News briefing for Monday, September 19, 2022

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

Biden has for a fourth time said that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the face of a Chinese invasion: “Would U.S. forces defend the island?” Biden was asked in an interview broadcast on CBS News’s 60 Minutes program on Sunday. “Yes, if, in fact, there was an unprecedented attack,” the president replied.

• The Chinese Foreign Ministry has also lodged “stern representations” with the United States. His comments “severely violate” Washington’s long-held policy on Taiwan, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning 毛宁 said on Monday per AFP.
• “In my view, ‘strategic ambiguity’ is being eroded, but what is replacing it is closer to ‘strategic confusion’ than ‘strategic clarity,’” Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund, said per the Financial Times.

“Do not have direct skin-to-skin contact with foreigners,” Wu Zunyou 吴尊友, the chief epidemiologist at the CCDC, said on his official Weibo page on Saturday, as part of a warning issued one day after China reported its first case of monkeypox in the megacity of Chongqing. He also urged locals to avoid skin-to-skin contact with recent travelers from overseas and with strangers.

• The warning, which drew widespread online attention over the weekend, has sparked backlash, with some Weibo users calling the post racist and discriminatory: “This is very inappropriate [to say]. At the start of the pandemic, some foreigners stood up and [defended us] by saying that Chinese people are not viruses,” wrote one user per the BBC.

China attends the Queen’s funeral: Chinese Vice President Wáng Qíshān 王岐山 visited the lying-in-state of the late Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday, despite an earlier report from Politico that a Chinese delegation would be barred from attending the vigil at Westminster Hall because of Beijing’s sanctions on seven British parliamentarians.

• Meanwhile, amid an outpouring of nostalgia in the former British colony of Hong Kong, some public figures are being scrutinized over their tributes to the Queen for being “too admiring of her reign or British rule in general.”

Sanctions on American defense CEOs: The CEOs of American defense contractors Raytheon and Boeing Defense have been slapped with sanctions by China on Friday over a $1.09 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan earlier this month.

China’s first electric supercar: Last week, Aion 埃安, the electric car subsidiary of GAC Group 广汽集团, presented its new premium brand Hyper 昊铂 “electric supercar” with gullwing doors, which can accelerate from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour) in 2.3 seconds. The price tag is just under 1.3 million yuan ($186,117). See today’s Business briefs from the Chinese media, with more links and info on the following:

• “Use of foreign capital” is increasing in China, especially from South Korea, Germany, and Japan (26.8%).
• Updates from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development on this year’s urban renewal campaign.
• New data on China’s national hi-tech zones.

Anti-China feelings in Kazakhstan: The Associated Press reports on a Chinese-born ethnic Kazakh man named Bekzat Maxutkanuly who last week, as “soldiers goose-stepped to anthems welcoming Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 on a visit to Kazakhstan[, was] preparing to drive from village to village across his country’s vast hinterlands to sign people up for a political party that will challenge Beijing, not welcome it.”

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