Footage from China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, has emerged showing a tornado striking the southern Chinese city of Foshan. Buildings, cars and local infrastructure has been damaged. Onlookers filmed the weather event as it ripped the roof off a building and tore through power cables. BBC
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Trade Representative has a stark warning for those who choose to buy more from Russia. Taras Kachka told the BBC that that Moscow would “weaponise anything”, use their dependency as a means to manipulate and hold countries to ransom. But as they chase a (relative) bargain at a challenging time, that warning is that those taking their custom to Russia may be loath to heed. BBC
China carried out a test of “ground-based midcourse anti-missile intercept technology” that “achieved its expected purpose”, the defence ministry in Beijing has said, describing it as defensive and not aimed at any country. Beijing has tested missile interceptors before; the most recent previous public announcement of a test was in February 2021, and before that in 2018. State media has said China has conducted anti-missile system tests since at least 2010. China has been ramping up research into all sorts of missiles, from those that can destroy satellites in space…
Advertisement On June 10, FactWire announced that it was shutting down with immediate effect, becoming the tenth Hong Kong news organization to close in less than 12 months. FactWire had used an innovative crowdfunding model to produce Chinese-language investigative journalism, exemplifying the type of award-winning independent media that once flourished in the territory. But just as many feared when Beijing imposed the National Security Law (NSL) on June 30, 2020, the landscape for free expression in Hong Kong is now increasingly desolate. Under the NSL, Hong Kong’s total score in…
Hua Shao stands knee-deep in water at the edge of the sea, behind a table piled high with large crabs. The famous Chinese TV host is sweaty, sunburnt and laughing with a co-host as a red-and-blue fishing boat bobs behind them. “The sea-ears taste so good, it must have been collected from a sea area where the water is very clear,” he tells more than 100,000 people who are watching online. It’s the eve of “618”, one of China’s biggest retail festivals, which are increasingly driven by the weird world…
Advertisement China’s Gen-Z (defined loosely as individuals born after 1996) tends to be associated with images of ferocious, vocal, and unyieldingly nationalistic supporters of the country and regime. In his incisive ethnography of China’s youth in the aftermath of the late 1980s era of brief political liberalization and contentious politics, Alec Ash remarks that “the newest Chinese youth, born in the 2000s, are also different, formed by a stronger and more nationalistic China” – though Ash caveats that “the diversity is still there.” Renowned IR expert and intellectual Yan Xuetong…
It was a project that launched a thousand interstellar dreams. Fifty years ago, NASA published a fat, 253-page book titled, “Project Cyclops.” It summarized the results of a NASA workshop on how to detect alien civilizations. What was needed, the assembled group of astronomers, engineers and biologists concluded, was Cyclops, a vast array of radio telescopes with as many as a thousand 100-meter-diameter antennas. At the time, the project would have cost $10 billion. It could, the astronomers said, detect alien signals from as far away as 1,000 light-years. The…
At least one person was killed in a large fire at a Shanghai chemical plant that shot clouds of smoke across the city on Saturday, state media reported. The fire at a Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co plant in outlying Jinshan district broke out around 4am but was brought under control later that morning, according to state news agency Xinhua. “The fire at the scene has been effectively brought under control and protective burning is currently being carried out,” Xinhua said. “According to our initial understanding, the fire has already caused…
TikTok has said that Oracle will store all the data from its US users, in a bid to allay fears about its safety in the hands of a platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The move comes as a report from BuzzFeed news, citing leaked audio from TikTok in-house meetings, said ByteDance employees in China have repeatedly accessed private information about US TikTok users. The popular video snippet sharing service has fended off concerns about the ability of engineers in China to access information about US users that isn’t…
After the end of a two-year diplomatic freeze between China and Australia, the new Albanese government is embarking on a grand experiment: is a different tone enough to get the relationship on a better footing? Gone are Peter Dutton’s blunt declarations that Beijing wants to turn countries like Australia into tributary states, as is the prediction Australia would almost certainly join any US-led military action to defend Taiwan against invasion. Anthony Albanese’s government has reverted to Australia’s long-standing bipartisan position against any unilateral changes to the status quo. At the…