Kinaforum

torsdag 27. august 2026

America’s lost Chinese students are staying home instead

The most telling number on American campuses this month is the one that didn’t show up.

New foreign enrollment at US universities fell 20% this past spring from a year earlier, according to a survey of 149 institutions co-published by NAFSA, the association of international educators. Graduate programs did worse, down 24% on average. That slide began well before spring. In August 2025, the month when most students arrive, international student travel to the US was down 19% from the year before. That figure includes returning students.

The instinctive reading is a transfer of wealth: America’s loss, Asia’s gain. There’s evidence for it. Some 82% of surveyed Asia-Pacific institutions outside Australia reported growing international undergraduate numbers, against 47% in Europe.

With America deranged, President Xi summons overseas Chinese

Torbjørn Færøvik: Kina lar seg ikke diktere av USA

Unge, fremadstormende oljeanalytikere bør unne seg en kopp te en gang iblant. Hvorfor ikke nyte den i den irrgrønne åsen utenfor Ningbo, Kinas viktigste råoljehavn?

Hit kommer tankskip fra hele verden for å losse olje. Fra åsene bak gjestehuset Xinyi er det strålende utsikt til båtene som kommer og går. Noen frakter olje fra Iran, andre fra Irak, Saudi-Arabia og De forente arabiske emirater. I fjor håndterte Ningbo og nabobyen Zhoushan 1,4 milliarder tonn gods, mer enn noen annen havn i verden. Trafikken her forteller mye om dramaet som nå utspiller seg.

Ningbo ligger litt sør for Shanghai og har ti millioner innbyggere. Byen er som en trakt som sluser olje til det folkerike Yangtsedeltaet, et enormt marked med 250 millioner mennesker. Og selv om Kina har kastet seg på den grønne bølgen, er landet fremdeles avhengig av råolje utenfra. Landet er verdens desidert største råoljeimportør og vil sannsynligvis være det i mange år framover.

Trump’s fallback strategy on Iran faces just one big problem

When US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled “Operation Economic Outcast,” threatening damaging new sanctions on countries that refuse to stop doing business with Iran, he didn’t name the one country that could decide its success or failure: China.

The world’s second-largest economy has long been a critical economic lifeline for Tehran, buying up the vast majority of its oil exports – worth an estimated tens of billions in US dollars last year – in addition to other trade. Bringing it on board with the White House’s latest effort to subdue an Iranian leadership stubbornly defiant after almost six months of war, however, is an extremely tall order.

Around the world, people desperately search for news of missing loved ones after Nepal-China floods

When floodwaters cascaded down deep mountain gorges and swept into a Nepali valley on Wednesday, it devastated already-vulnerable communities that sat along the swollen river, home to many ethnic groups and farmers.

But it also sent shockwaves across the world, with hundreds of foreign nationals unaccounted for. In households across the United States, India, Canada and more, people are desperately waiting for news of their missing loved ones – which include a doctor from Delaware, a New Zealand mother of two, and three young teenagers from the US and Australia. At least 389 people have been killed, according to Nepali police who did not specify how many are foreign nationals.

US supplies most of the world’s plasma. No country depends on it more than China

As she watched the pale yellow liquid drip into her mother’s vein, Ge Lan felt the weight of every drop. Her mother, recovering from stomach cancer surgery, relied on daily infusions of human albumin to restore her blood protein levels. At about $46 for a 10-gram bottle, the imported blood product was the costliest medicine in her mother’s treatment.

“I just hope (she) gets better soon,” the 44-year-old told CNN. “I’m worried about the money too, but I have no choice.”

Over two months, her mother used 72 bottles, costing the equivalent of seven months’ income for Ge, a local store worker in Henan, central China. Without help from her sister, she said she simply couldn’t have afforded the treatment – and without it, her mother’s condition could worsen.

After a sexual assault case went viral, China’s corporate drinking culture is under fire

What started as a business dinner between local officials and executives celebrating a lucrative real-estate deal has sparked public outcry in China, after two men were accused of sexually assaulting a woman in their party.

Authorities in the affluent tech hub of Hangzhou have placed a senior executive and a public official under criminal detention for allegedly “forcibly molesting” the woman at a karaoke bar after their dinner, according to an official report of the ongoing investigation. The woman was injured and had to be hospitalized, the report said. Both men have been dismissed from their posts.

