Month: January 2022

China’s Espionage Plans for the 2022 Winter Olympics: What Athletes Should Expect

Chin@Strategy

Advertisement As the world prepares for the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the athletes will have to contend with more than just competing in their chosen sport. The Chinese government will implement extensive surveillance efforts to ensure the safety of all involved, to control the spread of COVID-19, and to serve China’s political interests. It is the latter reason that is of particular concern. China’s national image before the world is of the utmost importance to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Why would China feel threatened by professional athletes? Of…

Winter Olympic Torch Relay Shrinks to ‘Prioritize Safety.’

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The Olympic torch’s public journey to the opening ceremony of the Winter Games will be much more lonely and with much less fanfare. The torch relay, usually global and lasting for months, will be just three days, mostly local, and open only to select members of the public, according to organizers of the Beijing Olympics. “This torch relay will always prioritize safety,” Yang Haibin, an official from the organizing committee, said at a news briefing on Friday. The route will feature stops at the Great Wall, the Summer Palace, and…

China hires western TikTokers to polish its image during 2022 Winter Olympics

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An army of western social media influencers, each with hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, Instagram or Twitch, is set to spread positive stories about China throughout next month’s Winter Olympics. Concerned about the international backlash against the Beijing Games amid a wave of diplomatic boycotts, the government has hired western PR professionals to spread an alternative narrative through social media. In November, as Joe Biden contemplated a diplomatic boycott, Vipinder Jaswal, a US-based Newsweek contributor and former Fox News and HSBC executive, signed a $300,000 contract with China’s…

Biden Looks to Intel’s U.S. Investment to Buoy His China Agenda

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WASHINGTON — In celebrating a $20 billion investment by Intel in a new semiconductor plant in Ohio, President Biden sought on Friday to jump-start a stalled element of his economic and national security agenda: a huge federal investment in manufacturing, research and development in technologies that China is also seeking to dominate. With two other major legislative priorities sitting moribund in Congress — the Build Back Better Act and legislation to protect voting rights — Mr. Biden moved to press for another bill, and one that has significant bipartisan support.…

The Communist Party revisits its egalitarian roots

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Jan 22nd 2022 CHINESE NATIONALISTS and fans of liberal democracy do not often agree. Still, early this century, both groups sounded convinced of the subversive power of affluent Chinese buying American coffee. In 2007 a state television anchor growled that a Starbucks branch in the Forbidden City “trampled Chinese culture” (the branch closed the same year). In 2004 a New York Times columnist declared the Communist Party revolution “finished” once Starbucks entered China, because: “No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.”…

A film in Shanghai dialect is a surprise hit in China

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Jan 22nd 2022 BEIJING THERE ARE several reasons why “Aiqing Shenhua”, a new film released on Christmas Eve in Chinese cinemas, has surprised movie buffs. One is that the movie, whose English title is “B for Busy”, is a tender portrayal of relationships among a group of middle-aged Shanghai urbanites, yet stars Xu Zheng, a veteran actor more famous for raucous comedies. Another is that such a film, produced on a tiny budget and heavy on dialogue, with not a car chase or gun-battle in sight, has succeeded at the…

How Chinese propaganda films became watchable

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Jan 22nd 2022 IN 2021, THE year after China overtook America to become the world’s largest film market, “The Battle at Lake Changjin” became the highest-grossing film in Chinese history, and the second-highest of the year worldwide. It made over $900m, just behind “Spider-Man: No Way Home”. The eponymous battle took place in 1950 during the Korean war and saw Mao Zedong’s army inflict a heavy defeat on America. The film, which was directed by Chen Kaige, a leading light of the “fifth generation” of film-makers who sprang to global…

China Maritime Report No. 18: Chinese Special Operations in a Large-Scale Island Landing

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PLA special operations forces (SOF) would likely play important supporting roles in an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Their capabilities and training are geared towards several missions undertaken during the preparatory and main assault phases of the landing, including infiltration via special mission craft and helicopter, reconnaissance and targeting, obstacle clearance, strikes and raids, and extraction missions. While PLA SOF have made progress in recent years, several longstanding challenges could affect their performance in an island landing: integrating advanced special mission equipment for complex and dangerous missions, coordinating their operations with…

IMF warns China over cost of Covid lockdowns

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China, the world’s second largest economy, should review its zero-tolerance approach to the pandemic or risk damaging the global recovery, according to the head of International Monetary Fund. Kristalina Georgieva said Beijing should reassess the use of lockdowns to limit the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant since it became clear the harm to human health was less severe than the Delta variant. Speaking at the World Economic Forum on a virtual panel, she said that while the hardline approach had contained the pandemic in China for “quite some…

Zero-Covid Policy Shakes Hong Kong’s Economy and Its ‘Soul’

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HONG KONG — Perry Lam felt confident that his business had weathered the worst of the pandemic. Several rounds of bar closures in Hong Kong had dimmed the city’s vibrant nightlife, threatening to destroy his brewery. But things seemed better late last year. After the government’s relentless effort to stamp out the virus, there were no local infections, bars began ordering kegs of his lager again and money was coming in. “You saw the silver lining,” said Mr. Lam, 34. That changed this month when Omicron started spreading, and officials…