Beijing’s Burmese days

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

Top story: A Chinese national is out on bail in Pakistan after he was arrested for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad on blasphemy charges. His rare release comes amid a growing number of blasphemy cases in the country — some of which are violently settled outside the court through mob lynchings. Click through for the whole thing.

China pledged deeper cooperation with Myanmar and urged the international community to “respect its sovereignty” during a meeting between Chinese Foreign Minister Qín Gāng 秦刚 and Min Aung Hlaing, the head of Myanmar’s military-controlled government, yesterday in the Myanmar’s capital of Naypyidaw. China is Myanmar’s biggest trading partner and a key supplier of the country’s military. Beijing has provided crucial support to the Southeast Asia nation since its military overthrew the former government, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, in 2001 and stamped out the pro-democracy protests that erupted after the coup.

China and Mongolia pledged to develop key transport infrastructure and “deepen the cooperation on the Belt and Road Initiative, mining, connectivity, and other fields” in a meeting between their two foreign ministers on May 1. Both sides vowed to strengthen ties and support each other’s interests. Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, is a key hub in the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor (CMREC), the shortest land corridor between Mongolia and its two powerful neighbors, which offers alternative transit routes for trade and investment in the Eurasian region.

The Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, will be allowed to travel to Pakistan next week to meet with the foreign ministers of Pakistan and China, after a UN Security Council sanctions committee on May 1 granted him an exemption to the travel ban implemented in 2011. The Security Council committee previously allowed Muttaqi to travel to Uzbekistan to meet with the foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries for regional stability and peace talks.

China just made its first sale of personal data, as the country looks to regulate and marketize the troves of data in the world’s second-largest economy. State-backed Guiyang Global Big Data Exchange (GBDE), the country’s first data exchange, which began in 2015, says it will compensate job seekers who uploaded their resumés to a database, access to which has been sold to other companies. Personal data is strictly regulated under China’s personal information protection law, and while the transaction volume of GBDE reached a modest 581 million yuan ($84.6 million) in February, authorities are hoping that those numbers will jump to an annual turnover of 10 billion yuan ($1.45 billion) in 2025.

Consumption roared back during The May 1 holiday period — which began on Saturday and ended today:

• 200,000 people went though entry-exit stations at Shanghai Pudong Airport and there were 1,600 international flights;
• Total box office takings of new films exceeded 1.4 billion yuan ($200 million), up from last year’s COVID-struck 297 million yuan ($29.95 million) ;
• Shanghai hosted 15.6 million tourists who spent 18.9 billion yuan ($2.73 billion), while nationwide tourism-related revenues added up to 148.05 billion yuan ($21.42 billion), a year-on-year increase of 128.90%.

State media: Tomorrow is Youth Day, which commemorates the anti-imperialist, modernizing movement epitomized by student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919.

The official Xinhua News Agency is celebrating with a story about Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 speech last year in which he called for “young people to unswervingly listen to and follow the Party’s words,” while the People’s Daily reports on a letter Xi wrote to students of China Agricultural University about “planting a strong love for farmers and cultivating the ability to revitalize agriculture .”