Lucas Niewenhuis is the Newsletter Editor at SupChina. 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.
Is Beijing willing to treat climate change as a “standalone issue” in relations with the U.S., as climate envoy John Kerry has advocated? We may soon find out, after Biden sent Kerry to Shanghai and an unofficial delegation to Taiwan at the same time.
After Japan announced its intention to discharge built-up wastewater from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, China was joined by South Korea and Taiwan in protest. The U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency said the plan met safety standards.
Gao Fu, the director of China’s CDC, suggested mixing vaccines, adding doses, and looking into mRNA technology to improve the efficacy of COVID-19 shots. He later insisted that he wasn’t “admitting” to a low effectiveness of Chinese vaccines.
Whether in response to a state directive or as a pre-emptive move to avoid public outrage, Chinese streaming services have taken to blurring foreign brands that refused to use Xinjiang cotton. Where do nationalistic consumer boycotts go from here?
After the Trump administration beefed up U.S.-Taiwan ties, the Biden administration has continued to more actively embrace Taiwan. Some figures in foreign policy are calling for unambiguous support for Taiwan, but others say that a significant change from “strategic ambiguity" could trigger a Chinese invasion.
The U.S. and China continue to express mutual distrust or even disdain on many issues today, but tackling climate change could be an area of healthy competition, or even policy coordination.
China and the Philippines are engaged in a diplomatic feud after hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels, which the Philippines called an unofficial “maritime militia,” anchored around a disputed reef.
Facebook employees are raising concerns about the Chinese government’s use of ad money to promote propaganda about happy Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Wall Street Journal reports. Might Facebook eventually follow Twitter in restricting political advertisements in response?
Contracts for Chinese overseas lending tend to have “unusually broad confidentiality clauses” and require priority repayment to lenders, a new study has found. The strings attached to China’s loans complicate international debt negotiations during the pandemic.
After the WHO released a report that raised more questions than answers about the origins of COVID-19, Beijing pushed back against accusations that it had interfered in the inquiry. The Chinese Foreign Ministry then suggested that the Fort Detrick biological lab in the U.S. should be investigated next.