisational heritage and cultural traits”, which he linked to Xi’s “extraordinary” interest in major archaeological projects.

He quoted Xi’s comments that these projects can showcase China’s “glorious achievements and great contributions to world civilisation”, adding they can be used to “mobilise Chinese nationalism – essentially Han nationalism” – as a “powerful resource” for the Communist Party’s goals.

He also warned that as a result of these changes the “bar is higher today” for scholars in both China and the West to collaborate because of “increased sensitivities” in areas such as ancient and modern history, including the party’s own past, ethnic relations, religion, social welfare, demographic changes, culture and current political and economic transformation.

This also limits the scope for Chinese international relations specialists to evaluate Chinese’s foreign policy, especially regarding the US, he said.

US-China relations have deteriorated sharply in recent years as the two sides clash over geopolitics, trade, technology and human rights. Washington has said the relationship is one between “systemic rivals”, although China has rejected this framing.

Elsewhere in the report, published on Wednesday, contributors warned of the impact that both sides’ focus on national security was having.

The Year of the Loong? China’s dragons ‘are not’ the West’s ‘giant reptiles’

“The over-securitisation of every element of the relationship is restricting a more comprehensive recoupling of ties, a vexing situation which is stifling research, limiting overseas study, reducing mutual understanding, and harming the national interest of both countries.” Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the CSIS, said in the introduction to the report.

Kennedy added that Beijing and Washington must lay a stronger foundation for relations between the two countries, especially for academic cooperation, but academics need to “ensure that their principles are protected and their mission furthered”.

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Former Australia PM Scott Morrison says China can be a democracy; Chinese people ‘care just as much about freedom as we do’

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3257222/former-australia-pm-scott-morrison-says-china-can-be-democracy-its-people-care-just-much-about?utm_source=rss_feed

Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has dismissed the idea that China is unable to become a multiparty democracy, saying there is no “anti-democratic” instinct in the Chinese people.

Morrison, who led Australia from 2018 to 2022, said the Chinese people “care just as much about freedom as we do” but “sadly in mainland China they don’t have the opportunity for it.” The former Australian leader was a guest on the Diving Deep podcast hosted by Olympic athlete Sam Fricker.

“There’s a view that some put around that, oh, you know, democracy can’t work in Chinese culture,” Morrison said on the podcast. “Well, that’s crap. I’ve been to Taiwan.”

Australia should ‘end servility to US’, defuse Aukus deal: ex-Greek minister

During Morrison’s time as prime minister, relations between China and Australia reached their lowest point in decades. Following a call by Morrison for an independent investigation into the origins of Covid-19, Beijing placed trade restrictions on lucrative Australian imports such as wine, barley and coal. Just this week, Beijing scrapped punitive tariffs on Australian wine shipments.

Ties between the two countries have improved following Morrison’s defeat and the election of the centre-left Labor government in May 2022. Earlier this year, Morrison announced he was quitting Australia’s parliament, and later joined a consulting firm run by former US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

Morrison said Canberra’s relationship with China will always be transactional and never “values-based” like Australia’s ties with the US.

“Not with their government,” Morrison said in reference to Beijing. “It potentially could be values-based with their people.”

Australia ‘buying US hegemony’, ex-PM says as he slams Canberra’s China policy

Morrison said he never held a state visit to China in his time in office, but he did meet Chinese President Xi Jinping several times for informal talks. Asked what Xi was like, Morrison described him as an “able politician.”

“He knew what he wanted, he knew where he was going,” Morrison said. “But as time wore on, the sort of charismatic exterior gave way to a more autocratic, authoritarian outlook on the region.”

Morrison said the Chinese government was irritated that Australia didn’t sign up for their international Belt and Road Initiative, which he described as “effectively their empire building process.”

Niger cosies up to ‘new friends’ China and Russia just days after sending US military packing

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257165/niger-cosies-new-friends-china-and-russia-just-days-after-sending-us-military-packing?utm_source=rss_feed

Niger has already begun courting new international supporters, just days after it severed military ties with the United States and ordered 1,000 American troops out of the country.

On March 16, Niger’s government broke off “with immediate effect” its military cooperation agreement with the US. The very next week, officials from the Chinese embassy in capital Niamey as well as executives from China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), which has invested billions in Niger’s petroleum industry, met the ruling military junta. They have not been the only Chinese officials to hold talks with the Niger government over the last two weeks.

It is part of what the West African nation calls its “diversification of international partnerships” plan.

The shift in those international partnerships comes after former president Mohamed Bazoum was ousted in a military coup in July last year.

Bazoum was a key US ally. Since his departure, relations between Niger and the West, especially France and the US, have deteriorated, culminating in their troops being ordered to pack up and move out.

But while Niger has been distancing itself from its former Western partners it has been moving closer to China and Russia.

Each of those new relationships offer something different to the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland – Niger’s ruling military council.

Observers say Russia wants to develop a stronger military cooperation while China is keen to grow and protect its oil and mining interests.

It helps that, as well as its oilfields in the south of the country, Niger has Africa’s highest-grade uranium ore in the north. Its uranium accounts for around 5 per cent of global mining output.

Niger breaks off military cooperation with US, as junta moves closer to Russia

For decades, the former French colony has been fuelling France’s nuclear power. But as Paris now sweats over whether that uranium supply could disappear, China is angling to get France’s share to ramp up its own nuclear power generation.

China National Uranium Corporation, whose parent company is China National Nuclear Corporation, has been carrying out studies on restarting production in northern Niger.

With Niger’s crude oil, though, China already has a strong foothold.

In November, PetroChina, a subsidiary of the state-owned CNPC, completed the building of a 2,000km (1,243 mile) crude oil pipeline from the landlocked country’s southeast oilfields to port terminal Seme in neighbouring Benin on the Atlantic coast. It has invested US$4.6 billion in Niger’s petroleum industry, and PetroChina owns two-thirds of the Agadem oilfield.

It is likely that these oil and mining interests were top of the agenda for the recent meetings with Niger’s government.

On March 18, CNPC executives, led by Zhou Zuokun, its country managing director, met Niger’s Minister of Interior, Public Security and Territorial Administration, General Mohamed Toumba, with Niger’s oil resources “at the heart of discussions”.

Two days later, on March 20, special representative of the Chinese government for African affairs Liu Yuxi led a delegation to Niger that met Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine to discuss the “continuation of current development projects”.

Then, on March 22, Chinese ambassador to Niger Jiang Feng met Abdourahamane Tchiani, the president of the ruling military council, to discuss the “strengthening of friendly relations and the strategic partnership uniting Niamey and Beijing”.

On March 26, it was Russia’s turn, with Tchiani having a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin as the pair discussed “the need to strengthen their security cooperation … to face current threats”, according to a readout released by Niger.

Tchiani said Niger was grateful for Moscow’s recent support to “Niamey in its quest for national sovereignty”.

David Shinn, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, said while both Russia and China have welcomed the departure of US military personnel from Niger, their specific goals are quite different.

Shinn said Russia wants to develop a close military relationship with Niger and replace previous French and American forces with those from the Africa Corps, formerly known as the Wagner Group.

“Niger appears open to that arrangement,” Shinn said. “However, it is not clear whether China is collaborating with Russia on the assignment of Africa Corps personnel to Niger, but it has no interest in sending Chinese forces there,” Shinn said.

He said China’s interest is in protecting its oil investment in Niger.

“China will do what it can to protect these interests, including, if necessary, not objecting to the assignment of Russian troops or mercenaries to Niger,” Shinn said.

“China and Russia, pursuing their individual interests, will work collectively to reduce American and Western influence throughout the Sahel region.”

Niger hoped to start oil shipments in January but sanctions imposed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) put the brakes on those plans. Niger has been pumping crude oil through the new pipeline, with it currently sitting in tanks at the port terminal in Benin.

According to S&P Global Commodity Insights, Niger could begin shipping its first oil cargo next month, initially starting with 90,000 barrels a day before ramping up to 110,000 barrels a day.

It has been producing 20,000 barrels a day from its Agadem Rift Basin, but until now that has primarily been used domestically due to the lack of an export route.

Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development and a former ­minister in Liberia, said China has shown a much higher threshold for risk tolerance across markets, including in Niger. He said the Niger-China relationship has been two decades in the making.

“Since Chinese foreign policy is regime agnostic, it was never in question whether China would continue working with the junta,” Moore said.

China and Niger entered a production-sharing agreement for the development of oil in 2008, he said. By 2020, China had invested around US$2.7 billion in Niger to develop both oil and uranium. Further development of the Agadem oilfield should take the total investment to more than US$4 billion.

“Niger’s export of oil through the pipeline is thus the endpoint of a very long investment process. It could be a linchpin of a breakthrough,” Moore said.

Francesco Sassi, a research fellow in energy geopolitics and markets at consultancy Ricerche Industriali ed Energetiche, said there are few doubts that China will continue to play a leading role in Niger’s oil industry amid the West African nation’s international isolation.

Sassi said Chinese investments and know-how have been key to developing the Agadem oilfield and pipeline.

“The project represents a positive result of Beijing’s energy diplomacy in Africa,” Sassi said. “And its finalisation against the background of such an unstable scenario unfolding in Niger suggests CNPC’s presence has been protected by the same junta.

“It is in Beijing’s interest that Niger’s oil is finally traded on the international market to help curb supply instability.”

John Calabrese, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington said it seemed clear that Niger had found “new friends”.

“It seems likely that Russia’s Wagner Group, China and even Iran will acquire, retain or possibly expand their engagement with Niger,” he said.

But he pointed out that the departure of Niger’s former allies in the West could have unexpected security implications, particularly for China, which he noted is Niger’s second-largest investor after France.

“The pipeline project illustrates the ‘big plans’ Chinese state-owned enterprises have for Niger and the surrounding region,” Calabrese said. “Yet, here we are: Chinese investments and Chinese nationals could now fall into harm’s way should the junta be ill-equipped to deal with the security threats it faces without Western support and its ‘new friends’ not be up to the task.”

Chinese education giant XJ International hit with winding up petition after defaulting on US$324 million bond

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3257225/chinese-education-giant-xj-international-hit-winding-petition-after-defaulting-us324-million-bond?utm_source=rss_feed

One of China’s largest private education operators, XJ International, formerly Hope Education Group, is facing a winding up petition brought by international bondholders after it failed to meet a repayment deadline earlier this month.

The Bank of New York Mellon London branch, acting for a group of creditors, filed a petition with the High Court in Hong Kong on Wednesday to liquidate XJ and seeking payment of US$324 million of convertible bonds and US$27,056 of interest, the education company said in a stock exchange filing late on Thursday night.

Bank of New York is the trustee for the defaulted bonds and is taking legal action under the instructions of a group of international bondholders who own 49. 1 per cent of the offshore convertible bonds issued by the Chengdu-headquartered company.

“The ad hoc group was left with no choice but to pursue this course of action by the company’s failure to enter into substantive discussions either prior to or since its default on the convertible bonds in the amount of not less than US$324 million on 2nd March 2024,” the bondholders said in a statement.

The convertible bonds issued in March 2021 allowed holders to demand the company redeem all of the bonds on March 2, but the company allegedly failed to meet the redemption requirements.

After the default, the company and the bondholders held a meeting on March 14 but the bondholders said XJ “presented no concrete or credible plan” to repay the bonds, prompting them to sue. Kirkland & Ellis is representing the bondholders, and the first petition will be heard on June 19.

XJ, which was renamed last month, closed 3 per cent lower on Thursday at 24.7 HK cents before the announcement was issued after the market closed. The company’s share price has tumbled 60 per cent over the last year.

It is based in Sichuan and operates vocational schools and universities across mainland China with about 300,000 students and 20,000 staff. One of its major shareholders is Hope Education Investment which is a subsidiary of West Hope Group, a large agriculture conglomerate in the mainland.

Zhang Bing, chairman of XJ, said the company is seeking legal advice “to take the appropriate course of action.”

“The petition has had no material impact on the business operation of the company, and its subsidiaries and the operation of the company and its schools remain normal,” Zhang said in the exchange filing.

