Kinaforum

søndag 19. april 2026

Mandarin learning law already being actively implemented in Tibet’s monasteries

Following China’s adoption last month of its law on so-called promoting ethnic unity and progress, mandating the predominance of Mandarin learning and use across the PRC, monks in Tibet are now required to take time off their traditional Tibetan grammar and scripture learning to study the language of their rulers.

As in many cases under Chinese rule in Tibet, where measures have already been under implementation for years before the laws on them are actually adopted, monks in Tibet have already been learning Mandarin (or Putonghua) for years. As a result, many have already gained efficiency in the language.

For example, monks at Dordong Monastery, located in Bome County of Nyingtri City, Tibet autonomous Region, have actively studied the standard spoken and written Chinese language and acquired knowledge relevant to modern society.

China takes a potshot at exile Tibetan election exercise

Anyone who is not a “useful idiot” of China knows that Beijing’s so-called “whole process people’s democracy” to describe the country’s government system in glowing terms lacks any substance, and is, in fact, nothing but a euphemism for justifying its brutal authoritarian rule. But that has not prevented China from taking a potshot at the exile Tibetans’ elections for choosing their leaders, with its official globaltimes.cn Apr 7 calling it an “election without a land” and “an institutional illusion created by separatist groups in exile”.

Employing an occupying power’s yardstick for determining the legitimacy of the exile Tibetan setup, the unusually lengthy report cited Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons as having repeatedly stressed that “the so-called Tibetan government-in-exile is entirely an organized separatist political group with a political platform and an agenda for ‘Tibet independence’.”

It is an illicit organization that violates China’s Constitution and laws. No country in the world recognizes it, the report maintained.

New textbooks introduced to inculcate Chinese students with party-state ideology

In China, the party is the state and the state the party. In order to drive this message home, the party-state has introduced new school textbooks even as existing teaching materials are already heavily saturated with political indoctrination materials that scuttle independent thinking and discussion.

Students in China are now required to learn to be loyal to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) right from elementary school, and all the way till high school, with the introduction of national security text books rolled out recently. The four-volume series, titled “National Security Education Readers for Primary and Secondary Students,” has been rolled out nationwide and is intended for use from elementary through high school, the report said, citing Chin’s state media Xinhua New Agency Apr 15.

China Shock 2.0 jolts global economy as Trump does Xi’s work

On top of the tariffs, wars and inflation upending the global economy, US chieftains are grappling with a new question: which tech companies might get “BYD-ed” next? The reference here is to the Chinese electric-vehicle juggernaut that’s zoomed past Elon Musk’s Tesla and its peers to become No. 1 globally.

The idea that the Shenzhen EV company was an aberration has since been dispelled by the “DeepSeek shock,” which disrupted the artificial intelligence realm, and by a number of other startup successes, from Horizon Robotics to autonomous vehicle shop Qcraft.But as 2026 unfolds, and US President Donald Trump prioritizes trade wars over investing in raising America’s tech game, China is not so quietly grabbing market share around the globe despite Trump’s tariffs and trade curbs.

And thanks to the “Made in China 2025” program Xi Jinping launched in 2015, this isn’t spin but economic reality. And this latest “China shock”, increasingly known as “China shock 2.0”, is becoming the talk of corporate boardrooms everywhere.

Hormuz standoff sets a tense tone for Trump-Xi meet

The Trump administration’s decision to carry out a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has raised tensions in the Persian Gulf to new and more perilous levels.

The move was announced by the US president, Donald Trump, after negotiations over a ceasefire with Iran broke down on April 11, partly due to Iran wanting to retain control of the vital Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil transits.The blockade is designed to neutralize Iran’s efforts to close the strait to shipping it deems unfriendly to Tehran and implement a toll system for other vessels transiting the strait.

The US blockade can be seen as the latest attempt by the Trump administration to project strength. But it also throws down a challenge to Beijing. China has been the main purchaser of Iranian oil in recent years and is one of the few nations whose shipping can enter the strait unchallenged.

Record number of Rohingya refugees died at sea last year, UNHCR says

The United Nations refugee agency has revealed that nearly 900 Rohingya refugees were reported dead or missing in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea in 2025.

