Category: The Diplomat

Waving Chinese national flags and singing the military anthem are sights more commonly associated with state-sanctioned patriotic rallies. Yet on the night of August 18 along Chongqing’s Nanbin Road, young men used these patriotic symbols while marching against a seemingly bizarre enemy: teenage idol trainees of a boy-band talent agency and their female fans. What began as a localized dispute outside the headquarters of Shidai Fengjun (also known as “Time Fengjun,” or TF Entertainment), an agency that helped pioneer China’s idol-trainee industry, rapidly escalated into a prolonged public disturbance. For…

In the first six months of 2026, China received 22.91 million visits from foreign nationals, up 20.4 percent year on year. The uptick is the result of China’s visa-free policy, which accounts for 77.7 percent of all foreign arrivals.  Earlier this year, China announced that starting February 17, 2026 all ordinary passport holders from Canada and the United Kingdom can travel to its mainland for up to 30 days without a visa. The expansion in China’s unilateral visa-exemption program to include Canada and the U.K. followed recent visits to Beijing…

Law has become an increasingly important arena for international competition. Over the past six years, China has introduced a series of foreign-related laws and regulations to counter foreign sanctions, intervention, and long-arm jurisdiction, collectively constituting what Chinese policy discourse calls the “three-anti”  legal framework (“三反”法治体系). While Beijing’s sanctions and export controls have attracted much of the international attention over the past few years, the blocking and judicial remedy mechanisms under this framework are now also being put into practice. The latest case came on August 19, when China’s Ministry of…

Faced with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), U.S. legislation that presumes any goods made in Xinjiang involved forced labor, as well as with new European forced labor rules, China has not retreated. Instead, Beijing is building its own corporate responsibility and supply chain standards, limiting how some Western audit and standards systems operate in China, and promoting China-led standards abroad. China’s Ministry of Commerce recently accused the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) of assisting U.S. sanctions against China over alleged forced labor in Xinjiang and barred Chinese organizations and…

China’s influence operations are expanding across the Indo-Pacific. In Japan, disinformation circulated on social media during the House of Representatives election in February 2026 in what appeared to be a coordinated Chinese influence operation. Posts on X systematically spread memes promoting narratives such as “Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae is a militarist” and “Japan cannot win in a Taiwan contingency.” The Japanese text bore traces of simplified Chinese, some meme images resembled those used in Chinese government affiliated media, and the narratives aligned with Chinese government talking points — all pointing…

On June 3, Burmese-American scholar U Min Zin disappeared in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan, where he was set to attend an academic conference. On June 12, shortly before Myanmar’s ruler, Min Aung Hlaing, arrived in China for a state visit, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian confirmed that Zin had been arrested and accused of endangering Chinese national security. No further details were provided.  On August 20, the U.S. State Department officially classified Zin as “wrongfully detained.” Assistant Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs Dylan Johnson pledged that…

The U.S. State Department yesterday designated Myanmar scholar and U.S. citizen Min Zin as “wrongfully detained,” two months after his arrest in China on espionage charges. The move was announced by Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary of state for global public affairs, who said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had made the designation after “an extensive review of the circumstances” surrounding Min Zin’s arrest on June 3. “The safety and security of U.S. citizens is the State Department’s top priority,” Johnson said. “We will continue to advocate for Mr. Zin…

In November 2026, the European Union will prohibit exports of potentially recyclable plastic to non-OECD countries. The EU labeled these exports “waste” and described the cross-border flows as “environmental exploitation.”  At the same time that the EU is shutting down the trade, China has reversed course and committed to expanding the movement of recyclable plastic across its border. For most of the past decade, China was closed to imports of plastic waste entirely. The EU and China seem to be moving in different directions. Europe’s efforts concentrate on boosting demand…

On August 17, Xi Jinping delivered a speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary and Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who passed away in 2022. The speech unsurprisingly was laudatory. Jiang, Xi stated, was “a great Marxist,” “a great proletarian revolutionary, politician, military strategist, diplomat,” and “the core of the party’s third generation central leadership collective.”  Yet the speech was more than a mere commemoration. Rather, it exhibited a long-noted tendency of the CCP to “make the past serve the present” through…

In early 2024, a grandmotherly figure known as “Wang Po”（王婆）became a national sensation in China for her folksy matchmaking performances in Kaifeng. Less than two years later, the country’s online matchmaking scene has undergone an unexpected gender reversal. A new generation of male matchmaking influencers, including Aoye（鳌烨）, Wukong（悟空）, Dachao（大超）, and Tianshu（天书）, has taken over the spotlight. These men have little in common with the traditional image of the matchmaker. Often dressed in business attire and speaking in the language of markets, they assess participants’ appearance, education, family background, income, and…