Macron and Xi, life expectancy will be up to 81.3 in China

These are the top stories from and about China for Thursday April 6, 2023.

Top story: The leaders of China, France, and the EU met in Beijing today. While not much came out of the highly-anticipated meeting, France did walk away with a good number of lucrative business deals. Click through for the whole thing.

By 2035, average life expectancy in China will reach 81.3 years, according to a new study published in the journal The Lancet. In 2022, average life expectancy in China was 77.9 years.

Taiwan’s President Tsai and U.S. Speaker of the House McCarthy met in Los Angeles yesterday, in the first public meeting between a U.S. House Speaker and a Taiwanese president on American soil since the U.S. broke off formal diplomatic relations with the island in 1979. But China’s response to the meeting has been considerably muted compared to the largest-ever military drills it conducted around Taiwan after McCarthy’s predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, made a surprise visit to the island last August.

China plans to build a $500 million undersea internet cable to link Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, in a bid to rival a similar project led by the U.S. China’s new state-backed cable will aim to link Hong Kong to Hainan, then extend out towards Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and France, as the two superpowers rush to build out the key infrastructure that carries more than 95% of all internet traffic worldwide.

Tech billionaire Zhōu Hóngyī 周鸿祎 is getting divorced. The CEO of internet security company Qihoo 360 (who has big stakes in a total of four listed companies) is divorcing his wife and business partner, Hú Huān 胡欢. Per the divorce agreement, Zhou will transfer 6.25% of the shares of Qihoo 360 to Hu, worth approximately 9 billion yuan ($1.3 billion).