Kinaforum

lørdag 7. november 2026

Torbjørn Færøvik: "Freedom is like av flower" - Hungary remembers the uprising of 1956

«Freedom is like a flower. It must be tended and watered every day,” says the ageing veteran as he hobbles down from the podium.

The schoolchildren who have been listening fall silent after hearing his account of what happened in 1956. Seventy years have passed since the Hungarian uprising, a collective cry for freedom crushed by brute force. At the House of Terror on Andrássy Avenue in Budapest, the anniversary is being marked with exhibitions and lectures.

The museum opened in 2002, but the building is old. Behind its thick walls, Hungarian freedom fighters were tortured for years, first by Hitler’s Hungarian collaborators, then by the communists. Just inside the entrance, my eyes settle on a quotation from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The deeper we delve into the past, the fewer witnesses remain; oral tradition gives way to silence, and memories are lost in the mists of time.”

North Korea tells EU to 'mind its own business' on human rights

North Korea responded to the European Union's draft United Nations resolution on human rights in the country by telling the bloc to "mind its own business," state media reported Thursday. Pyongyang has long been accused by the UN and human rights advocates of committing human rights violations.

North Korea's UN mission said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency that the move was a "farce" and a "politically motivated provocation." It said the resolution is "flagrantly distorting its human rights policy," claiming that human rights are not "a monopoly of the West." Referring to the protests in Europe, the North Korean mission said: "Streets are filled with demonstrators from all walks of life demanding such elementary rights as the rights to existence."

Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong sentenced to 10 more years in prison

A Hong Kong court sentenced prominent activist Joshua Wong to 10 more years in prison Thursday under a Beijing-imposed national security law, in a case that critics say underscores the crackdown on the city’s once-thriving pro-democracy movement.

Wong, 30, first led student protests as a teenager and engaged in international advocacy efforts for Hong Kong’s democracy movement. He was already serving a four-year, eight-month prison term after pleading guilty in the city’s biggest national security case, and had been due to be freed in January.

But he was further charged in 2025 with conspiracy to collude with foreign forces to endanger national security, an offense under the security law imposed by Beijing in 2020. Judge William Tam said Wong and fellow activist Nathan Law colluded with foreign officials and other foreign actors and sought measures against China and Hong Kong.

Once a teen activist, Hong Kong’s Joshua Wong is spending years of his adult life in prison

Some 15 years ago, then-high school student Joshua Wong was a rising political star in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. Now 30, he has been sentenced for the second time under a Beijing-imposed national security law that effectively crushed the movement he once championed.

Critics say Wong’s imprisonment reflects the authorities’ determination to keep prominent dissidents behind bars. But Beijing views him as an anti-China figure supporting Hong Kong independence.

Wong became a household name in the city as a teenage activist in 2012 when he and his now-dissolved group, Scholarism, protested against the introduction of national education in schools. Thousands of people gathered outside the government headquarters, some launching hunger strikes.

Former Chinese Politburo member Ma Xingrui charged with taking bribes

A former member of one of China’s top decision-making bodies has been formally charged with accepting bribes, state media reported Thursday, a week after Communist Party leaders confirmed his expulsion from the party. Prosecutors in Yichang, a city in the central province of Hubei, accused Ma Xingrui of using his leadership positions to accept “exceptionally large” bribes and to secure benefits for others, while also accepting financial assets himself, Xinhua state news agency said.

Ma had been named to the Politburo in 2022 and his downfall became public in April, when authorities said he was being investigated for severe violations of party discipline and national laws, without providing details.

Bollywood and the underworld — together in the spotlight?

A wave of shootings and extortion threats has rattled India's film industry. This time, those claiming responsibility are very different from the Mumbai underworld that had Bollywood in its grip back in the 1990s. "In the entire film industry, whoever works without aligning with us, or works with Salman Khan, will be killed."

This warning was delivered in an audio message by presumed attackers on Indian actor Tiger Shroff in Mumbai earlier this month, as they claimed responsibility for the shooting. The apparent perpetrators said they were connected to Lawrence Bishnoi, a student-politician-turned-gangster who has been in prison since 2014. Notably, police have not confirmed the gang's involvement.

The shots fired at Shroff, which injured his driver, were only the latest in a string of attacks targeting prominent figures from the Mumbai-based film industry, popularly known as "Bollywood".

South Korea tests Arctic shipping route amid Russia-West row

A South Korean container ship completed a voyage to Western Europe through the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Russia in October, fueling Seoul's hopes of exploiting the route as a shortcut for trade.

The ship made the round trip from Busan to Rotterdam in just 50 days, saving at least 10 days compared to the fastest travel times along the more commonly used Suez Canal route. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) is not only around 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) shorter, it also avoids the geopolitical flashpoint of the Middle East.

But the faster delivery times might not exactly trigger celebrations across western European capitals. Analysts say the nations arrayed against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine fear that South Korean President Lee Jae-myung is looking to boost Seoul's economic relations with Moscow. This would run contrary to the efforts to cut off Russia made by Kyiv and its Western alies.

Brutality of Lhasa Chinese police again leaves Tibetan woman pleading justice for her jailed brother severely injured

Chinese police in Tibet’s capital Lhasa have on Oct 26 severely beaten the sister of a prominent jailed Tibetan businessman, leaving her with severe internal injuries and broken bones, after she staged yet another protest with appeals for justice for him. The brother, Dorje Tashi, has long continued to be held incommunicado and without access to his family and lawyers in what is seen as a politically motivated persecution.

Gonpo Kyi (also known as Gonmo Kyi, according to tibetwatch.org) staged her latest protest outside the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) Higher People’s Court. She held a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping alongside a two-point petition demanding a fair retrial for Dorje Tashi, said Washington-based Tibet advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet (savetibet.org) Nov 3.

The group cited sources close to the family as saying she had previously staged multiple similar protests outside the same court in June and August this year and over the past four years.

Chinese AI lab Moonshot turned to Europe for Nvidia Blackwell access amid U.S. China curbs

Moonshot AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence lab that the White House accused of accessing Nvidia advanced chips remotely in East Asia, has sought access to the chips through data centers in Europe, sources have told CNBC.

Deals have been discussed this year for Moonshot to rent capacity from neoclouds hosting Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, at facilities in Europe, four people familiar with the matter said. They asked not to be named because they were discussing private information.Nvidia’s effective monopoly over the most powerful chips has made U.S. export controls a key tool in Washington’s effort to preserve its advantage over China in the AI race. American AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in a training and pricing battle with Chinese developers, including Moonshot AI, which makes the Kimi family of models.

China warns Philippines to be cautious over South China Sea

China said Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned his Philippines counterpart in a phone call about alleged interference in their nations’ relationship and urged the Philippines to act with caution in their South China Sea dispute.

Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Theresa Lazaro said she and Wang had “a frank and constructive” discussion on the direction of their bilateral relationship in the call Tuesday night. “Both sides emphasized the need for continued diplomatic dialogue and the proper management of differences anchored on mutual respect,” Lazaro said in a post on X without elaborating.

China and the Philippines have overlapping claims to the South China Sea, which have escalated into physical clashes between sailors and collisions between navy vessels in recent years. The tensions over their territorial claims have surfaced in their diplomatic exchanges lately.

Taiwan to criminalize Nvidia AI chip smuggling to China

Taiwan is moving to criminalize the unauthorized export of advanced AI chips to China, aiming to close a loophole exposed when Nvidia-powered servers bought on the island reached Chinese buyers via Indonesia, Japan, and Hong Kong.

The Legislative Yuan’s Economics Committee held a public hearing on Monday on an amendment to the Foreign Trade Act proposed by lawmakers of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). It would ban exports of specified integrated circuits, key wafer materials, components and chipmaking equipment to mainland China without government approval.

Violators would face up to 10 years in prison and fines of NT$5 million to NT$10 million (US$155,000 to US$310,000), according to the proposed amendment. The same penalties would apply to anyone shipping controlled goods to China through a third country, while illegal gains would be confiscated.

China’s tech boom borrowing the playbook of its property bust

On October 28, 2026, Unitree, China’s top robotics company, released its first quarterly report since going public in Shanghai. Third-quarter profit fell 17.4%, even as the stock traded at more than 465 times earnings. Those numbers explain why its founder, Wang Xingxing, looked so grim on listing day two months ago.

Then, on August 19, Wang struck the gong on Shanghai’s STAR Market as Unitree debuted at 445 billion yuan(US$66 billion), yet the new billionaire did not smile. One day later, Xu Jiayin, founder of the property giant Evergrande and once China’s richest man, stood white-haired in court where he was sentenced to life in prison.

A Chinese proverb says the waves behind drive the waves ahead, and the waves ahead die on the shore. Most of the commentary those two days saw it as a handover from the old economy to the new.

How North Korea became the crypto heist king

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, was the victim of a massive heist in late October. Approximately US$6.36 billion of funds were stolen within the space of 20 minutes in an attack that has been described as the largest of its kind in history.

