Kinaforum

mandag 15. desember 2025

India: Toxic smog chokes Delhi, disrupts travel

Air quality in New Delhi continued to be in the "severe" category for the third consecutive day on Monday as a thick toxic smog engulfed the Indian capital. Air pollution in Delhi and its suburbs, which together make up the National Capital Region, has been at its worst levels in weeks.

According to government data, the averageAir Quality Index (AQI) in the region on Monday was 471, which among the worst in the world, with any measurement above 300 considered "hazardous" to health.

For comparison, any measurement under 50 is considered "good."

On Sunday, authorities imposed the most stringent pollution-control measures, which include a complete ban on the movement of older diesel vehicles and a halt in construction activities. Schools have also been directed to conduct classes in hybrid mode. Smog is a recurring phenomenon in Delhi, especially during the winter months. The issue of air pollution in the national capital is also a heated political issue. There have been demands for a long-term solution to curb the smog.

How Late Architect Frank Gehry Silently Shaped Chinese Cities

On Dec. 5, American architect Frank Gehry, famous for designing landmarks such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 96.

Unlike other internationally renowned architects — Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and Tadao Ando, who designed the CCTV Headquarters, Beijing Daxing International Airport, and several Chinese museums, respectively — Gehry left no works in the Chinese mainland. He was invited to compete for, but didn’t win, the commission for the National Art Museum of China. While he was selected to design the Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, his plans were so radical that it remains unknown whether they will be implemented.

But despite the mainland lacking a Gehry building, he has had a profound influence on how Chinese cities have changed in the past two decades. This influence is not due to any particular architectural style, but lies in the urban development logic that a visually striking landmark will enhance an area’s profile, drive up land values, and spark commercial activity.

Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai found guilty in landmark national security trial, faces possible life sentence

Former Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai has been found guilty on two national security charges and a lesser sedition charge, in a landmark two-year trial widely viewed as a measure of the city’s shrinking freedoms under Beijing’s rule.

Self-made billionaire Lai, 78, is one of the highest-profile critics of Beijing charged under a sweeping security law imposed on the semi-autonomous city in 2020 following months of huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests. He founded Apple Daily, a fiercely pro-democracy tabloid newspaper known for its blistering broadsides against the Chinese Communist Party until its forced closure in 2021.

Lai had pleaded not guilty to all charges, and now faces possible life in prison. Monday’s verdict marks the end of a tumultuous legal saga that had drawn condemnation from supporters and foreign leaders around the world, including US President Donald Trump – who had once vowed to “get him out.”

US Responds to Chinese Water Cannon Attack in South China Sea

The State Department has said the United States stands with the Philippines after the treaty ally's fishing boats were hit with water cannons by Chinese forces in the South China Sea last week, as maritime disputes between Manila and Beijing remain unresolved.

The Philippine coast guard said three fishermen were injured and two fishing boats sustained significant damage from what it called "high-pressure water cannon blasts" while operating lawfully at Escoda Shoal—also known as Sabina Shoal—on Friday.

The Chinese coast guard accused Philippine vessels of conducting "provocative acts" in waters near the atoll, which China claims as Xianbin Jiao, despite repeated warnings. It said "necessary control measures" were taken to drive multiple groups of vessels away.

Full List of Countries in New US Alliance To Win Chip War With China

The United States has brought together a group of allied nations to launch Pax Silica, a strategic initiative aimed at securing global supply chains for artificial intelligence, critical minerals and advanced technologies amid growing competition with China. The program is designed to strengthen technological resilience, coordinate research and development and cultivate a workforce capable of sustaining critical innovations.

Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg described the initiative as the start of “a new golden era” of cooperation on AI and supply-chain security, emphasizing the importance of collective action among trusted partners to counter rising technological threats.

Where in the world are wealth and income most unequal?

The richest 10 percent of the world’s population now owns three-quarters of all personal wealth, according to the newly released World Inequality Report 2026.

Income is not much different, where the top 50 percent of earners take home more than 90 percent, while the poorest half of the world receives less than 10 percent of total income. The report, which has been published annually since 2018, notes that the 2026 edition arrives at a critical time. Worldwide, living standards are stagnating for many, while wealth and power are increasingly concentrated at the top.

Wealth and income levels do not always go hand in hand. The wealthiest are not necessarily the highest earners, highlighting the persistent divide between what people earn and what they own. Wealth includes the total value of a person’s assets-such as savings, investments or property, after subtracting their debts.

