Kinaforum

mandag 26. oktober 2026

What to know about China’s plenum as Xi seeks stronger Communist Party discipline

China’s political leaders and elites began a four-day meeting Monday to discuss strengthening the ruling Communist Party’s discipline, as Chinese President Xi Jinping pushes for greater loyalty and reliability from officials while deepening his yearslong campaign against corruption.

This week’s closed-door gathering, known as the fifth plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, comes roughly a year before Xi is widely expected to secure his fourth five-year term as the party’s leader and personnel changes to key leadership bodies.

Xi began the meeting by delivering a work report and speaking about a draft policy decision on advancing “full and rigorous party self-governance,” according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. The policy aims to make cadres more disciplined, effective and less corrupt.

As the US and China form AI blocs, countries are increasingly torn between them

With the two leading AI powers, the United States and China, forming their own AI blocs, other countries are maneuvering to harness the strengths of both groupings and avoid losing out. As the rivalry intensifies, experts say the window for countries to be able to choose freely between the two AI superpowers may be narrowing, forcing them to at one point pick between the U.S.-led Pax Silica and the China-inspired World AI Cooperation Organization.

How the world’s highest bridge became a tourist hot spot in China

Against the towering mountains of southwestern China, a crowd gathered as a young man prepared to bungee jump off the world’s highest bridge. He stood above a vast canyon, the bridge’s roadway soaring nearly nine times higher above the water than San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Beyond him, the ancient peaks of Guizhou rolled toward the horizon. Around him, spectators edged closer, phones raised, eager to capture the moment.

First came the safety checks. Strapped into a harness, he stood on a platform beneath the roadway as staff inspected his equipment. Then he stepped into the air. For seven seconds, he plunged toward the canyon floor, hundreds of meters below. Then the huge bungee cord bounced him back. Next came the applause.

Wealthy Chinese move offshore money to U.S. banks as Beijing’s tax net widens

Wealthy Chinese rattled by Beijing’s widening hunt for overseas wealth are turning to a once-familiar refuge for their money: the U.S. Private bankers and lawyers who work with Chinese clients say inquiries about opening U.S. bank accounts have grown in the months after Beijing imposed retroactive taxes on offshore wealth in July, moving assets previously stored in Singapore or Hong Kong there to stay further away from Beijing’s reach.

“It has become relatively prevalent,” said Keith Tan, CEO of Singapore-based Golden Acacia Capital, who is helping Chinese clients manage their offshore portfolios. His clients began planning exits to the U.S. in July, and some have the accounts set up in less than two months. “The hurdle is not that high for Chinese clients to open American accounts and transfer assets there.”

Wealthy clients tend to choose large private banks while smaller accounts go to regional banks or online brokers, Tan said.

Japan records a trade deficit as oil imports soar because of conflict in the Middle East

Japan’s trade deficit reached 2.81 trillion yen ($17.8 billion) for the first fiscal half, according to government data released Wednesday, as the war in Iran sent oil import prices soaring. The Finance Ministry’s preliminary data showed that Japan’s exports for the April-September period grew 18.4% from the same period the previous year to 63.5 trillion yen, while imports soared to 66.3 trillion yen, up 20.4% year-over-year. Both were record highs for Japan. The soaring price of oil affects a wide range of sectors, including plastic goods and shipping costs.

Resource-poor Japan imports virtually all its oil and has relied on access to the Strait of Hormuz in the Middle East for its oil shipments. That’s now basically blocked, and Japan has had to pay more to get shipments from other routes.

Cambodia and Laos are not pawns in a Chinese encirclement

In late September, China and Laos opened a Beijing-funded training and support center and an aviation academy at Ban Keun airport, about 50 kilometers north of Vientiane. China’s Ministry of National Defense says the facility will train Lao Air Force pilots and is “not directed against any third party.”

Even so, much of the commentary has linked Ban Keun to Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, which Beijing helped finance and where it also funded a joint training center, and has read the two as part of a Chinese effort to encircle Vietnam from the west. The evidence so far supports a more cautious view. Satellite imagery shows the Ban Keun runway at about 2,000 meters, long enough for most Chinese fighters and the Y-20 transport, but well short of the roughly 3,000 meters long-range bombers such as the H-6 need.