This was the deadliest year on record for maritime movements in South and South East Asia, and thousands of people continue to make the dangerous journeys in 2026, the UN said on Friday. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, the UNHCR’s spokesperson, Babar Baloch, described the area as an “unmarked graveyard for thousands of desperate Rohingya refugees”, noting that some 5,000 are thought to have drowned at sea over the last decade.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees began fleeing Myanmar in 2017 amid an ethnic cleansing campaign. They largely settled in refugee camps in Bangladesh, which continues to give refuge to those fleeing today.

These North Korean brothers spent 10 years planning their escape. Months after reaching freedom, everything changed

Two brothers spent a decade plotting their escape from North Korea – an audacious plan conceived by their late father, whose ashes they carried as they crept toward a boat moored in the shadows. There were guards nearby, and no second chances.

It was May 6, 2023. A three-day spring storm churned over the Yellow Sea, cloaking their movements. Kim Il-hyeok and Kim Yi-hyeok gathered their seven relatives – including women who just tiptoed through a minefield – as they traced their route one last time. Among the passengers were Kim Yi-hyeok’s two children, ages 4 and 6, hidden in burlap sacks. Kim Il-hyeok’s wife, five months pregnant, reluctantly agreed to join.

“My wife did not want to defect,” Kim Il-hyeok told CNN. “She was especially worried about doing it while pregnant.”

Viktor Orbán built a ‘propaganda machine.’ Hungary’s next leader must dismantle it

As thousands swarmed the streets of Budapest last weekend to celebrate the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Balasz said he could not help thinking of his great-grandmother – now in her 80s, living in a rural town in Hungary’s deprived east. For her, having consumed little but state media for the past decade, the victory of Péter Magyar was not cause for joy, but for crippling fear.

Throughout Orbán’s re-election campaign, the media controlled by his governing Fidesz party depicted Magyar as a reckless enemy of peace, bent on dragging Hungary into the war in neighboring Ukraine. Balasz, a 42-year-old financial analyst who only gave his first name, said he was shocked by the extremity of the “lies” his great-grandmother was told each day – how, if Magyar won, Hungarian men would be conscripted, the economy would collapse, and a third world war would surely follow.

North Korea fires ballistic missiles again, flexing muscle amid Iran war

North Korea fired ballistic missiles into the sea on Sunday, accelerating its missile launches amid Iran war tensions and talk of possible meetings with the U.S. and South Korea. Pyongyang’s intense missile activity - this was the fourth such launch this month and the seventh of the year - is meant to display its self-defence capabilities while gaining international leverage, some experts said.

“The missile launches may be a way of showing that - unlike Iran - we have self-defence capabilities,” said South Korean former presidential security adviser Kim Ki-jung.

Kazakhstan sentences 19 for protest against repression in China’s Xinjiang region

A court in Kazakhstan convicted 19 activists after a protest against Beijing’s crackdown in China’s far-western Xinjiang region last year, in what experts and advocates said was the largest move yet by the Kazakh government to silence criticism at Beijing’s behest.

The activists, all of whom were Kazakh nationals, protested near the border with China in November, burning Chinese flags and portraits of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and calling for the release of a Kazakh citizen detained in Xinjiang last year.

Eleven activists were sentenced to five years in prison for “inciting discord,” while the other eight were given restrictions on their movement. Shinquat Baizhan, a lawyer representing the activists, confirmed the sentences, which were also reported in local media.

China urges travelers to avoid Seattle airport after 20 scholars were denied entry to the US

Chinese government officials are encouraging travelers to be wary and avoid entering the United States through Seattle, citing a pattern of continual harassment by U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel. About 20 Chinese scholars with visas flew through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport recently to attend an academic conference, but China Consular Affairs said in a post on X that the academics were “unreasonably inspected” by CBP personnel and refused entry.

Emails seeking more information and comment were sent Thursday to spokespersons for the federal agency, the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., and its consulate in San Francisco.

Since Chinese scholars have been continuously harassed at the airport, the foreign ministry and the embassy urged citizens with plans to visit the U.S. to do so with a mindset of safety and security and to avoid the Seattle airport, the post said.

Torbjørn Færøvik: Tehran Under Watch - China’s Surveillance Grip on Iran

Tehran is no longer what it once was, say travelers who have recently returned from Iran. Under normal circumstances, the Iranian capital is a bustling metropolis. But this spring, it seems as though people are tiptoeing around street corners, for no one knows what the day—or tomorrow—may bring.

