Lucas Niewenhuis is the Newsletter Editor at The China Project. Previously, he has researched China-Africa relations at the Social Science Research Council, interned at the Council on Foreign Relations, and studied Chinese language and culture in Shanghai and Beijing.
The highly transmissible Delta variant of COVID-19, first identified in India, is proving hard to control in Guangzhou. Like with other localized outbreaks over the past year, China is attempting to isolate the virus by testing nearly every resident in the city โ 18 million tests in just three days.
Hong Kongโs Victoria Park was empty on June 4 for the first time in 32 years, as police enforced a ban on the annual Tiananmen remembrance vigil. Some Hongkongers defied police and gathered near the park and elsewhere, while others found more subtle ways to mark the day.
In other Chinese vaccine news, Sinovac Biotech becomes the second China-based company to win WHO approval for its shot, and Chinese vaccine makers promise even greater supply for developing countries.
As Hong Kongโs courts gave additional prison sentences to activists and the cityโs police again banned the annual June 4 gathering, the Legislative Council formally approved new rules imposed by Beijing requiring that only โpatriotsโ can be elected to public office.
As a small surge in COVID-19 cases disrupts life in Taiwan, and the islandโs vaccine rollout continues slowly, Taiwanese officials blamed China for blocking some of their vaccine supply.
While the dominant origins theory for COVID-19 involves a natural source and no laboratories, the exact way that the pandemic began remains unknown. Some prominent scientists are becoming more skeptical of Chinaโs denials of a lab leak, and want to see more records from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution today condemning Chinaโs human rights abuses and counter-sanctions over Xinjiang. Ratification of the EU-China investment deal is off the table, the resolution says, until Beijing removes those sanctions.
True to form for the worldโs most populous nation, China is now administering eye-popping numbers of COVID-19 vaccinations. In a span of nine days, 100 million people in China recently received a shot.
The successful landing of the Zhurong rover on the Red Planet marks a major milestone in the China National Space Administrationโs efforts to catch up to NASA.