In 2025, the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population owned 75 percent of global wealth, the middle 40 percent held 23 percent, and the bottom half controlled only 2 percent.

Jimmy Lai, former pro-democracy newspaper founder, to hear verdict in national security case

A Hong Kong court will deliver its verdict on Monday in the trial of former pro-democracy media mogul Jimmy Lai, who’s charged with conspiracies to commit sedition and collusion with foreign forces in a case that marks how much the semi-autonomous Chinese city has changed since Beijing began a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent five years ago.

Lai, 78, was arrested in 2020 under a national security law imposed by Chinese authorities to quell the massive anti-government protests that rocked the city in 2019.

Lai’s 156-day trial is being closely watched by foreign governments and political observers as a test of the judicial independence and media freedom in the former British colony, which was promised it could maintain its Western-style civil liberties for 50 years after returning to Chinese rule in 1997.

‘We Can’t Even Afford to Have Sex’: China’s New Condom Tax Draws Ire

The Chinese government is testing out a new solution to falling birth rates: making sex more expensive.

Consumers will pay a 13% value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and products, including condoms, beginning Jan. 1, as part of China’s newly revised Value-Added Tax Law. Those products have been exempted from tax since 1993 as part of China’s one-child policy, which heavily penalized families for having more than one child from 1980 to 2015. As the country’s birth rate has fallen in recent years, the government has turned to seeking to boost birth rates with a range of incentives and subsidies.

Officially, the latest move has been framed as a “technical adjustment within a broader tax-system reform,” says Yuan Mei, assistant professor in the School of Economics at Singapore Management University. The focus has been about “administrative consistency rather than demographic goals.”

As China has shifted from fearing that rapid population growth in the 1970s would strain resources and hamper economic development to wanting to reverse falling birth rates, some experts say it is reasonable that the government’s policies reflect that change.

Gordon G. Chang: Trump’s National Security Strategy Sugarcoats China Threat | Opinion

At a time when the Chinese regime is assaulting the U.S. at home and abroad, President Donald Trump’s national security strategy does not label China as a threat. The document, released December 4, states that America seeks “a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration outlined China as “the U.S.’s primary foreign-policy challenge” in its national security strategy.That’s no longer the case. As the paper pointed out, “The White House’s new national-security strategy signals a softer approach to competition with Beijing, playing down ideological differences between the two superpowers and marking a break from years in which China was singled out as posing the U.S.’s greatest challenge.”

Thailand declares curfew along coast as Cambodia border fighting spreads

Thailand announced a curfew in its southeastern Trat province on Sunday as fighting with Cambodia spread to coastal areas of a disputed border region, two days after US President and would-be peacemaker Donald Trump said the sides had agreed to stop.

The Southeast Asian neighbours have resorted to arms several times this year since a Cambodian soldier was killed in a May skirmish, reigniting a conflict that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the border.

“Overall, there have been clashes continuously” since Cambodia again reiterated its openness to a ceasefire on Saturday, Thai Defence Ministry spokesman Rear Admiral Surasant Kongsiri told a press conference in Bangkok after announcing the curfew.

Philippines says China Coast Guard damages fishing vessels

Authorities say three Filipino fishermen were injured when the Chinese Coast Guard fired water cannon at their boats. The incident comes amid rising confrontations in the South China Sea. Three Filipino fishermen were injured and two fishing boats suffered "significant damage" after Chinese Coast Guard vessels fired water cannon at them and cut anchor lines, Philippine authorities said Saturday.

The incident, which involved some 20 Philippine fishing boats, occurred on Friday near the Sabina Shoal, a fish-rich area in the South China Sea. Beijing claims the South China Sea almost in its entirety in the face of an international ruling that the assertion is legally unfounded. The fishermen "were targeted with water cannon and dangerous blocking maneuvers," a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman said in a statement Saturday.

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A velvet reset: Trump’s new strategy hands China breathing space

For years, Washington framed China as the defining adversary of the American century. The National Security Strategy released on December 4 has quietly abandoned that posture. At just 33 pages, the document mentions China sparingly and never as an existential threat. Instead, it treats Beijing as a major power with which the United States must reach “reciprocity and fairness” in trade.

The shift is deliberate and, from a Chinese perspective, long overdue. After a decade of being cast as the villain in successive Pentagon papers and Biden-era strategies that labelled China a “pacing challenge” and “systemic rival,” Beijing now finds itself described in language that prioritizes economic rebalancing over ideological confrontation.

