News Briefing for Thursday, July 21, 2022

Here’s what else you need to know about China today:

Biden and Xi might have a very tense phone call: U.S. President Joe Biden said that he expects to speak with Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 by the end of the month, as tensions between the two countries simmer over Taiwan and trade.

• Biden said the Pentagon did not support plans for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pay a visit to Taiwan. If acted upon, she would be the most senior U.S. politician to visit the country in a quarter of a century. As expected, China was outraged.
• Qín Gāng 秦刚, China’s ambassador to the U.S., said at the Aspen Security Forum on Wednesday that Washington’s growing ties with Taiwan are undermining the “One China” policy. He also had some things to say about Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
• At the same conference, CIA director Bill Burns said that China probably learned from witnessing the war in Ukraine that “you don’t achieve quick, decisive victories with underwhelming force.”

Is Didi out of the woods? The Chinese ride-hailing firm has officially been fined more than 8 billion yuan ($1.2 billion), after earlier reports that Beijing was wrapping up its year-long investigation signaled that the worst may have passed for the embattled tech giant.

• Regulators also fined Didi chairman Chéng Wéi 程维 and president Liǔ Qīng 柳青 1 million yuan ($148,000) each. Read the cyberspace regulator’s Q&A here, translated by Pekingnology’s Zichen Wang.

Baidu’s new robotaxi has a much cheaper price tag: The Apollo RT6, a fully electric vehicle equipped with a detachable steering wheel and a massive sunroof, will cost 250,000 yuan ($37,000) per unit.

• “This massive cost reduction will enable us to deploy tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles across China,” Robin Li (Lǐ Yànhóng 李彦宏), the company’s co-founder and CEO, said at the Baidu World Conference on Thursday. “We are moving toward a future where taking a robotaxi will be half the cost of taking a taxi today.”

NIO to produce solid-state EV battery: Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer NIO 蔚来汽车 has announced that, as soon as the fourth quarter, it will produce a 150 kWh solid-state battery of silicon-carbon composite anode material that will give NIO’s ET7 sedan a range in excess of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles).

Jump in silicon output: According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in the first half of the year, the national output of polysilicon was about 365,000 tons, a year-on-year increase of 53.4% (see our report this week on market leader Tongwei Group). Over the same period, total national exports of photovoltaic products were about $25.9 billion, an increase of 113.1% year-on-year.

Pizza Hut food scandal: Following an undercover investigation by journalists, two Beijing outlets of Pizza Hut, operated by Yum China in China, were yesterday inspected for food safety violations and temporarily closed. The outlets were found to be using expired food products, and had unsanitary kitchens and dirty cutlery. In March this year, one of the two stores was fined 50,000 yuan ($7,403) for similar violations.

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