China is building a vast ‘national ring road’ uniting the entire PRC borderlands

China is building a vast “national ring road”, known as the “border-coast loop”, meant to be a national unity road in the wake of the recent implementation of its national Ethnic Unity Law, encompassing the borders of the entire current territories constituting parts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

China has outlined plans to build a massive road-link snaking along the PRC’s land borders and coastlines – an ambitious project that could boost incomes in a string of remote regions, but also provoke geopolitical and ecological risks, reported the scmp.com Aug 23.

It said the project is framed as an effort to boost economic development, social stability and national unity, with its more than 25,000km (15,500-mile) route set to run through several regions with large ethnic-minority populations – including Tibet and the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region (East Turkestan).

Trump moves toward levying new tariff on China for flooding market with cheap goods, AP sources say

President Donald Trump is moving toward levying a new tariff on China that would penalize the world’s second-largest economy for flooding the global market with underpriced goods, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Two of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations still being finalized, said Trump is considering setting the new tariff at 7.5%. It’s a level administration officials believe would not endanger the one-year trade truce between Washington and Beijing or a planned White House meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping expected to take place in late September.

The move, if finalized, appears to be a calibrated effort by the White House to work around a Supreme Court decision earlier this year that struck down Trump’s plan to implement a sweeping, high-tariff scheme not seen since the 1930s.

China hits back at criticism over excess industrial capacity as more US tariffs loom

Translation: “You Can’t Address Sexual Assault at Banquets Without Addressing the Nature of Power”

In the censored post translated below, blogger Zhúbùdǎo ("Unyielding Bamboo") responds to reporting by investigative journalist Li Wei’ao on two recent cases of alleged sexual assault by officials. The post first notes other related censorship, and highlights the perennial issue of official statements dictating what is reported, how, and when, which even former Global Times editor Hu Xijin has bemoaned, among others.

A statement was released in the more recent case a day later, announcing the dismissal and detentions of the two men involved—an official and an SOE executive. Zhubudao goes on to examine the power dynamics that give officials perceived license to keep acting this way, arguing that the issue cannot be adequately addressed by responding to each case as it arises. "The problem isn’t someone’s inability to control his lower half," the post concludes, "it’s our fundamental lack of an iron cage strong enough to keep power contained."

Trump admin unveils anti-Iran global sanctions plan, signals China not exempt

The Trump administration on Monday announced a plan to isolate Iran’s economy by threatening to impose secondary sanctions on the “enablers” keeping the Islamic Republic afloat. “We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe,” Treasury Scott Bessent said as he unveiled the new sanctions scheme, dubbed “Operation Economic Outcast.”

President Donald Trump is calling world leaders and making “specific requests to cease their interactions” with Iran, Bessent said at the Treasury Department. The promised sanctions have yet to be imposed. The U.S. will instead start by sending timelines to individual countries to “shut down activities we have identified,” Bessent said.

US launches ‘Operation Economic Outcast’ to cut Iran’s economic lifeline

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has announced an economic pressure campaignagainst Iran, vowing to target Tehran’s financial interests across the world.

Bessent said on Monday that the US would target all of Iran’s sources of revenue, including oil, with the aim of preventing other countries and companies from doing business with Tehran.“Around the globe, our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone,” he said.

He said countries around the world must choose between the US and Iran, stressing that the new campaign exposes Tehran’s trade partners to secondary penalties. Bessent emphasised that “no one is above the reach of US sanctions”. If countries and entities “facilitate transactions and are part of the ecosystem that turns Iranian oil into money, into repression, they will be targeted”, he said.

Japan lawmakers visit China seeking to ease tensions over Taiwan

Japanese lawmakers have travelled to Beijing in a bid to soothe strained relations between the two nations. The delegation landed in China on Monday for talks aimed at restoring communication. The mission was undertaken after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi issued comments on Taiwan that triggered a diplomatic dispute that has begun to weigh on economic relations.The visit will run through Thursday and marks the first such consultations with senior Chinese Communist Party officials since ties soured late last year.

Relations plunged after Takaichi suggested in November that Japan could respond militarily if China attacked Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own territory.

China is highly sensitive regarding Taiwan and considers questioning of its claim on the island a red line. In response to Takaichi’s comments, it warned its citizens against travel to Japan and tightened trade restrictions, including measures that reportedly disrupted the flow of rare earth minerals to Japanese firms, adding an economic sting to the diplomatic fallout.

Will China Rewrite the Rules of Global Supply Chains?

Faced with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), U.S. legislation that presumes any goods made in Xinjiang involved forced labor, as well as with new European forced labor rules, China has not retreated. Instead, Beijing is building its own corporate responsibility and supply chain standards, limiting how some Western audit and standards systems operate in China, and promoting China-led standards abroad.

China’s Ministry of Commerce recently accused the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) of assisting U.S. sanctions against China over alleged forced labor in Xinjiang and barred Chinese organizations and individuals from doing business or cooperating with it. The RBA is one of the world’s largest corporate social responsibility initiatives; it has over 600 member companies that together employ more than 21.5 million workers. Its Responsible Minerals Initiative runs the Responsible Minerals Assurance Process (RMAP), the only supply chain due diligence scheme so far formally recognized by the EU under its Conflict Minerals Regulation.

The Chinese Animated Film that Became an Unlikely Hit

A mother-son team's low-budget film about a calf has become an unlikely box office hit in China, raking in 20,000 times its budget as Chinese audiences flock to watch Niu Lai. "Niu Lai," which translates roughly to "Here Comes the Ox/Cow," is a family film that initially drew online ridicule for its simple CGI graphics, which would not be out of place in the mid-90s. It opened to crickets when it hit theaters on August 5, earning just 7,000 yuan ($1,000) in its first 10 days.

Images Expose China’s Island Base That Xi Said Would Never Happen

Chinese state-backed engineers have spent eight months completing the foundations of a new military base in the contested South China Sea under the constant watch of U.S. satellites. Work to turn the once submerged Antelope Reef into China’s next permanent military complex in the disputed Paracel archipelago—also claimed by Vietnam—began last fall, just months after President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

U.S. administrations including Trump’s own once were highly critical of China’s strategy of formalizing longstanding maritime claims via rapid land reclamation. Today, Beijing’s island-building campaign is accelerating with apparent impunity for the first time in a decade.

U.S. to unveil ‘greatest financial offensive’ against Iran as Tehran threatens ship seizures

The U.S will unveil “the single greatest financial offensive ever” against Iran on Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, while Tehran threatened to seize vessels that violate transit rules in the Strait of Hormuz. The looming escalation comes as both sides missed a 60-day ceasefire window to reach a deal, closing off the formal truce mechanism aimed at ending the Middle East war now in its sixth month.

In a post on X Sunday evening stateside, Bessent said “at dawn begins an economic D-Day,” framing the coming measures as the “endgame” for Washington’s campaign against Tehran. The new measures will add to an extensive sanctions regime already targeting Iran’s banking, energy, aviation and cryptocurrency sectors. The Trump administration has claimed that Iran’s economy is in freefall, with runaway inflation and a collapsing currency.

Before China’s First Emperor: Unearthing the Long Rise of the Qin

Wang Hui still remembers everything about the sensational tomb-robbing scandal that launched his career.

It was the early 1990s, barely a decade into China’s transition from planned to market economy, and grave robbing had become a lucrative cottage industry in the Chinese countryside — a rare way for villagers to get rich. So when a local farmer in northwestern China’s Gansu province uncovered bronzes while digging for oracle bones, it kicked off a feeding frenzy.

The looters who descended on the site — now known as Dabuzi — were embedded in a highly specialized chain covering target scouting, excavation, transportation, trafficking, and smuggling. At its peak, there were reportedly tens of thousands of grave robbers and dealers in Dabuzi and the surrounding Lixian County. Their numbers were so great that they generated entire side businesses, with people setting up camp near the tombs to sell them water, food, and cigarettes.

The Forgotten Legacy of China’s Greatest Explorer

During the opening decades of the 15th century, a eunuch from China’s imperial court led seven epic voyages across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, pushing westward as far as the Red Sea and the shores of East Africa.

The expeditions were astonishing feats of engineering and navigation. Setting sail decades before Christopher Columbus or Vasco da Gama, Zheng He spent years crossing the oceans at the head of a vast fleet of 200 ships. Some of the vessels measured up to 70 meters long — three times the size of Columbus’ ships.

For many, Zheng deserves to rank among history’s greatest explorers. Yet, much about the voyages — and Zheng himself — remains shrouded in mystery. He barely features in the official records left by China’s Ming dynasty (1368–1644), with court historians dismissing his expeditions as impressive, but ruinously expensive. Even the place and date of Zheng’s death are unknown.