China, the curate’s egg

It’s been a week of mixed-up news about China.

Less-than-stellar economic numbers were followed by a plan and pledge from the Communist Party to give full backing to private enterprise; it was greeted with public expressions of support from some of the country’s leading entrepreneurs.

New rules to govern generative artificial intelligence were finalized. The rules aim to foster innovation but give the government powers to control the output of consumer-facing AI applications like Ernie Bot, Baidu’s answer to ChatGPT. Most experts agree on the need for governments and companies to regulate AI, but would you trust the Cyberspace Administration of China to do it?

Meanwhile, U.S. climate envoy John Kerry had a series of meetings in Beijing aimed at restarting climate cooperation, but Chinese leader Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 emphasized that his country would choose its own path to emissions reductions, and he avoided meeting Kerry.

Xi did however meet with the 100-year-old master of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, a man whose vision of great powers dividing up the world into spheres of influence and staying out of each other’s domestic affairs is appealing to Beijing.

Kissinger and Kerry’s visits followed those of U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, apparently a sign of a thaw in the frosty China-U.S. relations, but just today, the Wall Street Journal reported that “hackers linked to Beijing accessed the email account of the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, in an attack that is believed to have compromised at least hundreds of thousands of individual U.S. government emails.”

These are just some of the contradictions of the week’s news. Read on for more!

Our Phrase of the Week is: Appeared out of nowhere (横空出世 héngkōng chūshì), which social media users have been using to describe a fictional university that became a viral meme after China’s competitive university examination season in June.

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Jeremy Goldkorn Editor-in-Chief

On July 17, China released official economic statistics for the first half of 2023. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 6.3% in the second quarter from a year ago, and 5.5% over the first half of the year.

These numbers are much better than most countries can boast of but they were lower than many had expected, and there are other troubling signs, for example, youth unemployment in China hit a new record high, with the jobless rate of 16- to 24-year-olds in urban areas rising to 21.3% in June. Markets were not reassured.

Then on July 19, Beijing announced a new 31-point plan to promote the private sector and juice the economy, after more than two years of crackdowns on entrepreneurs. Billionaires are vocally supporting the plan, but will it work?

More editor’s picks from this week:

The German government’s recently released “Strategy on China” has struck a balance between the country’s pro-China business interests and the China-skeptic foreign policy establishment. The position paper marks an important milestone and irreversible shift in wider European relations with China, writes Jacob Mardell.

In four decades, Chinese people went from using food coupons to eating fatty meals delivered via mobile phone apps. The country’s rapid economic rise also means that the foods that Chinese people eat are changing — impacting the country’s health, food security, and environment.

China pressured Turkey to bust a Uyghur bookseller. Chinese publishers are barred by Beijing from granting permission to reprint Uyghur books. For one bookseller in Istanbul, accusations of copyright infringement suspected to be prompted by the Chinese government drove more than 50 Turkish police to burst into his shop to cart off sackfuls of his 11,000 Uyghur books. Ruth Ingram reports from Istanbul.

If you missed our Daily Dispatch newsletters this week, you can find them online here with all the news you need to know:

• July 20, 2023: Beijing’s new plan to juice the economy…and Kissinger, but not Kerry, gets a meeting with Xi
• July 19, 2023: Fat China…and a deep dive into Germany’s new China strategy
• July 18, 2023: Where is China’s foreign minister?…and China’s green energy expansion into Central Asia
• July 17, 2023: Good or bad economic news?…and Kerry and Xi discuss global warming as China bakes

Even as President Biden’s special envoy on climate John Kerry worked to get the U.S. and China realigned while visiting Beijing this week, lawmakers in Washington, D.C. advanced legislation that would undermine the collaboration between American and Chinese scientists that experts say could be critical in slowing climate change.

• On July 14, legislation banning the U.S. government from funding or supporting research in China passed a House vote as an amendment to the FY 2024 Pentagon budget.
• Last month, 10 Republican members of the House called on the State Department to allow the expiration of the Scientific and Technological Agreement (STA) with China, a pact that goes back to 1979.

Advocates for continuing and even increasing U.S.-China cooperation on science and technology say the STA will be critical if the world’s two largest economies, and largest funders of scientific research, are to beat climate change, pollution and pandemics. But its future does not look bright.

More editor’s picks from this week:

Has the West lost the electric vehicle race to China? How did the entire world become dependent on China for electric vehicles, from supply chains to manufacturing to car brands? We talked to two leading EV experts, Lei Xing and Henry Sanderson, in this subscriber-only webinar — click here for a transcript.