He admitted XJ is “experiencing difficulty in redeeming the relevant bonds” due to “the impact of the external environment, industry policies and the company’s current financial conditions.”

The company will continue to work with the bondholders to try to achieve a settlement, Zhang added.

China is all in on green tech. The U.S. and Europe fear unfair competition.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/29/china-clean-green-energy-technology-trade/2024-03-15T01:42:13.379Z

CHENGDU, China — A decade ago, Tongwei Group was a maker of fish food and livestock feed. Today, the company, based in this famously overcast corner of southwest China, is the world’s largest producer of solar cells, the components of panels that turn sunlight into electricity.

At its $2.8 billion facility on the outskirts of Chengdu, robotic arms stacked the delicate cells on autonomous carts that zipped between production stages. Productivity has gone up 161 percent — and the number of workers down by 62 percent — thanks to 5G equipment from homegrown technology giant Huawei, the company says.

Tongwei now has even grander ambitions: It is rapidly expanding and upgrading six production facilities and, by the end of this year, aims to churn out 130 gigawatts’ worth of cells annually — four times the total solar capacity installed in the United States in 2023.

China — through solar companies like this — will be without doubt the “main force leading the global energy transition,” said Liu Hanyuan, Tongwei’s founder and chairman.

Tongwei encapsulates how China has come to dominate global clean technology markets. China produces 80 percent of the world’s solar panels — compared with the United States’ 2 percent — and makes about two-thirds of the world’s electric vehicles, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries.

That may be good for the Earth, which desperately needs to move away from fossil fuels to slow global warming.

Climate activists hope that China’s surging investments in clean technology will soon tip the balance and stop the country’s emissions of carbon dioxide — which are nearly double those of the United States — from rising any further. Last year, China installed more solar panels than the rest of the world combined.

But China’s overwhelming dominance has alarmed officials in the United States and in Europe, who say they are worried that a flood of cheap Chinese products will undercut their efforts to grow their own renewable energy industries — especially if the Chinese companies have what they consider an unfair advantage.

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, who is expected to soon make her second visit to Beijing in less than a year, said in a speech Wednesday that she will press China to address “excess capacity” — including in solar, electric cars and batteries — that “distorts global prices” and “hurts American firms and workers.”

Combined, this raises the specter of another trade war, one that activists say could pit protectionism against planet.

Green tech grows as economy slows

China’s metamorphosis into clean tech giant was ordered from the very top. Leader Xi Jinping made supporting “essentially green” industries a priority last month as he tries to stop the world’s second-largest economy from slowing.

Clean energy is a bright spot in an otherwise gloomy economic outlook: China’s exports of electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar products soared 30 percent to $146 billion last year. BYD overtook Tesla in 2023 to become the world’s top-selling electric-car maker.

This helped make the renewable energy industry the biggest contributor to the country’s economy, ahead of every other sector, according to the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a think tank.

That shift has come about thanks in no small part to state support. For over a decade, Beijing has used measures including subsidies and tax breaks to create dozens of huge conglomerates that dominate sustainable energy industries.

The Tongwei facility, toured by The Washington Post, is 15 percent owned by two of Chengdu city’s state-run investment companies. In the first nine months of last year, the company reported being subsidized with $125 million by the state, a 240 percent rise from 2022.

This has led to saturation in the domestic market — a good thing, climate activists say, as the world’s largest polluter transitions to renewable energy — after manufacturers churned out electric cars, batteries, solar panels and wind turbines faster than China needs.

That has forced them to search for profits overseas, where there are more buyers willing to pay higher prices.

This, critics say, could push American and European competitors out of the global market.

Western governments have expanded investigations into unfair Chinese trade practices like subsidies and dumping.

Yellen will hammer home this message in her upcoming visit. This month, the European Commission said it found sufficient evidence of subsidies boosting Chinese electric-vehicle exports and warned it will probably raise tariffs later this year. This came after Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, warned of a “race to the bottom” in clean tech amid alleged unfair competition by Chinese firms.

With the trade temperature mounting, Beijing has begun accusing Western governments of trying to hobble its most advanced companies — part of what it sees as a broader campaign to keep China down.

Concerns about Chinese exports are “nothing more than an effort to hold back China’s industrial upgrade and to use unfair means to protect the vested interests of certain Western countries,” the official Xinhua News Agency stated in a recent article.

Liu, the Tongwei chairman, also urged an end to “protectionist measures.”

China’s solar industry has “comprehensively overtaken” Europe and the United States, he said in written answers to questions from The Post after declining an interview. It is “not really realistic” for the world to reach net zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century without embracing Chinese manufacturing, he wrote.

China’s defensiveness is spurred by a sense that its big bet on low-carbon technologies was just starting to pay off.

“From a Chinese perspective, their industrial policy really worked,” said Nis Grünberg, a researcher at the Mercator Institute of China Studies, a Berlin-based think tank. “Now they are starting to hit walls.”

Beijing could revert to economic retaliation

This could mean China will now turn to its “well-rehearsed playbook of pressure and evasion,” said Yanmei Xie, an analyst at Gavekal, a research firm.

It turned to that playbook in the 2010s during solar panel trade disputes to keep trade barriers low, and it has threatened more recently to restrict critical minerals like graphite, a metal needed to power electric vehicles.

These worries are most acute for solar energy, which scientists predict will be the world’s leading source of energy by the middle of the century. China controls over 80 percent of manufacturing and makes over 95 percent of the world’s silicon wafers, a key component.

But breaking China’s near monopoly on parts of the renewable energy supply chain won’t be easy or cheap.

Rich nations will need to spend about $6 trillion between 2023 and 2050 to create viable alternatives to Chinese clean tech products, according to Wood Mackenzie, a global energy consultancy.

That’s because Chinese companies already have such a big head start in creating well-integrated supply chains and have gained a significant foothold in international markets.

While the United States has been able to maintain its global lead in critical technologies like semiconductors by focusing on advanced research, this approach doesn’t apply to renewable energy, said Ilaria Mazzocco, an expert on Chinese industrial policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank.

