China Watch

Saudi-China energy, trade and investment ties | Reuters

‘Strategy is to…’: China welcomes Saudi-Pakistan defence deal, sees it as a move to corner India and Israel – India.Com

pgnewser September 22, 2025 0

Saudi-China energy, trade and investment ties | Reuters

‘Strategy is to…’: China welcomes Saudi-Pakistan defence deal, sees it as a move to corner India and Israel – India.Com
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Excerpt:

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed a defence agreement on Wednesday, stating that an attack on either country will be treated as an attack on both. The pact is meant to strengthen their decades-old security partnership at a time when tensions in the region are rising. The two nations have always shared close ties, with Saudi Arabia often described as Pakistan’s “ATM” because of its repeated financial support.

Pakistan, who already shares close defence ties with China, welcomed the new Saudi-Pakistan pact. Chinese analysts have described the agreement as part of a strategy aimed at putting pressure on India and Israel.

The agreement comes as Saudi Arabia faces fresh security concerns. According to Global Times, Gulf countries have begun to question America’s reliability as their long-term security protector. Worries increased further after Israel’s recent attack on Qatar. In a statement, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said: “Any act of aggression against one will be considered an act of aggression against both.”

After the signing of the defence agreement, Pakistan’s state television showed Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman smiling and hugging each other. Media reports said that Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, was also present at the event. Munir, often described as the most powerful man in Pakistan, is believed to be the key figure behind this deal. Analysts say he understands that Pakistan’s army alone cannot defeat India, so he is trying to bring Saudi Arabia in as a strong security partner and source of pressure on New Delhi.

Thousands evacuated in Hong Kong after 1,000-pound WWII bomb discovered– www.foxnews.com

pgnewser September 22, 2025 0

Thousands evacuated in Hong Kong after 1,000-pound WWII bomb discovered– www.foxnews.com
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Excerpt:

Thousands of people were forced to evacuate a bustling neighborhood of Hong Kong overnight while experts sweated through the delicate work of defusing an undetonated nearly 5-foot, 1,000-pound bomb left over from World War II.

The U.S.-made bomb was found at a construction site in Quarry Bay on Hong Kong’s west side overnight Friday, and it isn’t the first bomb from the war to be found on the island.

“We have confirmed this object to be a bomb dating back to World War II,” Andy Chan Tin-Chu, a police official, told reporters. He said because of “the exceptionally high risks associated with its disposal,” approximately 1,900 households involving 6,000 individuals were “urged to evacuate swiftly.”

TikTok’s Algorithm Will Soon Be “Controlled By America” – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com

pgnewser September 22, 2025 0

TikTok’s Algorithm Will Soon Be “Controlled By America” – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com
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Excerpt:

After years of bipartisan warnings about TikTok’s potential national security risks, users may soon confront a different kind of threat, perhaps even worse: an algorithm “controlled by America.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the detail on Saturday, a key aspect of the emerging agreement announced by the Trump administration last week between the United States and China. The deal could finally settle TikTok’s fate in the US following months of uncertainty with a brief ban, reversal by the Trump administration, and shifting, self-imposed deadlines for an agreement.

“There will be seven seats on the board that controls the app in the US, and six of those seats will be Americans,” Leavitt told Fox News. “The data and privacy will be led by one of America’s greatest tech companies, Oracle, and the algorithm will also be controlled by America.”

It’s unclear what exactly a US-controlled algorithm will involve. Right-wing conspiracy theories? Charlie Kirk memorials? Coupons for MAGA swag? Nor did Leavitt specify which American individuals would be involved in determining an algorithm. We also have little details on how Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a Trump loyalist, intends to approach the responsibility for managing TikTok’s data and security while the Trump administration weaponizes everything from voting data to confidential Social Security records.

China’s Gap Between Rhetoric and Action Perpetuates Status Quo in Gaza– chinadigitaltimes.net

pgnewser September 22, 2025 0

China’s Gap Between Rhetoric and Action Perpetuates Status Quo in Gaza– chinadigitaltimes.net
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Excerpt:

On Monday, Reuters reported on the story of a man who tried to flee Gaza by crossing the border into Egypt and then flying to China in order to seek asylum, only to be denied and sent back. As his case illustrates, China’s well-known rhetorical support for Gaza has in many ways not translated into concrete action. In fact, China has appeared to soften its stance towards Israel over the past year. Its criticism over what a U.N. Commission of Inquiry described this week as genocide is directed more at the U.S. and other Western states that undergird Israel’s campaign, rather than at Israel itself. This selectivity serves to undermine the U.S.’ standing relative to China in the eyes of some other countries, while preserving China’s interests in Israel. However, Israel’s increasingly aggressive actions—including recently bombing Qatar’s capital—risk finally pushing Beijing to adopt a more confrontational stance backed by material consequences.

As Youth Unemployment Hits New High, China Waxes Nostalgic for the “Boom Years”– chinadigitaltimes.net

pgnewser September 19, 2025 0

As Youth Unemployment Hits New High, China Waxes Nostalgic for the “Boom Years”– chinadigitaltimes.net
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Excerpt:

China’s National Bureau of Statistics published new data on Wednesday showing that urban youth unemployment rose to a two-year high last month. According to the data, the rate of unemployed youth aged 16 to 24 (excluding students) rose from 17.8 percent in June to 18.9 percent in August, nearing the historical peak of 21.3 percent in June 2023. This development underscores how even in a country that censors and “optimizes” negative data, a harsh economic landscape continues to frustrate millions of Chinese youth.

After the peak in 2023, government officials suspended the publication of youth unemployment data for several months and revised their methodology to yield lower figures. Articles discussing the state of the Chinese economy have also been censored online, including one on WeChat from March titled “Ten Questions About the Chinese Economy in 2025,” and a similar list of ten economic questions in 2023. A meme comparing masses of youth at a job fair to the Terracotta Warriors was likewise taken down from the internet in May. Upon hearing about the latest youth unemployment figures, Chinese netizens on Weibo and X joked about the sensitivity and unreliability of such statistics, as documented by CDT Chinese editors:

Stream2024: Great news! Another record high!

Nvidia CEO disappointed after reports China has banned its AI chips– www.cnbc.com

pgnewser September 18, 2025 0

Nvidia CEO disappointed after reports China has banned its AI chips– www.cnbc.com
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Excerpt:

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has weighed in on the U.S. tech giant’s struggles in China after a report claimed the country has banned its artificial intelligence chips.

Huang said he was “disappointed” after the Financial Times on Wednesday reported that the Cyberspace Administration of China had ordered companies including TikTok parent company ByteDance and Alibaba not to buy Nvidia’s RTX Pro 6000D, a chip that was made for the country.

In response to a question on the FT report, Huang said Wednesday that “we can only be in service of a market if the country wants us to be.”

“We probably contributed more to the China market than most countries have. And I’m disappointed with what I see,” Huang said. “But they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I’m understanding of that.”

It comes after a tumultuous few years for Nvidia’s business in China, which Huang described as “a bit of a roller coaster.”

“We’ve guided all financial analysts not to include China” in financial forecasts, Huang told reporters Wednesday at a press briefing in London. “The reason for that is because that’s largely going to be within the discussions of the United States government and Chinese government.”

International Students in China Complain, “Quark AI Has Forgotten Us!”– chinadigitaltimes.net

pgnewser September 18, 2025 0

International Students in China Complain, “Quark AI Has Forgotten Us!”– chinadigitaltimes.net
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Excerpt:

Some international students in China have taken to social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu) to complain about being excluded from obtaining free educational accounts for Quark AI, an LLM tool widely used by their Chinese university classmates. Using the hashtag #WeStudyInChina, these students have also set up an online “message wall” to lobby for inclusion in the popular AI tool.

Chinese online reactions to the students’ pleas ranged from sympathy to amusement, Schadenfreude to national pride. Some commenters highlighted the perceived privileges enjoyed by exchange students in China, while others pointed to the clamor for Quark AI as a sign that Chinese AI tools have finally become cutting edge. Others noted the similarities between these recent “Quark AI refugees” and the millions of so-called “TikTok refugees” who joined RedNote earlier this year when a U.S. ban on TikTok seemed imminent. (After U.S.-China bilateral trade talks in Spain this weekend, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that the two nations had reached a framework deal to divest TikTok’s ownership from Chinese parent company Bytedance.)

In a recent WeChat article titled “As International Students in China Are Reduced to ‘Quark AI Refugees,’ Should We Gloat, or Feel Proud?” blogger Xiang Dongliang discusses various aspects of the controversy, including China’s educational subsidies for foreign students, on-campus segregation of Chinese and international students, and the rise of xenophobic attitudes in Chinese society. In the end, Xiang suggests that neither smug nationalism nor petty Schadenfreude is an appropriate reaction to the travails of exchange students in China:

I came across this particularly interesting trending topic: “Quark AI has forgotten us!”

Secrets of Chinese AI Model DeepSeek Revealed in Landmark Paper– www.scientificamerican.com

pgnewser September 18, 2025 0

Secrets of Chinese AI Model DeepSeek Revealed in Landmark Paper– www.scientificamerican.com
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Excerpt:

The success of DeepSeek’s powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model R1 — that made the US stock market plummet when it was released in January — did not hinge on being trained on the output of its rivals, researchers at the Chinese firm have said. The statement came in documents released alongside a peer-reviewed version of the R1 model, published today in Nature.

