News on China Archives - Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research | Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

News on China | No. 40

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 07:00:38 +0000

19 September 2026

About 10 min read.

Lula’s Special Adviser Celso Amorim Visits China as Beijing Highlights “High Level of Political Trust”

On 16 September, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Brazilian President Lula’s Special Adviser Celso Amorim in Beijing, where Amorim delivered a letter from Lula to Xi Jinping. Wang called for stronger strategic coordination between China and Brazil and closer cooperation within the Global South. The two sides discussed bilateral ties and cooperation in artificial intelligence, supercomputing, space and critical minerals. Beijing reiterated its principle of non-interference in Brazil’s internal affairs and expressed hope that the country’s elections will proceed in a stable and peaceful manner.

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US$10.8 Billion Pinglu Canal Opens, Cutting 560 Kilometres from Southwest China’s Sea Route

Thirty general cargo ships made the first transits on 16 September, sailing from ports in Nanning and Qinzhou, Guangxi. The 134.2-kilometre waterway cost 72.7 billion yuan (US$10.8 billion) and can accommodate vessels of up to 5,000 tonnes. As part of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, the canal connects China’s inland river network with the Beibu Gulf, shortening routes to the sea by more than 560 kilometres. Guangxi authorities expect logistics costs to fall by 18 to 30 percent. China and ASEAN have been each other’s largest trading partners for six consecutive years, with trade rising 18.2 percent in the first half of 2026.

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Hong Kong Unveils First Five-Year Plan, Targeting 3% of GDP for Innovation After 2030

Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee presented the city’s first five-year plan to the Legislative Council on 16 September. Priorities include accelerating the Northern Metropolis, a technology-focused development near Shenzhen planned for 2.5 million residents and 650,000 jobs. The plan also targets an increase in domestic expenditure on innovation activities from 1.63 percent of GDP in 2024 to 3 percent after 2030. Lee said the plan sets out a strategic direction rather than a planned economy.

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State Council Orders Hazard Checks in Key Industries After Qingdao Shipyard Fire Kills 25

Premier Li Qiang chaired the cabinet meeting in Beijing on Friday 11 September. Accidents had ‘occurred frequently in recent times, with profound lessons to be learned’, the meeting said. It ordered an in-depth investigation into the causes and resolute action against violations of laws and regulations. The session also reviewed computing networks and the upgrading of ageing reservoirs, and approved a draft revision to the Regulation on the Administration of Foundations.

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QatarEnergy Pays US$4 Billion for Bul Hanine Project, China’s Largest Offshore Contract Abroad

Fabrication began on 15 September at a Qingdao base in Shandong province, where a CNOOC subsidiary cut the first steel. COOEC is prime contractor for more than 60 offshore facilities and 40 subsea pipelines and cables, plus over 130,000 tonnes of steel. QatarEnergy is paying for the entire chain, from design and procurement to offshore installation and commissioning, with completion scheduled for mid-2031.

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Cost-Accounting Rules Make Below-Cost Selling Measurable, Pushing Firms from Price to Quality

The National Development and Reform Commission and the market regulator released the notice on 10 September. Whether a producer has sold below cost is judged in principle against its individual cost for the specific product. Where that cannot be calculated, industry associations work out an industry average, and a certain downward margin is allowed. Existing law barred low-price dumping without saying how to calculate it, and the aim is competition on quality and innovation.

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Carbon Market Expands Beyond Power to Steel, Cement and Aluminium, Reaching 3,680 Emitters

Heavy industry entered the national scheme for the first time in 2025, ending a single-sector design in place since July 2021. Around 8.3 billion tonnes of CO2 now fall under the market, more than 65 percent of the national total. Annual trading volume hit a record 235 million tonnes in 2025, up 24.36 percent year on year. All major industrial sectors are due to join by 2027.

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Digital Village Plan Sets Eight 2030 Targets Spanning Farm Technology and Rural Livelihoods

The Cyberspace Administration of China and two ministries released the five-year roadmap on 11 September. Its 24 tasks across five areas run from smart breeding and seed production zones to village delivery stations. Digital education, digital healthcare and digital finance carry equal weight in the text. Rural internet penetration is set to reach 75 percent by 2030, and county cultural centres to run 170,000 online activities, up from 151,600.

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AI Security Governance Framework 3.0 Released as Beijing Police Warn of Voice-Cloning Fraud

The 2026 Cybersecurity Week opened on 14 September in Jinan, east China’s Shandong province, themed on safeguarding cybersecurity in the intelligent era. Version 3.0 of the AI security governance framework was released at the opening ceremony. Beijing police warned in the same week that fraudsters keep silent on calls to capture a few seconds of speech, then clone the answerer’s voiceprint with AI to ask relatives for money. Officers advise saying nothing, counting to three and hanging up.

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China Presents First Far-Side Lunar Sample to UN in Vienna for Permanent Public Display

Chang’e-6 collected 1,935.3 grams from the South Pole-Aitken Basin in 2024, material no earlier mission had reached. A piece of that return was presented to the United Nations in Vienna on 14 September 2026. The UN Office for Outer Space Affairs director, Aarti Holla-Maini, said the rare far-side material now ‘belongs to everyone’. Permanent display puts it before thousands of students, delegates and visitors each year.

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Embodied Intelligence Robot Technician Gains Official Status as China Drafts Skill Standards

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security released the latest batch of new roles on 9 September, adding 11 occupations and 23 job specialties. Five of the 11 are classified as digital occupations and three as green, lifting national totals to 113 and 142. National standards will follow, guiding vocational education, skills training and talent assessment. The ministry expects a sizable shortage of digitally skilled workers, and says recognition will spur training.

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World’s First Pterosaur Museum Opens on Xinjiang’s Gobi with 3D Eggs and Embryos

Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) researchers spent more than two decades on rescue excavations in the fossil-rich Hami region. Their finds went on display on 13 September in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, including the world’s first three-dimensionally preserved pterosaur eggs and embryos. Six oval halls cover 4,600 square metres and, seen from above, resemble a clutch of eggs in the desert. The exhibits recreate life roughly 130 million years ago, now open to the public.

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Sirens and 14 Bell Strikes Mark 95 Years Since the September 18 Incident

The commemoration opened on Friday morning at the torn calendar-page monument in Shenyang. Japanese forces caused an explosion nearby in 1931, blamed Chinese troops and attacked them. The warning bell was struck once for each of the 14 years of resistance that followed. Cities across Liaoning province then sounded three-minute air-raid sirens at 9:18 a.m., and drivers stopped and pressed their horns.

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News on China | No. 39

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 07:00:32 +0000

12 September 2026

About 10 min read.

Xi reaffirms ties with North Korea as US, Japan and South Korea hold military drills

On 9 September, President Xi Jinping reaffirmed Beijing’s commitment to strategic ties with Pyongyang, calling the relationship an ‘unshakable’ policy and describing China and North Korea as friendly socialist neighbors that ‘stand side by side and share joys and difficulties.’ In 2026, ties advanced with Xi’s June visit to Pyongyang, the resumption of passenger rail services after six years, and progress on the Yalu River Bridge. Meanwhile, the US, Japan and South Korea are holding the Freedom Edge military exercise through 11 September, which Pyongyang condemned as a provocation, amid growing tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

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Xi to Attend BRICS Summit as India and China Prepare Successive Presidencies

Xu Feihong, Beijing’s ambassador in New Delhi, wrote in The Hindu on 7 September that the two countries will hold the rotating chair in succession. President Xi Jinping will attend the 12–13 September summit, his first visit to India in seven years. Sound coordination between the two chairs, Xu said, would safeguard the common interests of developing countries.

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Over One Billion Voters Set to Elect 2.6 Million Grassroots Deputies Across China

Turnout in the round that ended in 2022 reached 86.49 percent at county level and 85.63 percent at township level. That meant 921 million ballots for county congresses and 623 million for township congresses. County and township are the only tiers citizens fill by direct ballot, and their deputies are tasked with conveying public views and resolving practical problems. Xinhua describes the exercise as one of the world’s largest democratic practices.

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Import Growth Outpaces Exports for a Sixth Month as Zero-Tariff Access Reaches 63 Countries

The General Administration of Customs reported on 8 September that August goods trade reached US $683.8 billion, up 26.3 percent in dollar terms. For a sixth consecutive month, import growth outran exports, 28.2 percent against 25.0 percent. China has removed import duties for 63 countries and cut its average tariff to 7.3 percent. It has been the world’s second-largest import market for 17 consecutive years, an opening for Global South exporters.

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China’s Central Bank Says It Never Sought a Surplus, Urges Deficit Economies to Adjust Too

The G20 finance meeting in Asheville ended without a communiqué. All members present except China backed a US chair’s statement telling countries with excessive and persistent external surpluses to curb their overreliance on exports. Pan Gongsheng, the governor of the People’s Bank of China, answered that the country has never deliberately pursued a trade surplus. He urged deficit economies to cut fiscal deficits and raise savings, and surplus economies to promote consumption and investment growth.

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Solar Capacity Overtakes Coal for First Time as China Supplies over 80% of World’s Modules

The National Energy Administration announced the milestone on 1 September, drawing on official figures for the end of July 2026. Installed photovoltaic (PV) power stood at 1.286 billion kilowatts against coal’s 1.285 billion. Output is another matter: solar holds 31.5 percent of installed capacity but supplied only 13 percent of electricity consumption in January-July. China supplies over 80 percent of the world’s PV modules, putting that transition within reach of countries that cannot manufacture it.

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World’s First Humanoid Robot for Hybrid Crop Breeding Automates Pollination Long Done by Hand

The Chinese Academy of Sciences released GEAIR 2.0 on 4 September at the 33rd China Beijing Seed Industry Conference. Developers put stigma recognition at 92.8 percent, up from 85 percent, and demonstrated a tomato pollination in under 10 seconds. Xu Cao’s team gene-edited the flower itself, making it male-sterile with a stigma the robot can reach. Manual crossing accounts for over 25 percent of fresh-market tomato breeding costs in China.

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Six Agencies Issue Rural Investment Plan Covering Bonds, Credit, Insurance and Private Capital

The text was made public on 7 September and carries no aggregate spending figure. Its one quantified target is a 2030 deadline for the mechanism itself, aligning it with the 15th Five-Year Plan period. Government funding retains the leading role, with bonds, loans and insurance leveraged alongside non-government capital. Price and subsidy policy must now move in step with those funding channels.

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Ministry Plan Targets 9,800 EFLOPS of Intelligent Computing and Adaptation to Domestic Chips

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a five-year plan for the information and communications industry on 7 September. Intelligent computing capacity is to rise from 1,590 EFLOPS (each a quintillion operations per second) in 2025 to 9,800 by 2030, roughly a sixfold increase. The plan’s computing task pairs that target with greater efforts to adapt infrastructure to domestically produced chips. Capacity had already reached 2,185 EFLOPS by end-June 2026, up 177 percent year on year.

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BeiDou’s 7,569 Ground Stations Open Their Data to Industry While Staying Publicly Owned

The Ministry of Natural Resources and the National Data Administration announced the arrangement on 4 September. Officials call it a shift from an underused public resource to a compliant, tradable asset, opened to key industries under state supervision. The network’s 420 national, 3,293 provincial and 3,856 coordinated stations refine China’s own satellite navigation for autonomous driving and urban governance. Ministry chief planner Zhang Bing called it a replicable model for managing public data in other sectors.

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Algorithm Governance Widens from Eight Platforms to 25 in Push for Gig Workers’ Social Security

About 200 million people work in flexible employment, 84 million in new forms – 21 percent of the workforce. Zhao Shitang, a vice-minister at the Communist Party of China’s Society Work Department, announced the expansion on 9 September. Unreasonable order assignment and opaque pricing have been addressed, and some localities now pause the delivery timer at red lights. A separate occupational injury insurance scheme covered nearly 30 million workers by June 2026.

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Chinese Malls and a Metro Operator Hand Prime Advertising Space to National Role Models

A 7.8-metre lightbox of rocket scientist Qian Xuesen replaced a paid commercial poster in Heze, Shandong, on 7 August. The mall agreed the swap with an advertising company, and no national order required it. Similar displays reached Anhui, Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi and Henan. Zhengzhou Metro then gave six honourees three major interchange stations, among them hybrid-rice researcher Yuan Longping and Nobel laureate Tu Youyou.

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News on China | No. 38

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:00:43 +0000

5 September 2026

About 10 min read.

Modi, Xi and Putin Defend Multipolar Order as Russia Offers China Permanent Visa-Free Travel

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation marked its 25th anniversary at a Bishkek summit on 31 August and 1 September 2026. Narendra Modi urged the leaders to leave ‘endless war’ behind and move towards its end. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, meeting on 31 August, pressed for an equal and orderly multipolar world. Putin offered to make the reciprocal 30-day China-Russia visa-free regime permanent, citing a 43% rise in bilateral tourism in the first half of 2026.

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China Steps Up Emergency Aid to Nepal with Third Airlift and Rescue Teams

A third shipment of emergency supplies reached Kathmandu on 3 September, including tents, blankets, mortuary refrigerators, medical protective gear and satellite communication equipment. Chinese forensic experts also arrived to assist with victim identification, while Xizang sent two Bailey bridges to help restore access. The shipment followed a second airlift carrying drones, water purification gear and genetic testing equipment. Together, the first two airlifts delivered 55.8 tonnes of aid, including 13,200 relief items. China has provided US $2 million in emergency aid, while the Red Cross Society donated US $200,000. Nepal recorded around 1,300 dead and 4,800 missing.

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China Quits Gwangju Biennale over ‘Taiwan Pavilion’ Name but Credits Seoul’s One-China Stance

Since June, organisers had listed the exhibition under an institutional acronym, drawing ‘political censorship’ accusations from the participating artists in Taiwan, China. The biennale’s foundation restored ‘Taiwan Pavilion’ in late August, and China’s embassy called that a violation of the one-China principle. It credited Seoul’s one-China position, faulting ‘a very small number of South Korean politicians and social groups’. Seoul called the naming a cultural-sphere decision unrelated to policy, while Beijing said ties are on the ‘right track’.

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Regular Aid and Monitoring Enter Rural Revitalisation to Prevent Large-Scale Poverty Relapse

A joint inquiry on 26 August put lawmakers’ questions to Vice Premier Liu Guozhong and senior ministry officials. Liu said regular support should be incorporated into the rural revitalisation strategy, with targeted monitoring to prevent a large-scale return to poverty. Per capita income in counties lifted out of poverty reached 18,627 yuan (US $2,772) in 2025, growing 8.2 percent a year since 2020. Employment among people lifted out of poverty has stayed above 30 million for five consecutive years.

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Coast Guard Enhances Huangyan Dao Patrols to Strengthen Management and Safeguard Sovereignty

Rules published in August prohibit unauthorised fishing, mining and the collection of corals and giant clams inside a national nature reserve. Coast guard drills covered search and seizure, interdiction of forced entry and forced towing. Patrols in Huangyan Dao’s territorial sea have since been enhanced, with offending ships regulated under the law. The coast guard says the patrols further strengthen orderly management of the waters and safeguard China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests.

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Foreign Investors Hold Under 2% of Onshore Bonds as Hidden Local Debt Halves in Two Years

A State Council report published on 31 August put total government borrowing at 102.5 trillion yuan (US $15.27 trillion) at end-2025. Within that, off-balance-sheet local liabilities fell to 6.5 trillion yuan (US $968 billion) from 14.3 trillion yuan (US $2 trillion) at end-2023. A 10 trillion yuan (US $1.49 trillion) swap package launched in late 2024 drove the fall. Most of the debt is owed to domestic, state-backed lenders, so a sudden crisis remains unlikely.