The main way to gain an advantage in clean energy is to scale up and cut costs, which “really plays to China’s advantage,” she said.

There are, however, some signs of bloat in the sector. Longi, another of China’s largest solar companies, is reportedly planning to slash its workforce by 30 percent. The company told The Post prices are falling because of “excessive competition” and “huge new investments and rapid increases in production capacity.”

But Beijing appears unlikely to take its foot off the renewable gas any time soon, Mazzocco said. “China is going to fight to maintain its dominance by lowering the cost and expand manufacturing capacity within China.”

Vic Chiang and Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, contributed to this report.

Can you believe this young Chinese influencer ‘Little Fairy’ with 7.7 million fans pays US$13 million in taxes?

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3256572/can-you-believe-young-chinese-influencer-little-fairy-77-million-fans-pays-us13-million-taxes?utm_source=rss_feed

A young influencer in China with 7.7 million followers on Douyin paid nearly 100 million yuan (US$13 million) in taxes last year, driving home how potentially lucrative the career can become.

Pan Yurun, 28, hails from the city of Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province and shares skincare and makeup tips on Douyin. Her nickname is “Little Fairy,” and she has built a following thanks to her eloquence, sweet appearance, and cheerful personality.

On March 14, she disclosed in a video that she paid 95 million yuan in taxes in 2023 and displayed a screenshot of her tax payment as proof.

“Tax payment is everyone’s obligation, and I always pay the full amount without engaging in any so-called ‘reasonable tax avoidance’,” said Pan.

On the assumption that Pan paid the highest possible personal income tax rate at 45 per cent, her annual income in 2023 could have exceeded 200 million yuan (US$28 million).

Even if that number is incorrect, Pan’s success was highlighted during a skincare product live-stream in October 2023 when she achieved a daily sales revenue of 110 million yuan (US$15 million).

Her transparent attitude towards paying her full taxes may also result from a recent crackdown on celebrities who did not pay up, which often leads to hefty fines.

In December 2021, China’s “live-streaming queen” Huang Wei – also known as Viya – who has 90 million fans on Taobao, was fined 1.34 billion yuan (US$210 million) for tax evasion, and her account was banned on all platforms.

Taobao is owned by Alibaba which also owns the South China Morning Post.

Over the past nine years, Pan’s video content has evolved from sharing weight loss tips to selling clothes and offering beauty tips.

Now, she sells skincare products through her live-streams on Douyin, where fans can buy the products directly through the app.

Her work also includes inspirational entrepreneurial stories and financial management strategies.

In 2019, Forbes magazine listed Pan as one of the top 50 Key Opinion Leaders, or KOLs, in China.

“Live-streaming is my entire life,” said Pan, adding: “I cherish every one of my fans and do my best to help them buy the most affordable products.”

One fan who has followed Pan for nine years explained why the influencer is so popular.

“‘Little Fairy’ is a girl who knows what she wants and is very brave in pursuing it, and that’s why I trust her and her products,” the fan said.

There are more than 150 million live-streamers in China according to a report on the mainland’s live-streaming and short video industry.

However, more than 95 per cent of them earn less than 5,000 yuan (US$700) a month, falling below China’s individual income tax threshold.

South China Sea: Philippines fires back at ‘patronising’ Beijing as tensions escalate

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3257194/south-china-sea-philippines-fires-back-patronising-beijing-tensions-escalate?utm_source=rss_feed

The Philippines is not seeking a fight or trouble in the South China Sea but will not be cowed into silence, submission, or subservience, its defence ministry said on Friday, in its latest show of defiance in a heated row with China.

Recent Chinese statements show their isolation from the rest of the world on their “illegal and uncivilised activities” in the South China Sea, the Philippine defence ministry said in a statement.

“It also shows the inability of the Chinese government to conduct open, transparent, and legal negotiations. Their repertoire consists only of patronising and, failing that, intimidating smaller countries,” the ministry said.

Duterte-Xi allegedly made ‘gentleman’s agreement’ for status quo in disputed sea

The statement was in response to its Chinese counterpart accusing the Philippines on Thursday of provocations, misinformation and treachery after Manila accused Beijing of aggressive conduct in Manila’s exclusive economic zone.

Chinese defence ministry spokesperson Wu Qian on Thursday said the Philippines was to blame for the breakdown of relations, demanding its neighbour to cease what it calls were acts of infringement and provocation.

Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr on Thursday upped the stakes in the escalating row, saying his country would implement unspecified countermeasures against “illegal, coercive, aggressive, and dangerous attacks” by China’s coastguard. China claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea.

The battle of words stems from a series of stand-offs near the Second Thomas Shoal during Philippine resupply missions to a group of soldiers posted to guard a decaying warship that was intentionally grounded on a reef 25 years ago to push a sovereignty claim.

China Vanke boss acknowledges ‘pressure’ as 2023 profits slump amid liquidity distress rumours

https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/3257182/china-vanke-boss-acknowledges-pressure-2023-profits-slump-amid-liquidity-distress-rumours?utm_source=rss_feed

Embattled property developer China Vanke posted a 46.4 per cent slump in net profit for 2023, alarming investors just weeks after markets were roiled by rumours of liquidity problems at the firm.

Net profit came in at 12.16 billion yuan (US$1.7 billion) versus 22.68 billion yuan in the same period of 2022, according to a filing by Vanke made to the Hong Kong stock exchange on Thursday night.

Core profit, which excludes the impact of foreign exchange and changes in the value of assets and financial instruments, stood at 9.79 billion yuan, plunging by more than 50 per cent from the same period the previous year.

Revenue fell 7.6 per cent to 465.7 billion yuan from a year earlier, while the company’s net debt ratio rose by 11 percentage points to 54.7 per cent.

“Although we have stressed the awareness of surviving very early, it seems now we need to strengthen the awareness of crisis [management],” chairman Yu Liang said during a post-results press conference on Friday morning.

“A company that wants to survive in the fragile market … also needs to be fully prepared if there is an unexpected downfall.”

Vanke, the second-largest Chinese developer by sales, said it aims to ensure a bottom line of safety and offload debt of more than 100 billion yuan in the next two years, as it tries to smoothly transform its business model.

