Minister of Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, has said that a planned high-level Government Delegation to China has been postponed to late March.
According to him, the postponement is due to the National People’s Congress of China which is scheduled to take place earlier in March this year.
He made this known when he held bilateral talks with the German Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), Ms. Svenja Schulze in Accra on February 22, 2023.
The Finance Minister however said the bilateral talks with China will continue ahead of this important mission.
The government of Ghana has started to actively engage external debtors with the view to getting debt cancellation, especially from the Paris club of creditors.
The first stop of a government delegation seeking debt restructuring will be in China with Minister of FinanceKen Ofori-Atta will be leading the team expected in Beijing.
China holds a third of Ghana’s external debts amounting to $1.7 billion out of a total of $5.7 billion.
Government only recently concluded a Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP) as part of efforts to secure an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout by March 2023.
In order to achieve the required and maximum benefits, African states should enhance their negotiating skills while working with China, according to SIGA Director General Edward Boateng.
The former Ambassador to China debunked the claim that the Chinese have ripped off African states and overburdened them with unsustainable debts and said contracts between China and African states are often negotiated so all that is needed is strong negotiation skills from Africa.
Appearing on Face to Face on Citi TV, the SIGA boss said the presence of the Chinese in Africa and their infrastructural development on the continent is laudable but poor negotiations on the side of African states often demonize the Chinese as rip-offs.
“What the Chinese have done well in the last twenty years is the development of infrastructure in Africa. Travelling across Africa was difficult, and the Chinese came with the mindset of infrastructural development of Africa and many countries have benefitted.”
Mr. Boateng noted that “Bui Dam was in the books for a long time and then the Chinese came, and today we have Bui and there are so many examples of these projects dotted across Africa. I think where Africa needs to do better is the negotiations because we are often weak in negotiations and therefore something that may cost $100 to do in China may cost $500 in some African countries.”
He further called for strict measures to regulate the stay of Chinese in Africa to ensure that they follow and respect local laws to prevent them from taking advantage of the loopholes in our systems.
“They come from a very regimented society and when they come into our communities that are so relaxed, we allow them to take advantage of us, and so we have to make sure that when they come in, they have to play by our rules.”
According to the Foreign Ministry, China’s top diplomat will travel to Russia this month. This will be the first trip to Russia by a Chinese ambassador in that position following Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
The eight-day international trip by Wang Yi, who was appointed last month as the top foreign policy advisor to Chinese President Xi Jinping, will begin on Tuesday and include stops in France, Italy, Hungary, and a speech at the Munich Security Conference this weekend, where US Secretary of State Antony Blinken may also be present.
The foreign itinerary is Wang’s first after leaving his post as Foreign Minister and taking up his new role, and it could provide a test of the diplomat’s ability in balancing Beijing’s close ties with Moscow, while also attempting to boost China’s image and relations in Europe – and by extension the United States.
Wang’s attendance at the Munich Security Conference, which Blinken is expected to attend, could provide a chance for the two to meet in person for the first time since US-China tensions again flared after a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon entered American airspace late last month.
The fallout from the balloon has been swift, with Washington accusing China of overseeing an international surveillance program – and Beijing denying those claims and in turn accusing the US of “illegally” flying high-altitude balloons into its airspace more than 10 times since the start of last year. China maintains the balloon, which US forces identified and then downed earlier this month, is a civilian research aircraft accidentally blown off course.
The incident also had an immediate impact on what had been seen as an opportunity for the US and China to stabilize relations, as Blinken postponed an expected early February visit to Beijing after US officials announced they were tracking the device.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price on Monday declined to confirm that Blinken would attend the Munich conference and said there was no meeting with a Chinese official scheduled. He noted, however, that the US was “always assessing options for diplomacy,” including meeting in third countries.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin did not mention any potential meeting with Blinken when announcing Wang Yi’s travel plans during a press briefing on Monday.
Wang’s itinerary would bring an opportunity for China to work for “new progress in bilateral relations” with France, Italy and Hungary, as well as “promote China-EU strategic mutual trust,” the spokesperson said.
China’s relationship with Europe has come under significant stress in the wake of the Ukraine war.Beijing has refused to condemn the invasion outright or support numerous measures against it in the United Nations. China has also continued to partner with the Russian military during large scale exercises, while boosting its trade and fuel purchases from Moscow.
According to China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang’s visit to Moscow will provide an opportunity for China and Russia to continue to develop their strategic partnership and “exchange views” on “international and regional hotspot issues of shared interest” – a catch-all phrase often used to allude to topics including the war in Ukraine.
The Foreign Ministry did not specify whether Wang would meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“China is ready to take this visit as an opportunity and work with Russia to promote steady growth of bilateral relations in the direction identified by the two heads of state, defend the legitimate rights and interests of both sides, and play an active role for world peace,” spokesman Wang Wenbin said.
Wang’s visit may also foreshadow a state visit by Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Moscow later this year. Putin extended an invitation to Xi during a customary end-of-year call between the two leaders, but China’s Foreign Ministry has yet to confirm any plans.
The Finance Minister, Ken Ofori Atta, has disclosed that talks are underway with China over Ghana’s debt following a successful domestic debt exchange programme.
Mr Ofori-Atta said negotiations with China are important because they hold the majority of the external bonds.
Speaking with Citi News, the Finance Minister said he will lead a delegation to China to plead for debt cancellation.
“The big elephant in the room is China, we will be visiting China by the end of the week to really discuss how they come into the envelope as quickly as possible. So we are looking at that support from them. China represents about a third of the $5.7 billion loan and so it is important that we engage them.”
In January 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it is working towards a debt cancellation programme for Ghana and other countries amid a global economic recession scare this year.
The other countries are Ethiopia, Zambia, Chad, Lebanon, Surinam, and Sri Lanka.
The move, Madam Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF Managing Director, said was to avert any “bad surprise” on the global economy, out of which 25 percent had its trade in emerging markets territories.
“We’re working hard to press for debt resolution for these countries, and we’ve engaged with the traditional creditors, the Paris Club, the non-traditional creditors, China, India, and Saudi Arabia. Our call is very simple: Urgently we have to act,” she said in an interview.
Following a successful Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP), Ghana has advanced to the next level of managing the government’s international debts and has started discussions with China about Ghana’s debt.
Because China owns the majority of the external bonds, negotiations with China are crucial, according to Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta to Citi News.
According to Mr. Ofori-Atta, he will head a mission to China to make a case for debt forgiveness.
“The big elephant in the room is China, we will be visiting China by the end of the week to really discuss how they come into the envelope as quickly as possible. So we are looking at that support from them. China represents about a third of the $5.7 billion loan and so it is important that we engage them,” he said.
In January 2023, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it is working towards a debt cancellation programme for Ghana and other countries amid a global economic recession scare this year.
The other countries are Ethiopia, Zambia, Chad, Lebanon, Surinam, and Sri Lanka.
The move, Madam Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF Managing Director, said was to avert any “bad surprise” on the global economy, out of which 25 percent had its trade in emerging markets territories.
“We’re working hard to press for debt resolution for these countries, and we’ve engaged with the traditional creditors, the Paris Club, the non-traditional creditors, China, India, and Saudi Arabia. Our call is very simple: Urgently we have to act,” she said in an interview.
A company in Chengdu, China has been praised for asking both job applicants and recruiters to wear masks in order to avoid discrimination based on looks.
Chengdu Ant Logistics recently made news headlines after a video showing its recruitment process went viral on Chinese social media. Shot by one of the interviewees, the short clip shows several masked people waiting to be interviewed by a recruiter, who was reportedly also masked.
The company has since put out a statement on the matter, claiming that the video was shot at its recent biannual recruitment fair and that the masked were introduced to eliminate bias based on looks.
