India will not have a single journalist left in China

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

China has ordered the last Indian journalist in the country to leave, as the two neighboring nations continue to purge each other’s journalists from within their borders. Chinese authorities have instructed the Press Trust of India reporter to leave the country this month, following the departure of the Hindustan Times reporter over the weekend, as well as the denied visa renewals for two Indian journalists from public broadcaster Prasar Bharati and the Hindu newspaper in April.

Since 2020, “the number of Chinese journalists stationed in India has plummeted from 14 to just one,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wāng Wénbīn 汪文斌 said today, while stating that India still had not approved a visa extension for that remaining journalist. “We hope that India will meet China halfway and continue to issue visas for journalists and remove unreasonable restrictions,” Wang added.

The White House scrambled to declassify information on the China-Cuba spy base over the weekend in an effort to redress what it called “not accurate” reporting on the matter. “The sensitive nature of this information is such that we just simply couldn’t go into more detail, even before the first story appeared, to try to better inform that reporting,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said today. “This is not a new development that China has been trying to achieve some intelligence-gathering capabilities in Cuba and, frankly, elsewhere in the hemisphere.”

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) first reported on June 8 that China and Cuba reached an agreement worth several billion dollars for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island, roughly 100 miles from Florida. China’s Foreign Ministry today denied any use of Cuba as a spying base.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal says Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 “is stepping up his effort to gird China for conflict.”

Marriages in China hit a new low last year, with wedding registrations declining for nine straight years to 6.83 million newlyweds in 2022, according to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs. That is almost half the peak of 13.47 million marriages in 2013. The last time so few people decided to tie the knot in China was more than four decades ago, when 6.37 million couples registered to wed in 1979.

South Korea has accused a former Samsung executive of stealing trade secrets from the Seoul-based chip giant to build a copycat semiconductor plant in China. The unnamed 65-year-old former senior executive was indicted along with six others for trying to leak sensitive technologies and information, including confidential chip plant basic engineering data (BED) and process layout and design drawings, from August 2018 to 2019.

Smart vending machines are booming in China and Southeast Asia, bolstered by the widespread use of mobile payments, contactless shopping habits left over from the COVID pandemic, and rising labor costs. In China, smart vending machines drove total vending machine sales to 40% over the five years through 2022, along with a 70% jump in Malaysia and 10% hike in Singapore and Thailand, according to London-based market research firm Euromonitor International. While Japan is a dominating global player in the vending machine industry, many of the smart vending machines sold in Asia are made in China.

Chinese state media: The People’s Daily’s print edition celebrates the visit to Beijing of Honduran President Xiomara Castro, who switched her country’s diplomatic ties from Taiwan to the P.R.C., as does Xinhua News Agency, which calls Castro’s meeting with Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 “historic.”