mandag 2. mars 2026

As China’s economy slows, some young people are snapping up cheap apartments to ‘retire’ early

The “Life in Venice” housing development, a multibillion-dollar replica of the Italian city on the Chinese coast, stands silent. Many of the tens of thousands of homes are hollow husks of concrete and alabaster. But in recent years the remote, partially abandoned complex has drawn unlikely new residents like Sasa Chen, a burned-out young Chinese woman who until recently worked a high-earning finance job in Shanghai, China’s bustling commerce hub.

The appeal?

Chen pays just 1200 RMB, or $168, a month for her apartment in faux Venice in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. It’s so cheap that it’s allowed Chen to retire at the tender age of 28. Experts say Chen is part of a broader trend that has seen a growing number of young people across China migrating to small towns and cities, taking advantage of cheap real estate prices that have been plummeting since the COVID pandemic.

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China is the clean energy superpower, but there’s another snapping at its heels — and it’s moving even faster

Prem Chand is one of the many rickshaw drivers who spend their days darting and weaving along Delhi’s hectic roads. And like an increasing number of the city’s many thousands of rickshaws, Chand’s vehicle is electric.

He used to drive a gas-powered cab but ditched it eight months ago when he did the math and realized an e-rickshaw was far cheaper to run. Plus there’s an added bonus: it pumps no tailpipe pollution into the city’s famously toxic air.

“This is good for my pocket and for my environment, so why wouldn’t I make the switch?” Chand said.

Electric three-wheeler vehicles dominate in many Indian cities, relied on for short journeys between metro stations, offices, shops and homes. It’s not just an urban phenomenon, either; e-rickshaws have proliferated in rural areas. Across India, nearly 60% of all three-wheeler sales are now electric.

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Why Is Xi Still Purging His Generals?

The purges have renewed doubts that corruption may have undermined PLA readiness by compromising equipment, personnel, and training. Moreover, many key positions are vacant or staffed by less experienced officers, raising questions about China’s ability to conduct major operations. At a minimum, this points to added risks for Xi to order the PLA into combat during this decade. Making matters worse, it also appears that the system within the PLA that is responsible for preventing corruption in the first place is broken.



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søndag 1. mars 2026

Torbjørn Færøvik: The Temple of Heaven - Ritual and Power in Imperial China

Since it is Sunday, it seems fitting to pay a visit to China’s most beautiful building. For what other Chinese structure can compare with the Temple of Heaven in Beijing? “An architectural masterpiece,” was the verdict when UNESCO placed it on its World Heritage List.

Curiously enough, that did not happen until 1998. By then the temple had stood for more than five hundred years.

The Temple of Heaven lies in the southern part of central Beijing, just over four kilometers south of the Forbidden City. The entire park, with its green grounds, covers nearly 2.7 square kilometers and is therefore larger than the Forbidden City. In the new millennium it is surrounded by broad avenues and modern city life, yet within its walls one finds a striking calm.
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Torbjørn Færøvik: Himmelens tempel - Kinas vakreste bygning

Siden det er søndag, passer det å avlegge et besøk i Kinas vakreste bygning. For hvilken annen kinesisk bygning kan måle seg med Himmelens tempel i Beijing? «Et arkitektonisk mesterverk», lød dommen da UNESCO førte det opp på sin verdensarvliste.

Forunderlig nok skjedde det ikke før i 1998. Da hadde tempelet stått der i mer enn fem hundre år.

Himmelens tempel ligger i den sørlige delen av det sentrale Beijing, vel fire kilometer sør for Den forbudte by. Hele området med sitt grøntanlegg dekker nesten 2,7 kvadratkilometer og er dermed større enn Den forbudte by. I det nye årtusen er det omgitt av brede avenyer og moderne byliv, men innenfor murene finner vi en påfallende ro.
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Kim Jong Un at party congress builds a wall with South Korea

The Ninth Congress of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party covered ground this past week that was familiar from its last gathering five years ago. Kim Jong Un proclaimed his goals of state-driven economic development, a military buildup focused on nuclear weapons and his singular and unchallenged leadership.

