Kinaforum

søndag 5. april 2026

Torbjørn Færøvik: Beijing Fifty Years Ago - When China Turned on Mao

Beijing, an April day fifty years ago. China had never seen anything like it. From all directions, agitated citizens streamed toward Tiananmen Square. Many carried white funeral wreaths, a sign of mourning.

In 1976, the annual day of remembrance for the dead, Qingming Festival, fell on April 4. In Beijing, preparations had begun weeks in advance. In courtyards across the city, young and old squatted side by side, weaving white wreaths—white being the color of grief. “Do not go to Tiananmen Square!” the party leadership ordered. “Honoring the dead is a tradition of the past.”

The first mourners had already made their way to the square in March. Party newspapers urged them to turn back, but they were not heeded. On April 2, the British diplomat Roger Garside estimated the crowd at ten thousand. The following day, even more arrived. Most walked in silence; others sang “The Internationale” or China’s national anthem. On the silk ribbons attached to their wreaths, they had written their final greetings to Zhou Enlai, the country’s recently deceased prime minister.

China cranks South China Sea buildup while Iran consumes US

China’s renewed land reclamation at Antelope Reef comes as the ongoing US-Israel-Iran War draws significant US military assets into the Middle East, raising questions over whether shifting US force posture is opening strategic space in the South China Sea.

This month, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that China has stepped up land reclamation at Antelope Reef in the disputed South China Sea, satellite imagery shows, underscoring an effort to consolidate maritime claims and reshape the strategic balance in a potential Taiwan-linked conflict.

UNESCO World Heritage sites facing the heat

While wars and revolutions have long threatened national cultural heritage sites — most recently in Iran and Ukraine — a new danger has emerged in the form of climate change.

UNESCO World Heritage sites from the 4,000 year-old pyramid temples in Iraq to the ancient statues of Easter Island are facing extreme erosion and deterioration as temperatures rise and storms and droughts intensify. A 2025 study showed that 80% of World Heritage sites are facing climate stress as materials such as wood and stone struggle to adapt to a hotter world.

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Taiwan’s failures on migrant labor issues

Despite calling itself a nation based on human rights, Taiwan continues to let migrant workers remain subject to the pressures of debt, precarity and fear in the workplace. This is not the institutional progress we expect; it is a distortion of our values.

These so-called “ghost workers,” sidelined to the fringes of society, are evidence of what Taiwan still finds to be an uncomfortable reality: Despite being critical to our factories, care systems and daily life, migrant workers pay a much higher price than local workers in accessing basic labor rights, including lodging appeals, resignations and accessing financial relief.

Recent reports have once again illustrated how many migrants, after paying brokerage fees and being saddled with debt, are forced to remain in exploitative situations, working overtime, and dealing with occupational injuries or poor conditions. The question is not whether Taiwan has laws to address this; it is whether the laws are being upheld to protect workers’ rights.

Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania

Weeks into the craze, nobody quite knows what to make of the OpenClaw mania sweeping China, marked by viral photos of retirees lining up for installation events and users gathering in red claw hats.

The queues and cosplay inspired by the “raising a lobster” trend make for irresistible China clickbait. However, the West is fixating on the least important part of the story. As a consumer craze, OpenClaw — the AI agent designed to do tasks on a user’s behalf — would likely burn out. Without some developer background, it is too glitchy and technically awkward for true mainstream adoption, not to mention the cybersecurity risks.

Even so, the fad could leave China’s AI industry with something far more valuable: more token demand, more real-world experimentation, and more live training data for open-source models trying to catch US rivals.

India makes first Iranian oil purchase in seven years with no payment problems

Indian refiners have purchased Iranian oil amid the Middle East conflict that has disrupted supplies through ‌the Strait of Hormuz, the oil ministry said on Saturday.

The world’s third-biggest oil importer and consumer, India has not received a cargo from Tehran since May 2019, following U.S. pressure not to buy Iranian ⁠crude, but supply disruptions from the U.S.-Israel war have hit the South Asian nation hard. “Amid Middle East supply disruptions, Indian refiners have secured their crude oil requirements, including from Iran; and there is no payment hurdle for Iranian crude imports,” the oil ministry said on X.

Chinese chip firms hit record high revenue driven by the AI boom and U.S. curbs

Chinese semiconductor firms have reported record revenue last year driven by AI demand, a shortage of memory chips and U.S. export restrictions that have pushed Beijing to bolster its homegrown tech industry.