How are China’s environmental businesses regulated? China has been lauded in recent years for its accomplishments in environmental protection. But on-the-ground experiences show that its path toward emission reductions may have inadvertently sowed seeds of long-term challenges, according to author and scholar Denise van der Kamp.

China is neither laying a debt trap nor building a lot of fossil projects in Africa. Rather, it’s been relatively generous with debt relief, and in developing Africa’s renewable energy capabilities, argues Kenyan economist Anzetse Were.

Eclipsing Russian energy in Central Asia: China has a significant comparative advantage in green energy, and growing incentives for Central Asian countries to diversify their energy mix are creating opportunities for Chinese companies.

Earlier this month, China released a national regulation on generative artificial intelligence — AI that can generate images or text based on prompts, such as ChatGPT and Baidu’s Ernie Bot. The primary purpose is to assert control, but revisions from a previous draft suggest Beijing understands the importance of leaving space for development. Qiheng Chen has read both the initial and final draft, and presents his analysis here.

Other features from The China Project this week:

10 Chinese-language podcasts you should listen to. From interview shows to bite-sized news programs, these are the best Chinese-language podcasts currently being produced, as curated by Andrew Methven.

China’s relations with Chile, its oldest friend in South America. For Chile, China is a bigger destination of exports than the next five countries combined. For China, Chilean resources are crucial in sustaining its solar panel, wind turbine, and EV output. But prosperous partnerships aren’t always trusting ones, writes Alex Colville in China Ties.

The problem with Mao’s “continuous” revolution. Wuhan fractured in the summer of 1967 amid Mao’s Cultural Revolution. On one side were the Red Guards, who believed in continuous revolution against institutions, including the military. On the other side…the military, which fought back, with deadly results, writes James Carter in This Week in China’s History.

What the U.S. looked like to an early 20th-century Chinese diplomat. Wǔ Tíng-fāng 伍廷芳 was the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the new Chinese Republic in the 1920s. In his travelog America, Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat, he observes American society while asking big questions, many of which are still relevant today. Read Paul French’s latest on his Ultimate China Bookshelf.

Shanhe University is a made-up school born from a single joke that a Weibo user made in late June, after China’s 2023 national college entrance examination, the gāokǎo 高考, concluded on June 9.

Over the next few weeks, the fictional initiation became a viral meme — and revealed education inequality in the country.

More editor’s picks from this week:

Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 is “an idiot” and “my biggest promoter” says Liào Yìwǔ 廖亦武, the Sichuan-born writer and street musician who spent four years in prison for “Massacre,” his poem about Tiananmen Square in 1989. Liao talked to fellow author Ian Johnson about exile in Germany and his plan to print dictators’ faces on toilet paper.

Discussion about the #MeToo story line in Wave Makers — a TV show that follows the fictitious lives of Taiwanese political staffers working on an election — has largely been censored on Chinese social media, but that hasn’t stopped some people from openly talking about it. In the latest Queer China column, Nathan Wei talks to Chinese queer feminists about what they think of the series.

Chinese tennis player Zhāng Shuài 张帅 received an outpouring of support from athletes and sports fans at home following her tearful exit from a recent match in Budapest, Hungary, where she suffered a panic attack after a disputed call by the umpire.

Dalian artist Jì Qióng’s 继琼 work combines traditional Chinese drawing techniques with a heavy dose of surrealism.

This week on the Sinica Podcast, host Kaiser Kuo welcomes back Jeremy Daum, senior research scholar in law and senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Law Center.

Daum has a well-deserved reputation as a debunker of myths and misperceptions about China. This time, he takes on the much-discussed “overseas police stations,” and examines how they are — and aren’t — related to China’s transnational repression.

More from the Sinica Podcast Network:

The short but eventful history of pro wrestling in China is filled with highs and lows. For a while, rival promoters dreamed of building the WWE of China, but money dried out and then COVID nearly killed the industry. Those who are still kicking — a motley crew of professionals, hobbyists, lifers, dreamers, and realists — are now working together to rebuild this thing they love.

Wuhan fractured in the summer of 1967 amid Mao’s Cultural Revolution. On one side were the Red Guards, who believed in continuous revolution against institutions, including the military. On the other side…the military, which fought back, with deadly results. Listen to This Week in China’s History.

On our TikTok channel:

The U.S. and China have restored climate talks however tensions still linger overhead as both countries seek out the best strategy to tackle the growing climate crisis.

Shanhe University is the perfect school — except it doesn’t exist. Students have created the meme college in order to vent frustrations about education disparity in China.

Beijing has published a plan to reinvigorate private business, and the country’s billionaires are voicing their support. What does this development say about the state of China’s economy?

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