Good morning. We’re covering China’s economic stimulus plan, President Biden’s push for war funds and extreme heat in India and Pakistan. China’s Covid stimulus plan As China’s lockdowns continue and new infections continue to spread in Beijing, the central government has laid out a wide-ranging economic stimulus plan to staunch expected losses. The government will subsidize businesses, pausing unemployment insurance payments if companies avoid mass layoffs, as well as electricity and internet charges. Young people graduating from college will be subsidized if they start their own businesses, since few jobs…
Tag: Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022)
Your Wednesday Briefing: Beijing’s Mass Testing Plan
Good morning. We’re covering Beijing’s scramble to quash the Omicron variant, Germany’s pivot to supplying Ukraine with heavy weaponry and a brownface controversy roiling Hong Kong. Mass testing in Beijing Faced with a growing number of coronavirus infections across Beijing, city officials are trying to test most of the Chinese capital’s 22 million residents in the hope of avoiding the pain of imposing a citywide lockdown like in Shanghai. Beijing is ordering mass testing across the city more quickly than in Shanghai, where officials started testing on a similar scale…
It will neither rattle Putin nor change our obligations in the war.
Just over a week ago, Joe Biden acted like Joe Biden and called the Russian campaign in Ukraine a “genocide” — leaping ahead of our major allies, our State Department and the available facts. The comment prompted head-shaking from people nervous about American escalation and praise from people seeking it (notably, the president of Ukraine). I am generally on the side of the nervous people: In a conflict with a nuclear power there is always an interest in reducing the existential stakes, and accusations of genocide should be made only…
It’s Not Just High Oil Prices. It’s a Full-Blown Energy Crisis.
Look to the Mediterranean, for an example. Europe’s decoupling from Russia will intensify the geopolitical tensions over gas around the sea. In the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey resents its exclusion from energy projects and has been increasingly confrontational in asserting its interests. When Turkey struck a deal with Libya in November 2019 to claim new maritime economic boundaries for itself in the eastern Mediterranean, European Union leaders denounced the agreement as a violation of Greek and Cypriot sovereignty and incompatible with United Nations law. Now the route for a pipeline to…
China and Russia Are Giving Authoritarianism a Bad Name
How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Russian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that Putin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated army and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precision weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank and logistic…
Faced With a Changed Europe, China Sticks to an Old Script
When European leaders recently pressed China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, to distance himself from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, he doggedly stuck to prepared remarks for the video summit, shutting down any opening for their demands. Speaking from the grandiose Great Hall of the People, he declared that China, as it had for years, welcomed the European Union as a pillar of an emerging multipolar world. But Mr. Xi also made clear that cajoling China about Russia was not the kind of assertiveness that he wanted. Their talks were…
U.S. Report Describes a Global Retreat on Human Rights
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Tuesday that governments around the world, including in Russia and China, grew more repressive last year, as the State Department released its annual report on global human rights. The department’s 2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices echoes President Biden’s warnings that authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. Its introduction cites “continued democratic backsliding on several continents, and creeping authoritarianism that threatens both human rights and democracy — most notably, at present, with Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine.” The report…
Your Wednesday Briefing: Putin’s defiance
Good morning. We’re covering Vladimir Putin’s defiant remarks, Sri Lanka’s default and China’s economic pivot. Putin’s defiance President Vladimir Putin of Russia said that peace talks with Ukraine had reached a “dead end.” He also said there was “no doubt” that Russia would achieve its goals in a campaign that has left cities in ruins, forced millions to flee their homes and raised disturbing accounts of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. Here are the latest updates. “What we are doing is helping people and saving people, on the one hand,…
China’s Echoes of Russia’s Alternate Reality Intensify Around the World
When Twitter put up a warning message atop a Russian government post denying civilian killings in Bucha, Ukraine, last week, China’s state media rushed to its defense. “On Twitter @mfa_russia’s statement on #Bucha got censored,” wrote Frontline, a Twitter account associated with China’s official English-language broadcaster, CGTN. In a Chinese Communist Party newspaper, an article declared that Russians had offered definitive evidence to prove that the lurid photos of bodies in the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, were a hoax. A party television station in Shanghai…
Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun.
Next, I’m describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one another’s economies. At the…