Month: January 2022

Is China Putting ‘Wolf Warriors’ on a Leash?

Chin@Strategy

Advertisement On December 20, 2021, former Chinese ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai delivered a biting keynote address to a symposium co-hosted by the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. In front of assembled dignitaries including Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister and state councilor, Cui criticized the current state of China’s diplomacy, warning against “carelessness, laziness, and incompetence.” He admonished his fellow diplomats to “always have the country at large in mind, and not always think about being an internet celebrity.” The comments were a thinly-veiled dig at the…

Morrison speaks out against China’s ‘economic coercion’ at Davos

Chin@Strategy

Scott Morrison has taken aim at China for “economic coercion”, foreign interference and cyber attacks in a speech to the Davos World Economic Forum. Without naming the source of “sharper geopolitical competition”, the Australian prime minister warned of increasing territorial disputes in the Indo-Pacific region and urged an end to protectionist measures directed at Australia. Australia has been the target of Chinese tariffs on key agricultural exports, such as barley and wheat, due to a long series of grievances including “interference in China’s Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan affairs” and…

MPs criticise cyber agency for not aiding China rights group after it was hacked

Chin@Strategy

Members of a cross-party China human rights group have accused Britain’s cybersecurity agency of “failing to respond” with help after their website was taken offline this week in an attack they fear came from Beijing. MPs from the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) said the incident took place on Tuesday, days after the group had said publicly it was “deeply disturbed” by reports that an Anglo-Chinese lawyer had been trying to improperly influence parliamentarians in the UK. They complained the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) did not engage or…

Observer Now, Beneficiary Later: China and the Unrest in Kazakhstan

Chin@Strategy

Advertisement After a tumultuous week across Kazakhstan in early January, the situation has stabilized. Kazakhstani security forces, with the help of troops from Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) allies, put an end to both the peaceful protests and the violent riots that followed them. The political elite around President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev strengthened its hand in an accelerated intra-elite struggle that was intertwined with the unrest, forcing several loyalists around former president Nursultan Nazarbayev out of their posts. While events were confined to Kazakhstan and stemmed from domestic issues, they also…

U.S. Drops Its Case Against M.I.T. Scientist Accused of Hiding China Links

Chin@Strategy

BOSTON — Federal prosecutors on Thursday dropped the government’s charges against Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a high-profile setback to the China Initiative, a nearly three-year-old government effort intended to stop scientists from passing sensitive technology to China. Dr. Chen was arrested on Jan. 14, 2021, during President Donald J. Trump’s last full week in office, and charged with a form of grant fraud, hiding his affiliations with Chinese government institutions in applications for $2.7 million in grants from the U.S.…

Sport is indifferent to the Uyghur genocide: the Warriors investor said the quiet part out loud

Chin@Strategy

The US state department has described the Uyghur human rights issue as a genocide and the largest-scale detention of an ethno-religious community since the second world war. And yet to hear one leading professional sports owner tell it, “nobody cares”. Chamath Palihapitiya, a billionaire investor in the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, used the most recent episode of his All-In podcast to weigh in, dismissing the Uyghur crisis as “a very hard, ugly truth” that’s “below my line”. When his co-host David Sacks countered that the Uyghurs were a great, if…

Lockdown Made Their Second Date Last Weeks. Would Romance Bloom?

Chin@Strategy

When Zhao Xiaoqing first met Zhao Fei on a blind date, the sparks didn’t really fly. When they met for a second time at his home in northwest China in December, it lasted longer than they both expected. Facing a new outbreak of coronavirus cases, the health authorities announced a lockdown so sudden and severe that she didn’t have time to scurry home. So for nearly four weeks, Zhao Xiaoqing has lived in the city of Xianyang, in Shaanxi Province, with the family of Zhao Fei, a man she had…

How MI5 uncovered a Chinese ‘agent’ in parliament

Chin@Strategy

Last week Britain’s security services issued an extraordinary warning to parliament naming Christine Lee, a well-known lawyer in London’s Chinese community, as an agent working covertly for the Chinese government. It is the first time MI5 has issued an “interference alert” relating to China and it cast a spotlight on the Labour MP Barry Gardiner, whose office received £584,177 worth of donations from Lee. Gardiner said he had been “liaising with our security services for a number of years about Christine Lee”. He added: “All the donations were properly reported…