Category: The Economist

America and China established full diplomatic relations on January 1st 1979. By the end of that month they had also signed the Science and Technology Co-operation Agreement (STA). The deal didn’t commit either side to much, but it laid out a shared desire for collaboration in these areas. Its terms call for renewal “by mutual agreement” every five years. For decades that happened with little fuss. Now, though, things are looking shaky. The deadline is August 27th. China wants to stay in the deal. America is seeking a sixth-month extension…

Rongjiang County, tucked away in the rainy hills of south-west China, has little going for it at first glance. The grey tiles covering houses in the county seat give it a rather drab feel. The area was one of the last in China to be declared free of extreme poverty. Locals often have to find work elsewhere, travelling to distant factories and construction sites. In 2019 a video went viral of three young children in Rongjiang begging their migrant-worker parents to stay with them. Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio…

“HONG KONG is becoming less and less relevant,” says a Western diplomat in the city. On the face of it, that is an odd claim. Lots of foreign governments take Hong Kong seriously, noting each step of the financial centre’s journey towards autocracy. Listen to this story.Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android. Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Only last month the governments of America, Australia and Britain formally protested when the authorities in Hong Kong announced bounties of HK$1m ($128,000) on eight democracy activists…

In the story “Luocha Haishi” a Chinese merchant gets lost at sea and ends up in a faraway land. The place is called Luocha, a word that refers to demons. But its people say they value beauty above all else, including in their leaders. So the merchant is shocked to find that the leaders have goblin-like faces. The higher their rank, the uglier they get. To win their favour, the merchant smears his own face with coal. The story, written by Pu Songling, a novelist during the Qing dynasty (1644–1912),…

THE dejected, shirtless man kneeling this week outside the head office of Country Garden, a troubled Chinese property giant, might easily have gone unnoticed—if, that is, guards had not tried to hide him behind a wall of large, red umbrellas. Still more security guards held up umbrellas to conceal a woman and a teenage girl, sitting on the ground beside the family’s luggage. Others blew whistles at anyone taking pictures. Across the road, Chaguan, who stumbled on this quiet human drama by chance, was briefly joined by three riot police…

IN JANUARY 2021 a fleet of Chinese fishing vessels approached the coast of Oman, apparently searching for squid. According to the ships’ automatic identification transponders, they stayed just outside Oman’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which grants it control of fishing rights up to 200 nautical miles (370km) from its shores. But radio signals from the ships, detected by commercial satellites, told a different story. They indicated that the ships were operating within Oman’s EEZ in a suspected illegal raid on the Gulf state’s valuable squid stocks. That was an early…

In the tea-growing hills of southern China, bonds of blood make villages strong. Most residents of Lüchuwu, a village in the pine-clad highlands of Fujian province, share just two surnames between them. The clout of the Su family, in particular, is shown by a white-walled, red-pillared shrine bearing the inscription: “Su Clan Ancestral Hall”. Yet if family ties bind places like Lüchuwu, those bonds are also conditional. A woman may be born and brought up in a village that her ancestors built. But if she marries a man from elsewhere,…

ON THE ARID north China plain around Beijing, people usually complain there is too little water, rather than too much. But in recent weeks a typhoon named Doksuri made its way unusually far inland. On July 28th the storm made landfall on China’s eastern coast. Its remnants arrived in northern China the next day, bringing rains heavier than any recorded since China’s last imperial dynasty. Beijing and the surrounding province of Hebei were hardest hit. In just four days 331mm of rain fell on the capital, as much as it…

IN THE WINTER of 1978, two years after the death of the Communist leader Mao Zedong, Chinese intellectuals began pasting political posters on a wall near Beijing’s Forbidden City. Chinese authorities tolerated this “Democracy Wall” at first. But they soon clamped down. A curious inversion of this episode unfolded in London around August 6th when Chinese art students daubed Communist Party slogans on a wall in Brick Lane, a street famed for its curry houses and arts scene. Spray-painted in bright red paint against a white background were 24 large…

AN EXPLOSION OF anti-government discontent in Hong Kong in 2019 prompted China to impose a draconian national-security law on the territory to prevent further protests. Officials say this has helped: Hong Kong has achieved a “major transition from chaos to order”, they insist. But even after thousands of arrests and numerous trials, both under the new law and dredged-up statutes from the colonial era, the authorities are twitchy. Increasingly, they warn of “soft resistance” that could trigger fresh unrest. A new phase may be unfolding in Hong Kong’s war on…