It has been a bumpy week for China’s beleaguered technology giants. They are under increasing scrutiny overseas, and the communist party continues to tighten the screws on them at home. In many ways they are also their own worst enemies. The UK has become the latest government to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok from government devices
20 min listen
This week: Ian Williams asks how China will cope with the rise of AI chatbots (00:56), Kara Kennedy recounts her upbringing in the Welsh ‘murder capital’ of Pontypridd (08:11), and Oscar Edmondson makes the case for the BBC World Service (13:38). Presented by Natasha Feroze.
The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own. Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies not to offer their users ChatGPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty much
It was perhaps the most intriguing moment of their Moscow summit. As Xi Jinping left the Kremlin last night, he stood face to face with Vladimir Putin and told the Russian leader, ‘Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years and we are driving this change together’. The two men clasped hands, smiling. ‘I
It hardly seems like the most propitious time for Xi Jinping to be visiting Moscow. There’s an international arrest warrant out for his host Vladimir Putin for war crimes, and the man Xi has described as his ‘best friend’ spent the weekend inspecting land he’s snatched from Ukraine – in gross violation of the principles
China’s new foreign minister Qin Gang has come out growling, using his first media appearance to accuse the US of ‘all-out containment and suppression’. He said his country’s friendship with Russia was a beacon of strength and stability which ‘set an example for foreign relations’ and asked: ‘Why should the US demand that China refrain
China is moving to consolidate and exploit its position as world leader in solar power technologies, by restricting the export of key components. The move could deliver a severe blow to the European and American solar industries and is a stark warning about the dangers of over-dependence on Beijing for critical technologies of the future.
There will no doubt be some tense moments in the boardrooms of western technology companies over the coming days after the revelation that the Chinese spy balloon shot down after traversing the United States had western-made components with English-language writing on them. The finding was reportedly contained in intelligence briefings to US lawmakers and will
China usually shuts down for the Lunar New Year, but Communist party leaders have marked the arrival of the Year of the Rabbit with a burst of activity worthy of that skittish animal. They have followed their colossal U-turn on zero-Covid with a charm offensive to convince the outside world that China is open for
China is entering the new year with its tech ambitions under a Covid cloud. The enormous cost of the now abandoned zero-Covid policy has badly strained government finances, and the communist party’s pledge to build a world-beating chip industry, already reeling from American sanctions, is falling victim to the familiar ills of cost, waste and
China’s scrapping of strict Covid controls represents not so much a shift in gear, as a screeching hand-break turn. It is abrupt and haphazard and comes at a particularly risky time. Hundreds of millions of people will soon be on the move for Chinese New Year, which is next month, and the spread of the
It is a measure of the dark places Xi Jinping is taking China politically and economically that the rule of Jiang Zemin, who died on Wednesday aged 96, is being looked back upon with some nostalgia. During Jiang’s later years, ‘toad worship culture’ (a play on his supposed amphibious features) became popular on social media
The Chinese people seem to have run out of patience with their country’s draconian Covid policies. After almost three years of brutal lockdowns, mass testing and sweeping quarantine, all facilitated by claustrophobic surveillance, they appear to have snapped. The protests that swept China at the weekend are the biggest challenge to Xi Jinping since he
It has been a remarkable few days for China’s increasingly absurd and at times chilling zero-Covid campaign. There was outrage on social media after the death of a three-year-old boy from carbon monoxide poisoning, which his father blamed on delays obtaining treatment because of a lockdown. Angry residents who took to the streets were confronted
A steward tries to lift Hu Jintao from his seat, but Hu doesn’t want to move. The former Communist party leader is sitting to the left of current boss Xi Jinping, and he reaches out to take Xi’s notes, but Xi moves Hu’s hand away and takes back the papers. The world’s cameras follow every
It is hard to say what is more shocking, dozens of former British military pilots lured by vast salaries to work for China’s People’s Liberation Army or the fact there appears to be no law to stop it. At least 30 experienced pilots, who have flown Typhoon, Jaguar, Harrier and Tornado fighters, as well as
The chip war between China and America is heating up, with an increasingly assertive Joe Biden battling with Xi Jinping as he enters his third term as Chinese leader. The US last week further restricted China’s access to advanced American know-how, in what were some of the most stringent export controls for decades. Xi didn’t mention
In her speech to the Conservative party conference, Liz Truss rightly pointed out that we did not stand up to Russia early enough. ‘We became too dependent on authoritarian regimes for cheap goods and energy,’ she said. We can safely assume that those ‘other’ regimes include China, though curiously given how prominently the China threat
Another Covid-19 lockdown, another angry confrontation. This time it was on the streets of Shenzhen, China’s high-tech hub, where videos this week showed an angry crowd facing off against police officers wearing protective medical gear, including blue gowns, masks and plastic visors. ‘Lift the lockdown’, the protesters yelled, pushing against hastily erected barricades. Some threw
To say that Vladimir Putin is giving autocracy a bad name is rather to state the obvious. But it now appears to have dawned even on his ‘old friend’ Xi Jinping that Russian incompetence and cruelty in Ukraine is undermining their joint ambition to re-write the international order. Putin’s admission that Beijing might have ‘concerns’