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South-South Trade Deepens as China and ASEAN Cross US $1.05 Trillion for the First Time

Vice Minister of Commerce Yan Dong announced the 2025 total on 1 September. In January–July 2026 the two sides exchanged US $744.41 billion, up 24.7 percent and equal to 21.8 percent of China’s foreign trade. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has now been China’s biggest trading partner for six successive years. The wider Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is the world’s largest trading bloc, holding 28 percent of world GDP against the European Union’s 18 percent.

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Digital Rural Strategy Closes Second Stage as Report Sets 15th Five-Year Plan Tasks

The Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs published the seven-year review on 31 August. It records 2025 as the year the 2019 Outline of the Digital Rural Development Strategy met its second-stage goals. Rural internet penetration reached 69.5 percent in 2025, narrowing the urban-rural access gap to 15.6 percentage points. The report then sets 15th Five-Year Plan tasks: digitalised rural industry, informatised rural construction and smart governance.

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Tibetan Plateau Weather Monitoring and Cryosphere Data Sharing to Expand After Mudslide

Part of a glacier broke off on the Nepalese side of the border on 26 August and reached Gyirong Port in Xizang within seven minutes. Three portable automatic weather stations now support road restoration, rescue work and barrier lake surveys. The China Meteorological Administration pledged on 28 August to improve the siting of weather stations across the Tibetan Plateau. It will also share glacier, snow and permafrost data and survey the region’s glacial lakes.

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Chinese Scientists Target World Protein Shortage with Food-Waste Feed Using 1% of Soybean Land

A two-stage process at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology ferments canteen leftovers into organic acids, then feeds them to the marine microbe Schizochytrium. The best engineered strain produced 46.72 kg of single-cell protein per tonne of dry waste, with land-use impacts about 1% of soybean-based production. The peer-reviewed study calls the process a low-carbon answer to global protein deficits. Fossil resource use runs 203% above soybeans, and industrial scale-up is the team’s stated next step.

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China’s Space Computing Cloud Serves 100 Users as Musk’s Orbital Data Centres Await Launch

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications launched the Tiansuan Constellation in 2021, which now runs 16 low-Earth-orbit satellites and seven ground stations. Xinhua reported on 31 August that the platform had begun routine in-orbit services. The milestone drew little Western coverage, though Chinese state media announced each step. Elon Musk has promoted orbital AI data centres for months, telling a March event that space compute could undercut terrestrial costs in as little as two to three years.

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China’s First Healthcare Security Law Covers 1.33 Billion People and Codifies Long-Term Care

Lawmakers approved the seven-chapter, 56-article text on 28 August, and it takes effect on 1 January 2027. It requires a multi-tiered system with basic medical insurance as its mainstay. Long-term care insurance, piloted since 2016, now becomes a statutory system. The scheme covered 308.55 million people at the end of 2025, when 323.38 million Chinese were aged 60 or above – 23 percent of the population.

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Chongqing Lets Schools Keep Phones off Campus from the First Day of Autumn Term

The measure sits inside a wider juvenile-protection statute, passed by the municipal legislature in late July and effective since 1 September. Each school decides whether to exclude phones, tablets and smartwatches. UNESCO monitoring counts 114 education systems with national school phone bans, 58% of countries, up from 24% in June 2023. Australia’s social media age limit for children took effect in December, and Portugal and Spain have passed comparable laws.

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News on China | No. 37

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:00:43 +0000

29 August 2026

About 10 min read.

China and Jordan unite for Palestine; Xi proposes four principles for a political solution amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza

During Jordanian King Abdullah II’s state visit to China from August 18 to 24, Beijing and Amman reaffirmed support for an independent Palestinian state. President Xi Jinping proposed four principles to advance a political solution: pursuing a two-state solution, upholding “Palestinians governing Palestine,” protecting civilians and ensuring humanitarian aid, and defending international law and justice. A joint statement called the two-state solution “the only way” to achieve just and lasting peace, supporting a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital and full UN membership. China and Jordan also reaffirmed their strategic partnership and expanded cooperation in trade, the digital economy, artificial intelligence, green energy, education, technology, culture and tourism.

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China and India Reach Eight-Point Border Consensus, Adding Two Hotlines and Delimitation Push

China and India reached an eight-point consensus during the 25th round of Special Representatives’ talks in Beijing on August 25, the third since an October 2024 understanding eased the Ladakh standoff. Wang Yi and India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval reaffirmed their commitment to maintaining peace and pursuing a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable settlement based on the 2005 agreement. Two working groups will finalize their terms of reference before pursuing an “Early and Substantial Harvest” on boundary delimitation and border management. The sides agreed to improve understanding of the Line of Actual Control, add two military meeting points and two hotlines, reopen three border trade markets, and expand cooperation on transboundary rivers. The next round will take place in India in 2027.

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Cross-Border Corruption Bill Would Codify Sky Net and Fox Hunt, Set Duties for Overseas Firms

Reviewed on 25 August by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the text runs to six chapters and 47 articles setting out principles, scope, operational mechanisms and institutional responsibilities; Huo Zhengxin of the China University of Political Science and Law, who took part in drafting, said it provides for extradition, mutual legal assistance and repatriation in line with the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) and places integrity and compliance duties on state-owned and private firms alike.

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From Xiamen’s 12 Measures to Fuzhou’s 17-City Network, Cities Lead Cross-Strait Exchanges

Presented at a regular Beijing briefing, the latest round of cross-Strait initiatives is municipal in origin and people-facing in content: Xiamen is establishing a distribution hub for agricultural and fishery products from Taiwan, China, an audiovisual platform and digital-content training for young people; Fuzhou (Fujian’s capital) has extended its Strait Youth Development-Oriented City programme, launched in 2025 and now spanning 17 mainland cities; and a Shanghai gathering from 24 to 28 August drew about 1,000 participants.

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Entrusted by Xi, Premier Li Qiang Directs Xizang Mudslide Rescue Under Level-II Emergency

After a glacier collapse in Nepal buried Gyirong Port on the China-Nepal border on Wednesday, leaving three people dead and 558 missing, including 260 foreign nationals, the central government activated its second-highest disaster and geological emergency responses, allocated 220 million yuan (US $33 million) and dispatched hundreds of rescuers with 30,000 relief items, while the premier, acting on President Xi Jinping’s instructions, travelled to the site on Thursday to direct all-out operations.

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High-Tech Industries Account for 41.6% of Foreign Capital as Overall Inflows Fall 6.2%

In the first seven months of 2026, actual investment in research, development and design services rose 72.1 percent and in services commercialising sci-tech achievements 62.2 percent, lifting high-technology inflows 32.7 percent to 182.31 billion yuan (US $27.13 billion) and their share of the national total 12.2 percentage points, while 37,711 new foreign-invested enterprises were established, up 4.4 percent, under an encouraged-industries catalogue steering foreign capital into advanced manufacturing since 1 February.

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Chips, Robots and 6G Anchor 2026-30 Growth Agenda, Backed by ‘Little Giant’ SME Drive

Industry Vice-Minister Xin Guobin told a State Council Information Office press conference on 26 August that integrated circuits, aerospace, biomedicine, the low-altitude economy, new energy storage and intelligent robots will be developed into emerging pillar industries, with a tiered cultivation system for specialised small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and a second phase of the national SME development fund extending the drive for technological self-reliance into industrial-chain resilience, employment and livelihoods.

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Officials Face Lifelong Liability for Ecological Damage and Failure to Advance Carbon Goals

Replacing a framework first issued in 2015, the revised document extends punishment to senior figures at public institutions, development zones and state-owned enterprises, tightening a system under which 3,371 people were held accountable in central environmental inspections (May 2020–June 2022), while requiring that enforcement be precise and evidence-based, neither dampening officials’ enthusiasm for work nor undermining the credibility of the Party and the government.

