House Committee Targets U.C. Berkeley Program for China Ties

A congressional committee focused on national security threats from China said it had “grave concerns” about a research partnership between the University of California, Berkeley, and several Chinese entities, claiming that the collaboration’s advanced research could help the Chinese government gain an economic, technological or military advantage. In a letter sent last week to Berkeley’s president and chancellor, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party requested extensive information about the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, a collaboration set up in 2014 with China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and the Chinese city…

China Regroups to Snuff Out a Wave of Covid Protests

After China experienced its boldest and most widespread protests in decades, defying Xi Jinping, a Communist Party leader who prizes his reputation for ironclad authority, his security apparatus is scrambling to reassert control. Public security personnel and vehicles have blanketed potential protest sites. Police officers are searching some residents’ phones for prohibited apps. Officials are going to the homes of would-be protesters to warn them against illegal activities and are taking some away for questioning. Censors are scrubbing protest symbols and slogans from social media. On Monday, the demonstrations were…

At a China Covid Protest, a Mix of Giddy Elation and Anxiety

BEIJING — The crowd was hard to make out at first, a dark mass huddled along the Beijing riverbank after sunset. They stood quietly, almost nervously, dozens of people bundled in thick coats beside yellowed willow trees. At their center was a small altar, strewn with candles and flowers, for the 10 people who died in a fire in western China last week. Two hours later, that crowd had swelled into the hundreds, a mass of people marching and chanting for freedom, rule of law, an end to the three…

Memes, Puns and Blank Sheets of Paper: China’s Creative Acts of Protest

In Shanghai, a vigil grew into a street protest where many held blank sheets of white paper in a symbol of tacit defiance. In Beijing, students at Tsinghua University raised signs showing a math equation devised by the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann, whose surname in Chinese is a homonym for “free man.” And on China’s suppressed internet, where positive messages abound and negative ones are scrubbed, protesters resorted to irony: They posted walls of text filled with the Chinese characters for “yes,” “good” and “correct” to signal their discontent while…