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.
In less than a year, three independent media outlets in Hong Kong — Apple Daily, Stand News, and now Citizen News — have closed due to increased pressure from authorities enforcing the National Security Law.
After over a year of deliberations, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has passed both the House and Senate in the U.S. Congress. President Biden is expected to sign the bill into law soon. Here’s what it would do.
Charles Lieber, the former head of Harvard University’s chemistry department, is now on trial accused of hiding financial ties to China. His is the latest case under the U.S. Department of Justice’s China Initiative, which has come under growing criticism for creating an atmosphere of fear among Chinese scientists.
Chinese AI giant SenseTime postponed a planned $767 million IPO in Hong Kong after a U.S. Treasury Department blacklisting. It was the second round of U.S. sanctions placed on the company, after it was accused in 2019 of developing facial recognition software targeting Uyghurs.
China is the “world’s worst jailer of journalists,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said in its annual survey. Reporters Without Borders estimated that 127 journalists are currently detained in China, including Hong Kong, which has seen its press freedoms rapidly deteriorate under the National Security Law.
In the spring of 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook successfully lobbied Chinese officials to make a massive five-year deal, committing the company to invest billions in the Chinese economy. The Information, which revealed the existence of the deal, says that it helped Apple secure multiple regulatory exemptions and become the top-selling smartphone brand in China.
Team USA will compete in the Winter Olympics in China, but the Biden administration will not send any officials to Beijing in protest of human rights abuses, particularly in Xinjiang. China called the move a “blatant political provocation.”
The South Pacific nation of fewer than 700,000 people remains divided over a 2019 decision to switch diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China. That is likely one of many factors in recent violent protests, but Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare insisted it is “the only issue” and that the violence had been “encouraged by other powers” that don’t like China.
Taiwanese conglomerate Far Eastern Group (FEG) was recently fined in mainland China for problems such as “fire safety,” but the real problem appears to be politics: FEG is linked to officials in Taiwan that Beijing considers to be “‘Taiwan independence’ stubborn elements,” whose “affiliates and financial backers must be punished.”