Month: January 2024

Chinese government hackers are busily targeting water treatment plants, the electrical grid, transport systems and other critical infrastructure inside the United States, FBI Director Chris Wray told House lawmakers on Wednesday in a fresh warning from Washington about Beijing’s global ambitions. Underscoring the threat, the US Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation announced just before the hearing that they had disrupted a botnet of hundreds of US-based small office and home routers owned by private citizens and companies and hijacked by the Chinese state hackers to cover their tracks…

US authorities have charged four Chinese nationals with crimes related to the smuggling of US-made electronic components, including some with possible military use, to Iran, the Justice Department said on Wednesday. The Chinese nationals are accused of moving US export-controlled items through China and Hong Kong to sanctioned entities affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its defence ministry, the department said in a statement. The accused were identified as Baoxia Liu, aka Emily Liu; Yiu Wa Yung, aka Stephen Yung; Yongxin Li, aka Emma Lee; and Yanlai…

The central government may still unveil more forceful stimulus packages later at the annual “two sessions”, when the national legislature and top political advisory body meet, but it is unlikely Beijing will make economic growth the only priority. But, in a break with precedent, Wednesday’s meeting concluded with no reference to the third plenum, an important part of the five-year political cycle that usually sets out the path for future economic policy. The omission suggests that the event, which many observers had expected to take place last year, will not…

Analysts said China’s economic “recovery is still shaky”, and that achieving the same pace of growth in 2024 will prove a lot more challenging than last year. 2. Population decline a ‘concerning trend’ Another highly watched figure in January was China’s population figure for 2023, which confirmed that the overall population fell by 2.08 million in 2023, while births declined by 5.6 per cent to 9.02 million. The overall population in mainland China fell to 1.4097 billion in 2023, down from 1.4118 billion in 2022. 03:23 China posts record-low birth…

“Both of us leave feeling that we didn’t agree or see eye to eye on everything but that there was a lot of work to carry forward,” Sullivan told a conference sponsored by the University of California, San Diego and the Council on Foreign Relations. “Both of us agreed that we would report back to our leaders and we would get them on the phone sooner rather than later,” he added, without providing a date. China-US relations: ambassadors foresee warmer future between recent rivals While reviewing the China-US relationship at…

In a brief statement late on Tuesday, Beijing’s Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said it was cancelling an “offset measure” for southbound operations of the M503 flight route. The route is just west of the strait median line – a notional midway point between self-governed Taiwan and mainland China. 30:18 Why Taiwan is a ‘life-or-death question’ for China: Cui Tiankai on US-China tension Why Taiwan is a ‘life-or-death question’ for China: Cui Tiankai on US-China tension The CAAC said it would also start eastbound operations of two side routes…

The chief executive of ByteDance, owner of TikTok and its mainland sibling Douyin, berated employees for “not being sensitive enough” to the emergence of new technologies such as ChatGPT. In an internal meeting on Tuesday, CEO Liang Rubo said staff only began discussing ChatGPT in 2023, according to excerpts of his speech published by ByteDance on various social media platforms on Wednesday. “The LLM start-ups that have been doing well were basically established between 2018 and 2020”, said Liang, who took over as ByteDance’s CEO when fellow founder Zhang Yiming…