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Airborne Wind Turbine Generates Power at 4,000 Metres in Northwest China Flight Test

Developed by Beijing start-up Sawes Energy Technology with Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Aerospace Information Research Institute, the helium-filled craft (roughly the length of a Boeing 747) carries lightweight turbines into steadier high-altitude winds and returns the electricity down a tether; it can be moved quickly between sites, making it suited to deserts, highlands, islands and disaster zones beyond the reach of a power grid, though no output figure was disclosed.

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South China Morning Post, 25 August 2026

Beijing’s Humanoid Robot Games Move 21 of 51 Events into Real Factories and Hotels

Fully autonomous operation carried a scoring coefficient of 1 against 0.5 for remote control, while task tolerances were drawn from paid work – a microwave timer turned to five minutes, with deviations beyond one minute costing points, and 30 minutes for robot teams to move luggage, replenish guest-room supplies and make beds – so that performance on the field itself, in the organisers’ words, provides evidence of commercial viability.

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Chang’e 7 Lunar South Pole Launch Postponed Beyond Its Planned Window on Reliability Grounds

Bound for permanently shadowed terrain near the rim of Shackleton crater with a lander, rover and hopping probe, the water-ice mission was halted days before lift-off at Wenchang under the principles of ‘prudence, reliability and absolute safety’, with no cause disclosed; the wider programme is geared to a crewed landing before 2030 and a joint research station with Russia by 2035, while the United States, India and Russia are pursuing the same south-polar region.

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Chinese Archaeologists to Excavate Peru’s 5,000-Year-Old Caral in First South American Project

Two societies that rose on opposite rims of the Pacific will now be compared on the ground, under an agreement covering field surveys, excavations, heritage conservation and specialist training, signed by the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences with Peru’s Culture Ministry and the National University of San Marcos, at sites of a civilisation that flourished around 3000 BC to 1800 BC (the oldest known in the Americas).

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Decade of Fieldwork Yields World’s Largest Language Archive, Now a Strategic AI-Era Resource

Opened on 24 August inside the Hunan Museum in Changsha, a new exhibition hall draws on a national documentation programme launched in 2015 that has surveyed more than 1,800 sites and assembled a repository of over 120 languages and dialects, with an alliance of universities and research institutions formed the same day to promote language technologies in education, research and cultural preservation, meaning the corpus is now being positioned as data infrastructure rather than salvage recording.

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News on China | No. 36

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 07:00:17 +0000

22 August 2026

About 10 min read.

China and South Korea Revive Dialogue Amid Tensions on the Korean Peninsula

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s 19–20 August visit to South Korea, the first by a Chinese foreign minister in five years, renewed efforts to strengthen bilateral ties amid tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Beijing and Seoul agreed to accelerate negotiations on the second phase of their Free Trade Agreement and expand cooperation in trade, supply chains, technology, and cultural exchanges. Wang called for South Korea to pursue external relations in an ‘independent, autonomous, balanced and non-conflicting manner’ and urged Washington to change its ‘hostile policy’ towards Pyongyang. China reaffirmed its commitment to peaceful resolution and regional stability; Seoul reiterated the one-China principle. Beijing is considering a Xi–Lee summit at November’s APEC in Shenzhen.

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US Imposes Drone Tariffs of up to 100% as China Demands Repeal

China has urged the United States to withdraw new Section 232 tariffs on drones and related components, calling them discriminatory against Chinese products and harmful to Chinese companies. On 13 August 2026, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation imposing tariffs of up to 100% on certain drones and components, while others face 25% duties. Producers in the European Union, Japan and Switzerland face a 15% ceiling, and UK suppliers 10%. Most tariffs take effect on 3 September, with some components delayed until 9 February 2027. Beijing’s 20 August response follows a US national-security investigation launched in July 2025 and broader efforts to restrict Chinese technology and reshape global supply chains.

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Cross-Border Corruption Bill Goes to First Reading After 963 Fugitives Repatriated in 2025

Convening at the Great Hall of the People on 18 August, the Council of Chairpersons, chaired by Zhao Leji, set 25–28 August for the 14th National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s 24th session, with the National Commission of Supervision’s anti-graft measure – on the legislative plan since 2023 – to be deliberated alongside draft laws on healthcare security and farmland protection, days after Evergrande founder Xu Jiayin’s life sentence for fraud and bribery.

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Xi Marks Jiang Zemin’s Birth Centenary, Tying 1990s Reform Record to the ‘New Journey’

About 6,000 people filled the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 17 August for an address crediting the late leader with the Theory of Three Represents, accession to the World Trade Organization, the response to the Asian financial crisis and the 1998 floods, and a push for a multipolar world, each achievement then matched to a present-day task from strengthening Communist Party leadership to high-quality development.

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Weekly Arctic Route Opens to Europe, Halving Shipment Times for a Chinese Container Line

Bound north through the Bering Strait and the frigid waters along Russia’s northern coast, the Dubai Tower sailed from Ningbo-Zhoushan Port on Saturday evening carrying energy storage cabinets, power batteries and photovoltaic modules from the Yangtze River Delta, and is timetabled into Felixstowe on 7 September with Hamburg and Gdynia later that week – a crossing possible only while the ice has melted enough to allow transits without icebreakers.

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BRI Markets Take US $83.67 Billion of China’s Car Exports as Consultants Warn of Overcapacity

Customs data compiled by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers record 3.381 million vehicles, 1.135 million of them new energy models (up 59.4 percent), shipped to Belt and Road Initiative partner countries in the first half of 2026, which now take 57.5 percent of China’s automobile export value; the surge continues even as AlixPartners predicts that only 15 of China’s 129 electric and hybrid brands will be financially viable by 2030.

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Ecological and Environmental Code Takes Effect, Replacing 10 Laws with Systematic Governance

Adopted by the National People’s Congress in March 2026 and binding on every company operating in China, the 1,242-article text has applied since 15 August, absorbing 10 statutes in full while drawing more than 100 administrative regulations and over 30 laws into one system, its dedicated green and low-carbon chapter tying ecological stewardship to growth as the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) embeds environmental considerations across economic policy.

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Shanghai’s Domestic Green Methanol Chain Delivers World-Record 8,016 Tonnes to a French Ship

Fuel made from Jilin’s wind, solar and biomass, moved through Dalian Port along an inter-provincial corridor opened in June 2026, reached CMA CGM’s 13,000-TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) dual-fuel vessel with a single 8,016-tonne lift covering an entire transoceanic voyage without a top-up, while cutting lifecycle emissions by an estimated 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ and giving international shipping a production-to-bunkering model that Shanghai Electric says can be repeated and expanded.

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China’s Non-Governmental ‘Nobel Prize’ Awards US $1 Million Each to Three 2026 Laureates

Zhang Hong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fudan University’s Zhao Dongyuan and Peking University’s Yuan Xinyi were named in Beijing on 13 August for work on autophagy (‘self-eating’), on mesoporous materials underpinning catalysis, energy storage and biomedicine, and on arithmetic geometry; their selection takes to 49 the scientists recognised since 2016 by the country’s first privately funded science award, which scientists and entrepreneurs, not the state, jointly initiated.

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DeepSeek’s ‘Everything Is a Plugin’ Harness Passes 33,000 GitHub Stars Within Hours

Released as a developer preview one week ago and built on the Cordis composability framework, the MIT-licensed Node.js runtime treats the model adapter, tool registry, session log and even the agent loop itself as interchangeable plugins (no privileged core to patch); because external pull requests are not yet accepted, DeepSeek channels contributions into community plugins and GitHub Discussions instead, around a harness that drives Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure or Google models just as readily.

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Qixi’s Weaver Girl Returns to the Square as a Migrant Cook’s War Drama Tops Cinemas

Guangzhou’s Tianhe district opened a seven-day carnival on 14 August, carrying customs listed as national intangible cultural heritage – needle-threading for skill, offerings to the Seventh Sister on the night the Cowherd and Weaver Girl meet on a magpie bridge – into public space, while cinemas drew couples to Once Upon a Time in the Middle East (Welcome to Dragon Restaurant), where a migrant cook keeps his kitchen open through a war because people need three meals a day.

