News briefing for Tuesday, August 16, 2022

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

H&M has returned to Alibaba’s Tmall, the Chinese tech giant’s ecommerce platform, 16 months after the Swedish retailer was boycotted in China for its statements about Xinjiang cotton.

Political criticism may still land you in a psych ward in China, according to a Tuesday report by Madrid-based rights group Safeguard Defenders: 99 people had been locked up in psychiatric hospitals 144 times between 2015 and 2021, covering 109 hospitals in 21 provinces, municipalities, or regions across China — despite Beijing’s legal reforms nearly a decade earlier to prevent such occurrences.

• In the late 1980s, China began sending some activists and critics to psychiatric hospitals under a system called ānkāng 安康 (“peace and health”), a uniform designation of a network of government-run psychiatric facilities for the criminally insane (though not all ankang hospitals are prison hospitals).
• The system drew international concern after Chinese pro-democracy activist Wáng Wànxīng 王万星 was forcibly held for 13 years in a Beijing asylum after staging a one-man demonstration in Tiananmen Square on the third anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown. He was released in 2005 and exiled to Germany.

Steep drop in highway passenger volume in July: On the back of disappointing economic data for July, the Ministry of Transport has announced that the total highway passenger volume in July was 341.84 million, a year-on-year decrease of 25.3%, and the total highway passenger turnover was 25.15 billion passenger-kilometers, a year-on-year decrease of 28.9%. Road freight and cargo volumes increased by small amounts.

Only eight Chinese universities in the top 100: Yesterday, Shanghai Jiao Tong University released its latest Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) of the world’s top 1,000 universities. A total of 163 mainland Chinese universities are on the list, but only eight among the top 100, with Tsinghua University ranking highest in 26th place.

Tesla made a million cars in China: Yesterday, Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory announced that it had launched its millionth car, making it Tesla’s most productive factory ever.

Cambodia “unswervingly adheres to the one-China principle,” Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense General Tea Banh said in a meeting on Monday with General Xǔ Qíliàng 许其亮, the vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission. The two chiefs reaffirmed “iron” ties between the two nations, after a U.S. report in June claimed China was secretly building a PLA military base in a joint port project in Cambodia — causing both sides to vehemently deny the accusations.

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