Kinaforum

torsdag 9. april 2026

India's digital census prompts fear of hidden agendas

India has been conducting a fully digital census since April 1, deploying over 3 million enumerators while also providing people with an opportunity to enter their data into a self-enumeration portal.

In the first phase, the officials will focus on house listing and housing conditions. This involves collecting data on 33 parameters, including building materials, access to basic amenities like electricity and clean water, and ownership of assets such as smartphones and vehicles.

Every building will also be geo-tagged to ensure complete geographic coverage and an accurate reflection of the country's infrastructure.The second phase, scheduled for early next year, is to focus on the population, gathering detailed demographic and socio-economic data. This includes recording age, education, and occupation for every individual. By capturing migration patterns and fertility data digitally, the officials hope to form a comprehensive profile of India's evolving population, which is already considered the largest in the world.

China’s Economic Sanctions Against Japan: An Assessment

On February 24, 2026, China placed twenty Japanese companies on its Entity List. This move marked a significant shift in China’s posture: Having previously sought to keep Japan’s security status deliberately ambiguous, Beijing has now explicitly designated Japan a country of security concern and publicly identified specific firms it views as threats. By framing the measure under the national security exceptions recognized by the WTO framework, China has made it considerably more difficult for Japan to establish a clear trade rule violation.

Until now, China had pursued a different strategy. Rather than openly categorizing Japan as a security adversary, it engaged in “economic coercion” – discriminating against and pressuring specific countries for political, non-commercial reasons in violation of the WTO’s most-favored-nation (MFN) principle.

In Strait of Hormuz, Iran and China take aim at US dollar hegemony

As the United States-Israel war on Iran — paused for two weeks on Wednesday amid fresh diplomatic talks — has roiled the global economy for more than a month, Iran and China have seized the opportunity to address a shared gripe about the global financial system.

Their common cause: ending the hegemony of the US dollar. For years, they say, Washington has leveraged the dominance of the dollar in international trade to exert influence and inflict pain on enemies and competitors, Iran and China included.

The supremacy of the dollar is especially apparent in the global oil market, where about 80 percent of transactions are settled in the currency, according to a 2023 estimate by JP Morgan Chase.

On rare China visit, Taiwan’s opposition leader calls for reconciliation

Taiwan’s main opposition leader has used a high-profile visit to China to push for dialogue with Beijing, invoking the legacy of revolutionary figure Sun Yat-sen amid rising cross-strait tensions.

Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of the Kuomintang (KMT) party, laid a wreath at Sun’s mausoleum in Nanjing on Wednesday, in a gesture steeped in historical symbolism.The city once served as the capital of the Republic of China before the KMT retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war to the communists led by Mao Zedong.

“The core values of Sun Yat-sen’s ideal that ‘all under heaven are equal’ have always been equality, inclusiveness, and unity,” Cheng said, in remarks broadcast live on Taiwanese television. “We should work together to promote reconciliation and unity across the [Taiwan] Strait and create regional prosperity and peace.”

China Could Dominate the Physical AI Future

On Feb. 16, hundreds of millions of households watched as humanoid robots from four different Chinese companies danced, acted in a comedy skit, did parkour, and performed martial arts onstage at the Spring Festival Gala, China’s most-watched television broadcast. Across the country, drone shows lit up the night skies as China celebrated Lunar New Year, the synchronization of tens of thousands of drones coordinated by artificial intelligence.

The physical AI fervor has traveled across the Pacific. At the glitzy Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year, Chinese startups dominated the convention with AI-enabled hardware from smart home appliances and wearables to all kinds of robots.

‘Weeks, if not months’: Strait of Hormuz tanker traffic won’t normalize anytime soon

The U.S. and Iran’s “fragile truce” has lifted hopes that a full reopening of the Hormuz Strait can end the energy supply crunch that threatens to cripple the global economy. But shipping and maritime experts say traffic through the critical energy artery will not normalize anytime soon.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday the ceasefire is contingent on the “complete, immediate, and safe opening” of the Strait, which typically carries around one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies. Vice President JD Vance reiterated on Wednesday that the Iranian leadership has agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, however, has made it clear that the reopening would be conditional, subject to coordination with the country’s armed forces and technical limitations.

