Editor’s note for Friday, September 4, 2020

Dear reader,

Monday, September 7, is the Labor Day holiday in the U.S., where most of our team is based, so we’ll be taking the day off. If a huge story breaks, we’ll send a short email, otherwise, we’ll see you again next Tuesday.

Thank you so much for your support!

My thoughts today:

It’s all too easy for us at The China Project to get stuck in the rut of a bipolar world: China and the U.S. We’re trying to remedy that:

• Here is a piece on China’s growing clout in the Caribbean, by Leland Lazarus and William Yuen Yee.
• We linked to this yesterday, but in case you missed it: Chinese nuclear energy in Argentina is in trouble, by Álvaro Etchegaray.

You can expect coverage from us on countries around the world, from Brazil to Zambia, in the coming months.  

In the “trade wars are good, easy to win” department: The U.S. trade deficit was the widest since 2008 in July as imports greatly outpaced exports, reports the Wall Street Journal (porous paywall).

“China secretly built a vast new infrastructure to imprison Muslims” is the title of a BuzzFeed News investigation “based on thousands of satellite images [that] reveals a vast, growing infrastructure for long-term detention and incarceration” in Xinjiang, published last week. The Washington Post’s editorial board refers to the BuzzFeed report in an opinion piece that concludes:

The United States should block the import of goods tainted by forced labor in Xinjiang, as several human rights and labor organizations recently suggested. And the world must ask whether China, slowly strangling an entire people, has the moral standing to host the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. We think not.

Our word of the day is the five never allows (五个绝不答应 wǔ gè juébù dāyìng).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief