China sends first civilian astronaut to space

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

Top story: Protesters clashed with police in Nagu, Yunnan province on Saturday, as the mostly Hui Muslim residents of the town feared that authorities were commencing with plans to remove the dome and minarets of the historic Najiaying Mosque.

China sent its first civilian astronaut to space today as part of a three-person crewed mission to the Tiangong space station, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced at a press conference (in Chinese) — all previous Chinese astronauts have been members of the People’s Liberation Army. The Shenzhou-16 spaceship launched this morning from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, marking the fifth manned mission to the Chinese space outpost since 2021 as part of the country’s ambitious plans to place astronauts on the moon before 2030.

Beijing turned down the Pentagon’s request for a meeting between U.S. defense secretary Lloyd Austin and Chinese defense minister Lǐ Shàngfú 李尚福 at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this week. The U.S. needs to “create necessary atmosphere and conditions for dialogue and communication” between their militaries, China’s Foreign Ministry said when asked about the rejected meeting today. Li has been sanctioned since 2018 by the U.S. because of his involvement in Chinese purchases of Russian combat aircraft and missiles.

A Hong Kong court unanimously rejected a bid by media mogul Jimmy Lai (黎智英 Lí Zhìyīng) to terminate his national security trial. Lai, the 75-year-old founder of the now-defunct pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, has been detained since December 2020 and was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison last October in a separate fraud case. The news comes a few weeks after Hong Kong lawmakers passed an amendment to a law that grants the city’s leader the power to bar overseas lawyers from handling national security cases, following four failed attempts to bar Lai from hiring a foreign barrister to represent him in his trial.

Elon Musk is paying a trip to China this week in his first visit to the country in three years. The CEO of Tesla, Space X, and Twitter has already met with foreign minister Qín Gāng 秦刚, He is also expected to meet with other senior government officials and tour Gigafactory Shanghai, Tesla’s electric vehicle factory in China.

China’s homegrown C919 passenger jet took its maiden commercial flight, in a long-awaited first challenge to aircraft industry giants Boeing and Airbus in one of their most important markets. The China Eastern Airlines flight left Shanghai for Beijing on May 28, after 15 years of development by state-backed aerospace champion the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac).

State media: The print edition of Party paper the People’s Daily and Xinhua’s English website both lead with a report on Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 exhorting the Politburo to “accelerate the construction of a powerful education country to provide strong support for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” and calling for China to become “an important and strongly influential world education center.”

Xinhua’s Chinese website has a more recent story about Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 presiding over a meeting of National Security Commission of the Central Committee, where he emphasized the “need to accelerate the modernization of the national security system” including “artificial intelligence security governance,” and that “the complexity and arduousness of the national security issues [China is] currently facing have increased significantly.”