News Briefing for Tuesday, September 6, 2022

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

At least 65 people died after a 6.6-magnitude earthquake hit the mountainous region between Sichuan Province and Tibet on Monday. The epicenter was near Kangding, at Luding, about 140 miles southwest of the provincial capital Chengdu, which felt tremors. “Another 16 people were missing and 50 were injured,” CCTV said late on Monday about the neighboring megalopolis Chongqing.

Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 will visit Kazakhstan on September 14, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry said at a briefing on Monday. Last month, media reports suggested that Xi was preparing to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin at a Central Asia regional summit in Uzbekistan in mid-September. Xi has not been outside of China since January 18, 2020, when he returned from Myanmar.

The U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods will stay in place, pending review by the Biden administration. The Office of the United States Trade Representative did not give a timetable in its written statement.

China has threatened “countermeasures” if the Biden administration sells arms worth more than $1.1 billion to Taiwan, as it approved last week Friday. Meanwhile, Chinese state media says that Russia and China are seeking “closer trade ties at [a] key economic forum in Russia’s Far East amid U.S. hegemony.”

China’s battered economy is still at risk, according to senior central bankers and other financial officials, who also promised fresh remedies to follow recent rounds of stimulus.

Domestically listed Chinese liquor companies increased their net profits 21.1% year-on-year, to about $10 billion.

New U.S. export restrictions on microchips “could disrupt China’s development of autonomous driving technology and data centers,” according to Caixin, as the U.S. Department of Commerce on Tuesday released some details on the Biden administration’s $50 billion industrial policy aimed at shoring up the American semiconductor industry.

China accused the U.S. of hacking into computers at Northwestern Polytechnical University, which U.S. officials say does military research. New Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Máo Níng 毛宁 said (in English, Chinese) the “U.S.’s behavior pose[s] a serious danger to China’s national security and citizens’ personal information security.”

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