China

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Nepal Lifts Ban on TikTok, in a Likely Overture to China

      by

      The move signaled that Nepal’s new prime minister, who has cultivated ties with China, would continue on that path.The new prime minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, on Thursday overturned a ban on TikTok that his predecessor imposed in November, an apparent sign that the veteran politician intended to strengthen the country’s relations with China, its northern neighbor.The popular social media app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was banned for its refusal to curb what the previous Nepalese government had described as hate speech that disturbed “social harmony.” At the time, Nepali officials said that they had resorted to the ban after TikTok declined to address concerns about troubling content.TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.The decision to reinstate TikTok signaled Mr. Oli’s belief that, amid the geopolitical bickering between China and India, Nepal’s neighbor to the south that also banned the app, the Himalayan country was better off aligning with China.TikTok and many other Chinese apps have been banned in India since 2020, amid historically fraught relations between the two countries and more recent efforts to dominate the South Asian region.Prithvi Subba Gurung, a Nepalese government spokesman, said TikTok would now have to abide by certain directives, such as naming a point of contact in the country.“We have set a few conditions such as TikTok to be used for promoting Nepali tourism, supporting us for digital safety, digital literacy and digital education and curb hate content,” Mr. Gurung said.On Thursday morning, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Chen Song, wrote on the social media platform X, “Today is a good day,” which many Nepalese took to mean that the talks to reinstate TikTok had been finalized.Mr. Oli, 73, who leads Nepal’s largest communist party, returned to power in July as the leader of a new ruling coalition, taking charge of the government for the fourth time. The previous leader, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, was seen as easier than Mr. Oli for India to manipulate and frequently changing coalition partners for his personal benefit.Mr. Oli has made no secret of his opposition to India’s influence in Nepal. During his first stint as prime minister in 2015, he stood up against a crippling economic blockade that India had imposed over certain provisions in Nepal’s Constitution.During his second stint as prime minister, after elections in 2017, Mr. Oli revised Nepal’s political map in a way that further soured relations with India.On Thursday, Nepal and China also agreed to expand a few development projects aimed at strengthening bilateral ties, including an agreement to complete the upgrade of a highway in Kathmandu, the Nepalese capital, as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative project. Anupreeta Das More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in UK Politics

      Shame of British judge keeping free speech hero Jimmy Lai in jail

      by

      Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorThe son of a UK citizen imprisoned by China warned that time is running out to save his father as a British judge in Hong Kong was condemned for helping to keep him in jail.Sebastien Lai, son of pro-democracy newspaper tycoon Jimmy Lai, said his 76-year-old father was approaching a fourth year in solitary confinement.Mr Lai has been locked up since 2020 and faces a life sentence under Beijing’s National Security Law, while also serving time for charges overseen by British judges.British judge David Neuberger voted on Monday to uphold Mr Lai’s conviction for taking part in anti-Beijing protests alongside 1.7 million others in 2019. Mr Lai was sentenced to 14 months in prison.But former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten said it was “obvious” the case Lord Neuberger upheld was an “act of vengeance” by the city-state’s government.Lai has been locked up since 2020 and faces a life sentence under Beijing’s National Security Law More

    • 50 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Changing Supply Chain

      by

      We explore why commerce has changed — and how companies and governments are reacting.For decades, major companies have behaved as if geographic distance were almost irrelevant. A factory in China was the same as a factory in Michigan. The internet, container shipping and international trading arrangements had supposedly shrunk the globe.No longer. The pandemic and geopolitical upheavals have exposed the risks of depending on faraway industry to make critical things like computer chips, protective gear and medicines.I recently wrote a book on this topic, “How the World Ran Out of Everything.” I’ll use today’s newsletter to help you understand why commerce has changed — and how companies and governments are reacting.The pandemic shockThe emergence of Covid in China ended the previous version of globalization. Quarantines shut Chinese factories at the same time that Western consumers, stuck in lockdown, ordered more manufactured goods like exercise equipment and electronic gadgets.This combination of reduced supply and surging demand made other countries realize that they had become heavily dependent on a single nation — China — for many items, including medical supplies. Covid eventually faded from the headlines, but policymakers and business executives in the United States and Europe faced pressure to diminish their reliance on China.A central reason for concern was the rise of geopolitical tensions. China wasn’t merely the world’s factory; it is also an autocracy that, under President Xi Jinping, has become more aggressive in asserting global influence. Xi, for instance, has been vocal about bringing Taiwan under China’s control, using force if necessary. Taiwan is the dominant manufacturer of the most advanced varieties of computer chips.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans are on the offensive, and ‘Tampon Tim’ Walz is to the rescue | Arwa Mahdawi