Takeaways from AP investigation into police shootings of alleged cow smugglers in India

Police in India’s most populous state have shot hundreds of Muslim men accused of cow smuggling in the legs in encounters that critics describe as extrajudicial justice designed to pander to India’s Hindu majority, an Associated Press investigation found.

Police in Uttar Pradesh say they shoot in self-defense and that the state’s “zero tolerance” policy on crime has helped restore law and order. Now the tactic of shooting people just below the knee — known locally as “Operation Lame” — is spreading to other states in India, even as human rights lawyers, local judges and activists raise alarms about rule of law and religious bias in the world’s largest democracy.

Here are key takeaways from the investigation.

US Treasury proposes a rule to crack down on high-tech investments in China, other adversaries

The U.S. Treasury Department proposed a rule Thursday to crack down on American high-tech investments such as supercomputing and artificial intelligence in China, Russia, North Korea and other “countries of concern.” The U.S. government has been working for years to deny China and other adversaries investments that could help them boost their military power.

That program began in 2023 when then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order putting restrictions on outbound U.S. investments in sectors such as semiconductors, quantum computing and artificial intelligence going into China. Treasury later established the Outbound Investment Security Program.

In December 2025, Congress passed a law that codified and expanded the program to target more technologies and more foreign countries, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

China Cannot Remain the World’s Factory. What Comes Next?

China’s manufacturing dominance is generating resistance. And not only in America. Europe worries about the erosion of its industrial base. Developing countries welcome Chinese investment and admire aspects of China’s development experience, but still ask a reasonable question: where, in this model, is our development?

Most countries do not simply want to buy Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, machinery and robots. They want factories of their own. They want their workers to acquire new skills and their suppliers to move up the value chain. They want technology and know-how. For years, Western companies complained that access to China’s enormous market came with demands for technology transfers. Now, China finds itself on the other side of the table, being asked to share its own expertise.

China’s Economy Has a Huge Weakness

As China’s manufacturers flood the global market with cars, chips, and just about everything else, the country’s economic juggernaut seems unstoppable. Policy makers in the United States and elsewhere fret that this onslaught will overrun their own industries, destroy jobs, and leave them reliant on a rival for vital products. But a growing number of Chinese factories are failing to produce at least one crucial thing: a profit. According to the London-based research firm Capital Economics, the share of Chinese industrial firms that are losing money has doubled since 2018 to 30 percent this year.

Losses are piling up at Chinese firms even as exports surge. Local governments regularly prop up unprofitable enterprises to preserve employment and meet economic targets. This has had a perverse effect throughout the country. An economic program that was meant to make China stronger and more independent has in fact made it more vulnerable to the policies of other countries.

Why China’s AI triumphs aren’t saving its flagging stock market

When Chinese stocks lose a South Korea-sized sum in five months, Beijing has a problem.

The US$2.4 trillion plunge in market value since May sits between Korea’s $2.25 trillionGDP and Canada’s $2.49 trillion. Many factors could explain Chinese shares entering bear market territory, but a major one is a protracted slump in consumption and property. External pressure is also mounting as the AI trade wobbles.The irony is that China keeps winning the AI innovation race while its stock market gets nothing from it. The CSI 300 index is down 11% this year, while the Taipei and Seoul bourses are up 59% and 31%, respectively.

Since the “DeepSeek shock” of January 2025, Chinese labs have repeatedly impressed. July’s launch of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 proved DeepSeek was no aberration, and Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI recently concluded that China is rapidly eroding America’s lead.

Xi’s peace principles offer little cover for China in Africa

On October 9, fighters from two jihadist groups clashed near Gonadaouri, in Burkina Faso’s Oudalan province, not far from the Malian border.

One side belonged to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate. The other belonged to the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP), known until 2022 as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. The two have been fighting along that frontier since August. Three days later, ISSP claimed to have killed more than 400 JNIM fighters, several commanders among them. AFP, for one, could not verify the figure. Specialist sources quoted by Radio France Internationale described heavy losses on both sides, including ISSP commanders killed by JNIM. JNIM made no statement.

On October 13, Chinese President Xi Jinping received Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbe in Beijing. Much of the meeting dealt with trade, from zero-tariff access for Togolese goods to Togo’s wider use of the renminbi. Xi also set out four principles for how outside parties should help settle Africa’s “hotspot issues”, and Gnassingbe endorsed them in full.

