Tag: Communist Party of China

China’s Covid Tsunami Recedes, Bringing Relief, Grief and Anxiety

Chin@Strategy

When China abruptly abandoned “zero Covid,” accelerating an onslaught of infections and deaths, many feared a prolonged tide rippling from cities into villages. Now, two months later, the worst seems to have passed, and the government is eager to shift attention to economic recovery. Doctors who were mobilized across China to treat a rush of Covid patients say in phone interviews that the number of patients they are now seeing has fallen. Towns and villages that had hunkered down under the surge of infections and funerals are stirring to life.…

Golf Course or Housing? A Patch of Green Divides Hong Kong

Chin@Strategy

On an autumn afternoon at the Hong Kong Golf Club, hundreds of dogs — pugs, Pomeranians, Shiba Inus — strolled the verdant grounds with their owners in tow, enjoying rare access to the range that charges new members a $2 million entry fee. But these impeccable greens, in the northern reaches of Hong Kong, have become an unlikely battleground. The Hong Kong Golf Club has been fighting a government proposal to carve out less than one-fifth of its 172 acres of land and redevelop it for public housing. The open…

Is This How a Cold War With China Begins?

Chin@Strategy

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ There are few issues on which the dominant consensus in Washington has changed as rapidly in recent years as it has on China. Donald Trump made taking on China a core pillar of his campaign and presidency. And while Joe Biden has toned down the harsh anti-China rhetoric of his predecessor, many of his administration’s policies have gone even further than Trump’s did. In October the Biden administration unveiled sweeping controls on advanced chip exports to China — a move that former Trump officials…

China Arrests ‘Zero Covid’ Protesters in Quiet Crackdown

Chin@Strategy

First, the accountant and the freelance writer were taken away. Then, the former tutor with a degree in English literature. And several days later, the police came for the editor at the Beijing publishing house. The four detained women were friends. They spent their free time in China’s capital as many curious, creative-minded young people did: hosting book clubs, watching movies, discussing social issues like feminism and L.G.B.T.Q. rights over barbecue. When protests against coronavirus restrictions broke out in November across China, including in Beijing, they attended. And now, they…

China’s Mad Dash Into a Strategic Island Nation Breeds Resentment

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Down a dirt road outside the Solomon Islands’ capital city, past Chinese construction projects and shops where Chinese merchants sell snacks, a tribal chief tried to explain what it feels like to have a rising superpower suddenly take an interest in a poor, forgotten place desperate for development. “At first,” said the chief, Peter Kosemu, 50, as he sat in the shade on Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands, “most people just wanted to see what was going on.” He and many others have watched China rush headlong into…

China Helped Raise My American Kids, and They Turned Out Fine

Chin@Strategy

When Covid was raging across the world a couple of years ago, I came across a picture online of an American woman wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, “I refuse to co-parent with the government” — a response to perceived government overreach regarding school mask mandates. I laughed out loud: My own kids were, in a way, co-parented by the Chinese government. My work in the fashion industry took my husband and me to Shanghai in 2006, where we spent the next 16 years and started a family. In China, government…

China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis

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The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say will be irreversible. The government said on Tuesday that 9.56 million people were born in China in 2022, while 10.41 million people died. It was the first time deaths had outnumbered births in China since the early 1960s, when the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s failed economic experiment, led to widespread famine and death. Births were down from 10.6 million in 2021, the…

With F.B.I. Search, U.S. Escalates Global Fight Over Chinese Police Outposts

Chin@Strategy

The nondescript, six-story office building on a busy street in New York’s Chinatown lists several mundane businesses on its lobby directory, including an engineering company, an acupuncturist and an accounting firm. A more remarkable enterprise, on the third floor, is unlisted: a Chinese outpost suspected of conducting police operations without jurisdiction or diplomatic approval — one of more than 100 such outfits around the world that are unnerving diplomats and intelligence agents. F.B.I. counterintelligence agents searched the building last fall as part of a criminal investigation being conducted with the…

From Disciplinarian to Cheerleader: Why China Is Changing Its Tone on Business

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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, used his annual New Year’s Eve address in 2021 to laud the patriotic achievements of the Chinese people. In a year marked by crackdowns on tech companies, curbs on borrowing by the country’s property firms, and a refusal to budge on restrictive Covid policies, Mr. Xi made no direct mention of the economy or business. In the first minute of his most recent address, Mr. Xi extolled the country’s economy, still the world’s second largest, and explained that China had cut taxes and fees as well…

China’s Covid Surge Threatens Villages as Lunar New Year Approaches

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The infections in Dadi Village, a corn farming community tucked between verdant hills in China’s remote southwest, started in early December when a handful of young people returned from jobs in big cities. The nearest hospital was an hour away, and few could afford the $7 bus fare there. The village clinic is not equipped with oxygen tanks or even an oximeter to detect if someone’s blood is dangerously deprived of oxygen. It quickly ran out of its stockpile of five boxes of fever medicine, so officials told sick residents…