News briefing for Monday, October 3, 2022

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

Google has pulled its Translate app in China due to “low usage,” as the U.S. tech giant joins a growing list of foreign firms that are retreating from the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s National Day was commemorated with protests over Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang around the globe — a sharp contrast to the celebrations in the mainland to mark the 73rd anniversary of the ruling Communist Party on October 1.

• Crowds gathered in several cities in the U.K. and the U.S.: Some waved flags for Tibet and for what some Uyghurs call East Turkestan, while others chanted protest slogans from the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
• In Taiwan, Chinese flags were raised by the Taiwan People’s Communist Party in support of Beijing, and burned by the pro-independence Taiwan Statebuilding Party on a boat in the waters where China conducted its military drills in August.
• In Hong Kong, leader John Lee Ka-chiu (李家超 Lǐ Jiāchāo) heralded the city’s “return to rule from chaos” at the official flag-raising ceremony, while police deployed special forces — including the counterterrorism unit — and armored vehicles to guard the event.
• Meanwhile, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China’s State Council hosted a reception attended by both Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 and Lǐ Kèqiáng 李克强, where the latter said that “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong and Macau had been “firmly, fully and faithfully implemented,” and that “Taiwan independence” had been “firmly opposed.”

The human cost of COVID zero: A string of recent suicides driven by “inhumane COVID-19 restrictions” has been reported from Lhasa, as the Tibetan capital nears its 50th day of lockdown despite an ease in COVID cases.

• In Xinjiang, at least 13 Uyghurs have died of poisoning from COVID-19 disinfectants that were sprayed in their homes to fight off the virus, Radio Free Asia reports.
• Elsewhere in China, COVID-zero measures now dictate people’s lives, from spending extended lengths of time waiting in lines to get tested to stockpiling their kitchens in case of a sudden lockdown.

BYD is the electric car king: Chinese electric vehicle (EV) and battery manufacturer BYD sold a record 201,300 EVs in September, the seventh month in a row of record sales and the first time it sold more than 200,000 units in a single month. It was also a good month for Tesla, which sold about 90,000 locally manufactured cars (up from about 77,000 in August). See today’s Business briefs from the Chinese media, with more links and info on:

• SOE revenue up, profits down so far this year.
• A postal boom in Tibet.

Spy vs. spy, hacker vs. hacker: “Suspected Chinese hackers tampered with widely used software distributed by a small Canadian customer service company,” reports Reuters. Last week, the Pekingnology newsletter translated and summarized Chinese reports about the U.S. hacking into a university and “deep into the Chinese information infrastructure.”

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