China Note Archive

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wedenesday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. More than 100 million viewers tuned in Saturday to a live state television broadcast of the moment Meng Wanzhou touched down in Shenzhen, where the Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s headquarters is located. After having spent the past three years under house arrest in Canada, Meng—the company’s chief […]

In the pantheon of state-led cyber operations, Russia has historically led when it comes to disinformation and sowing the seeds of social discord, while China was traditionally associated with intellectual property theft. There are signs that is changing, though, with China reportedly stepping up its disinformation campaigns on social media.  Earlier this month, Mandiant Threat Intelligence reported two significant advances in online influence campaigns in support of the People’s Republic of China—one involving the use of accounts in multiple languages across many different social media platforms, and the other involving attempts to physically mobilize protests on the ground, on topics ranging from […]

The prevailing foreign assistance architecture of today’s world, which prioritizes transparency, inclusion and accountability, was developed and codified in a unipolar system—with significant U.S. leadership and influence. Since the end of the Cold War, Western donors have supported this framework, further developing and codifying it in the Millennium Development Goals of 2000; the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness; the 2008 Accra Agenda, which built on the Paris Declaration; and the 2011 Busan Agreement to standardize good development practice, norms and standards. This architecture is now coming under pressure, largely due to China’s growing interest in and influence over today’s […]

As evidenced by the wall-to-wall coverage this week in this publication and countless others, French President Emmanuel Macron’s recall of France’s ambassadors from Washington and Canberra over the trilateral security pact between the U.S., Australia and the U.K. has naturally raised anew worries about the stability of the trans-Atlantic partnership and the cohesiveness of NATO. U.S. President Joe Biden’s hard pivot to the Indo-Pacific is clearly giving France specifically, and the EU and the world more generally, a bad case of whiplash.  But perhaps overshadowed by Paris’ fit of pique over Australia’s cancellation of its multibillion-dollar deal with France to build attack-class submarines in favor of […]

In the space of a single news cycle last week, the substance behind the news that the United States and Britain had joined forces to sell nuclear submarine technology to Australia came to be overshadowed by the emotions aroused by this development—namely, France’s theatrically indignant response to having its preexisting deal to sell submarines to Canberra canceled without notice. Paris has invoked “treason” and spoken of being stabbed in the back, comparing U.S. President Joe Biden unfavorably to his predecessor, Donald Trump, all while taking the extraordinary step of recalling its ambassadors from the United States and Australia, something seldom done even […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wedenesday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Last Wednesday, the Biden administration unveiled a historic security partnership in the Indo-Pacific region between the U.S., Australia and the U.K., known as AUKUS. As part of the deal’s terms and conditions, the United States and the United Kingdom will help Australia build and deploy nuclear-powered submarines, as […]

Last week, Maggie Dennis, Wikimedia’s vice president of community resilience & sustainability, announced that it had removed seven Chinese nationals as editors on Wikipedia, following a year-long investigation into “the unrecognized group Wikimedians of Mainland China.” The internal investigation by Wikipedia’s parent organization uncovered evidence of “infiltration” resulting in members of the platform’s editorial community facing the risk of physical harm and other threats to their safety. Though Wikipedia is banned in mainland China, there have been press reports of hotly contested “edit wars” relating to political content on the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement and the status of Taiwan.  The episode reignites […]

The newly announced nuclear-powered submarine deal and trilateral security partnership between the U.S., the U.K. and Australia is remarkable for the sheer range of regional and subject matter experts needed to make sense of it. Like the proverbial three blind men and the elephant, it means something very different depending on where you grab hold of it. Some of issues raised by the sub deal, particularly over the technical specifications and proliferation concerns, remain open questions that will only be answered 18 months from now, when the framework agreement is due to be finalized in an actual contract, although that […]

To many people who follow events in China closely, two announcements made in the past month by the Chinese government seemed like reasonably foreseeable developments, if not entirely predictable in their timing or details. In the first, Beijing said that it was committed to combating the grueling common workplace culture known as 996, which stands for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Placing such heavy demands of self-sacrifice for the benefit of corporations was unhealthy for society, the state concluded, in a belated judgment that follows more than a generation of high-speed growth characterized by utter domination […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox.  Approximately 100 disgruntled investors gathered at the headquarters of the troubled property developer China Evergrande Group in the southern city of Shenzhen on Monday to demand repayment of loans and other financial products.  Reuters’ David Kirton captured the chaotic scenes that erupted as Evergrande employees tried to placate the […]

In the wake of the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan amid the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces and their allies, China has rhetorically seized upon America’s failures. The official Xinhua news agency lambasted the United States as “the world’s largest exporter of unrest,” arguing that “its hegemonic policies” have led to far too many human tragedies, and that the fall of Kabul marked the collapse of America’s international image and credibility.  Beijing also appears to be extending an enthusiastic hand to the Taliban. In late July, several of the group’s leaders visited China and met directly with Foreign Minister […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wedenesday. If you’re already a subscriber,  adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Up until late August, Zhao Wei was one of the biggest stars in mainland China. Having shot to fame in the late 90s with the television drama My Fair Princess, the 45-year-old eventually became a household name, with a net worth of $1 billion. But almost overnight, […]

In the past few years, public awareness has grown about the race currently underway among states and corporations to dominate the development and deployment of new technologies. This isn’t only a race, however, to lock in the trade advantages that come with tech dominance. It is also a race to shape our societies and the values by which we live. And it is being run on many different tracks, some of them well-known by now—5G telecom networks and artificial intelligence—but others more obscure and unexpected. For example, in late 2019, the Chinese government proposed a change to the deep structure […]

There is extensive evidence that the Chinese government is violating the human rights of ethnic Uyghurs, and that these violations include crimes against humanity and genocide. Satellite imagery, testimonials, demographic data and photographs substantiate the extensive allegations against China, which include the use of mass surveillance technologies throughout Xinjiang province, the arbitrary detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees, the separation of children from their parents, systematic sterilization, rape, forced labor and organ harvesting. While survivors, relatives and diaspora communities have long sought to draw attention to the systematic […]

The topic of my column last week, the first in an occasional series of a Q&As with interesting thinkers, was ostensibly the rapidly changing nature of cities in Africa. But an important subtext of the piece, present throughout the conversation, was African performance or, perhaps better stated, underperformance on a range of issues. My interlocutor last week, George Kankou Denkey, noted, for example, that Africa, a continent that is presently urbanizing on a scale never experienced anywhere before, generally lacks urban planners; even its universities seem unengaged with the topic. Elsewhere, he pointed out that although one of the largest megalopolises […]