Trump Made a Deal That Gives Him Nothing He Wanted

President trump said he went to war to ensure that Iran never acquired a nuclear bomb. The war ended—for now, at least—with a demonstration that Tehran possesses an arguably more powerful weapon of deterrence against future attacks, one that is cheaper to use, gives Iran enormous sway over the global economy, can bring in revenue, and can’t be negotiated away: the Strait of Hormuz.

More than 12,000 U.S. missiles, bombs, and drones hit Iranian targets over the past five weeks, destroying the country’s navy and much of its military infrastructure. Several of Iran’s leaders and some 1,500 of its citizens were killed, including more than 170 who died in a strike on a girls’ school that was the apparent result of errant targeting.

Iran is holding the world economy hostage. Trump’s truce proves its leverage

President Donald Trump has cast a fragile two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran as a “total and complete victory.” But the terms of the truce highlight how Iran has used control of the Strait of Hormuz to gain enormous leverage over the global economy.

That the ceasefire is conditional on Iran agreeing to reopen the vital waterway is a tacit acknowledgement of Tehran’s influence over the world’s most important oil chokepoint – and, with it, significant chunks of the global economy. “Iran doesn’t need a lot of military might to cause a huge disruption in the global economy,” Brookings energy expert Samantha Gross said last month.

Torbjørn Færøvik: Bombs and Poetry - Why Iran Cannot Be Erased

The parties to the Iran war have agreed to a ceasefire. Thus, Donald Trump loses, for now, an opportunity to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. He must also postpone the destruction of the mausoleum of the incomparable Ferdowsi, the national poet who a thousand years ago wrote Shahnameh, a work of some 50,000 lines.

In northeastern Iran, not far from the city of Mashhad, lie the remains of Tus, once a cultural center along the Silk Road between East and West. Today it has been reduced to ruins, earthen ramparts and silent fields. Here, on the edge of the ancient city, rests Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi.

The mausoleum rising above his grave is anything but modest. It was built in its present form in the twentieth century, under Reza Shah, at a time when Iran sought to highlight its pre-Islamic heritage. The structure is inspired by ancient Persian monuments, in pale stone with columns and reliefs that give it a classical appearance.

AI has spread across China with startling speed. Ten people describe what it now allows them to do.

An 11-year-old schoolboy in Shanghai composing his own songs. A farmer in Henan identifying unfamiliar weeds in his fields. A college student in Suzhou chatting with an AI boyfriend she designed herself.

They are among 10 people across China — young and old, rural and urban, farmers, students, doctors, and entrepreneurs — who have nearly all begun using generative AI tools regularly within the past three years.And they are hardly alone. By the end of 2025, more than 600 million people in China were using generative AI tools, a user base that had grown 141% in just one year, according to official industry data.

The speed of the shift is striking, but the groundwork was laid nearly a decade ago. In 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated world champion Lee Sedol at the ancient game of Go, long considered too complex for computers to master. The victory jolted China’s tech sector and helped push AI to the center of national strategy.

Taiwan opposition leader arrives in China on what she calls a ‘journey to peace’

Taiwan opposition leader Cheng Li-wun arrived in China on Tuesday at the invitation of President Xi Jinping, in what she’s calling a “journey for peace” as Beijing pushes for the self-ruled island to come under its control. The visit is the first by a Taiwanese opposition leader in a decade and comes ahead of a meeting in Beijing between Xi and U.S. President Donald Trump scheduled to take place in May.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s opposition-controlled parliament has stalled attempts by its government to pass a $40 billion special defense budget, expected to fund arms deals with the United States and the development of Taiwan’s indigenous defense industry.

Vietnam's leader To Lam strengthens power in unanimous assembly vote

Vietnam's communist-dominated general assembly has elected To Lam, the party leader, to be the country's president and head of state, an unusual concentration of power in one person. He was elected unanimously by the 500 seat assembly which started sitting on Monday, following the Communist Party Congress in January, which makes all the big decisions about the country's future direction.

This makes To Lam the most powerful leader in Vietnam in recent decades. To Lam rose over the last decade by serving as the powerful Minister for Public Security, enforcing a nationwide anti-corruption drive which saw many of his potential rivals disgraced and purged.

Iran ceasefire deal a partial win for Trump - but at a high cost

In the end, cooler heads prevailed – at least for now. At 18:32 Washington time, President Donald Trump posted on his social media website that the US and Iran were "very far along" with a "definitive" peace agreement and that he had agreed to a two-week ceasefire to allow negotiations to proceed.

It wasn't exactly the last minute, but with Trump's looming 20:00 EDT (00:00 GMT on Wednesday) deadline to reach a deal or the US would launch massive strikes against Iranian energy and transportation infrastructure, it came pretty close.

All of this is contingent on Iran also suspending hostilities and fully opening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping traffic, which the regime says it will do, while insisting it still exerts "dominion" over the waterway.

How Pakistan helped secure a fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran

In the hours before the two-week ceasefire between Iran and the US was announced, there were some small signs of hope from Pakistan. Speaking anonymously, a Pakistan source told the BBC that the talks continued "at pace", with Pakistan operating as an intermediary between Iran and the US.

Those conducting the negotiations from Pakistan's side consisted of "a very small circle" and that the mood was "sombre and serious but still hopeful that a cessation of hostilities will be the outcome. There are a few hours left." The source said they were not part of that small circle.

Pakistan has acted as an intermediary between Iran and the US over the last few weeks, passing messages between the two. It has a historic relationship with Iran, a shared border and regularly refers to its "brotherly" relationship with the country.

A hacker has allegedly breached one of China’s supercomputers and is attempting to sell a trove of stolen data

A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data – including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics – from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China.

The dataset, which allegedly contains more than 10 petabytes of sensitive information, is believed by experts to have been obtained from the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in Tianjin – a centralized hub that provides infrastructure services for more than 6,000 clients across China, including advanced science and defense agencies.

Cyber experts who have spoken to the alleged hacker and reviewed samples of the stolen data they posted online say they appeared to gain entry to the massive computer with comparative ease and were able to siphon out huge amounts of data over the course of multiple months without being detected.

India's top court hears challenges to ruling on women's entry into temple

India's Supreme Court is hearing petitions challenging a landmark 2018 order that allowed women of menstruating age into the famed Sabarimala temple in southern Kerala state. The nine-judge constitutional bench, set up by Chief Justice Surya Kant, will also consider other similar cases from different faiths.

So, the court's guidelines will also help decide whether women can be denied entry into Parsi temples and Muslim mosques, whether religious leaders can excommunicate people and the legality of female genital mutilation. Legal experts say the court's decision will have far-reaching consequences for women's religious freedoms and right to enter places of worship.

Russia and China veto watered-down UN resolution aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz

Russia and China on Tuesday vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz that had been repeatedly watered down in hopes those two countries would abstain.

The vote — 11-2, with two abstentions from Pakistan and Colombia— took place just hours after U.S. President Donald Trump issued an unprecedented threat that a “whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not open the strategic waterway and make a deal before his 8 p.m. Eastern deadline. One-fifth of the world’s oil typically passes through the strait, and Iran’s stranglehold during the war has sent energy prices soaring.

Russia and China strongly defended their opposition, both directly citing Trump’s most recent and perilous threat yet to end Iran’s civilization as confirmation that the proposal would have given U.S. and Israel “carte blanche for continued aggression,” as Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia put it.

China using Iran as proxy lab for future AI warfare with US

China’s AI-driven intelligence support to Iran is turning the war into a deniable, data-driven proxy conflict in which battlefield advantage increasingly depends on information rather than force.

The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Chinese private technology firms are marketing AI-driven intelligence tools that claim to track and “expose” US military movements in the context of the Iran conflict, underscoring a growing US security concern despite China’s efforts to distance itself from the war.

Companies such as Hangzhou-based MizarVision and Jing’an Technology are using artificial intelligence to analyze open-source data, including satellite imagery, flight tracking and shipping information, to map US deployments in the Middle East, including pre-operational buildup.