Even the message to the United States was not new: Stop your “hostile” attitude and accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state, and maybe we might be willing to talk to you. The only surprise lay in Kim’s deep antagonism toward South Korea, making it clear that the demilitarized zone was no longer just a temporary demarcation line but now a wall of deep and unalterable division of the Korean Peninsula into two completely separate states.

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Kim’s daughter is a princess – but not necessarily crown princess

South Korea’s spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, is reported to have issued an assessment earlier this month that Kim Jong Un has settled on a daughter of about 13 as his successor.

It’s possible the future will play out the way the government analysts are now predicting. The NIS, after all, does have vast resources to call upon before making such a determination. And the agency’s vision got a publicity boost when the daughter and Kim appeared in matching leather jackets at the Workers’ Party Congress, held in Pyongyang during the week that’s just ending.

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Minxin Pei:Old Wine in a New Bottle: What is the CCP’s Overall Strategy for Solving the Taiwan Issue in the New Era?

The number of incursions by People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft into Taiwan’s ADIZ shows a qualitative change after 2021. In 2021, incursions by 972 aircraft were recorded. But in 2022, incursions by 1,597 aircraft were recorded. In 2023, incursions of 1,669 aircraft were recorded. In 2024, the first year of newly elected President Lai Ching-te’s term, the number of aircraft entering the ADIZ rose to 3,615. In the same period, the number of Chinese warships and coast guard ships operating in the waters close to Taiwan also rose dramatically.

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Occidental Fall: Assessing Chinese Views of U.S. Decline

China’s leadership, state media, and foreign policy analysts consider the U.S. a declining but dangerous power. That assessment has remained durable since Michael Swaine analyzed views in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in his 2021 essay for China Leadership Monitor, though the frequency of that assessment has fluctuated. 

The resilience of such views in the PRC press reflects genuine assessments of U.S. internal contradictions, the Chinese Communist Party’s Leninist predisposition to see capitalist powers as declining, and a desire to buttress the party’s own propaganda. Notably, contrary to previous expectations, the persistence of PRC views of U.S. decline do not seem to have prompted a shift toward a more aggressive policy. Instead, until recently, this assessment seems to have led Chinese officials to judge that time is on China’s side, and the PRC should avoid provoking the U.S., which has the capacity to lash out at China even as it declines.

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China building a different AI future than the West

The headlines are predictable by now. The United States restricts chip exports. Chinese labs release competitive models. Pundits declare who is “winning” the artificial intelligence race. The language borrows from sport and war: sprints, breakthroughs and supremacy.

It makes for compelling drama. It also misses the point.A key issue in the AI era is not who builds the most powerful model. It is what different societies want intelligence to do. And on that metric, China is not merely competing in a Western-defined race. It is redefining the destination.

In Silicon Valley, AI is framed as frontier exploration. What are the implications of general intelligence that rivals or exceeds human cognition? Should it be regulated? The US government largely maintains a hands-off posture, funding research while allowing private firms to lead.

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lørdag 28. februar 2026

Vanishing Elites: Disappearances and Purges in Xi Jinping’s China

Since assuming leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012, Xi Jinping has overseen the most sweeping anti-corruption campaign in modern Chinese history. Officially framed as a drive to eliminate graft and restore Party discipline, the campaign has reached deep into the upper echelons of political, military, financial, technological, and cultural life.

But beyond court verdicts and expulsion notices lies a recurring pattern: sudden disappearances.

Senior ministers vanish from diplomatic calendars. Generals stop appearing at military ceremonies. Billionaire executives become “unreachable.” Celebrities are erased from streaming platforms. In most cases, official Chinese media later confirm investigations for “serious violations of discipline and law,” without detailed evidence. In others, there is no formal explanation at all.

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China’s Growth and destruction of the Environment

China’s transformation into the world’s second-largest economy over the past four decades is one of the most rapid industrializations in history. It has also produced environmental damage of corresponding magnitude and duration. At its peak between 2005 and 2015, air pollution in northern China regularly exceeded levels considered immediately dangerous to human health; independent studies estimate it caused between 1.6 and 2.2 million premature deaths annually. More than 60 % of monitored groundwater and roughly one-fifth of the country’s arable land have been classified as polluted, in many cases heavily, with cadmium, arsenic and other toxins entering the food chain.

