Editor’s note for April 11, 2023

Dear reader,

It’s been a wild few days of news about China since our last newsletter on Friday:

French President Emmanuel Macron has been widely criticized for remarks in an interview with Politico on his way home from China on Saturday in which he said that Europe should not get dragged into a U.S.-China confrontation about Taiwan.

Some have complained that the Politico story was oversimplified — if you read French you can read more extensive reporting by Les Echos here. Others have commented on his submissive body language in video clips released by the Chinese government, and his endorsement of the Chinese government in a video released by his own presidential Twitter account.

Just hours after Macron departed, China began three days of military exercises around Taiwan. Commenting to The China Project on the drills during a visit to Taiwan,, U.S. Representative Ami Bera (D-Calif.) said “We expected that they would do something, I think it’s par for the course.” (Details here, or scroll down for a summary.)

Yesterday, a court in Beijing sentenced human rights activist lawyers Xǔ Zhìyǒng 许志永, 50, and Dīng Jiāxǐ 丁家喜 to prison sentences of 12 and 14 years (scroll down for a summary). Xu and Ding’s sentences exceed the nine years given to the Xuzhou man who had kept the wife he bought from traffickers in 1998 locked up in an outdoor shack. (Details here, or scroll down for a summary.)

The Cyberspace Administration of China today released draft rules for ChatGPT-type platforms. The proposed rules specify that generative AI must not produce content that subverts the state,and that companies will be held responsible for any “illegal content” that their platforms produce, as well as for problems in the source materials used to train the platforms.

I talked to the radio show The World about the new rules earlier today.

Xi Jinping’s whirligig diplomacy continues this week, with visits by European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Watch this space for reports.

Our Word of the Day is: Generative artificial intelligence services (生成式人工智能 shēngchéng shì réngōng zhìnéng fúwù).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief