Kinaforum

fredag 23. oktober 2026

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.

China’s new drone mothership targets US undersea edge

China’s development of specialized naval auxiliaries designed to transport, launch and recover submarine-sized uncrewed vessels signals an assertive push to project autonomous undersea power beyond the First Island Chain and systematically challenge US submarine dominance in the Western Pacific.

This month, multiple media outlets reported visual evidence showing that China has constructed a second dedicated mothership to deploy and service submarine-sized uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs), signaling an expanding bid to project autonomous undersea power beyond its coastal waters.

APEC finance ministers warn persistent global imbalances risk growth and stability

Senior Pacific Rim finance officials say global economic imbalances are bringing persistent risks and have pledged to improve cooperation and communication. In a joint statement after two days of meetings in Hong Kong, the finance leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum emphasized Wednesday that rebalancing of trade is their common interest. However, they did not elaborate on specific measures to be taken.

The meetings, in preparation for an APEC summit next month in the nearby Chinese city of Shenzhen, come at a time when global policymakers are highlighting the need to rebalance trade with China. Its trade surplus this year is expected to exceed 2025’s record $1.2 trillion.

The officials also pointed to risks from geopolitical tensions and vulnerable supply chains. “We note that global imbalances have persisted, creating risks to growth and stability,” the statement said.

The Global Cost of Ignoring Xinjiang

In the years following 2017, when evidence of mass arbitrary detention in China’s Uyghur region began reaching the outside world, a broad coalition responded. Civil society mobilized, governments passed genocide resolutions, the UN launched an investigation, and corporations faced legal exposure over tainted supply chains.

In 2026, that energy has largely dissipated. Governments that once spoke plainly about conditions in the Uyghur region (Xinjiang, known to Uyghurs as East Turkistan) now say little, or nothing at all. The UN’s human rights office has seemingly made little progress. Western companies continue to expand, largely unchecked, into the Uyghur region. These developments reflect a choice governments and other institutions have made, quietly setting aside Uyghur rights in favor of economic and strategic priorities.

North Korea to resume propaganda broadcasts, South Korea urges dialogue

North Korea says it plans to resume broadcasting anti-South Korea propaganda along the armed border between the countries, as Seoul has urged Pyongyang to discuss easing tensions.

Kim Yo Jong, a senior North Korean official and the sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said on Wednesday that North Korea will place loudspeakers along the entire border, following a visit with top military officials to fortifications along the contested frontier. Kim warned Seoul of “the most horrible and distressing situation” if it continues what Pyongyang calls interference in North Korea’s internal affairs.

She said North Korean tactical units had taken up new positions, and accused South Korean troops of conducting warning broadcasts and firing warning shots at multiple locations near the border.

Southeast Asia’s toxic haze spurs calls for legal action against polluters

As toxic haze from Indonesia’s worst wildfires in a decade clouded skies across Malaysia and Singapore over the past two months, a growing clamour of voices has demanded legal accountability.

In theory, a patchwork of domestic and international laws makes it possible for Southeast Asian governments to hold polluters responsible for cross-border haze, most of which has been blamed on land clearing by Indonesian palm oil plantation owners. In practice, sensitivities around national sovereignty, a lack of enforcement mechanisms, and the practical challenges of evidence collection make legal action difficult, if not infeasible.

On paper, Southeast Asian countries are committed to working together to prevent cross-border air pollution under the ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, signed in 2002.

North Korea tells border troops to take ‘resolute action’ if South threatens their safety

North Korea has told its border troops to take “prompt and resolute action” if South Korean forces threaten their safety, state media said on Wednesday, raising the risk of a clash along the ⁠heavily armed frontier. The report came a day after Seoul pledged to punish “resolutely” any further provocation by Pyongyang if North Korea acted on threats to strengthen its military posture along the border.

North Korean Army Marshal Pak Jong Chon inspected fortifications on the border with South Korea on Tuesday, accompanied by Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, KCNA reported.

China shutters three more Golog Tibetan-run schools in Sinicization imperative

Chinese authorities in one prefecture in Qinghai province have ordered the closure of at least three more privately-run Tibetan schools in the past three months under Beijing’s recently passed language laws, said Dharamshala-based Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (tchrd.org) as well as the Central Tibetan Administration (Tibet.net) Oct 19. The schools – an orphanage, a charity-run nomadic grassland school for girls, and a community-funded village primary school – were forcibly shuttered after they refused to heed orders to switch to Chinese language and Sinicization-focused curricula.

The closure of the Golog Tadrag Orphans School, the Ragya Jigme Gyaltsen Grassland Girls School, and a community-funded village school in Jasag village – all in Golog (Chinese: Guoluo) prefecture – took place over Aug-Sept, 2026, depriving Tibetan children of education in their own mother tongue, culture, and community settings.