      by

      Watch out world, Republicans are on the offensive. Still smarting from being called “weird”, it looks like a bunch of GOP strategists got in a room this week to workshop devastating nicknames for Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. After combining their dozen or so braincells, they came up with a winner: Tampon Tim. The name has been trending on social media as people on the right desperately try to make #TamponTim stick.Apart from the fact that it alliterates, what prompted this moniker? Well, in 2023 Walz signed a wide-ranging Minnesota education bill that, along with a number of other provisions, mandated public schools offer free menstruation products in their bathrooms.To anyone with an ounce of common sense, this sounds like a great thing to do. Tampons are expensive! And “period poverty” – the inability to afford menstruation supplies – is a serious problem in the US. According to a 2021 study commissioned by Thinx, a period product company, 38% of US teenage students who menstruate said that they “often or sometimes cannot do their best schoolwork due to lack of access to period products”. A 2019 edition of the same study also found that more 84% of students in the US have either missed class time or know someone who missed class time because they did not have access to period products.For a long time, period poverty was an overlooked problem; in recent years, however, there has been a wave of legislating to address it. According to the Alliance for Period Supplies, 28 states and Washington DC have passed legislation to help students have free access to period products while in school. So, while the bill Walz signed was commendable, it wasn’t radical in any way – it was part of a nationwide trend to combat a serious problem.I’ve got to hand it to the Republicans, it’s quite difficult to turn “implemented a mainstream policy making kids’ lives easier and helping them stay in school” into something negative, but it seems they are always happy to try. Predictably the right has been using the bill as a way to attack, not just Walz, but trans people.“As a woman there is no greater threat to a woman’s health than leaders … who support putting tampons in men’s bathrooms in public schools. Those are radical policies Tim Walz supports,” a Trump campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt,told Fox News on Tuesday.The actual legislation, I should be clear, does not explicitly state that tampons should be put in men’s bathrooms. It says that free menstrual products “must be available to all menstruating students in restrooms regularly used by students in grades four to 12”. But the very idea that a policy might be inclusive and help trans students seems to drive Republicans up the wall.The “Tampon Tim” attacks aren’t just born out of a hatred of trans people, they also reflect the Republicans’ disdain for women. There are memes with Walz’s head on a tampon and showing him menstruating into his jeans – all of which are meant to convey the idea that Walz is feminine. Which, to many men on the right, seems to be the most insulting thing you can call a man. Last week, for example, the Fox News host Jesse Watters wondered why any self-respecting man would vote for a woman. “[T]o be a man and then vote for a woman just because she’s a woman is either childish – that person has mommy issues – or they are just trying to be accepted by other women,” Watters said. “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.” Ah yes, that is exactly what the scientists say.While Republicans may be having fun with their silly nickname, I’m not sure it’s going to help them in the polls. If anything, it will help Walz. As Hillary Clinton posted on Twitter: “How nice of the Trump camp to help publicize Gov. Tim Walz’s compassionate and common-sense policy of providing free menstrual products to students in Minnesota public schools.”Republicans’ juvenile tampon jokes also reinforce how Walz represents a very different model of masculinity than the one Trump and JD Vance embody. In 1999, for example, when Walz was a high school teacher and football coach in rural Minnesota, he helped students create the school’s first Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). Walz has said he thought it was important for him to be the adviser to the GSA because “it really needed to be the football coach, who was the soldier and was straight and was married.” He wanted to show, in other words, that masculinity didn’t have to be toxic, that a real man had empathy.All of this to say: thanks for the nickname, guys! Rather than being the insult they think it is, Tampon Tim is a compliment. One that reinforces the fact that the GOP is suffering from a severe case of Toxic Schmuck Syndrome.New York’s oldest person said her secret to longevity is staying single“That’s why I am living … because I didn’t get married,” Louise Jean Signore, 112, told reporters this week. “I’d rather be single. When you are married, you have a lot of trouble.” The fact that Signore doesn’t drink or smoke probably also has something to do with it.Outcry on social media prompts new IUD insertion guidelinesWho says that complaining online is a waste of time? After TikTok users recently shared their painful experiences with getting intrauterine devices inserted, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued updated guidance on how doctors should share options for pain management with their patients. This is one small step towards taking women’s pain more seriously.Bulgaria’s parliament bans LGBTQ+ ‘propaganda’This mirrors regressive legislation passed in Russia and Hungary in recent years.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe gender police consistently target female athletes of colour“More women from the Global South or developing countries are affected by sex testing in sports,” the executive director of a sports advocacy organization told the AP in the wake of the Imane Khelif “controversy”. The AP further notes: “International sporting federations don’t tend to promote an understanding of diversity in sex and gender identity and that gender tests have often targeted female athletes of color who don’t conform to typically Western, white ideals of femininity.”Israel minister says starvation of millions in Gaza might be ‘justified and moral’While extremist Israeli leaders are fantasizing about starving 2 million people to death and defending rape, Harris has said she doesn’t support an Israel arms embargo. It is becoming clear that, just like Joe Biden, Harris has no red line when it comes to Palestinian suffering.Women in China spread secret, female-only languageNushu, sometimes called “script of tears”, is a secret language that goes back centuries in China.A political candidate who told voters not to be ‘weak and gay’ lost her raceValentina Gomez, the Missouri Republican who released homophobic campaign videos, lost her bid to become secretary of state by an embarrassing margin.The week in pawtriarchyBehind their prickly demeanor, cats are big softies. New research suggests cats will grieve after the death of fellow pets. They’ll even grieve dogs. Cats, it would appear, have more empathy than the average Republican politician. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Chinese American man convicted in US of spying on dissidents for China

