Day: January 21, 2022

Biden Looks to Intel’s U.S. Investment to Buoy His China Agenda

Chin@Strategy

WASHINGTON — In celebrating a $20 billion investment by Intel in a new semiconductor plant in Ohio, President Biden sought on Friday to jump-start a stalled element of his economic and national security agenda: a huge federal investment in manufacturing, research and development in technologies that China is also seeking to dominate. With two other major legislative priorities sitting moribund in Congress — the Build Back Better Act and legislation to protect voting rights — Mr. Biden moved to press for another bill, and one that has significant bipartisan support.…

The Communist Party revisits its egalitarian roots

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Jan 22nd 2022 CHINESE NATIONALISTS and fans of liberal democracy do not often agree. Still, early this century, both groups sounded convinced of the subversive power of affluent Chinese buying American coffee. In 2007 a state television anchor growled that a Starbucks branch in the Forbidden City “trampled Chinese culture” (the branch closed the same year). In 2004 a New York Times columnist declared the Communist Party revolution “finished” once Starbucks entered China, because: “No middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot.”…

A film in Shanghai dialect is a surprise hit in China

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Jan 22nd 2022 BEIJING THERE ARE several reasons why “Aiqing Shenhua”, a new film released on Christmas Eve in Chinese cinemas, has surprised movie buffs. One is that the movie, whose English title is “B for Busy”, is a tender portrayal of relationships among a group of middle-aged Shanghai urbanites, yet stars Xu Zheng, a veteran actor more famous for raucous comedies. Another is that such a film, produced on a tiny budget and heavy on dialogue, with not a car chase or gun-battle in sight, has succeeded at the…

How Chinese propaganda films became watchable

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Jan 22nd 2022 IN 2021, THE year after China overtook America to become the world’s largest film market, “The Battle at Lake Changjin” became the highest-grossing film in Chinese history, and the second-highest of the year worldwide. It made over $900m, just behind “Spider-Man: No Way Home”. The eponymous battle took place in 1950 during the Korean war and saw Mao Zedong’s army inflict a heavy defeat on America. The film, which was directed by Chen Kaige, a leading light of the “fifth generation” of film-makers who sprang to global…

China Maritime Report No. 18: Chinese Special Operations in a Large-Scale Island Landing

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PLA special operations forces (SOF) would likely play important supporting roles in an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Their capabilities and training are geared towards several missions undertaken during the preparatory and main assault phases of the landing, including infiltration via special mission craft and helicopter, reconnaissance and targeting, obstacle clearance, strikes and raids, and extraction missions. While PLA SOF have made progress in recent years, several longstanding challenges could affect their performance in an island landing: integrating advanced special mission equipment for complex and dangerous missions, coordinating their operations with…

IMF warns China over cost of Covid lockdowns

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China, the world’s second largest economy, should review its zero-tolerance approach to the pandemic or risk damaging the global recovery, according to the head of International Monetary Fund. Kristalina Georgieva said Beijing should reassess the use of lockdowns to limit the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant since it became clear the harm to human health was less severe than the Delta variant. Speaking at the World Economic Forum on a virtual panel, she said that while the hardline approach had contained the pandemic in China for “quite some…

Zero-Covid Policy Shakes Hong Kong’s Economy and Its ‘Soul’

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HONG KONG — Perry Lam felt confident that his business had weathered the worst of the pandemic. Several rounds of bar closures in Hong Kong had dimmed the city’s vibrant nightlife, threatening to destroy his brewery. But things seemed better late last year. After the government’s relentless effort to stamp out the virus, there were no local infections, bars began ordering kegs of his lager again and money was coming in. “You saw the silver lining,” said Mr. Lam, 34. That changed this month when Omicron started spreading, and officials…

Is China Putting ‘Wolf Warriors’ on a Leash?

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Advertisement On December 20, 2021, former Chinese ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai delivered a biting keynote address to a symposium co-hosted by the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. In front of assembled dignitaries including Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister and state councilor, Cui criticized the current state of China’s diplomacy, warning against “carelessness, laziness, and incompetence.” He admonished his fellow diplomats to “always have the country at large in mind, and not always think about being an internet celebrity.” The comments were a thinly-veiled dig at the…

Morrison speaks out against China’s ‘economic coercion’ at Davos

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Scott Morrison has taken aim at China for “economic coercion”, foreign interference and cyber attacks in a speech to the Davos World Economic Forum. Without naming the source of “sharper geopolitical competition”, the Australian prime minister warned of increasing territorial disputes in the Indo-Pacific region and urged an end to protectionist measures directed at Australia. Australia has been the target of Chinese tariffs on key agricultural exports, such as barley and wheat, due to a long series of grievances including “interference in China’s Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan affairs” and…

MPs criticise cyber agency for not aiding China rights group after it was hacked

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Members of a cross-party China human rights group have accused Britain’s cybersecurity agency of “failing to respond” with help after their website was taken offline this week in an attack they fear came from Beijing. MPs from the Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China (Ipac) said the incident took place on Tuesday, days after the group had said publicly it was “deeply disturbed” by reports that an Anglo-Chinese lawyer had been trying to improperly influence parliamentarians in the UK. They complained the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) did not engage or…