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.
Three major outcomes of the Biden-Xi meeting are becoming clearer: A journalist visa thaw, nuclear-arms talks of some type, and an apparent prisoner swap involving China lifting an exit ban on one American, while seven Chinese citizens were deported from the U.S.
Joe Biden and Xi Jinpingโs virtual meeting yesterday evening appears to have been relatively friendly and promises more stability for the U.S.-China relationship. There were no breakthroughs, but Chinese media reported that an agreement had been reached to issue journalist visas, starting with the U.S. side.
The COP26 โGlasgow Climate Pactโ is the first climate summit agreement to explicitly mention fossil fuel reduction โ though a โphase-outโ of coal was watered down to โphase-downโ at the last minute, at the behest of China and India.
Chinaโs highly indebted property developer Evergrande continues to hop from one grace period to another on payments for various bonds, narrowly avoiding default. Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Reserve has raised concerns about risks from โhighly indebted corporations, especially in the real estate sectorโ in China.
The sixth plenum, a top Communist Party leadership meeting that started in Beijing today, is expected to approve a resolution that codifies General Secretary Xi Jinpingโs image as an indispensable figure in Chinese history and governance, and set the stage for his โthird termโ that would begin at the 2022 Party Congress.
With exactly three months to go until the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, health officials in the capital and elsewhere are taking extreme measures to quash the latest Delta-driven spike in COVID-19. How long will China hold out as the last โCOVID zeroโ country?
Yahoo has ended its 22-year presence in the Chinese market, a largely symbolic move after many of the internet companyโs services had already stopped operating in China years ago.
The 90-day review of U.S. intelligence on COVID-19 origins, which was completed in August, was highly inconclusive and even discounted several points cited by lab-leak theory proponents, according to a newly declassified summary. Beijing did not respond to the contents of the report, which it dismissed as โpolitical and false.โ
Beijing is very unhappy with statements in the last two days from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen and from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the future of the island nation that China sees as a breakaway province.