As of the end of 2023, it had interest-bearing liabilities of 320.05 billion yuan, of which 62.42 billion yuan is due within one year, it said.

The company declared that it might not distribute a dividend for 2023, as the industry is “undergoing an in-depth adjustment”, although the final plan needs further approval.

The lacklustre earnings report came after the company was rumoured to be facing liquidity distress earlier this month, roiling the market as it was one of the few remaining big state-backed developers to enjoy a solid credit rating.

However, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings, two of the big three rating agencies, have downgraded the firm to “junk” this month, citing a weakened sales performance and curtailed funding access. S&P has not cut Vanke’s ratings yet, but issued a downgrade warning two weeks ago.

The firm’s contracted sales fell 9.8 per cent year on year to 376.1 billion yuan in 2023, according to its filing. The developer’s woes have persisted since the start of this year, after it saw its combined contracted sales fall at an annual rate of 43 per cent to 33.5 billion yuan in January and February.

“There is some pressure, but we can get through,” Zhu Jiusheng, Vanke’s president and CEO, said during the briefing when asked about the debts coming due this year.

He said the company will have sufficient funds to meet the challenges of debt repayment this year, citing support from the Shenzhen State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), its major shareholder.

Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and China’s Xi Jinping allegedly had unwritten pact on South China Sea status quo

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3257138/philippines-rodrigo-duterte-and-chinas-xi-jinping-allegedly-had-unwritten-pact-south-china-sea?utm_source=rss_feed

Former Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte allegedly made a “gentleman’s agreement” with Chinese President Xi Jinping to maintain the status quo in the South China Sea while he was in office, with analysts suggesting Beijing could be using the broken pact to justify its recent aggressive actions.

Harry Roque, who served as Duterte’s spokesman for several years, said in an interview this week with the news website Politiko that the reason for China’s recent water cannon attacks on Philippine vessels might be because it thought the agreement would remain in place under Duterte’s successor, President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr.

Roque later clarified on Wednesday that the verbal, non-binding agreement meant the Philippines would not construct or repair any installations within the disputed area but could deliver “food and water supplies” to Filipino troops stationed at the BRP Sierra Madre, a World War II navy ship that was grounded at the Second Thomas Shoal to reinforce Manila’s territorial claims over the surrounding area.

“This is not a secret deal. This was made public by former Foreign Affairs [Secretary] Alan Peter Cayetano, who said before that if there are no repairs, no improvements on the ship, no problem in Ayungin [the Philippines’ term for the Second Thomas Shoal] … only water and food will be supplied,” Roque said.

He explained that the deal also required China to cease construction activities on the Mischief Reef, located near the Second Thomas Shoal.

Roque, a lawyer by profession, refused to call it an “agreement” on Wednesday, saying instead it was only an “understanding” that the Philippine Navy’s monthly resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre would be allowed as long as they were for “humanitarian purposes”.

However, Roque claimed Beijing would be wrong to assume that such an agreement would be honoured by Marcos Jnr’s administration.

Roque’s revelation came in the wake of some lawmakers’ demands that Duterte shed light on the reported deal.

Marcos Jnr’s administration has not commented directly on Roque’s revelation, but the president on Wednesday said Manila would, in the coming weeks, implement “proportionate, deliberate and reasonable” countermeasures against Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.

Roque defended his former boss, saying the agreement never required the removal of the BRP Sierra Madre, as China had previously suggested had been agreed to.

He also suggested that China believed the current resupply missions included deliveries of construction materials, and recommended leaving the BRP Sierra Madre in its dilapidated state rather than pushing forward with repairs and risking Beijing’s ire.

“You cannot force China to agree with us in doing improvements on BRP Sierra Madre. China won’t agree to that … I think the better policy is, even though the vessel is dilapidated, we still have a presence there and our people have enough supply of food and water,” he said.

Ramon Beleno III, head of the political science and history department at Ateneo de Davao University, said the “gentleman’s agreement” was just a temporary solution back then to ease tension in the South China Sea but not a solution to the problem.

“That’s the problem now. China is using the agreement against us,” Belen told This Week in Asia.

“The action that could have been done by the Duterte administration after having the deal with Xi was to push for the code of conduct between China and Southeast Asian countries to avert confrontations at sea,” he added.

Former Philippine senator Leila De Lima, a fierce critic of Duterte, said in a social media post on Wednesday that Roque’s revelation, coming two years after he stepped down from government service, only showed the duplicity of the past administration, noting the fact that the agreement was kept secret from the public.

“Regardless, President Ferdinand Marcos is not bound by such a secret agreement. A president cannot be bound by agreements secretly entered into by a predecessor for the simple reason that he has no way of complying with an agreement the details of which are subject to the recollection of those who knew about it, and therefore are highly unreliable,” she said.

“In the end, a gentleman’s agreement heavily relies on the integrity of the parties … China should have known from the start that such an agreement with Duterte is useless, as he is definitely no gentleman, and even lies to, and deceives his own people,” De Lima stressed.

During his six years in office, Duterte, who consistently called Xi a very close “friend”, reoriented Philippine foreign policy away from the United States towards closer ties with China.

His soft stance towards Beijing was tested on June 9, 2019, when a Chinese maritime militia boat rammed a Filipino fishermen vessel in the contested waters, leaving 22 Filipino fishermen floating at sea until a Vietnamese boat rescued them.

Instead of lodging a protest, Duterte played down the incident as a “little maritime accident” that should not get in the way of friendly bilateral relations.

Marcos Jnr reversed Duterte’s pro-China policy after assuming office in 2022, and realigned his own foreign policy back towards friendliness with the US, Manila’s long-time ally.

In February last year, Marcos Jnr gave the US widened access to military sites across the country under the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement to boost the Philippines’ defence capabilities and response to natural disasters.

Marcos Jnr has also consistently taken a more hardline stance on China’s encroachment, promising not to cede any of the Philippines’ territory to foreign powers.

On March 23, Manila’s regular resupply mission to Second Thomas Shoal turned violent, with two Chinese Coast Guard vessels water cannoning a civilian supply boat for more than an hour, leaving three sailors injured and heavily damaging the boat.