The source of the attack has not yet been officially confirmed. But the FBI and blockchain analytics company TRM Labs identified North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking unit as the group most likely to have been behind it. Two other blockchain analytics firms, Chainalysis and Elliptic, have supported this attribution.

This is not the first time North Korea has been linked to cyber-attacks. Several other cryptocurrency exchange thefts in recent years have been attributed to North Korean state-sponsored hackers. These include the 2019 Upbit and 2025 Bybit hacks, where funds worth US$42 million and US$1.5 billion respectively were stolen.

How Japan's Reforms on Imperial Succession Affect Its Monarchy

Japanese lawmakers are reforming the country’s more-than-a-millennia-old continuous hereditary monarchy in an effort to keep it alive amid a shrinking imperial family.

Amendments to Japan’s Imperial House Law that passed in July took effect on Saturday. One allows Japanese princesses to keep their royal status even if they marry non-royals, though their future children are not considered royals. The other amendment is an apparent roundabout way to preserve patrilineal succession: members of the royal family may adopt a male from former imperial branch families, and those adoptees’ future male offspring can be considered legitimate successors to the throne.T

The revisions aim to expand the future pool of eligible heirs to the throne while reinforcing the shutting out of women from leading the Japanese monarchy, which staunch conservatives including the country’s first female Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi, have repeatedly advocated against upending.

War, tariffs and China: What the US midterms mean for the Asia-Pacific

Across the Asia-Pacific region, governments and businesses reeling from the energy shock of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran are watching Tuesday’s US midterm elections closely.

Many want to see “enormous changes” during the rest of President Donald Trump’s term, analysts say, from the war on Iran to his policies on trade and tariffs. But few expect that to happen, even with the Democrats poised to take the House of Representatives, and potentially the Senate, from Trump’s Republican Party.“Of course, everybody is watching,” said Steven Okun, a trade specialist and the chief executive of APAC Advisors, a Singapore-based consulting firm. “It’s great political theatre.”

Outside the Middle East, no region has been hit harder by the war on Iran than the Asia-Pacific. Before the start of the conflict in January, the region took in most of the Gulf oil and gas that passed through the Strait of Hormuz.

How India pulled 500 million people out of poverty as inequality deepens

India lifted nearly 500 million people out of poverty between 2011 and 2023, with extreme poverty dropping from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent in the world’s most populous nation during the period, according to a new World Bank report.

The only other parallel in poverty reduction on this scale is China, which lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty, though that was over a period of 40 years. Yet despite the substantial fall in poverty in India — home to 1.4 billion people — the income and wealth inequality gap has widened significantly since it opened up its economy in the early 1990s. According to the 2026 World Inequality Report, inequality in India remains among the highest in the world.

North Korea denies links to Binance hack as researchers trace stolen billions

North Korea rejected allegations linking Pyongyang to the estimated$6.3 billion Binance hack, calling the accusation a “grave political provocation,” according to state media. Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, denounced the FBI’s attribution of the attack to North Korea-linked hacking group TraderTraitor, Yohnap reported Tuesday, citing the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

Blockchain analytics firms including Elliptic and Chainalysis have also linked the attack and subsequent movement of the stolen funds to North Korea-linked actors.

“The FBI is trying to brand the DPRK as a ‘cyber criminal state’, claiming that it obtained information that a hacking organization ‘supported’ by the DPRK was involved in the incident,” Kim said, according to KCNA. She accused Washington of misleading international public opinion by portraying cybercrimes around the world as the work of North Korea.

Mining in Tibet in 2026: The Copper Boom, Troubled Rivers and the Question of Who Benefits

In September 2014, over 1000 Tibetans gathered in a village east of Lhasa to protest mining, which they said was polluting their rivers and damaging their farming. The demonstration took place in Gyama, a mountain valley historically used for agriculture, livestock, and local water. Gyama, or Jiama as it is written in Chinese, is in central Tibet, about 60-70 km east of Lhasa in Meldro Gungkar County. It is well known for its large copper and gold mine and its cultural heritage.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that people in the area have been complaining of worsening river conditions, dwindling fish stocks, and crop damage. The rivers were once clean, and the area was famous for its scenic beauty, as recalled by a local resident. Now, serious waste-related issues continue to affect the waters. Gyama is also associated with environmental and mining safety issues. On the 29th of March 2013, there was a major landslide in the Gyama mining area which trapped 83 men. The disaster prompted many questions about mining safety and environmental management.