When Donald Trump went to war with Iran, he urged the country’s 93 million inhabitants to rise up. Instead, they have remained quiet. The reasons may be many. In wartime, most people have enough to do simply managing their daily lives. Moreover, they are painfully aware that the price of raising a fist can be extremely high—in the worst case, death.

China, too, is helping to keep the Iranians in check. In Tehran and other cities, they are monitored by Chinese-made cameras from morning till night. Equipped with facial recognition, the cameras can identify anyone who steps out of line.

China says its economy is accelerating despite Iran war turmoil – for now

Strong exports of electrical and mechanical products supercharged China’s economy in the first three months of the year, with growth exceeding analysts’ expectations even as the Iran war upended global trade and energy markets.

But officials warned of “volatile” external conditions ahead, as the conflict in the Middle East weakens global demand and threatens China’s export reliant economy.

On Thursday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported a 5.0% increase in Gross Domestic Product from the same period last year. It marked an acceleration from the 4.5% growth reported in the final quarter of last year. The NBS hailed the “solid start,” while cautioning against domestic and international headwinds.

China has so far weathered the historic oil crisis. But as Xi prepares to meet Trump, costs are starting to grow

China, the world’s largest importer of energy, has so far weathered the global energy shock brought on by war in the Gulf well compared with some of its Asian neighbors. But as global fuel markets remain volatile amid an uneasy US-Iran ceasefire and a new American military blockade that threatens Iranian exports, the stakes of the conflict are only rising for Beijing.

One reason? As the main importer of Iranian oil, China is the country that stands to be the most impacted by US moves impacting its flow – both last month when the White House removed certain US sanctions on Iranian barrels, and now, as the US military launches a blockade of Iranian ports.

These moves may not lead to immediate shortages in China, which has been well prepared for an energy shock.

China raises pressure on underground Catholics to join official church, Human Rights Watch finds

Chinese authorities are increasing pressure on underground Catholic communities to join the state-controlled official church while tightening surveillance and travel restrictions on all of China’s estimated 12 million Catholics, a rights group said Wednesday.

The detailed report from Human Rights Watch said the heightened pressure was part of a decade-old campaign to ensure that religious denominations and independent churches are loyal to the officially atheist Communist Party, a claim the Chinese government rejected, saying the group is “consistently biased against China.”

China’s Catholics have been divided between an official, state-controlled church that didn’t recognize papal authority and an underground church that remained loyal to Rome through decades of persecution.

China's satellite boost gives Iran an US targeting edge

Iran’s reported use of a Chinese-built satellite, combined with alleged Russian intelligence support, signals a shift toward a new model of warfare in which commercially enabled space assets reshape how US forces are tracked and targeted.

Reuters reported that Iran covertly obtained a Chinese-made TEE-01B spy satellite to improve its capacity to observe and potentially target US military bases throughout the Middle East. The report was based on information from the Financial Times (FT), which referenced alleged leaked Iranian military documents.

Linking possible ties between Chinese commercial satellite companies and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) 2025 China Military Power Report states that “as of August 2024, China-based commercial satellite companies participated in business with the IRGC,” but does not go into detail about the depth of such transactions.

Chinese Embassy in Japan says authorities fail to act on threats

The Chinese Embassy in Japan said Thursday it has received multiple threats and accused Japanese authorities of failing to take effective measures despite its repeated reporting to police, as tensions between the two sides rise.

Shi Yong, acting Chinese ambassador to Japan, said the embassy on March 5 received a letter from a group claiming to comprise former police and military members and threatening attacks on China’s diplomatic missions in Japan and “wiping out all Chinese” in the country.

The embassy said on X that it immediately reported to Japanese police and criticized they did not take the matter seriously, implement effective steps or establish the facts. Japan’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment.

Coal Is Rising in China's Clean Energy Transition

China’s energy transition is entering a more complex phase than commonly assumed. While the country is rapidly scaling up renewable energy – China now leads the world in both investment and deployment – coal production and coal power investment are also increasing.

This contradiction reflects a deeper structural reality: China is not moving from coal to renewables in a linear transition. Instead, it is attempting to expand both simultaneously, balancing decarbonization goals with rising electricity demand and system reliability constraints. China’s renewable expansion has reached unprecedented levels. In 2024, China’s clean energy investment exceeded $625 billion, nearly double the level in 2015.