Reporters witness Beijing’s clash against Philippine ships in South China Sea

It was the second incident in barely three weeks. Earlier this month, five sailors were also injured in similar harassment perpetrated by Chinese Coast Guard and its suspected Chinese militia in the same mission.

Filipino military historian and defence analyst Jose Antonio Custodio told a local radio station on Wednesday that China took offence when the Marcos Jnr government did not follow Duterte’s policies.

“There are repercussions for that. We need to be stronger … strengthen our relations with our international alliance system and with our forces in the West Philippine Sea. There should be more support for that,” Custodio said.

“Remember that even though Duterte was pro-China, China does not respect us.”

Poll shows fewer than 3 in 10 Americans support TikTok bill that would force Chinese owner to sell the app

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3257160/poll-shows-fewer-3-10-americans-support-tiktok-bill-would-force-chinese-owner-sell-app?utm_source=rss_feed

Fewer than three in 10 Americans support the bill the US House of Representatives passed earlier this month that would ban TikTok, the short-video sharing app, if its Chinese owner does not divest it, according to a poll released on Friday.

Half of the 2,000 Americans 18 or older that Savanta surveyed opposed the bill while only 28 per cent supported it, according to Savanta, a British-based market research firm behind the poll. Most said they would switch to other social media apps, particularly YouTube and Instagram, adding that “their friends” would continue to use TikTok despite the ban.

“Our research suggests a striking concern from the US public about the ability of lawmakers to deliver and actually implement a ‘TikTok ban’,” said Ethan Granholm, research analyst at Savanta. “Younger people – seen as key to the outcome of the presidential election – are particularly opposed.”

While the headline numbers show strong support, answers to other questions showed that a majority of respondents had concerns about the security of TikTok and its rivals.

More than two-thirds of them, for example, said that social media companies including TikTok must shore up their protection of personal data, including measures to block acquisitions by foreign governments.

This has been an argument central to the support of the TikTok bill. Proponents argue that the company, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, could share data with the Chinese government or influence content released on its platform, though there is little evidence so far to back up those concerns.

The bill, which enjoyed wide bipartisan support in the House, must still pass the Senate before President Joe Biden signs it into law, and momentum in the chamber has slowed notably.

With an estimated 102 million monthly active American users, TikTok has pushed ahead despite the political headwinds. The company has set an ambitious target to grow its US shopping operation tenfold to US$17.5 billion in gross merchandise volume this year, Bloomberg reported.

US House vote on TikTok ban suggests broader prism than just pro- or anti-China

It has also spent millions of dollars on US lobbying and advertising, including a recent US$2.1 million marketing campaign aimed at key political battleground states in the November presidential election, reportedly including the likes of Nevada, Montana, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.

“There is no doubt that I would not have found the success that I have today without TikTok,” says a figure in the ad, dressed in jeans, a cowboy hat and a shaggy beard.

According to Politico, as of mid-March, TikTok’s registered lobbyists are: Crossroads Strategies and Dentons US, both of which it paid US$110,000 last quarter; Mehlman Consulting, which it paid US$80,000 last quarter; Ankit Desai’s & Partners, which it paid US$40,000 last quarter; and Cozen O’Connor Public Strategies, which it paid US$30,000 last quarter.

In addition, ByteDance retains K&L Gates, which reportedly receiving US$40,000 last quarter, and LGL Advisors, which reported earning US$50,000 in the second quarter of 2023, the last time Urban reported lobbying revenues from ByteDance.

As Washington cracks down on Chinese businesses, lobbyists come under fire

At the same time, TikTok has tried to better focus its efforts, retreating from once-promising lines of business, including gaming and virtual reality.

The video site has inevitably been caught up in the US-China geopolitical scrum. Even as US lawmakers have warned of possible Chinese content meddling and data capture, Beijing has condemned the idea of a forced sale. And Chinese state media has urged the company to fight back.

“TikTok doesn’t just stay still and wait for death,” Shanghai Observer, a news site under state-owned newspaper Liberation Daily, wrote earlier this month. “It has mobilised its users to fight back”.

The Savanta polling results suggested that the US public has serious reservations about how social media companies operate.

Six in 10 respondents agreed that “social media companies need to do more to tackle harmful speech and imagery on their platforms”, while 46 per cent said they worried that social media platforms were able to influence US elections.

“While TikTok enjoys public support right now, [it] should be aware there are real concerns about how they use personal data, with some already suggesting they have decreased usage of the app as a consequence,” said Granholm.

“Consumers may well vote with their feet before lawmakers do, forcing TikTok to act.”

China decries U.S. ‘bullying.’ But, to many, China is the bully.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/29/china-security-us-region-influence-confrontation/2024-03-28T15:59:34.847Z

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At a regional security forum in the southern Chinese island of Hainan, Beijing laid out its vision for Asian peace and prosperity. But many onlookers interpreted the remarks made by Zhao Leji, the third highest-ranking official in the ruling Communist Party, as another tacit rebuke of the U.S. role in the region and an articulation of China’s hardening desire for a regional order free of U.S. involvement.

“Hegemonic and bullying acts are deeply harmful,” Zhao, a top leader of the Politburo and head of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, said while delivering a keynote speech at the annual Boao Forum. He did not mention the United States by name but was clearly gesturing to Washington’s open competition with China, tensions over strategic flash points in Asia and the ongoing trade wars pursued by successive U.S. administrations. “We must oppose trade protectionism and all forms of erecting barriers, decoupling or severing supply chains,” he added.

Speaking in slogans routinely put forward by Chinese officials, Zhao painted a rosy picture of Asian governments working in concert to resolve differences and ensuring the region does not become an “arena for geopolitical” rivalries. “We should jointly maintain security in Asia,” Zhao said. “We must always keep in our hands the future of lasting peace and security in Asia.”

A handful of world leaders were also in attendance, including Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Cambodia’s President Hun Sen, Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena and the leaders of the tiny island nations of Nauru and Dominica.

