Month: August 2022

Xi Jinping Poised to Win 5 More Years at China’s Congress in October

Chin@Strategy

A Communist Party congress that is poised to anoint Xi Jinping as China’s top leader for another five years will open in Beijing on Oct. 16, officials announced on Tuesday. The starting date of the party’s 20th congress — a pivotal event in China’s political life cycle — was revealed after the Politburo, a council of 25 senior officials, settled on plans for the event. Such congresses are choreographed rituals held every five years, bringing together about 2,300 delegates who rarely, if ever, dissent. This one will reveal China’s broad…

Lockdowns in China, and North Korea, Deal Double Blow to Bridge City

Chin@Strategy

SHENYANG, China — There are plenty of reasons that business has been lousy recently at Steven Wen’s clothing store in Shenyang, the largest city in northeastern China. Local officials locked down the city for one month this spring after detecting just a few dozen coronavirus cases among its nine million people. Residents have guarded their spending closely since the lockdown was lifted. And in a region often referred to as China’s Rust Belt, the local economy had already been shaky for years. Possibly the main problem, though, is that Ms.…

Rain eases China’s record heatwave but fresh energy crisis looms

Chin@Strategy

Rain across central China this week is expected to relieve the country’s worst heatwave on record, but weather agencies are now warning of potential floods, while analysts say the energy crisis exacerbated by the months-long drought is not over. Almost half of China has been affected by the latest heatwave, the hottest since record-keeping began in 1961. Hundreds of temperature records have been broken, and the heat has exacerbated the effects of low rainfall, drying up rivers and reservoirs across the country. Light to moderate showers have moved into central…

China’s censorship reaches far beyond its own borders | Letter

Chin@Strategy

I read with interest your editorial (The Guardian view on China’s censors: the sense of an (acceptable) ending, 24 August). In 2016, I was about to publish a book on pop art, which had a short section on artists responding to political and social turmoil in the 1960s, and which included an illustration of Jim Dine’s Drag – Johnson and Mao (1967). The etching depicts Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China and the US president Lyndon B Johnson, who sent troops to counter Chinese communist support in the…

What’s Driving China’s Chip Sector Crackdown?

Chin@Strategy

Advertisement During a quiet summer for Chinese politics, one part of the political machinery has been conspicuously active: the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI). Since mid-July, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s anti-graft agency has probed at least eight senior executives in China’s semiconductor industry, all linked to the China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, nicknamed the “Big Fund.” Among the executives being investigated are Ding Wenwu (a former Big Fund president), Diao Shijing (a former Big Fund chairman), and Zhao Weiguo (a former chairman of Big Fund portfolio…

China Charges 28 People, Months After Brutal Beating of Women

Chin@Strategy

HONG KONG — A group of men caught on camera violently beating several women at a barbecue restaurant in June were charged on Monday, part of a wider investigation into the criminal activities of a local gang in the Chinese city of Tangshan. More than a dozen officials and police officers are also under investigation for corruption, more than two months after the brutal attack unleashed a torrent of outrage over violence against women. The government has emphasized that the episode, which shocked the nation, was related to broader “evil…

Xi’s Color Revolution Obsession

Jianli Yang & Xueli Wang

Xi Jinping wishes to defeat “Color Revolutions” by defeating the United States China’s leader Xi Jinping had, in conversations with the then U.S. President Barack Obama over a decade ago, spoken of China being the target of “color revolutions” (New York Times, Aug. 7, 2022) — a phrase adopted from Russia, ostensibly to show how the West engineered revolutions in former Soviet territories. This wasn’t Xi Jinping’s first complaint. During a visit to Mexico three years earlier, he bitterly vented his rage: “A few foreigners, with full bellies, have nothing…

China prosecutes 28 people over restaurant attack on group of women

Chin@Strategy

Chinese prosecutors have launched criminal proceedings against 28 people suspected of assaulting a group of women in a viral incident that sparked outrage over gender-based violence in the country. Footage of a group of men assaulting four women at a barbecue restaurant in Tangshan, east of the capital, Beijing, was shared widely online, renewing debate about violence against women in China. The men carried out the assault after the women rejected their advances, the footage showed. Prosecutors in Hebei province said they would begin legal proceedings against the suspects –…

US warships sail through Taiwan Strait for first time since Pelosi visit

Chin@Strategy

The US Navy said two warships were sailing through international waters in the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, in the first such operation since heightened tensions with China over the Taiwan visit of the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. The guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville were conducting a “routine Taiwan Strait transit”, the US 7th fleet said in a statement. “The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” it said. “The United States military flies, sails and operates anywhere…