Hong Kong hosts a carnival instead of a vigil on June 4

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

Top story: At the Shangri-La Dialogue over the weekend, Chinese Defense Minister Lǐ Shàngfú 李尚福 and his U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin, each had sharp words to say about each other’s countries, dashing hopes that two superpowers might use the opportunity to stabilize fraught relations. Click through for the whole thing.

On June 4, Hong Kong opened a patriotic carnival at Victoria Park, instead of keeping with a decades-long tradition of hosting a vigil for the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Police were out on the streets en masse leading up to the anniversary, and have been since they detained 23 people as of Sunday for “breaching public peace.” While the city’s security apparatus kept a tight lid on any significant public demonstrations, it was unable to control other acts of commemoration either outside its jurisdiction, or barely skirting it: The U.S. and EU consulates in the city displayed lit candles in their windows to remember those who were killed 34 years ago. Meanwhile, Tiananmen vigils have popped up overseas in cities like New York, London, Berlin, and Taipei, with many Chinese dissidents in attendance.

The U.S. CIA director Bill Burns paid a secret trip to China last month to speak with top Chinese officials, in a bid to stabilize increasingly deteriorating ties between Washington and Beijing, reported the Financial Times. Burns, a former top diplomat, is frequently tasked by U.S. President Joe Biden to handle delicate missions at home and overseas — especially given the turbulent state of bilateral relations between the two superpowers ever since a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon flew over North America in February.

A landslide killed 19 people in a mining company’s worker dormitory in a mountainous rural district of Sichuan Province on Sunday morning, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. Continuous rain had been reported for the past several weeks around Leshan County in the southwestern part of the province. More than 180 people were dispatched to help recover those buried under the debris, and rescue operations concluded later on Sunday afternoon. Those killed were all apparently workers with the Jinkaiyuan mining company.

China is courting Argentina with currency and infrastructure deals as it continues to expand its footprint in South America. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) governor Yì Gāng 易纲 agreed to allow Argentina to tap up to 70 billion yuan ($9.89 billion) of the currency swap line, up from a previous limit of about 35 billion yuan ($4.94 billion), in a meeting with Argentina’s economy minister, Sergio Massa, on Friday in Beijing (in Chinese). Meanwhile, the two nations also signed a cooperation agreement to promote the construction of the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s National Development and Reform Commision (NDRC) announced (in Chinese) on June 2.

Temu is breaking the bank in its bid to rival Amazon in the U.S. While the shopping app, owned by the Chinese tech giant PDD, offers dirt-cheap prices, it is also losing an average of $30 per order in its race to break into the American market. Temu bleeds out between 4.15 billion yuan ($588 million) and 6.73 billion yuan ($954 million) per year, and is pressuring its small suppliers in China to keep prices low.

State media: The front page of this morning’s People’s Daily is mostly about a Friday speech by Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 about “modern Chinese civilization” and “cultural inheritance and development” (English version here).

Today is World Environment Day and Xinhua News Agency’s top story focuses on Xi’s thoughts on the “harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.”