Analysts present at the forum saw through Zhao’s rhetoric. “The Chinese are vehemently opposed to what they call ‘bloc confrontation’ but the truth is they are building their own sphere of influence in Asia,” Richard McGregor, senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, told Bloomberg News. “Zhao was quite explicit about this, saying in particular that Asian countries should be jointly responsible for security in the region, a notion that excludes the U.S.”

Under President Xi Jinping, China has put forward a somewhat vague project known as the Global Security Initiative — a set of broad-brush principles that, as the Financial Times summed up, “advocates for resolving conflicts through dialogue but which analysts believe ultimately aims to reduce America’s role in global defense, particularly in Asia.” At the forum, Zhao said “we should implement” the initiative.

Other countries in China’s neighborhood are not likely to be convinced. On Monday, the government of the Philippines lodged a protest with Chinese counterparts after a dangerous escalation in the South China Sea, where China’s maritime expansionism is butting against the parallel territorial claims of its weaker neighbors. Authorities in Manila furnished video evidence of a Chinese coast guard vessel attacking a Philippines naval resupply ship with water cannon on March 23, injuring Filipino crew members and damaging their vessel.

This follows a pattern of coercive Chinese measures, including water cannon attacks, deployed around the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, which Manila is defending from constant Chinese encroachment and provocations. The South China Sea is an artery that sees the passage of a third of global trade and its reefs and uninhabited archipelagoes have taken on deeper strategic significance in the shadow of China’s geopolitical rise.

“The systematic and consistent manner in which the People’s Republic of China carries out these illegal and irresponsible actions puts into question and significant doubt the sincerity of its calls for peaceful dialogue,” the Philippines coast guard said in a statement after another incident in December. “We demand that China demonstrate that it is a responsible and trustworthy member of the international community.”

Countries like the Philippines have to walk a careful line, avoiding open conflict with Beijing while checking its opportunism. After this week’s developments, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. wrote on social media that “we seek no conflict with any nation,” but his country would not be “cowed into silence.”

To this end, they can turn to a Biden administration that has quietly bolstered alliances around Asia. Marcos will go to Washington next month for a trilateral summit with President Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

“The term the administration uses — a ‘latticework’ of alliances and partnerships — is clunky, but the basic strategy is compelling,” wrote Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Biden has arguably done more than any president since the end of the Cold War to enhance and interlink the strategic relationships that let Washington project power into this vital region.”

These efforts naturally unnerve Beijing, whose officials now routinely invoke the boogeyman of American hegemony lurking around every geopolitical corner. At the same time, China has consciously engaged in a thaw with the Biden administration, seeking to lower temperatures at a moment of profound economic uncertainty within China, with growth sluggish after a decades-long boom. Xi is also trying to revitalize China’s economy in the face of far greater global skepticism and wariness over Chinese practices and intentions.

To that end, the Chinese president hosted a delegation of top U.S. business leaders Wednesday. According to state media, he called for a boosting of trade ties and mending of fences. “The respective successes of China and the United States create opportunities for each other,” Xi was quoted as saying by Xinhua news service. “As long as both sides regard the other as partners, respect each other, peacefully coexist and join together for win-win results, China-U.S. relations will improve.”

But as U.S. lawmakers grow all the more hawkish about China’s ambitions in the region — from its expansionism in the South China Sea to the threats it poses to Taiwan — a “win-win” scenario looks remote. A potential change in government in Washington next year offers little respite.

“For the Chinese strategic community, there’s no perception of Biden or [former president Donald] Trump being better for China; it’s a matter of who is less detrimental,” wrote Wang You, a Ph.D. candidate at the School of International Relations at Jinan University, in China.

Wang suggested that, if anything, a Biden defeat may be preferable to Beijing, given Trump’s record of disruptive, unpredictable diplomacy. “China may even be able to reap some benefits from Trump’s iconoclastic approach to diplomacy,” she added in a column for the Diplomat. “Trump’s foreign policy, particularly his ‘America First’ doctrine, led to a distancing between the United States and some of its traditional allies in the Asia-Pacific and Europe.”

Elderly China father secretly uses surrogate to have baby girl after only daughter, 29, told him she would not have children

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/article/3255790/elderly-china-father-secretly-uses-surrogate-have-baby-girl-after-only-daughter-29-told-him-she?utm_source=rss_feed

A woman in China has told how her husband resorted to secret surrogacy to acquire a baby because the couple’s 29-year-old daughter refused to give him a grandchild.

The 53-year-old woman, surnamed Guo, said when she returned from work one day in September 2022, she saw a strange woman in her home holding an infant, according to Henan Television.

The stranger told her the child belonged to Guo and her husband and she had been hired as a maid.

A shocked Guo later learned that the baby was born via surrogacy after her husband paid an agency.

The child was carried by a university student, the report said.

Guo and her husband, who live in Yiyang, Hunan province, in central China, have one daughter – their only child, who told them she does not want to marry or have children.

“My husband said: ‘Your choice means I will never be a grandfather. What’s the point of raising you? Not having a baby it means you are not filial, according to Chinese traditional culture’,” Guo said.

The man said because the infant girl was so cute and healthy, he might ask the surrogacy institute for a boy next time.

“I flared up into a fury. I am going to divorce him,” said Guo.

The husband stole his wife’s identity card to apply for the infant’s birth certificate which states that he is her father and Guo is her mother.

Guo’s daughter, who’s surname is Gao, said her father is absolutely not able to raise the infant alone. She is worried that once her parents are divorced, she will be left with the legal obligation to bring up the child.

“How ridiculous this is,” Gao said.

The news report told the story of another man, aged 62, from Henan province in central China who also hired a surrogacy company without telling his family, so he could have a baby boy.

The man’s daughter said her father had wanted a son for a long time.

“After the one-child policy was abandoned, my father asked my mother to have another child for him. But my mother was nearly 50 and she did not want to have another child,” said the daughter.

She said the surrogacy company charged her father 540,000 yuan (US$75,000) and guaranteed the baby would be a boy.

Surrogacy is illegal in China. In 2023, the authorities issued a directive to crack-down on the activity.

The story caused a heated discussion on mainland social media.

“I support surrogacy being illegal. Otherwise, women will just be used for their wombs,” one online observer said on Douyin.