R1 is designed to excel at ‘reasoning’ tasks such as mathematics and coding, and is a cheaper rival to tools developed by US technology firms. As an ‘open weight’ model, it is available for anyone to download and is the most popular such model on the AI community platform Hugging Face to date, having been downloaded 10.9 million times.

The paper updates a preprint released in January, which describes how DeepSeek augmented a standard large language model (LLM) to tackle reasoning tasks. Its supplementary material reveals for the first time how much R1 cost to train: the equivalent of just US$294,000. This comes on top of the $6 million or so that the company, based in Hangzhou, spent to make the base LLM that R1 is built on, but the total amount is still substantially less than the tens of millions of dollars that rival models are thought to have cost. DeepSeek says R1 was trained mainly on Nvidia’s H800 chips, which in 2023 became forbidden from being sold to China under US export controls.

Signposts Toward the Future of Indian-Chinese Relations– warontherocks.com

pgnewser September 17, 2025 0

Signposts Toward the Future of Indian-Chinese Relations– warontherocks.com
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Excerpt:

On Aug. 31, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s annual summit in Tianjin — Modi’s first trip to China in seven years. The meeting highlighted improving relations between the two countries, following a period of intensified tensions during border clashes in 2020. This renewed engagement occurs at a time of unusually high U.S.–Indian tensions, raising concerns in Washington that New Delhi might be leaning more toward China. We asked three experts to identify key indicators that might signify the direction of Indian–Chinese relations over the next few

China accuses Philippines of ship collision near disputed shoal in South China Sea– www.cbsnews.com

pgnewser September 17, 2025 0

China accuses Philippines of ship collision near disputed shoal in South China Sea– www.cbsnews.com
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Excerpt:

China’s coast guard accused a Philippine ship of deliberately ramming one of its vessels on Tuesday near the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. The Philippines denied it, saying China’s forces used powerful water cannons that damaged its ship and injured a crew member.

A Chinese coast guard statement said more than 10 Philippine government ships coming from various directions entered the waters around the shoal, which is called Huangyan Island in Chinese. It said it deployed water cannons against the vessels.

The encounter came six days after China announced it was designating part of Scarborough Shoal as a national nature reserve. The Philippine government, which calls the shoal Bajo de Masinloc, filed a diplomatic protest.

China and the Philippines have clashed repeatedly around outcroppings in the South China Sea, which China claims almost in its entirety. The two countries are among several that have competing claims to territory in the waters, which are of strategic importance and home to valuable fishing grounds.

The Philippine coast guard said two Chinese coast guard ships hit a Filipino fisheries vessel, the BRP Datu Gumbay Piang, with powerful water cannons for nearly 30 minutes “resulting in significant damage,” including in the captain’s cabin and the bridge. A glass window was shattered and injured a personnel while the deluge of water caused a short circuit that affected electrical outlets and five outdoor air-conditioning units, it said.

TikTok ‘framework’ deal overshadows U.S.-China trade talks– www.cnbc.com

pgnewser September 16, 2025 0

TikTok ‘framework’ deal overshadows U.S.-China trade talks– www.cnbc.com
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Excerpt:

U.S. and Chinese trade negotiations concluded in Spain Monday, after two days of talks on several sticking points ranging from tariff rates, export controls and the imminent deadline for a divestment of Chinese-owned TikTok.

Talks on trade were overshadowed by a “framework” deal regarding the social media platform, announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Monday.

“It’s between two private parties, but the commercial terms have been agreed upon,” he said from U.S.-China talks in Madrid. Both President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will speak on Friday to discuss the terms.

The news comes ahead of a Wednesday deadline to either divest TikTok’s U.S. business or shut down the social media app in the country.

Bessent led negotiations alongside Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the U.S. side, with the Chinese represented by Vice Premier He Lifeng and top trade negotiator Li Chenggang.

TikTok removes video honoring Charlie Kirk: violates ‘community guidelines’– www.thecollegefix.com

pgnewser September 15, 2025 0

TikTok removes video honoring Charlie Kirk: violates ‘community guidelines’– www.thecollegefix.com
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Excerpt:

A video by The College Fix honoring TPUSA leader Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination has been removed by TikTok, which states the video violates “community guidelines.”

The five-minute video, posted to all The College Fix’s media platforms on Saturday, features Assistant Editor Gabrielle Temaat expressing heartbreak over Kirk’s assassination. It then showcases three clips of Kirk debating students on various hot-button topic, and ends by quoting reactions to his murder.

The video was accepted on X, YouTube and Facebook with no problems….