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Frenchmen Hand Kunming Museum 16 Pages of Nantes Archives on a War the West Overlooks

Some 618 wartime photographs from Marcus Detrez’s grandfather in 1930s Shanghai set off a cross-border campaign by the non-profit Echoes of the World, which in August lodged 138 pages on the Chongqing Bombing and 891 more in Shanghai before handing a Kunming museum six documents dated 1938 to 1941 – drawn from France’s own diplomatic files, while the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) remains, Detrez says, insufficiently understood in many Western societies.

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News on China | No. 35

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 07:00:46 +0000

15 August 2026

About 10 min read.

China Seeks to Join Brazil’s WTO Challenge Against US Tariffs of up to 37.5%

China filed a request in Geneva on 10 August to join as a third party the World Trade Organization consultations opened by Brazil against US tariffs of up to 37.5%, saying it has a substantial commercial interest in the dispute. The move extends China’s legal challenge, launched in 2018, against Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974, which Beijing says allows Washington to determine violations and impose penalties without multilateral authorization. China’s Commerce Ministry has called the 12.5% rate applied to Chinese goods an act of unilateralism and protectionism. Brazil initiated its WTO case on 30 July.

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China and Indonesia Hold Naval Exercise as Taiwan Conducts Anti-Blockade Drill

On 12 August, China and Indonesia held a joint naval navigation exercise in waters east of Taiwan, featuring maritime communications, formation manoeuvres and replenishment at sea. Beijing said the drill aimed to deepen practical cooperation and safeguard regional peace and stability, while Jakarta described it as a routine Passing Exercise by a warship returning from Russia. Taiwan’s China-policy body condemned the activity as a military provocation as the island conducted its first joint navy–coast guard anti-blockade exercise during the 10-day Han Kuang war games.

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Senior CPC Official Visits Cuba as China Calls Ties “Good Friends, Good Comrades and Good Brothers”

Liu Haixing, head of the Communist Party of China’s International Department, met Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Communist Party international chief Emilio Lozada García in Havana on 9–10 August during centenary commemorations for Fidel Castro. Liu described China and Cuba as “good friends, good comrades and good brothers” whose ties have reached an “unprecedented new height”, reaffirming support for Cuba’s socialist path, deeper cooperation and coordination to uphold international fairness and oppose hegemony. Amid intensified US sanctions, Beijing called for an end to the blockade and unilateral sanctions, saying they violate international law and the UN Charter. China’s support included US $80 million, 60,000 tons of rice and 5,000 photovoltaic systems.

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Zhu Rongji, Premier Who Cleared Debt Chains and Refused Devaluation, Dies in Beijing at 98

An obituary issued jointly by the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the national legislature, the State Council and the top political advisory body credits Zhu – vice premier from 1991 and premier between 1998 and 2003 – with untangling the ‘triangular debts’ choking state industry, reining in inflation to achieve a soft landing, introducing a central-local tax sharing system, and encouraging exports while holding the renminbi steady through the Asian financial crisis.

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New Spacecraft Manufacturers Surge 185.7% as China’s Frontier Industries Add 561,000 Companies

Data released on 8 August by China’s market regulator showed that 561,000 new companies were registered in frontier and high-tech industries during the first half of 2026, including 55,000 generative AI firms, up 28%, and 116,000 humanoid robotics companies, up 9.5%. New spacecraft and launch-vehicle manufacturers surged 185.7%, while high-tech manufacturing enterprises reached 330,000 after 15,000 additions. New integrated-circuit makers rose 24.2%. Meanwhile, 7,632 new-energy vehicle-related, 5,089 photovoltaic and 155 lithium-battery companies were deregistered as some sectors consolidated.

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Eight Polysilicon Producers Holding over 90% of Capacity Pledge to Halt Below-Cost Solar Sales

Signed in Shanghai on 6 August, the initiative sets no fixed price but a cost floor, calculated under a group accounting standard issued on 27 July and reinforced by a market-regulator compliance meeting on 31 July, letting producers whose capacity long outran demand rebuild margins collectively rather than singly; polysilicon futures have since risen about 13.8% to CNY 37,040 (US $5,160) per tonne, a level Global South importers of the world’s cheapest modules will eventually meet.

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Nanning Park Turns 2,250 Tonnes of Daily Waste into Power, Heat, Metals and Bricks

Operational since late 2021 across some 73 hectares, the Shuangding Circular Economy Industrial Park routes the residual warmth of its furnaces into co-located organic waste, sludge and medical waste lines, strips slag for metals and eco-friendly bricks and recycles 1,700 tonnes of water a day, yielding nearly 600 kilowatt-hours per tonne on investment estimated at 2.56 billion yuan (US $379.33 million), while collection rates in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia run as low as 31 and 67 percent.

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South-to-North Middle Route Delivers 80 Billion Cubic Metres to 118 Million over 12 Years

Peer-reviewed modelling published in Nature Communications attributes 40% of Beijing’s groundwater storage recovery over 2006-2018 to the diverted supply, with increased precipitation and reduced irrigation contributing 30% each, meaning that the aquifer rebound the operator credits to the canal rests on a package of engineering and demand-side policy rather than on the transfer alone, a distinction that matters for water-stressed economies weighing comparable schemes.

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Collider in Beijing Yields Clearest Evidence in a Half-Century Search for Matter Made of Force

Sifting more than 10 billion J/psi decay events gathered since a 2008 machine upgrade, the BESIII collaboration reported on 5 August that the particle X(2370) shows no trace of a decay mode forbidden to flavour-singlet states, a signature Carnegie Mellon physicist Colin Morningstar calls ‘the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature’.

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Top Hospitals to Scale Back Routine Outpatient Care as Clinics Gain 12-Week Prescriptions

With no mandatory gatekeeper in place – patients may still present at any level of care without a referral – the State Council’s April measures work through inducement rather than obligation, combining higher grassroots reimbursement and no repeat deductible on downward transfer with a primary tier that handled 5.56 billion visits in 2025, or 52.6 percent of the national total, while cross-level referrals rose by more than 50 percent since 2020.

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UN Judge Reads Kunqu Plot from Movement Alone as Viewers Cite Asian and African Parallels

Artists of the Zhejiang Jingkun Art Center staged an unannounced corridor performance in a public area of the United Nations complex in New York on 4 August, where staff and visitors followed the excerpts through symbolic gesture rather than dialogue; one visitor said she did not understand the language but felt the emotion, finding that older cultures across Asia, Africa and indigenous communities ‘have so much in common’ – mutual recognition rather than one-way export.

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News on China | No. 34

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:00:08 +0000

8 August 2026

About 10 min read.

China Funds 475-Bed National Surgical Centre in Maputo to End Medical Referrals Abroad

Grant financing of US $42 million will, over a 24-month build employing roughly 200 Mozambicans, raise an eight-floor complex on two hectares inside Maputo Central Hospital with 475 beds – 19 of them in intensive care – sparing patients who need complex surgery the costly referral to South Africa, Portugal or India, while giving concrete form to agreements concluded between the two governments.

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China Rejects Japan’s Defense Report, Warns Against Remilitarization

On Aug. 5, China rejected Japan’s new defense white paper, accusing Tokyo of using the “China threat” narrative to justify military expansion. Defense Ministry spokesperson Chen Xi said the document, released on Aug. 4, contains “false narratives” and criticized Japan’s rising defense spending and long-range strike capabilities. Beijing opposed the use of Taiwan-related concerns to justify the buildup. The issue is also linked to historical tensions: UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 recognized the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China at the UN, while Japan’s wartime aggression, including the occupation of Chinese territories such as Taiwan, is estimated to have caused more than 20 million deaths.

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Cyberspace Regulator Publishes 60-Article Draft Law to Curb Online Abuse and Protect Victims

Open for public comment until 28 August, the text caps a decade of incremental rule-making on the internet environment, requiring platforms to run early-warning systems combining AI, big data and human review, trace and remove AI-generated harassment, and give targets on-screen tools to block strangers and record evidence; providers causing serious harm face fines of up to 10 million yuan, closure or licence revocation.

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Central Bank Steers Credit to Technology and Green Sectors as Aggregate Lending Slows

At the end of June, the five designated priority areas – technology, green, inclusive, pension and digital finance – had expanded 11 percent year-on-year, markedly outpacing overall loan growth, while cumulative sci-tech innovation bond issuance passed 2.8 trillion yuan (US $414.73 billion) and the World Bank recorded total credit easing to 7.7 percent, indicating that composition rather than volume has become the object of monetary policy.

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Pure-Electric Cable-Laying Ship Launched to Wire Deep-Sea Wind Farms and Intercontinental Grids

Superseding the 10,000-tonne, diesel-driven and non-self-propelled Qifan 19 from the same 708 Research Institute, the vessel entered the water in Jiangsu on 4 August with a 139.8-metre hull rated to carry 16,000 tonnes of cable and work at depths reaching 3,000 metres, meaning that the yards supplying most of the world’s new ships now also build the equipment that connects deep-sea wind farms and intercontinental power grids.

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Renewables Plan Sets First Binding Firm-Capacity Targets to Make Wind and Solar Replace Coal

Issued jointly on 23 July by the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration, the 2026-2030 blueprint makes renewable consumption of about 1.8 billion tonnes of standard coal equivalent one of only two binding indicators, while requiring wind to deliver 11 percent and solar 6 percent of installed capacity as dependable output during critical supply periods, meaning that reliability, not gigawatts, now measures success.

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After the Rescue, US $319 Million Turns to Repairing Water Works and Replanting Guangxi Fields

Typhoon Maysak destroyed 1.267 million hectares of crops and killed over 900,000 head of livestock across Guangxi in early July, and a month after the emergency rescue and resettlement tranches, the Ministry of Finance has joined the agriculture and water resources ministries to release US $319 million through a separate sectoral channel for post-disaster production recovery and water-works repair, with Guangxi named in three of the four tranches.

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Leaner DeepSeek Model Runs at 3 Cents per Test as China’s AI Industry Grows 40%

Switching on only a fraction of the parameters its largest domestic rivals use per query – Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max activates 95 billion at a time – the sparse V4-Flash released on 31 July costs 3 cents per benchmark test against 86 cents for Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, trimming the computation, and therefore the electricity, behind each unit of work in a sector that grew 40 percent to 1.2 trillion yuan (US $176.7 billion) in 2025.

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China Opens a Quantum Standards Committee Two Months After Jinan’s First IEC/ISO Plenary

Nearly 240 delegates from 21 countries, among them the United States, Germany, Japan and the Republic of Korea, gathered in Shandong from 25 to 28 May for the fifth plenary of the IEC/ISO joint technical committee on quantum technologies, the first hosted on Chinese soil; on 30 July the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology convened its own body to write industry standards for quantum computing, communication and precision measurement.

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Excavators Hedge Big Dipper Claim on Seven Pits as Hongshan Reopens Civilization Criteria

Announced through state broadcaster CCTV rather than in any excavation report, the burnt-earth features uncovered at the Neolithic ritual centre of Niuheliang drew a guarded reading from field leader Jia Xiaobing – ‘We are not sure for now that is the Big Dipper, but the shape does look alike’ – while the culture behind them, dating back 5,000 to 6,500 years, is cited to argue that writing, cities and metallurgy are not the only route to civilization.

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Chinese Web Fiction Draws 250 Million Registered Overseas Users across 200 Countries

Southeast Asia, Latin America and India together took more than three-quarters of global short-drama downloads in the first quarter of 2026 – 32%, 23% and 22% respectively – the clearest sign that the Global South now drives this cultural flow; platforms added 40 million overseas sign-ups in 2025 and 530,000 foreign authors now write on Yuewen’s international service, though revenue remains concentrated in the North.

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News on China | No. 33

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:00:45 +0000

1 August 2026

About 10 min read.

Ministers Cast SCO, Spanning 40% of World Population, as a Pillar of Multipolar Order

Convened in Cholpon-Ata, Kyrgyzstan, on 24 July, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s foreign ministers approved the draft declaration marking the bloc’s 25th anniversary ahead of the 1 September Heads of State Summit in Bishkek. Representing around 40% of the world’s population and nearly a quarter of global GDP, the SCO reaffirmed its commitment to strengthening regional security, economic cooperation and a multipolar international order. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi also held bilateral meetings with counterparts from Russia, India, Iran, Pakistan, Belarus and Uzbekistan.

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Xi Backs Brazil against External Interference as US Tariffs Reach 37.5% before October Election

In a phone call initiated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on 27 July, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged deeper bilateral and multilateral strategic coordination and reaffirmed China’s support for Brazilian sovereignty, independence and opposition to external interference. The conversation came days after the United States raised tariffs on Brazilian exports to 37.5% and imposed sanctions on Brazilian officials ahead of the country’s October presidential election. Both leaders also advanced Mercosur talks and cooperation in artificial intelligence, satellites, critical minerals and fertilizers.

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Draft Cyberbullying Law Would Outlaw Knowingly Supplying Hosting, Traffic, Ads and Phone Cards

The Cyberspace Administration of China opened a 60-article text to public comment on 29 July, running until 28 August, whose reach extends past abusers and platforms to anyone knowingly providing internet access, server hosting, data storage or communications transmission, or traffic, funding, advertising and payment services; the same clause bars selling personal information and selling, renting or lending phone cards, internet of things cards and online accounts.

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China Daily, 29 July 2026

New Relic Data Rules Open State Museum Archives to Scholars, Animators and Game Studios

The National Cultural Heritage Administration told a Beijing press conference on 28 July that measures taking effect in November will build a comprehensive management system covering the entire life cycle of relic data – collection, processing, storage, transmission, registration and services – around a traceable registration mechanism, benefiting scholars conducting academic research and nonprofit activities while meeting demand from industries such as cultural product development, animation, video games and advertising.

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African Exports to China Jump 23.5% in First Two Months of Continent-Wide Zero-Tariff Regime

Two-way commerce reached a first-half record of 1.41 trillion yuan (US $208 billion), Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian told a briefing on 27 July, with capital and intermediate goods comprising 75 percent of Chinese shipments to the continent; dried chillies, coffee beans, cashews and wild aquatic products have since won unified regional market access, the narrow band of goods where duty-free entry was genuinely new.

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Commerce Ministry Paper Rejects ‘Overcapacity’ Charge, Noting No WTO Rule Defines It

Released on 28 July as European and US trade-defence measures tightened, the four-chapter document severs the asserted links between industrial subsidies, trade surpluses and excess capacity, and argues capacity must be judged against each economy’s development stage; Brookings concedes the core point, calling the term neither established in economics nor defined by the World Trade Organization, though it still treats 80% utilisation as normal.

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Breeders Win Legal Share of Derived-Variety Profits as Seed IP System Covers 10 Crops

Developing a wholly new crop variety takes eight to 10 years and heavy investment, so the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs on 27 July required anyone commercialising a lightly modified version to obtain the original breeder’s authorisation and share proceeds, covering 38,600 plant variety rights applications filed by end-2025 across rice, wheat, cotton and seven other crops.

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Mangrove Area Reaches 31,700 Hectares, Making China One of the Few Countries with Rising Coverage

Closing its first dedicated five-year policy cycle on 26 July, the Ministry of Natural Resources reported 11,600 hectares of newly planted forest against a 9,050-hectare target, with over 90 percent of stands now inside the ecological protection red line; coastal cities are simultaneously piloting carbon credit auctions and judicial credits, monetising restoration whose benefit-cost ratios of 15.5 to 47.0 outstrip every other coastal habitat.

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Hefei’s Public Capital Books over US $148 Billion Paper Gain on CXMT after Decade-Long Bet

Underwriting 80 percent of an 18 billion yuan (US $2.67 billion) first-phase memory project in 2016 and holding through a decade of industry downcycles, the eastern city’s state investment platforms saw ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) close its Shanghai debut at 49 yuan against an 8.66 yuan issue price, turning a 33.1 percent stake into a book floating profit exceeding 1 trillion yuan (over US $148 billion) that remains unrealised.

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Kakeya and Hilbert Problems Fall as Chinese Citizens Take Fields Medal for the First Time

Classmates in Peking University’s 2007 undergraduate cohort, Deng Yu and Wang Hong dispersed to MIT and France before closing questions left open since 1900 and 1917; neither works in China today – Deng is at the University of Chicago and Wang at New York University and France’s Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques – yet the two make China the fifth country, and the first in Asia, to take two medals at one ceremony.

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Wenwu-01 Moves Relic Enforcement from Quarterly Checks to a Dedicated Half-Metre Orbital Watch

Manual patrols, local reporting and drone-based spot checks had left China’s more than 760,000 immovable cultural relics with limited coverage and lagging data updates, while the National Cultural Heritage Administration monitored world heritage and key national-level sites only once a quarter from 2024; the purpose-built craft, whose first images were released on 28 July, instead tracks the external environment around sites, flagging boundary changes and abnormal construction.

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Robots, AI Glasses and Old Books Recast National Book Fair, with US $173.71 Million Traded

Closing on 27 July after four days in Hangzhou, the 34th edition drew around 560,000 visitors and over 1,000 exhibitors to a format rebuilt around heritage woodblock printing, AI design, robot displays, livestream sub-venues and a state-backed secondhand-book zone, with total transactions of 1.18 billion yuan (US $173.71 million) registered in the first year that China’s national reading-promotion regulation has been in force.

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News on China | No. 32

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:00:27 +0000

25 July 2026

About 10 min read.

China, ASEAN Aim to Seal South China Sea Code of Conduct in 2026, Rejecting Bloc Confrontation

On 23 July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi attended a ministerial meeting with Southeast Asian counterparts on the sidelines of the 59th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting in Pasay, the Philippines. As China-ASEAN trade surpassed US$1 trillion in 2025, Wang called for accelerating the Free Trade Area 3.0, implementing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) at a high standard, and strengthening regional food, energy and supply-chain security. He also urged countries to reject external interference and bloc confrontation. Participants reaffirmed their goal of concluding the South China Sea Code of Conduct in 2026 and adopted a joint statement on the regional impact of the Middle East situation and energy cooperation.

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Thailand and China Pledge to Expedite High-Speed Railway Extending China-Laos Line to Bangkok

Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul visited China from 16 to 20 July, where he met with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang, reaffirming the countries’ comprehensive strategic partnership. During the visit, the two sides signed 15 cooperation agreements and memorandums covering trade, investment, education, technology, security and sustainable development. They also pledged to accelerate Phase 1 and launch Phase 2 of the Thailand-China high-speed railway, a flagship Belt and Road Initiative project extending the China-Laos Railway to Bangkok. Since opening in 2021, the China-Laos line has contributed to average annual GDP growth of around 4% and indirectly created 120,000 jobs.

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China Accuses Philippine Vessel of Provoking South China Sea Clash, Urges Dialogue

China said the Philippines had taken provocative actions near Ren’ai Jiao in the South China Sea on 20 July, following a maritime incident involving the two countries. Beijing urged Manila to resolve disputes through dialogue and negotiation between directly concerned parties. China’s Coast Guard said Philippine personnel harassed a Chinese patrol vessel after ignoring repeated warnings, while Beijing lodged serious diplomatic protests. Ahead of the ASEAN foreign ministers’ meeting in Manila, China also warned against external interference and said the July 2024 provisional resupply arrangement regarding Ren’ai Jiao remains unchanged.

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Beijing Unveils 19 Domestic Services Measures, Expanding Social Insurance for Flexible Workers

Issued by the Ministry of Commerce and eight other departments on 20 July, the package pairs vocational training and credit verification with improved social insurance coverage for domestic workers in flexible employment, after China’s per-order, platform-funded occupational injury scheme, covering nearly 30 million workers, went nationwide to all 31 provincial-level regions on 1 July – a state-led extension of social protection to more than 200 million flexibly employed people, offering direct reference points for Global South platform-economy labour debates.

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China Begins New Round of Grassroots People’s Congress Elections with Over 1 Billion Voters

Around 95 percent of China’s more than 2.77 million lawmakers sit in county- and township-level legislatures, chosen directly on a one-person-one-vote basis, and during a 15–17 July tour of Gansu – taking in grassroots legislative outreach platforms – the chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee instructed local authorities to conduct the coming elections in an orderly, law-based manner in line with Communist Party of China Central Committee arrangements, after the latest round drew over 1 billion voters.

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Equipment Manufacturing Drives Nearly 50% of China’s Industrial Export Growth in H1 2026

Overseas sales of wind turbine generators and lithium batteries rose 35.6% and 37.6% year-on-year in the first half of 2026, while automobile exports reached 5.096 million units (up 65.3%), the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reported on 20 July, with Chinese shipyards capturing 1,131 of the 1,481 vessels ordered worldwide in the period – about 72% of the global market, according to Clarksons data.

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C919 Jetliner Built with China’s Own Intellectual Property Makes Its International Debut

From 12 August 2026, Air China will fly a daily Beijing–Ulaanbaatar round trip with the homegrown trunkliner that rolled off the assembly line in 2015, won type certification in 2022 and has logged more than 42,000 commercial flights, while Washington’s suspension of engine sales from May to July 2025 – exposing the programme’s remaining reliance on overseas suppliers – underscores why propulsion is the next frontier of the aircraft’s technology self-reliance drive.

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Xinjiang First-Half Green Power Trading Hits Record 15.92 Billion kWh, Nearly Double 2025 Total

Weekly market openings, multi-level contracts and east-west time-difference matching that aligns exports with daytime demand in Jilin, Jiangsu and Zhejiang lifted trades within the region by 412% year-on-year to 9.98 billion kWh and cross-provincial deals by 41% to 5.94 billion kWh in January–June, backed by 173 million kilowatts of new energy capacity – over 60% of the regional total – as compulsory green-certificate purchases announced in March 2025 require energy-intensive industries to match China’s renewable share of about 35% by 2030.

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China’s Concentrated Solar Power Climbs to 2.1 GW, Second Worldwide Behind Only Spain

Mirror-based plants that capture sunlight as storable heat, delivering stable, dispatchable electricity, now number 24 in operation with 26 more totalling 3.2 gigawatts under construction, the China Electricity Council announced on 16 July, crediting over 95 percent equipment localisation and construction costs halved in a decade to 15,000 yuan (US $2,200) per kilowatt – a state-led drive towards 15 gigawatts by 2030 under a December 2025 roadmap targeting generation costs on par with coal-fired power.

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Quantum Technology Pioneer Pan Jianwei Becomes First Chinese Winner of UNESCO Mendeleev Prize

A Paris ceremony on 17 July 2026 honoured the University of Science and Technology of China physicist whose team launched the world’s first quantum satellite in 2016, the UNESCO citation crediting quantum key distribution and teleportation over thousands of kilometres, alongside demonstrated quantum computational advantage, with bringing ‘the prospect of a global quantum network from theory to reality’.

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China Takes Digital Sovereignty Case for the Global South to UN’s First Permanent Cyber Forum

A new index from Tricontinental researchers, decomposing command over data, infrastructure, governance and capability into four dimensions and sixteen indicators, scores BRICS members from China’s 4.25 down to South Africa’s 1.94 – quantifying the structural dependence that China’s position paper to the new UN cyber mechanism’s first session (20–24 July) addresses by asserting every country’s right to choose its own digital and AI development path without being forced to take sides.

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Minors Protection Campaign Takes Aim at ‘Toxic AI Cartoons’ as China’s AI Rulebook Expands

With artificial intelligence (AI) letting anyone splice gory or vulgar scenes into children’s animation within minutes and spread them in bulk at low cost, the Cyberspace Administration of China opened a four-month, two-stage operation shielding minors from malicious cartoon parodies, grotesque mass-produced AI clips and vulgar chatbot personas, complementing a parallel rectification drive that has removed more than 14,000 non-compliant AI products and handled over 26,000 offending accounts since April to steer the industry toward orderly development.

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Childcare Subsidies Reach 25.16 Million Children as Life Expectancy Hits Record 79.25 Years

Introduced in 2025 as part of efforts to build a ‘birth-friendly society’ – now a key focus of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) – the monthly payments of 300 yuan (US $44.17) per child under age three accompany birth numbers rising in 2024 for the first time since 2017 amid nationwide birth-support efforts, while average longevity has climbed 3.85 years since 2012, wellbeing gains central to Beijing’s goal of stabilising newborn numbers and long-term balanced population development.

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News on China | No. 31

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:00:23 +0000

18 July 2026

About 10 min read.

President Xi hosts North Korean premier marking 65th anniversary of mutual defence treaty

Chinese President Xi Jinping met North Korean Premier Pak Thae Song during his 10–12 July official visit to China, marking the 65th anniversary of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance. Xi urged both countries to maintain strategic resolve, strengthen strategic coordination and accelerate implementation of the consensus reached with Kim Jong Un during his June visit to Pyongyang. Pak also met Premier Li Qiang and conveyed Kim’s commitment to developing bilateral ties into ‘the strongest strategic relationship,’ while Xi said relations should continue serving both countries’ socialist causes and modernization drives.

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China, Russia launch joint Pacific patrols after Joint Sea-2026 drills

The week-long China-Russia Joint Sea-2026 naval exercise, held from 6 to 13 July, concluded at a military port in Qingdao, Shandong Province. The twelfth edition of the annual drills since 2012 involved 10 vessels, including surface warships, a submarine, aircraft and support units, focusing on joint responses to maritime security risks. Following a closing ceremony, participating forces formed a joint detachment in the Yellow Sea before beginning annual joint patrols in the Pacific. China said the exercise strengthened strategic mutual trust and both militaries’ capacity to respond jointly to maritime crises.

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Lithium Battery and Radar Pioneers Win China’s Highest Science Honour as Xi Sets Course for 2035

At an 8 July ceremony in Beijing recognizing 258 projects and 11 experts, Chen Liquan, 86, whose solid-state research helped make China a global leader in the lithium battery industry, and Ben De, whose airborne fire-control radar gave Chinese fighter jets over-the-horizon eyes, each received the country’s top science prize worth 5 million yuan (about US$700,000). Xi Jinping declared the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026–2030) a critical phase for achieving high-level scientific and technological self-reliance.

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Medical Paper Fraud Crackdown Names 28 Cases as Two Celebrity Writers Lose Master’s Degrees

The National Health Commission’s 10 July notification detailed penalties for 28 cases of medical research misconduct involving data fabrication, paper trading and guest authorship, with sanctions ranging from multi-year to lifetime bans on state-funded research. Separately, Northwest University and Renmin University of China revoked the master’s degrees of Jia Qianqian and Jiang Fangzhou after internet sleuths exposed systematic copying, extending China’s academic integrity campaign under 2022 investigation rules from medical research into the humanities and celebrity publishing.

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Five-Year Retail Modernization Guideline Aims to Boost Consumption and Jobs by 2030

Issued by the Ministry of Commerce and eight other departments on 9 July, the guideline promotes community ’15-minute life circles,’ online-offline integration, full-chain digitalization including drone delivery, and support for retailers expanding overseas. The measures form part of China’s broader 2026–2030 economic strategy, which includes maintaining the urban surveyed unemployment rate around 5.5 percent. Four days later, the State Council released China’s first dedicated five-year consumption plan, targeting around 60 trillion yuan (US$8.85 trillion) in annual retail sales by 2030 and positioning domestic consumption as a key driver of long-term economic growth.

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Bali Breaks Ground on Chinese-Built Waste-to-Energy Plant Set to Power 100,000 Households

Designed to process 1,500 tons of waste daily from the first half of 2028, the US$166 million Denpasar Raya facility will cut carbon emissions by around 640,000 tons annually and create about 1,200 green jobs. Invested in, built and operated by China’s Zhejiang Weiming Environment Protection, the plant is Bali’s first waste-to-energy project and launches the nationwide rollout of Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund Danantara, planned across 34 urban agglomerations.

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Grassland Protection Drive Lifts Healthy and Sub-Healthy Area to 180 Million Hectares, 70% of China’s Total

Figures released in Hohhot on 13 July during an event marking the UN-designated International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists showed that China’s healthy and sub-healthy grasslands have reached 180 million hectares, over 70 percent of the country’s total. During the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025), ecological projects, stronger supervision and subsidy-and-reward policies for sustainable grazing restored more than 3 million hectares of degraded pasture annually, while fresh-grass output exceeded 600 million tons across nearly 267 million hectares of grassland.

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China Issues Nationwide Heat Alerts as Temperatures Exceed 40 C

On 13 July, China’s National Disease Control and Prevention Administration and Meteorological Administration issued nationwide heat-health alerts as parts of Hubei, Chongqing and Inner Mongolia faced high to extreme risks from Monday night to Tuesday night. The top red-level warning was issued under the national joint health-risk system launched in July 2025. Chongqing opened 44 free cooling shelters and suspended outdoor construction at 40 C, while Wuhan’s power grid hit a record load of 18.11 million kilowatts amid soaring demand.

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FAST Telescope Reveals First Evidence Low-Energy Cosmic Rays Originate in Star-Forming Regions

The discovery sheds new light on low-energy cosmic rays, particles that play a key role in heating and ionizing dense interstellar gas but are difficult to study directly near Earth. Using hydrogen observations of the Orion molecular cloud and data from NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray satellite, researchers applied a self-absorption technique developed by Tsinghua University’s Li Di to show these particles are produced locally by star-forming activity. The world’s largest single-dish radio telescope also reserves about 10% of observing time for foreign scientists free of charge.

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Humanoid Robots Perform First Live-Animal Surgeries, Offering Low-Cost Path to Surgical Access

Published in Nature on 8 July, a University of California San Diego preclinical trial showed surgeons remotely controlling two Chinese-made general-purpose humanoid robots to perform two complete gallbladder removals on live pigs. The smaller platforms, a fraction of the size and cost of specialized surgical systems weighing around 1,800 pounds, could help expand robotic surgery to rural and remote communities, potentially improving access to safe and affordable care for underserved populations worldwide.

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Xi Jinping Presents AI Vision at Shanghai Forum as 29 Countries Back Cooperation Body

Speaking at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai from 17 to 20 July, President Xi Jinping, attending the event for the first time, outlined China’s proposals for AI development and governance under the theme “Intelligent Partners, Co-create the Future.” The conference brought together international organizations, governments and researchers, with 29 countries signing an agreement to establish the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO). China also highlighted AI training and cooperation initiatives with Global South partners.

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Nearly 3,000 Treasures from Mexico and Peru Meet Chinese Relics in Largest Americas Exhibition

Opened on 9 July for a 16-month run, the Shanghai Museum’s ‘On Top of the World Tree’ pairs Olmec, Maya, Aztec and Inca masterpieces with Chinese artifacts, a curatorial choice the deputy director of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History calls ‘a dialogue between two of humanity’s most ancient, intricate civilizations’, carrying China-Latin America cultural exchange to unprecedented scale after the museum’s Egypt show drew a world-record 2.77 million visitors.

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New Five-Year Health Plan Targets Average Life Expectancy of 80 by 2030, Up from 79.25

Issued by the State Council on 13 July, the blueprint builds on an increase of 1.3 years over the past five years, pursuing further gains through fair access to healthcare, stronger primary-level disease prevention and treatment, and a national smart healthcare platform sharing medical records across provinces – seeking to bring core health indicators in line with high-income economies at the stage beyond 75 years where international experience shows progress slows markedly.

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