US reinvents rare earth refining as China guards know-how

With Beijing keeping its rare earth refining technology, equipment and technicians at home, Washington is funding private refiners to develop new ways to process the strategic metals rather than copying Chinese methods.

A senior US official told Asia Times that American refiners would rely on their own innovation to make the country self-sufficient in critical minerals, and that she was confident they would succeed. Industry experts, however, said some US projects would still have to pay high costs to learn China’s traditional extraction method, which Chinese firms have spent more than two decades perfecting.

“Over the last 20 years, we’ve developed a lot of innovation, but we didn’t develop the manufacturing know-how,” Audrey Robertson, assistant secretary of energy at the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation of the US Department of Energy (DOE), told Asia Times at the Financial Times Metals & Mining Summit in London on October 15.

Rescuers search for survivors after deadly earthquake in China’s Tibet region

Rescuers combed through a remote area in the Chinese region of Tibet on Friday after a magnitude 7 earthquake that killed at least 16 people, injuring 54 and collapsing hundreds of homes, according to Chinese state media.

The disaster struck Nagqu, a city north of Tibet’s capital Lhasa that’s some 4,800 meters (5,249 yards) above sea level, on Thursday. At least 339 homes collapsed, and officials told journalists they were concerned about further building collapses from aftershocks, as well as casualties from rockslides.

Search and rescue efforts are complicated by the geography and low temperatures, officials said. As of Friday afternoon, rescuers had done three rounds of searches, going through each household, and each village, said Dunzhu, the acting mayor of Nagqu city, said in a press conference.

China cites non-existent Tibetan refugee threats to refuse reopening Nepal border trade post

The Tatopani crossing in Sindhupalchok is the most viable route for Nepal to conduct border trade with China through Tibet. However, despite intensified diplomatic efforts from Kathmandu, China remains unwilling to reopen it for regular border exchanges due mainly to its security concerns related to unsubstantiated allegations of Tibetan refugee movements and activities.

The border point has been opened only temporarily, for just three days, to facilitate the import of goods for the Dashain festival, reported english.nepalnews.com Oct 18. The festival is Nepal’s longest, grandest, and most important, and lasts 15 days and began on Oct 11 this year. It is celebrated to honour Goddess Durga and her victory over the demon Mahishasura.

Femicide in Iran: When 'honor' becomes a death sentence

The life of Maryam Yarmohammadi came to a violent end in the early hours of October 5, when the 28-year-old mother of two was attacked with knives by her brother and husband on Qeshm Island in southern Iran. Her genitalia were mutilated. She died shortly afterward in hospital. Both her husband and brother were arrested.

Media reported that about 50 relatives gathered outside the hospital to protest the arrests. They reportedly believed that death had been the "least severe punishment" Maryam Yarmohammadi deserved. What the young woman's relatives considered her guilty of has not been publicly reported. Yet both the circumstances of the case and the extreme violence involved follow a familiar pattern seen in so-called honor killings.

Stop Honor Killings

Kill With Impunity

Femicide in Iran

Are Europeans putting profits over human rights in Vietnam?

Vietnam's Communist Party chief and president, To Lam, arrived in Brussels on Wednesday for an official visit to the European Union (EU) and Belgium in another sign of a relationship that continues to grow.

The visit comes just days after Vietnam signed a free trade agreement with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), comprising Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein. Trade ties between Vietnam and Europe have deepened in recent years. The EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA), which took effect in August 2020, substantially expanded Vietnam's commercial ties with most European states.

Amid global tariff wars, the EU-Vietnam relationship "is a welcome advertisement for keeping markets open," Khac Giang Nguyen, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, told DW.

A Trump-Putin-Xi summit would put Xi at the apex

In July 1971, Henry Kissinger developed a convenient stomachache in Pakistan, vanished from public view and turned up in Beijing. The secret trip that led to Nixon’s opening to China rested on a simple piece of geometry: in a world of three great powers, the smart move is to stand closer to each of your rivals than they stand to one another.

The Sino-Soviet split gave Washington the hinge of the triangle, and Kissinger made sure America sat on it. Half a century later, Donald Trump is being invited to draw a triangle of his own. According to the Wall Street Journal, Vladimir Putin used an October 9 phone call with Trump, the same call in which the two men agreed that Washington would buy Russian diesel, to propose a three-way summit with Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in Shenzhen on November 18–19.