Analysts and the companies themselves are also expecting further revenue surges this year, underscoring how Chinese chip players are capitalizing on strong demand from domestic tech giants looking to build their AI infrastructure. U.S. export restrictions on China’s tech sector over the last few years have added “rocket fuel” on chip demand, amplifying growth from other areas like electric vehicles and AI data centers, according to Paul Triolo, a partner at Albright Stonebridge Group.

Fossils from China show complex life evolved millions of years earlier than once thought

Goblet-shaped sea jelly relatives with miniature “arms.” A plump, legless creature resembling a sausage. Long, wormlike animals tipped with flat “holdfast” discs for anchoring to the seafloor.

Newfound fossils from a site in southwestern China, preserved in exquisite detail, offer a peek at a time in Earth’s distant past called the Ediacaran (635 million to 542 million years ago). The discovery suggests that complex animals — perhaps even ancestors of all vertebrates — were around millions of years earlier than once thought.

A few types of creatures were previously known from the Ediacaran, but the evolution of complex animal life has long been associated with the Cambrian, a later period from 542 million to 488 million years ago when fauna diversity and complexity were booming.

Tibet, a rare exception to China’s visa-free entry for citizens of over 50 countries

While China has opened up the People’’s Republic of China (PRC) for visa-free entry or transit to a total of 77 nationalities from over 50 countries in an effort to give a boost to its flagging economy, Tibet remains a rare exception to the applicability of this rule. Even travels within Tibet are subjected to obtaining of further, specific permits, underlining the severe lack of accessibility to the region over which China has launched a new assimilation campaign under the vigour of President Xi Jinping’s renewed Sinicization drive.

Tourists visiting the PRC can “move freely between provinces and cities”; however, Tibet is a significant exception, noted the travel website travelandtourworld.com Mar 27, correcting its claim in an earlier article.

All foreign passport holders — including those from visa-free countries — must obtain a Tibet Travel Permit (TTP) in addition to their Chinese visa (or visa exemption) to enter the Tibet Autonomous Region, the report noted.

‘It all depends on the crop’: Gulf crisis hits South Asia farmers

Ramesh Kumar, 42, is anxiously doing the calculations for his crops this year.

Standing at the edge of his wheat field in northwest Punjab’s Gurdaspur, he runs through the numbers in his head, totting up fertiliser costs, expected yield, and market prices.Then he shifts to more personal concerns: School fees, household expenses, loan repayments and the money he has been saving for his daughter Varsha’s wedding.

“I don’t know if we can afford it this year,” he says. “Everything depends on the crop.”

The uncertainty has crept in quietly. Fertiliser, once a fairly predictable staple in farming, has become more expensive and harder to secure in time. For Kumar, it is not so much a question of cost as it is the difference between stability and strain.

“If prices go up more, we will have to cut somewhere,” he says. “Maybe delay the wedding. If things get worse … even children’s education becomes difficult.”

China’s Tech Giants Are Recruiting High Schoolers

From a 17-year-old spearheading an AI company’s technical report to high school internships mentored by CEOs, China’s tech giants are increasingly trying to spot and cultivate talented teenagers.

In the most recent publicized example, on March 16, Chen Guangyu, a 17-year-old high school student, co-authored a technical report on large language models for Beijing-based Moonshot AI. The report, published on web-based software collaboration platform GitHub, was later praised by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as “impressive work” on X, sparking heated discussion on Chinese social media.

Chen reportedly joined Moonshot AI’s Kimi chatbot team as a machine learning intern last November and is expected to graduate in June from an international high school in southern China’s tech hub of Shenzhen, Guangdong province. The Kimi report listed three joint first authors: Chen and two established researchers in the field.

China aims to show global leadership with Iran war diplomacy. US appears uninterested

China is stepping up its diplomacy on the Iran war, putting forward a five-point proposal with Pakistan, rallying support from Gulf countries and opposing a United Nations proposal to use any force necessary to open the Strait of Hormuz.

It is China’s latest push for a more prominent role in global affairs, though it may prove to be more rhetorical than substantive, with the U.S. appearing uninterested in Beijing’s efforts.

“The war with Iran is the priority of all countries in and outside the region,” said Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank. “It is an opportunity China will not miss to demonstrate its leadership and diplomatic initiative.”