      by

      A Chinese American scholar was convicted on Tuesday in the US on charges of using his reputation as a pro-democracy activist to gather information on dissidents and feed it to his homeland’s government.A federal jury in New York delivered the verdict in the case of Shujun Wang, who helped found a pro-democracy group in the city.Prosecutors said that at the behest of China’s main intelligence agency, the ministry of state security, Wang lived a double life for more than a decade.“The defendant pretended to be opposed to the Chinese government so that he could get close to people who were actually opposed to the Chinese government,” assistant US attorney Ellen Sise said in an opening statement last month. “And then, the defendant betrayed those people, people who trusted him, by reporting information on them to China.”Wang was convicted of charges including conspiring to act as a foreign agent without notifying the attorney general. Faced with up to 10 years in prison, he pleaded not guilty.Wang’s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.Wang came to New York in 1994 to teach after doing so at a Chinese university. He later became a US citizen.He helped found the Queens-based Hu Yaobang Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, named for two leaders of the Chinese Communist party in the 1980s.According to prosecutors, Wang composed emails – styled as “diaries” – that recounted conversations, meetings and plans of various critics of the Chinese government.One message was about events commemorating the 1989 protests and bloody crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, prosecutors said. Other emails talked about people planning demonstrations during various visits that Xi Jinping, Chinese president, made to the US.Instead of sending the emails and creating a digital trail, Wang saved them as drafts that Chinese intelligence officers could read by logging in with a shared password, prosecutors said.In other, encrypted messages, Wang relayed details of upcoming pro-democracy events and plans to meet with a prominent Hong Kong dissident while the latter was in the US, according to an indictment.During a series of FBI interviews between 2017 and 2021, Wang initially said he had no contacts with the ministry of state security, but he later acknowledged on videotape that the intelligence agency asked him to gather information on democracy advocates and that he sometimes did, FBI agents testified.But, they said, he claimed he did not provide anything really valuable, just information already in the public domain.Wang’s lawyers portrayed him as a gregarious academic with nothing to hide.“In general, fair to say he was very open and talkative with you, right?” the defense attorney Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma asked an undercover agent who approached Wang in 2021 under the guise of being affiliated with the Chinese security ministry.“He was,” said the agent, who testified under a pseudonym. He recorded his conversation with Wang at the latter’s house in Connecticut.“Did he seem a little lonely?” Margulis-Ohnuma asked a bit later. The agent said he did not recall.Wang told agents his “diaries” were advertisements for the foundation’s meetings or write-ups that he was publishing in newspapers, according to testimony. He also suggested to the undercover agent that publishing them would be a way to deflect any suspicion from US authorities.Another agent, Garrett Igo, told jurors that when Wang found out in 2019 that investigators would search his phone for any contacts in the Chinese government, he paused for a minute.“And then he said: ‘Do anything. I don’t care,’” Igo recalled. More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      US and Japan Strengthen Military Ties

