Day: May 30, 2024

In a village near the ancient Silk Road town of Yarkand, on the edge of the Taklamakan desert in the far-western region of Xinjiang, the gongzuodui has been busy. The term means “work team”. In Xinjiang it refers to a group of officials dispatched to a poor rural area to change the way Muslim residents live and think. In this village, called Konabazar, the team has been engaged in “ideological mobilisation”. The aim is to persuade reluctant farmers to head off and do other forms of work. The Economist

IN LATE 2022 the Chinese government dropped its strict controls over the spread of covid-19. That was good for the economy. Factories started humming again and more cars returned to the roads. For the same reasons, it was bad for the climate. In 2023 China’s carbon-dioxide emissions surged by 4.7%, to a record 12.6bn tonnes. China accounted for over a third of the world’s emissions last year. The Economist

The three presiding judges wasted little time in presenting their verdicts in the case of the “Hong Kong 47”, members of the city’s pro-democracy political opposition. Over the course of two minutes on May 30th, the justices declared 14 of the defendants guilty of conspiracy to commit subversion in the biggest national-security trial in the city’s history. Thirty-one had already pleaded guilty. Two were acquitted. The Economist