For much of this period, official data were suppressed or manipulated, independent monitoring was obstructed, and environmental activists faced detention.

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Germany bets on industrial AI to rival US and China

Germany launched a major artificial intelligence (AI) project this month to cut its reliance on US providers of high-performance computing and data processing — a move seen as helping Europe to control its own AI future.

The Industrial AI Cloud, backed by Deutsche Telekom, was built in record time, taking just six months to plan, build and launch, compared with the typical 12 to 24 months.

The telecom firm repurposed and modernized an existing facility in Munich's Tucherpark, with nearly 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs — the high-end chips currently in global short supply. Telekom says the computing power is sufficient for all 450 million EU citizens using an AI assistant simultaneously.

However, the Industrial AI Cloud isn't aimed at individual consumers. Instead, it targets Germany's industrial heavyweights, including automakers, machinery manufacturers and robotics companies. It could also be a critical tool for research institutions, the public sector and firms developing AI applications.


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19 deputies of China’s legislature, including 9 military officers, removed before annual meeting

China’s legislature has dismissed 19 members, including nine who are military officers, one week ahead of the start of its annual meeting.The late Thursday announcement did not say why the deputies had been removed, but such removals are generally tied to corruption investigations.

An anti-corruption campaign launched by Chinese leader Xi Jinping shows no sign of letting up after more than a decade. The military has been targeted in recent years, including the removal of its top general last month, as Xi seeks to reform and modernize the armed forces. Analysts say the campaign is also a way for Xi, who is in his 14th year in power, to remove potential rivals and ensure loyalty among his subordinates.

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China Purges Nine Military Officials Ahead of Key Meeting for Xi

Nine senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army were stripped of membership in China's top legislature, as President Xi Jinping continues his purge of the military establishment.

The move comes less than a week before the “Two Sessions,” the Chinese Communist Party’s most important annual political gathering, begin in Beijing. The timing may signal an effort by Xi to consolidate control ahead of a year expected to focus heavily on economic management and internal stability.

Since taking office in 2013, Xi has overseen a sweeping anti-corruption campaign targeting thousands of senior and junior officials, whom he has described as “tigers and flies.” Since 2022, 101 generals and lieutenant generals have either been formally removed or disappeared from public view, per a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ China Power Project.

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Kim Jong Un vows to strengthen nuclear program, watches military parade with daughter

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un promised to strengthen his country’s nuclear weapons program on Wednesday, before presiding over a nighttime military parade, accompanied by his daughter. About 14,000 troops marched through Kim Il Sung Square in the capital of Pyongyang, state media said. Columns of soldiers were seen goose-stepping under floodlights with fighter jets roaring overhead.

Kim’s teenage daughter, widely believed to be named Ju Ae, again appeared prominently at the parade beside her father. But despite speculation in South Korea about her potential grooming as a successor, no new official titles were announced as the once-in-five-years ruling party congress wrapped.

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With sniper rifle photos, Kim Jong Un intensifies spotlight on his daughter, a potential successor

North Korea on Saturday released pictures showing leader Kim Jong Un and his teenage daughter at a rifle range, the latest propaganda images to promote the child touted as a potential successor. State media KCNA said Kim and his daughter – along with Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong and other officials – fired the rifles after the North Korean leader gifted them to military leaders to salute their service to the reclusive state’s ruling party.

One of the images – which was flagged during a CNN check as being potentially AI-manipulated – showed the girl, believed to be named Kim Ju Ae and in her early teens, firing a sniper rifle.

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fredag 27. februar 2026

China’s Erasure of Ethnic Minority Languages

How is the Chinese government marking international mother language day on February 21? By legalizing the erasure of mother languages.

In December 2025, according to the NPC Observer, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee signed off on revisions to the Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language, originally adopted in 2000. The revisions remove a provision that allowed speakers of “minority languages” to use those as the medium of instruction in schools, stating simply that such education is “no longer necessary.”

A years-long trend of replacing Mongolian-, Tibetan-, and Uyghur-medium instruction with Mandarin Chinese-medium instruction is now codified in law. Students in these communities will now only be taught their mother tongue as a single, standalone class; all other classes will be taught in Chinese.

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