Dueling in the Pacific

The dying days of summer have been slow news days: the biggest story out of China took place in South Africa where Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 went for only his second foreign trip of the year. Xi missed a speech, prompting speculation about his health, but then joined fellow leaders from Brazil, India, and South Africa, and the foreign minister of Russia to welcome a bunch of new members to the BRICS bloc.

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Jeremy Goldkorn Editor-in-Chief

Laurel Schwartz checked in with elected officials from the region at a variety of events in Washington D.C. for the latest China and the Town column.

More news and current affairs:

At the BRICS meeting in Johannesburg this week, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 missed an important speech: we still don’t know why. But the next day, he reappeared, and member states Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa agreed to admit Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to their club. But can the enlarged bloc’s members agree on anything substantial?

Taiwanese Vice President and frontrunner for next year’s election William Lai (賴清德 Lài Qīngdé) made a stopover in the U.S. last week. His trip was intentionally low-profile, but it nonetheless angered Beijing, which responded with military drills.

Back in Taiwan, a third-party presidential candidate wants to challenge the political establishment. Jordyn Haime reports from Taipei on Ko Wen-je (柯文哲 Kē Wénzhé) of the Taiwan People’s Party.

Lying flat (躺平 tǎngpíngìng), first appeared on the Chinese internet in 2021 as a slacker reaction of China’s youth to the social phenomenon called “involution” (内卷 nèijuǎn), or intense economic competition for ever scarcer resources, which entered popular usage in 2020.

The outlook this year is even gloomier. China’s economy is struggling, and unemployment among urban Chinese aged 16 to 24 is over 20%, with 70% of them being university graduates.

And so, like their Gen Z counterparts in the U.S., but facing even greater economic headwinds, many are “quiet quitting” (糊弄学 hùnong xué), which is The China Project’s Phrase of the Week: Click through for the full story.

Last December, Cleverly called China “potentially an important partner for good” on climate change, a view that was blasted by his party’s former leader and China hawk, Sir Iain Duncan Smith. U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is making an effort before next year’s parliamentary polls to get Sino-British relations on a more even keel.

But the country’s bicameral legislature has been scathing toward the government’s approach, Thompson Chau reports.

More on China and the World:

The Philippines is one of the most vocal states protesting China’s claims to the South China Sea — a sore point in what would otherwise be a prosperous relationship, Alex Colville writes in China Ties.

Indonesia suspended diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China from 1967 to 1990 and restricted Chinese-language lessons and literature. But the two countries now have robust political and commercial connections, and large numbers of young Indonesians are learning Mandarin.

Local Londoners, together with exiled Uyghurs, Tiebtans, and Hongkongers have blocked the construction of a new super embassy China had planned for the U.K. capital, prompting fury in Beijing, but jubilation amongst the activists who opposed it.

More on business:

An almost comical price war has broken out between Hema Xiansheng and Sam’s Club, two major players in China’s supermarket sector owned by Alibaba and Walmart respectively. As a result, the price of durian crepe cakes, made from the famously stinky tropical fruit, has dropped significantly in the past few weeks.

But according to its founder, UniCome is the first of its kind to label itself as “queer feminist.”

More on The China Project:

A French sneak attack in 1884 led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Qing Dynasty technological prowess. It’s time to reexamine the popular — but simplistic, if not outright wrong — idea that China’s military losses to Europe (and, later, Japan) were due to its inability to modernize. James Carter explains in This Week in China’s History.

Michael Yahuda’s Hong Kong is a clear-eyed assessment of the run-up to the Hong Kong handover from Britain to the People’s Republic of China. Read all about it in Paul French’s weekly China books column.

An ongoing price war on durian cakes might seem silly, but it’s actually reflective of China’s current economic issues and the changing supermarket sector.

Mandarin learning was banned in Indonesia for decades, but as trade grows between China and Indonesia more Chinese language programs are popping up. What is the history behind China-Indonesian relations?

This week’s Sinica Podcast is something a little different: A selection of “This Week in China’s History” columns by James Carter, all narrated by Sinica host Kaiser Kuo with a little interstitial music by his Chinese heavy metal band Chunqiu.