Danny Russel, a former senior U.S. diplomat, described China’s diplomacy as “performative” and compared the five-point proposal for ending the Iran war with its 12-point plan for Ukraine in 2023, which was “filled with platitudes but never acted on.”

China ignores Trump’s Hormuz request as the Iran war deepens and his Beijing trip slips

Trump side-stepped diplomacy on his way to war in Iran. Now, he’s asking China and others for help

When Trump Goes to China: It’s the Strategy That Matters

When U.S. President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping finally meet in mid-May in Beijing, the optics will be grand and the words may be noteworthy, but the outcome is unlikely to be earth-shattering. Idle speculation about a China-U.S. G-2 condominium or pronouncements that fundamentally alter the nature of the rivalry is largely baseless.

The trip, however, may offer a revealing window into the divergent strategic approaches of the two leaders. In that sense, Trump’s second highly choreographed reception in the Forbidden City may still mark a milestone in a bilateral competition that, at present, is trending in China’s direction.

Will the Strait of Hormuz Sink NATO?

On Wednesday, after America’s NATO allies refused his call to help unblock the Strait of Hormuz, a furious Donald Trump said he might withdraw the United States from the alliance. No other American president has even hinted at taking such a step: they all considered NATO vital to American national security as well as to global, particularly European, stability. Even if Trump does not act on his threat—his address to the nation left that question unresolved—Trump has broken new ground simply by making it.Before turning to the alliance’s current crisis, it’s worth reviewing how things got to this point.

By the time Trump was first elected in November 2016, the proposition that America’s NATO allies had to spend more on defense was axiomatic within the Washington establishment. Successive administrations insisted that allies get serious about “burden sharing.”

As Taiwan steels its defenses against China, some are hatching escape plans

In the face of growing Chinese military aggression, Taiwan has increased defense spending, extended mandatory conscription and revamped its combat exercises, signaling its determination to fight off a potential invasion.

Some of its people, like 51-year-old Nelson Yeh, have been making different plans. Three years ago, Yeh decided to open a bank account in Singapore and move one-fifth of his wealth overseas. Then he applied for citizenship in Turkey, and nine months later obtained secondary passports for himself and his wife.

If Taiwan came under attack, he reasoned, he would be able to access emergency funds and use his Turkish papers to travel freely.

Eyes Only: How China’s Party Leaders Get Their Information

In China, as in all communist regimes, there exist two types of media: one is publicly available and the other is restricted and accessible only to regime insiders who possess the proper clearances. This second type of media, known as neibu 内部 or for ‘internal circulation’, has received less attention from scholars. The puzzle as to whether a Mao-era institution like internal-circulation media has survived into the twenty-first century stems from a theoretical uncertainty about the role of internal publications in an age when so much information is accessible to regime insiders via the Internet and social media. This article provides a theoretical argument about the function of neibu publications in China. It then argues that these media have retained their original functions and are still of central importance as conduits for transmitting sensitive information to Party leaders in the digital age.

Stanford University wins battle to keep diaries of Mao Zedong's secretary

A court in California has ruled that Stanford University can keep the diaries of a former secretary to Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China. Li Rui, a top official known for his criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in his later years, had meticulously kept diaries which are now deemed valuable historical records.

Li's daughter began donating his diaries to Stanford when he was still alive, saying this was per her father's wishes. But following his death, his widow sued for the documents to be returned to Beijing. Stanford framed the case as a fight against Chinese government censorship, arguing it was the rightful owner of the diaries and that they would be banned if returned.

On Tuesday, the court ruled the donation made to the Hoover Institution at Stanford was "lawful and in accordance with Li's wishes".

China is trying to play peacemaker in the Iran war - will it work?

As the war in the Middle East enters its second month, choking the world's energy supply and sending oil prices soaring, China is trying to step in as a peacemaker. It comes as President Donald Trump says US military action in Iran could end in "two to three weeks", but there is no clear sense yet of how that will happen or what comes after.

China joins Pakistan, which has emerged as an unlikely mediator in the US-Israel war against Iran. Officials in Beijing and Islamabad have presented a five-point plan with the aim of bringing about a ceasefire and re-opening the vital Strait of Hormuz.

Pakistan, which has been a US ally in the past, seems to have won over Trump to mediate this conflict.