Exports to the US from Chinese online shops such as Temu and Shein have plunged in the face of Donald Trump’s trade war, as shipping from China to the EU has increased. Official Chinese data showed its total e-commerce shipping dropped 65% by volume in the first three months of the year, but rose 28% in Europe. The sharp fall comes amid reports that the fast-fashion discount platform Shein is considering a restructuring in the US to circumnavigate tariffs. According to the Financial Times, one workaround would be for Shein…
Tag: Asia Pacific
China manufacturing activity plummets amid Trump tariff war
China’s factory activity slowed in April, with Beijing blaming “sharp changes” in the global economy as it fights a mounting trade war with the United States. Punishing US tariffs that reached 145% on many Chinese products came into force in April, and Beijing responded with 125% duties on imports from the US. Chinese exports soared more than 12% last month as businesses rushed to get ahead of the punishing tariffs. The impact of the measures began to show in official data on Wednesday, with the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) –…
Hedging our bets: the existential questions facing Australia’s next government in unpredictable times
The world is a more dangerous place. Global conflicts have doubled over the past five years, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (Acled). In 2024 alone, one person in eight across the world was exposed to conflict: political violence increased by a quarter, by factors worse in countries that held elections. Australian political leaders of all stripes couch it in shared aphorism: the most “challenging strategic circumstances since WWII”. Violence, of course, never went away. It ebbed in some periods, but the myth of the triumph of liberal…
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma implicated in intimidation campaign by Chinese regime
The Chinese regime enlisted Jack Ma, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba, in an intimidation campaign to press a businessman to help in the purge of a top official, documents seen by the Guardian suggest. The businessman, who can be named only as “H” for fear of reprisals against his family still in China, faced a series of threats from the Chinese state, in an attempt to get him to return home from France, where he was living. They included a barrage of phone calls, the arrest of his sister, and…
‘The eighth wonder of the world’: China’s terracotta warriors to march on Australia for blockbuster show
Two thousand years ago, in a bid to conquer death itself, China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang commissioned a city of the dead: a 49 sq km mausoleum guarded by an army of clay warriors, built to defend his tomb for eternity. When farmers near Xi’an unearthed the first clay head in 1974, they cracked open one of humanity’s greatest archaeological mysteries, with more than 8,000 Terracotta Warriors discovered over the last 50 years. Now, fragments of that dream of immortality rise again – this time in Perth, where the…
Student rescued from Mount Fuji twice in one week
A university student has been rescued from the slopes of Mount Fuji twice in the space of a week – the second time during an attempt to retrieve his mobile phone. The hapless climber, a 27-year-old Chinese national who has not been named, was airlifted from Japan’s highest mountain last week, only to be the subject of a second search four days later. It emerged that he had returned to the scene of his first rescue to retrieve his phone, Japanese media reported. The student, who lives in Japan, was…
Boonie Bears: Future Reborn review – kiddie Chinese eco-fable is like Mad Max on mushrooms
When George Michael recorded Careless Whisper, there can be no doubt his ultimate ambition for it would have been to soundtrack a garish animated sequence in which two anthropomorphic bears gambol through a prairie of giant fungus experiencing ecstatic visions as hallucinogenic spores rain down on them. Such is the frantic way of this Chinese cartoon franchise, as relentless and exhausting as ever in its 11th feature-film instalment. Five minutes in, before the credits, it has crammed in a post-apocalyptic prologue, oodles of eco-babble, a time-travelling tyke and an avalanche.…
Revealed: online campaign urged far right to attack China’s opponents in UK
One morning last August, a troubling message appeared in a social media group for Hongkongers in the UK. It was already a tense time to be an immigrant. Rioters, propelled by false claims online that the man who had murdered children in Southport was an asylum seeker, were descending on hotels housing refugees, trying to burn them alive. The message alerted the Hongkongers to posts on far-right channels suggesting some new targets. “They all help refugees who come to the UK to take resources,” one of them read. When Finn…
China and Philippines display competing flags on disputed South China Sea sandbank
China and the Philippines have displayed their national flags in competing photo opportunities on a disputed sandbank in the South China sea, ratcheting up longstanding regional tensions between the two countries. The dispute played out at Sandy Cay, which is part of the disputed Spratly Islands, and comes days after the US and the Philippines launched their annual joint military drills called “Balikatan”, or “shoulder to shoulder”, which this year will include an integrated air and missile defence simulation for the first time. The latest confrontation appears to have begun…
US treasury secretary says ‘there is a path’ with China over tariff negotiations
The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said “there is a path” to an agreement with China over tariffs after he had interactions with his Chinese counterparts last week in Washington. “I had interaction with my Chinese counterparts, but it was more on the traditional things like financial stability, global economic early warnings,” Bessent told ABC News’s This Week on Sunday, explaining that he spoke to the Chinese during International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington. “I don’t know if President Trump has spoken with President Xi,” he added. On Friday, President…