Tag: International Relations

China’s Country Garden Faces Winding Up Petition In Hong Kong

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Country Garden, China’s largest real estate developer as recently as 2022, said on Wednesday that a creditor had asked a Hong Kong court to liquidate its operations and pay off lenders, in the latest sign that China’s housing crisis continues unabated. Ever Credit Ltd., a Hong Kong lender, is petitioning the city’s High Court to shut down Country Garden. The court filing involves Country Garden’s failure to repay a loan of $204 million plus interest owed to Ever Credit, the real estate developer told the Hong Kong stock market. Ever…

Africa’s Donkeys Are Coveted by China. Can the Continent Protect Them?

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For years, Chinese companies and their contractors have been slaughtering millions of donkeys across Africa, coveting gelatin from the animals’ hides that is processed into traditional medicines, popular sweets and beauty products in China. But a growing demand for the gelatin has decimated donkey populations at such alarming rates in African countries that governments are now moving to put a brake on the mostly unregulated trade. The African Union, a body that encompasses the continent’s 55 states, adopted a continentwide ban on donkey skin exports this month in the hope…

As China Expands Its Hacking Operations, a Vulnerability Emerges

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The Chinese hacking tools made public in recent days illustrate how much Beijing has expanded the reach of its computer infiltration campaigns through the use of a network of contractors, as well as the vulnerabilities of its emerging system. The new revelations underscore the degree to which China has ignored, or evaded, American efforts for more than a decade to curb its extensive hacking operations. Instead, China has both built the cyberoperations of its intelligence services and developed a spider web of independent companies to do the work. Last weekend…

U.S. Campaign to Isolate Russia Shows Limits After 2 Years of War

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The Biden administration and European allies call President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a tyrant and a war criminal. But he enjoys a standing invitation to the halls of power in Brazil. The president of Brazil says that Ukraine and Russia are both to blame for the war that began with the Russian military’s invasion. And his nation’s purchases of Russian energy and fertilizer have soared, pumping billions of dollars into the Russian economy. The views of the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, encapsulate the global bind in which…

China’s Hacker Network: What to Know About the I-Soon Document Leak

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Leaked documents posted online last week show how the Chinese government is working with private hackers to obtain sensitive information from foreign governments and companies. The hackers worked for a security firm called I-Soon, part of a network of spies for hire working closely with Beijing. The leak showed how China’s top surveillance agency, the Ministry of Public Security, has increasingly recruited contractors to attack government targets and private companies as part of a cyberespionage campaign in Asia. The leak is likely to stoke fears among leaders in Washington who…

San Diego Zoo Could Be First in U.S. to Get Pandas From China Again

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Giant pandas from China could be arriving in the United States again soon, as Beijing is planning to continue its panda diplomacy with Western countries, according to a statement from the Chinese Embassy in the United States. The China Wildlife Conservation Association reached agreements with the San Diego Zoo in California and the Madrid Zoo in Spain “on a new round of international giant panda conservation cooperation,” according to the statement. The agreement would keep alive a more than five-decade old tradition of China lending pandas to American zoos in…

Leaked Files Show the Secret World of China’s Hackers for Hire

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A cache of documents from a Chinese security firm working for Chinese government agencies showed an extensive effort to hack many foreign governments and telecommunications firms, particularly in Asia, as well as targets of the country’s domestic surveillance apparatus. The documents, which were posted to a public website last week, revealed an eight-year effort to target databases and tap communications in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and elsewhere in Asia. The files also revealed a campaign to monitor closely the activities of ethnic minorities in China and online…

China’s Rush to Dominate A.I. Comes With a Twist: It Depends on U.S. Technology

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In November, a year after ChatGPT’s release, a relatively unknown Chinese start-up leaped to the top of a leaderboard that judged the abilities of open-source artificial intelligence systems. The Chinese firm, 01.AI, was only eight months old but had deep-pocketed backers and a $1 billion valuation and was founded by a well-known investor and technologist, Kai-Fu Lee. In interviews, Mr. Lee presented his A.I. system as an alternative to options like Meta’s generative A.I. model, called LLaMA. There was just one twist: Some of the technology in 01.AI’s system came…

Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Are Breaking Up With China

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DCM Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, began investing in China’s start-ups in 1999. The move reaped such blockbuster returns that in 2021, DCM said it planned to “double down” on its strategy of investing in China, the United States and Japan. Yet when DCM set out to raise money last fall for a new fund focused on very young companies and promoted its “cross-Pacific” expertise, the firm described plans to invest in the United States, Japan and South Korea, according to a fund-raising memo that was viewed by…

Low Prices Lure Hong Kongers to China

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Shuen Chun-wa, 81, and her husband hurried toward a green bus with two dozen other Hong Kong residents, dragging empty suitcases. They had purple tour stickers on their jackets and were headed to shop in Shenzhen, a bustling Chinese city that sits on the northern side of the border with Hong Kong. It was Ms. Shuen’s second trip to Shenzhen to find bargains in a year. Last time, she got dental implants. “You can count how much I need to pay,” she said. She paid $9,000 in Shenzhen for a…