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News Briefing

News briefing for April 24, 2023

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

Eastern Europe is outraged over remarks by China’s ambassador to France, Lú Shāyě 卢沙,questioning the sovereignty of post-Soviet states. Click through for the full story.

A leading Communist Party newspaper editor has been detained in Beijing for espionage for more than a year, his family stated on Monday, after he and a Japanese diplomat were arrested while eating lunch at a hotel restaurant on February 21, 2022. Dǒng Yùyù 董郁玉, a 61-year-old senior columnist and editor at Guangming Daily, one of the Party’s major newspapers, had often met with foreign diplomats and journalists for decades. But those interactions, which his family said were “a normal part of his job and a normal interaction between peoples in most parts of the world,” are now being scrutinized by authorities as evidence that Dong was working as a foreign agent for either Japan or the U.S.

China is considering evacuating its citizens in Sudan due to the escalating violence between two rival local military factions since April 15, which has led to widespread food shortages and the deaths of over 400 people. Beijing’s embassy in Khartoum has asked (in Chinese) its more than 1,500 Chinese citizens in the northern African country to fill out a form on its website on whether they wanted to evacuate, following similar moves by the embassies of other countries operating in the region.

Seoul and Beijing exchanged stern words over Taiwan, after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said in an interview with Reuters that recent tensions over Taiwan “occurred because of the attempts to change the status quo by force,” drawing fierce rebuke from Beijing. “The Taiwan issue is not simply an issue between China and Taiwan but, like the issue of North Korea, it is a global issue,” Yoon added.

Ecommerce app Temu has entered Europe, and is now operating in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K. PDD Holdings’ budget app now operates in 10 countries. In the first quarter, Temu was downloaded 19 million times in the U.S., and has been at the top of the Apple App Store and Google Play in the U.S. since November 2022.

Chinese footprints will be on the Moon by 2028: Today is Space Day in China, and the National Space Administration today released China’s first full global map of Mars based on data collected by the Tianwen-1 Mars mission, which landed on the surface of Mars in May 2021. According to Wú Wěirén 吴伟仁, chief designer of China’s Lunar Exploration Program, the Chang’e 8 lunar mission will be launched in 2028, and will establish a manned scientific research station at the south pole of the Moon.