Tag: Communist Party of China

Lam Wing-Kee, Hong Kong Bookseller Who Defied Authorities, Dies at 70

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Lam Wing-kee, a bookseller in Hong Kong whose abduction and imprisonment by Chinese authorities, forced confession to selling forbidden books and subsequent public stand against his detention made him an international cause célèbre, died on July 2 in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. He was 70. Mr. Lam’s death in a hospital, from lung cancer, was announced by the ministry of culture in Taiwan, where Mr. Lam had been living in exile since 2019. For two decades, Mr. Lam’s celebrated Hong Kong storefront, Causeway Bay Bookstore, specialized in titles that…

Expelled from China

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China is one of the biggest stories in the world — and one of the most complex. That’s why The New York Times has always tried to have correspondents on the ground who can get under the surface and report out the nuances. But the Chinese authorities have long been wary of foreign journalists. They restrict their access, surveil their movements and sometimes expel them outright. My colleague Vivian Wang, our brilliant China correspondent, recently had her visa revoked. During her time in the country, she talked to a cross-section…

What Americans Need to Understand About China

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This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. Since 2012, Xi Jinping has been the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He has consolidated power to a level very few people ever expected, and under his rule, China has strengthened technologically, diplomatically and militarily. It is now widely understood to be an industrial juggernaut on a scale the world has never seen, in a way the world does not quite know how to respond to. But Xi’s…

We Returned From China. We Realized Our Century’s Biggest Challenge.

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Humanity is inching along a precarious tightrope. Our world is in the midst of deciding how the artificial intelligence revolution will unfold and what limits should be drawn. Too much caution could waste A.I.’s promise of faster economic growth, greater scientific discovery and more prosperity. Too little caution could unleash labor-market chaos and social disorder. Balance matters. If we get the balance between control and growth wrong at any point, we’ll fall into the gorge below. And no country is guaranteed to get to the opposite side. This is our…

As Xi Looks to Extend His Rule, He Leans on a Longtime Ally

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As China’s leader, Xi Jinping, forges toward a fourth term in power, he confronts a dilemma common to aging autocrats: testing and recruiting a rising generation of loyal officials while ensuring his own dominance. To manage this looming challenge, he is leaning on Cai Qi, a longtime deputy who is probably the most influential official in Mr. Xi’s inner circle. Tall, silver-haired, and constantly at Mr. Xi’s side, Mr. Cai is a supercharged chief of staff to his leader. Mr. Cai holds multiple leading roles, including in national security and…

China Says Pilot Who Flew Into Skyscraper Had Thoughts of Death

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The authorities in Beijing said Thursday that the pilot who flew a small plane into the city’s tallest building last week was a 66-year-old man suffering from insomnia and anxiety and who had expressed a desire to end his life in journal entries. The pilot crashed his two-seat sport aircraft into Citic Tower, the headquarters of one of China’s biggest state-owned financial conglomerates, in a busy Beijing business district last Friday during evening rush hour. In a sign of the authorities’ sensitivity over an event that raised questions about the…

China’s Plan to Save Jobs From A.I.

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A Chinese lab recently unveiled another astonishingly powerful and astonishingly cheap artificial intelligence model. GLM-5.2, produced by Z.ai, is almost as good as Anthropic’s latest model but runs at less than a tenth of its price. The A.I. race between the U.S. and China has been front of mind at the highest levels of government in both countries. But creating the most potent model is not the only — and maybe not even the best — way to measure A.I. success. Today I write about an area that’s had less…

Former Chinese Billionaire and Bannon Associate Is Sentenced for Fraud

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Guo Wengui, a Chinese businessman who transformed himself from a Beijing insider into an anti-Communist crusader and ally of the American far right, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Monday for defrauding investors, including many of his own fervent supporters, of hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Guo, who had made a fortune in Beijing as a real estate developer and had forged an alliance with a corrupt intelligence official there, fled China in 2015, settling in a $68 million Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park. There, he took…

As Chinese Tech Pulls Ahead, U.S. Fears It Will Become Dependent

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At a factory in southeastern China, robot arms spin balletically, winding long strips of metal into rolls and shaping them into bricks that are destined to become batteries. As workers in white coveralls watch, the nascent batteries are packaged into aluminum cases and, as workers put it, “given life” — endowed with an electrical charge that will eventually power cars and data centers across the world. The site, owned by Contemporary Amperex Technology Company Ltd., or CATL, is the world’s largest cluster of battery factories, and the most advanced. Inside…

China Arrests U.S. Scholar on Spying Charge

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Chinese security officers have arrested an American citizen who studies politics in Myanmar, an authoritarian nation on China’s southwest border, and accused him of endangering national security, according to people with knowledge of the arrest. The U.S. citizen, U Min Zin, was arrested in early June, the people said on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive diplomacy surrounding the previously unreported arrest. He disappeared on June 3 while in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, which borders Myanmar. American diplomats visited him on Friday. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman…