Posts

Reacting to the news that a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction to TikTok and its parent company ByteDance on Sunday, saving it from being booted from mobile app stores in the U.S., the Global Times criticized the Trump administration. “The U.S. is shamelessly robbing a Chinese company in an attempt to drive it away from the products it has created and make U.S. companies its new owner. China won’t allow this,” the editorial published by the state mouthpiece said....

“The Chinese side will take all necessary measures to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies and rejects U.S. attempts to interfere in China’s internal affairs,” foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Friday, Reuters reported. The companies had been “implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass detention, and high technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” the U....

Driven by soccer-loving President Xi Jinping, China is using its financial clout to invest in prestigious overseas clubs like Inter Milan, and its own teams are spending heavily to coax marquee players into the domestic game. In the latest high-profile transfer, Shanghai SIPG signed Brazilian international Oscar from English club Chelsea in a deal said to make him the highest-paid player in the world. Financial details of Oscar’s transfer have not been released, but media reports have suggested Shanghai paid 60 million euros (about $64 million) to lure the 25-year-old to the Chinese super league club....

During the virtual meeting on January 21, Kishida became only the second Japanese leader this century to join the U.S. in officially declaring concerns over China’s policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, as well as its intimidation against Taiwan. Biden and Kishida also cautioned against further moves around the disputed Senkaku Islands, currently under Japanese control, with the White House saying both leaders “resolved to push back against [China’s] attempts to change the status quo in the East China Sea and South China Sea....

China’s Global Times and China Central Television (CCTV) posted tweets on Monday citing one the country’s top COVID-19 experts, Zhong Nanshan, who said that the Chinese vaccine in question was about 90 percent effective at preventing infection with the novel coronavirus. But the efficacy rate will not be publicly released “until the results of the first phase of trials are available,” the tweets said. The news from China comes just days after Pfizer announced that the vaccine it is developing with German biotechnology firm BioNTech SE “is more than 90 percent effective” at preventing COVID-19, according to an analysis of early data from a large Phase III trial....

In December 2020, China’s Chang’e-5 mission made history by returning samples from the surface of the moon back to Earth—the first time China had done so. It also marked the first time lunar samples had been retrieved in more than 40 years. Since then, scientists have been carefully studying the samples to work out what lunar dust is made of—a process that can provide insights into the formation of the early solar system....

Staring at three match points down in the second game, the World No. 11 brought forth all her courage and fighting skills to stave off the tenacious seventh-ranked Sung Ji Hyun of Korea, 11-21, 23-21, 21-19 in a marathon 1-hour 24-minute battle. The seventh seed will next face the eighth-seeded Sun Yu of China for the title. Sindhu had a 5-3 winning head-to-head record over the Korean coming into this match and was 2-1 in their meetings this year....

It allows these players to improve their rankings and get some much-needed matches to practise before any important tournament. The China Open will be no different. The Big 3 of the tennis world (Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic) will not be taking part in this event. But there are a host of talented players who can make an impact in Beijing. Last year’s China Open was won by Georgian Nikoloz Basilashvili and this year the event looks more competitive due to the participation of some of the top players....

Trump said Monday on Twitter that “China’s 2nd Quarter growth is the slowest it has been in more than 27 years,” touting his 25 percent tariffs on some $250 billion worth of Chinese goods as “having a major effect on companies wanting to leave China for non-tariffed countries.” “This is why China wants to make a deal with the U.S., and wishes it had not broken the original deal in the first place,” the president tweeted....

Pelosi’s heavily anticipated visit sent the stock market into its largest plunge in more than two months as investors reacted to escalated tensions between the United States and China, Reuters reported. The trip has inflamed relations between the two countries as China has made threats over the trip. Taiwan is an island located about 80 miles off the coast of mainland China that has been governed independently since 1949. It has long been a point of contention between China and the United States, as China claims it as its own territory, but Taiwanese authorities say they are an independent nation....

Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Tan Kefei said Washington, D.C. had taken a “covert approach” to its handling of the incident involving USS Connecticut—one of three Seawolf-class nuclear-powered boats operated by the U.S. Navy—which collided with a mysterious underwater object on October 2. The U.S. Pacific Fleet confirmed the incident via a statement six days later, saying no sailors were seriously injured and that the ship was headed for repairs in Guam....

In the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily, the Chinese leadership’s pen name “Zhong Sheng” said “a correct view of each other’s domestic and foreign policies and strategic intentions” was a prerequisite for properly managing bilateral relations, an urgent objective in both capitals. “The U.S. view of China as the ‘most important strategic competitor’ and the ‘most significant geopolitical challenge’ is a misjudgement of China-U.S. relations and a misreading of China’s development,” the paper said....

0 votes

California-based cybersecurity firm FireEye’s incident response division Mandiant published a report Tuesday claiming Chinese involvement in an attempt to penetrate the VPN technologies of the Defense Industrial Base Sector, defined by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as “the worldwide industrial complex that enables research and development, as well as design, production, delivery, and maintenance of military weapons systems, subsystems, and components or parts, to meet U.S. military requirements....

The 2008 and 2012 Olympic champion Guo, and her teammates Zhang and Zhou, executed a stable and consistent performance to finish first with a winning total of 1,146 points. Chinese Taipei ranked second by five points, and the bronze medal went to Mongolia, who got 1,140 points. The host South Korea placed fourth, with its team members Kim Jangmi and Jung Jeehae ranking first and second respectively to enter the individual final....

The Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) survey found that nearly half of its members expressed interest in leaving Hong Kong, the Associated Press reported. Members cited a decline in press freedoms as a primary reason for the desire to leave. Eighty-three of the 99 journalists interviewed said things have “changed for the worse.” In 2019, Beijing enacted a sweeping law in response to pro-democracy protests. The law outlawed what the government calls subversion, secession, foreign collusion and terrorism, and it has since been used to arrest over 120 people....

China’s government has long claimed to be transparent about its COVID-19 statistics, including numbers from the alleged epicenter of the virus, Wuhan. Some observers, including President Donald Trump, have accused China of releasing incorrect statistics. According to information allegedly given to CNN by the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, officials in the Hubei province did not publicly disclose all the reported positive cases. On February 10, China reported 3,911 positive cases of the coronavirus with 2,097 confirmed cases and 1,814 cases of COVID-19 suspected....

Is that really such a difficult message to get straight? In recent weeks China has been acting less like a budding superpower than a tin-pot dictatorship—petulant, preachy, defiant. Global audiences have seen images of truncheon-wielding riot police, sent to Lhasa and other Tibetan areas to quell anti-Beijing protests that began on March 10. Chinese officials talk of dark plots, re-education programs, Western media “bias.” Each new clampdown—and the shrill agitprop that accompanies it—seems guaranteed to antagonize not only China’s restive Tibetan and Uighur minorities but also the nations scheduled to compete at the Olympic Games in Beijing this August....

On Friday morning, several U.S. lawmakers, including Senators Lindsey Graham, Richard Burr, Robert Portman, Benjamin Sasse and Robert Menendez, traveled to Taiwan to meet with Tsai and Taiwan’s minister of defense, the Associated Press reported. During their meeting, Tsai spoke about the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and said that it “has proven that democracies must bolster their alliances.” “Collectively, we can defend ourselves from the threats posed by authoritarian nations that seek to disrupt regional peace,” Tsai said in a statement....

Russia and the United States are the largest nuclear powers, making a stable, working relationship important to world order. It was a topic Putin and Biden raised at Wednesday’s summit and after the meeting, both world leaders agreed to help reduce the threat because nuclear war must “never be fought” because it “cannot be won.” China called the agreement to engage in bilateral dialogue on strategic stability a “welcomed” development....