“Maybe in the future, dating couples will need to check their DNA to see if they are siblings,” wrote another.

China’s 5G market set to expand, fuel economic growth as tech solidifies status as pillar industry

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3257119/chinas-5g-market-set-expand-fuel-economic-growth-tech-solidifies-status-pillar-industry?utm_source=rss_feed

China’s flourishing 5G market is expected to add almost US$260 billion to its gross domestic product in 2030, with its 5G connections accounting for nearly a third of the worldwide total according to a recent report.

The mobile industry contributed to 5.5 per cent of China’s GDP last year, and in each of the coming years through 2030, nearly a quarter of that contribution will come from 5G – the highest echelon of current cellular technology – per the results of a study issued on Tuesday by the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA).

Telecommunications is a pillar industry buttressing the country’s fast-growing digital ecosystem, the likeliest source of future growth amid a structural transformation of its economy and an intense tech rivalry with the United States.

Overall, the mobile market’s contribution to the Chinese economy will reach around US$1.1 trillion in 2030, the association said.

In its The Mobile Economy China 2024 report, the GSMA said the country’s entire mobile sector has so far provided a total of nearly 8 million jobs directly and indirectly, and generated US$110 billion in tax revenue in 2023 alone.

The association’s findings were in line with a predicted boom in the sector, as Beijing tries to revamp its economy through the adoption and development of new technologies – a sector with the capacity to drive new growth and serve as a remedy for an ailing real estate market, a rapidly ageing population and geopolitical uncertainties.

China’s smartphone market recovers in 2023 amid Huawei’s 5G handset comeback

5G adoption in China “is growing faster than anticipated due to the speed of network deployments and a maturing device ecosystem”, the GSMA said, projecting that the number of 5G connections will surpass 1.6 billion by 2030, nearly a third of the global total.

By the end of last year, China’s 5G users numbered 810 million for an adoption rate of 45 per cent as a proportion of total mobile users. Only the US and South Korea ranked higher.

In absolute terms, however, China has the world’s most mobile phone users by a wide margin. As of the end of last year, there were 122.5 mobile phones for every 100 people, according to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics.

At the same time, the number of 5G base stations was nearly 3.38 million – a surge of 46 per cent from a year earlier.

In his government work report delivered earlier this month, Premier Li Qiang promoted further acceleration in digital innovation, saying digital infrastructure in China should “be built moderately ahead of schedule”.

“China continues to set the pace for cutting-edge 5G technology standards”, the GSMA said, adding the country’s operators are “leading the way” in the transition to 5G-advanced and 5G reduced capability networks.

“This is anticipated to kick-start a new round of 5G investment in 2024 and beyond.”

China is also investing heavily in research and development for the next generation of mobile technology, part of a global race to reach the next stratum of connectivity.

Though 6G has not yet been formally standardised, China Mobile, the world’s largest telecoms operator in terms of mobile subscribers, announced last month that it successfully launched the world’s first satellite to test 6G architecture.

South China Sea: Beijing urges Southeast Asian nations to ‘cherish peace’ and help stop South tensions spiralling out of control

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257135/south-china-sea-beijing-urges-southeast-asian-nations-cherish-peace-and-help-stop-south-tensions?utm_source=rss_feed

Southeast Asian countries should cherish lasting regional peace and help prevent the situation in the South China Sea from getting out of control, according to a senior Chinese diplomat.

“It is regrettable to see heightened tensions in the South China Sea over the past year,” Liu Zhenmin, China’s envoy for climate change, told the annual Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan on Thursday.

Liu, who was responsible for South China Sea affairs as vice-minister for foreign affairs before taking a senior United Nations role in 2017, said Beijing and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations should seek bilateral or regional solutions to their territorial disputes through negotiation.

“People in East Asian countries should be aware of and cherish the three-decade-long regional peace since the end of the Cold War, and efforts should be spared to prevent new conflicts from emerging in the South China Sea,” Liu told a panel discussion about the disputed waterway.

His comments follow a series of clashes between China and the Philippines around the disputed Second Thomas and Scarborough Shoals, which have led to an increased focus on the issue among the wider international community.

He also warned: “The past year has witnessed closer military cooperation among the United States, Japan and the Philippines. Many are concerned that this would trigger another conflict in Southeast Asia.”

Liu also told the event: “Extraterritorial countries should support neighbouring countries of the South China Sea in their search for fair solutions through negotiation, instead of fanning the flames and creating risks.

“Countries should also avoid … [supporting] one side while suppressing the other.”

The resource-rich South China Sea, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, is the subject of multiple overlapping claims. Aside from China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all have claims

Beijing claims the vast majority of the waters and rejected a 2016 international arbitration ruling that its claims were invalid.

What Philippine legal moves could mean for South China Sea dispute with Beijing

The most recent confrontation between Beijing and Manila came on Saturday, when the Philippines accused China’s coastguard of using water cannons against a civilian vessel on a resupply mission to troops stationed on the Second Thomas Shoal.

It follows a series of similar clashes, where the two sides have traded accusations over who was to blame.

The latest episode also prompted the United States – which has a mutual defence treaty with Manila – and Japan to express support for the Philippines. South Korea also later weighed in, expressing “grave concerns” over the use of water cannons.

Separately on Thursday, the Chinese defence ministry accused Washington of stirring up trouble in the South China Sea.

“The US provoked the confrontation, backed up the Philippines, threatened and exerted pressure on China citing the so-called bilateral treaty, and sent military vessels to the South China Sea to stir up troubles,” Wu Qian, a spokesman for the ministry, said.

He also urged Manila to realise that “provocations will only do them more harm than good, and soliciting foreign support will lead nowhere”.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Hung Son, vice-president of the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, told the Boao Forum that the current stand-off in the South China Sea is “risky” and “easy to escalate but hard to de-escalate”.

He said modern communications technology and social media made it easy for the public to watch footage from these confrontations – and that could stir up nationalist sentiment on all sides.

“These live images are going to touch the emotions of every country that is involved,” Son said. “And that is going to put a huge pressure on the government to do something about it, making it impossible to reverse course and to de-escalate.”