‘Cherry on the Cake’: How China Views the U.S. Crackdown on TikTok

Dan Wang has been a leading observer of contemporary China for years. As a tech analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm, and through his well-read newsletter, Wang has charted the country’s rise as a fast-growing high-tech economy and, more recently, its slowdown and rising tensions with the United States. Wang is now a visiting scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and writing a book about relations between the United States and China. He spoke with DealBook about how China views the latest U.S. crackdown on TikTok.…

Senate Targets China, Voting to Restrict Farmland Purchases and U.S. Investment

The Senate on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to block businesses based in China from purchasing farmland in the United States and place new mandates on Americans investing in the country’s national security industries, taking the first legislative steps of the new Congress to counter Beijing’s espionage activities and curtail its economic power. The provisions, which would need to clear the House to become law, are a far cry from more ambitious efforts to target China’s economy through export controls and undermine its intelligence gathering and influence operations in the United States…

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…

Chinese Censorship Is Quietly Rewriting the Covid-19 Story

Early in 2020, on the same day that a frightening new illness officially got the name Covid-19, a team of scientists from the United States and China released critical data showing how quickly the virus was spreading, and who was dying. The study was cited in health warnings around the world and appeared to be a model of international collaboration in a moment of crisis. Within days, though, the researchers quietly withdrew the paper, which was replaced online by a message telling scientists not to cite it. A few observers…

Why Some Scientists Choose China’s Space Station for Research

Seeking to burnish its prestige in the world, China is portraying its Tiangong orbital outpost as a space station that is available for scientists everywhere, not just for those who happen to live in other countries with established space programs. “We stand ready to conduct more international cooperation and exchanges with countries and regions committed to the peaceful use of outer space,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in April. For the International Space Station — a partnership between NASA, Russia, Canada, the European Space Agency…

Elon’s Two-Day War with Apple + How to Beat an A.I. Censor + S.B.F.’s ‘Bad Month’

Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon | Google Elon Musk accuses Apple of trying to sabotage Twitter. But after his visit with Apple’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, things are … good? Then, the New York Times reporter Paul Mozur on the tactics Chinese protesters are deploying to avoid the most sophisticated censorship apparatus in the world. Plus: S.B.F. says it’s been a “bad month.” Credits “Hard Fork” is hosted by Kevin Roose and Casey Newton and produced by Davis Land. The show is edited by Paula…

Biden Just Clobbered China’s Chip Industry

Semiconductors are among the most intricate tools that human beings have ever invented. They are also among the most expensive to make. The latest chips — the sort that power supercomputers and high-end smartphones — are densely packed with transistors so small they’re measured in nanometers. Perhaps the only things more ingenious than the chips themselves are the machines that are used to build them. These devices are capable of working on almost unimaginably tiny scales, a fraction of the size of most viruses. Some of the chip-building machines take…

As U.S. Hunts for Chinese Spies, University Scientists Warn of Backlash

That fear comes as China has started to experience a reverse brain drain. Over the last decade, a growing number of Chinese scientists have been lured back to the country by the promise of ample funding, impressive titles and national pride. More recently, scientists returning to China have cited a hostile environment in the United States as a factor. Westlake University, a research university in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, has recruited an impressive roster of talent, including many who once held faculty positions at top American schools. In…

Articles Involving Chinese DNA Research Are Retracted

Two respected scientific journals have retracted two articles that relied on the DNA samples of Uyghurs in western China after questions were raised about whether the subjects had provided their full consent. The two studies were published in 2019 by the International Journal of Legal Medicine and Human Genetics, both owned by the academic publisher Springer Nature. They listed numerous authors, including Li Caixia, chief forensic scientist at China’s Ministry of Public Security. The International Journal of Legal Medicine issued its retraction on Tuesday, and Human Genetics released its statement…