      by

      The two governments said the moves were a response to growing aggression by China, whose rapid military buildup has many leaders worried.The top diplomatic and defense officials from the United States and Japan announced on Sunday that their nations would take concrete steps to bolster their military alliance because of the growing threat from China in the region.Those steps include establishing joint forces that would answer to the American commander in the Indo-Pacific, according to a statement issued by the two governments’ top officials and the committee that they oversaw. They also call for increasing co-production of air-to-air missiles and air defense interceptor missiles.The statement framed these changes in the alliance relationship mainly as a response to aggressive moves by China in East Asia. The statement focused on China’s actions in the East China Sea, South China Sea and beyond while also mentioning hostile activity by Russia and North Korea.The governments reaffirmed the importance of the mutual-defense clause in their treaty because of the “increasingly severe security environment caused by recent moves of regional actors,” they said.One of the top issues cited was the East China Sea, which Japan and China both claim part of. The American and Japanese senior officials said their governments reiterated their strong opposition to China’s “intensifying attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion.”The U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, and the U.S. defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III, were in Tokyo on Sunday to meet with their Japanese counterparts in what is commonly called a 2+2 dialogue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Blinken and a Top Chinese Official in Talks on U.S.-China Tensions

      by

      The U.S. secretary of state pressed China’s top foreign policy official on Beijing’s support for Russia’s efforts to rebuild its military industries during the Ukraine war.Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken pressed his Chinese counterpart Saturday on areas of sharp disagreement between the two nations, including China’s support of Russia’s military industrial sector, the State Department said in a statement. Mr. Blinken met with the Chinese official, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of an annual international conference of Southeast Asian nations in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. Also in attendance was Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who at one group session blamed the United States for provoking Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Mr. Blinken.In their meeting, Mr. Wang listened to Mr. Blinken’s criticisms, but pointed out that China has not sent weapons to Russia, said the State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe diplomatic talks.President Biden and his aides have recently accused China of helping Russia rebuild its defense industrial sector, mainly through the export to Russia by Chinese companies of machine tools and microelectronics that have helped the Russian army persist in its war in Ukraine.Mr. Blinken told Mr. Wang that defending Ukraine against Russia’s aggression was a “core interest” of the United States, using a term that Chinese officials often deploy to signal their own national priorities, the State Department official said. The U.S. government has imposed sanctions on more than 300 Chinese entities as a result, but the Chinese government still has not curbed the exports, the official said. He added that Mr. Blinken presented specific examples of the exports, though the official declined to go into detail on that part of the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Autocracy, Inc review – fears for liberalism and democracy

      by

      “There is no liberal world order any more, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real,” Anne Applebaum writes in her new book, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.In the eyes of many, US failure in Iraq coupled with the great recession discredited rules-based democracy. Parents of privilege shielded their children from war and economic downturn. The rest were not so lucky. The world’s current crop of rising strongmen are not operating on a blank slate.Russian belligerence and the rise of China play out against this roiling landscape, so too the challenges of Iran and North Korea. The emergence of a reinvigorated Brics bloc is another reminder of western unsteadiness. Indeed the west itself – from Hungary to Paris to Washington – is far from immune to the trend.“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying upon kleptocratic financial structures,” Applebaum argues. She is a Pulitzer-winning historian, a staff writer at the Atlantic and married to Poland’s foreign minister.Looking back, Applebaum got it wrong on the Iraq war (she had advocated regime change), nailed it on Vladimir Putin (“personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people”) and came close to the mark on Ukraine (“Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist”).The strength of Autocracy, Inc lies in its description of how autocrats bend and distort opinion, and find allies across national boundaries.In retrospect, the west was too eager to treat China as just another trading partner, not as a rival. The Tiananmen Square massacre signaled what might come next. Xi Jinping is a product of a system.In such systems, Applebaum writes, elites operate “not like a bloc but like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power”.No single caricature-like figure calls the plays alone. Rather, ad hoc collectives are driven by cash and power.“The members of these networks are connected not only one to another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.”Such elites have lawyers in New York and London, bank accounts and holdings strewn across the world. Applebaum notes that Marc Kasowitz, who counseled Donald Trump during the Mueller investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, also represented alleged US conduits for a Ukrainian oligarch. As it happens, David Friedman, Kasowitz’s former law partner, was Trump’s ambassador to Israel.As Applebaum writes, “the globalization of finance, the plethora of hiding places, and the benign tolerance that democracies have shown for foreign graft now give autocrats opportunities that few could have imagined a couple of decades ago.”Putin is estimated to be worth between $70bn and $200bn, wealth to rival that of Elon Musk. Xi and his family clock-in north of $1bn.Applebaum examines gas pipeline deals between the then Soviet Union and what was West Germany. The US was rightly concerned.Richard Nixon saw the danger that such transactions would “detach Germany from Nato”. Jimmy Carter imposed sanctions on the sale of US pipeline technology, on account of Soviet human rights violations. Decades later, the Nord Stream pipeline emerged as a battleground between Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin and Washington.Applebaum turns her gaze to Gerhard Schröder, German chancellor between 1998 and 2005. Since then, he has worked for Nord Stream, Rosneft and Gazprom – all Russian. Now 80, he has chaired the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning around $270,000 a year. He also led the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2, now shuttered.He is unapologetic. In February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he told the New York Times: “I don’t do mea culpa, it’s not my thing.”Applebaum also discusses so-called “hybrid states”, which she characterizes as countries that are a “legitimate part of the international financial system” and possess many of the trappings of democracy but that are “also willing to launder or accept criminal or stolen wealth or to assist people and companies that have been sanctioned”.She points to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. “Russian property purchases in the Emirates rose 100% after the invasion of Ukraine,” she writes.Not surprisingly, Applebaum lauds patriotism but fears nationalism and isolationism. By such metrics, Brexit was a bust.“Did the removal of Britain from the European Union give the British more power to shape the world?” Applebaum asks.The answer is self-evident.“Did it prevent foreign money from shaping UK politics?”Want a hint? Evgeny Lebedev, son of Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and ex-KGB agent, is now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, neatly ensconced in parliament.“Did it stop refugees from moving from the war zones of the Middle East to Britain? It did not.”Nigel Farage’s dream has left the UK worse for wear. Farage’s admiration for Putin is a feature, not a bug.“I said I disliked him as a person,” Farage recently said of the Russian president, while campaigning for election as an MP. “But I admired him as a political operator because he’s managed to take control of running Russia.”Applebaum hopes liberalism and democracy are sustainable but is uncertain of their fate.“Nobody’s democracy is safe,” she writes. Still, “there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do.”For autocrats, liberty and autonomy are inconveniences. Conformity is king. There is little surprise that Putin portrays himself as the defender of faith and traditional values.American democrats – as well as Democrats – have reason to be concerned. During the 2016 election, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. A lot has happened since then. Come November, LePage just may get his wish.

      Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is published in the US by Penguin Random House More