This is not weakness on Washington’s part; it is realism born of exhaustion with endless confrontation and recognition that tariffs and technology bans have hurt American farmers, manufacturers and consumers as much as Chinese exporters. Beijing would be wise to pocket the concession and widen the opening before domestic politics in either capital reverses course.

Andrew Korybko: Russia-US détente can revolutionize global economic architecture

I have explained in a separate analysis that joint strategic resource investments after the end of the Ukrainian Conflict, particularly in energy and critical minerals, can assist the US in economically competing with China.

This vision aligns with the focus of the new National Security Strategy on securing critical resource supply chains, and it can prospectively be expanded to aid the United States’ allies, further advancing US goals.After all, the bulk of the strategy documents Asian section isn’t about the US military competition with China (though a subsection details efforts to deter it in Taiwan and the South China Sea). It’s more about their economic competition and the ways in which America’s allies can help the West keep pace with the People’s Republic.

It even proposes joint cooperation “with regard to critical minerals in Africa” for gradually reducing and ultimately eliminating collective dependence on China’s associated supply chains.

Chinese Electric Buses Are Thriving in Europe – Despite Security and Forced Labor Concerns

As Chinese electric buses have made inroads into European cities, potential security issues have been raised by the media. Recently, both the Danish and Norwegian public broadcasters reported on the risks of operating buses that can be “switched off remotely” from China. Such concerns feed into a broader debate about China’s growing dominance in the green tech sector – a debate that recently prompted EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to stress that “we should learn our lesson.”

Yet these security and dependency concerns have so far done little to deter European transport companies from operating Chinese buses. In Denmark, where Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has repeatedly warned against excessive reliance on Chinese suppliers, no less than 68 percent of Copenhagen’s city buses are currently “made by China,” a figure set to rise to 80 percent by 2027.

A Chinese official exposed his boss. Now in Texas, he’s hunted by Beijing - with help from US tech

Retired Chinese official Li Chuanliang was recuperating from cancer on a Korean resort island when he got an urgent call: Don’t return to China, a friend warned. You’re now a fugitive.

Days later, a stranger snapped a photo of Li in a cafe. Terrified South Korea would send him back, Li fled, flew to the U.S. on a tourist visa and applied for asylum. But even there — in New York, in California, deep in the Texas desert — the Chinese government continued to hunt him down with the help of surveillance technology.

Li’s communications were monitored, his assets seized and his movements followed in police databases. More than 40 friends, relatives, and associates — including his pregnant daughter — were identified and detained, even by tracking down their cab drivers through facial recognition software. Three former associates died in detention, and for months shadowy men Li believed to be Chinese operatives stalked him across continents, interviews and documents seen by The Associated Press show.

How Trump’s tariffs forced China to pivot – and export more

Just a year ago, Chinese manufacturers, fearing a new trade war, rushed to push out exports following the election victory of US President Donald Trump, who had pledged to slap punishing tariffs on imports from China over America’s widening trade deficit. A year later, Trump has delivered on his promise. But China has pivoted – and exported more.

In a striking display of resilience, the world’s second-largest economy notched a record trade surplus of $1 trillion in just the first 11 months of the year – a milestone no other nation has achieved.

The stunning outcome – underscoring that the American market is not entirely irreplaceable – has bolstered Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s confidence in taking a hardball approach with Trump throughout this year’s protracted trade war. While the two countries have dialed back tensions and returned to a fragile trade truce after Trump and Xi’s meeting in October, a final agreement remains nowhere in sight.

Thailand vows to keep fighting Cambodia, hours after Trump’s ceasefire call

Thailand’s leader vowed on Saturday to keep fighting on the disputed border with Cambodia as fighter jets struck targets, hours after US President Donald Trump said he had brokered a new ceasefire. Caretaker Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the Southeast Asian nation would “continue to perform military actions until we feel no more harm and threats to our land and people.”

Trump, who brokered a ceasefire in the long-running border dispute in October, spoke to Anutin and Cambodian premier Hun Manet on Friday, and said they had agreed to “cease all shooting.” Neither of them mentioned any agreement in statements after their calls with Trump, and Anutin said there was no ceasefire.

North Korea’s Kim Jong Un hails troops returning from Russia

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, the North’s KCNA news agency reported on Saturday.

In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials gathered to welcome the troops.

KCNA said the unit had been dispatched in early August and carried out combat and engineering tasks in the Kursk region of Russia during Moscow’s war with Ukraine.