The Chinese logistics company said that the bizarre recruitment method was implemented to reduce the job candidates’ stress levels and also to emphasize the fact that it values people’s individual abilities over their appearance.
The video doing the rounds on Chinese social media got generally positive feedback from millions of people, many of whom said that they wouldn’t mind wearing a mask when applying for a new job.
“As a person with social phobia, I would really enjoy such a job interview,” one person wrote on Douyu.
“This is equality, good looks should not count,” another person added.
However, there were those who expressed doubts about the authenticity of the explanation offered by the company. While the footage was indeed shot by an actual job applicant, the masks were allegedly issued to protect people’s identities because the interviews were live-streamed.
Some claim that after the video went viral, Chengdu Ant Logistics simply turned the interview into a publicity stunt.
According to Mr. Blinken, Chinese businesses are already offering “non-lethal support” to Russia, and new data suggests Beijing may do the same.
He cautioned China that this escalation would have “serious consequences.”
Moscow reportedly requested military hardware, but China has denied this.
Despite being a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping has not yet denounced Russia’s invasion and has advocated for peace.
China’s foreign ministry said it would not accept “finger pointing” and “coercion” from the US over its relations with Russia.
Mr Blinken was speaking to CBS after he met China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference.
He said that during the meeting he expressed “deep concerns” about the “possibility that China will provide lethal material support to Russia.”
“To date, we have seen Chinese companies… provide non-lethal support to Russia for use in Ukraine. The concern that we have now is based on information we have that they’re considering providing lethal support,” he said.
He did not elaborate on what information the US had received about China’s potential plans. When pressed on what the US believed China might give to Russia, he said it would be primarily weapons as well as ammunition.
The US has sanctioned a Chinese company for allegedly providing satellite imagery of Ukraine to the mercenary Wagner Group, which supplies Russia with thousands of fighters.
Mr Blinken told CBS that, “of course, in China, there’s really no distinction between private companies and the state.”
If China provided Russia with weapons, that would cause a “serious problem for us and in our relationship”, he added.
Relations between Washington and Beijing were already poor after the US shot down an alleged Chinese spy balloon in early February. Both sides exchanged angry words, but equally both sides appeared embarrassed by the incident and seemed ready to move on.
But if China were to deliver weapons to help Russian forces in Ukraine, then US-Chinese relations would deteriorate much more severely.
It would be the most “catastrophic” thing that could happen to the relationship between the two giants, said top Republican senator Lindsay Graham.
“It would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie,” he told ABC News. “Don’t do this.”
Mr Blinken’s warning seems to be clearly designed to deter China from doing that.
Mr Blinken also said the US was worried about China helping Russia evade Western sanctions designed to cripple Russia’s economy. China’s trade with Russia has been growing, and it is one of the biggest markets for Russian oil, gas, and coal.
Nato members, including the US, are sending a variety of weapons, ammunition and equipment to Ukraine, including tanks. They have stopped short of sending fighter jets, and Mr Blinken would not be drawn on whether the US would help other countries supply jets.
“We’ve been very clear that we shouldn’t fixate or focus on any particular weapons system,” he said.
He did, however, say that the West must ensure Ukraine had what it needed for a potential counter offensive against Russia “in the months ahead”. Russia is currently trying to advance in eastern regions of Ukraine, where some of the fiercest fighting of the war has taken place.
The top US diplomat’s remarks come ahead of a scheduled visit by Mr Wang to Moscow, as part of the Chinese foreign policy chief’s tour of Europe.
Mr Wang said in Munich on Saturday that China had “neither stood by idly nor thrown fuel on the fire” for the Ukraine war, Reuters reported.
China would publish a document that laid out its position on settling the conflict, Mr Wang said. The document would state that the territorial integrity of all countries must be respected, he said.
“I suggest that everybody starts to think calmly, especially friends in Europe, about what kind of efforts we can make to stop this war,” Mr Wang said.
He added that there were “some forces that seemingly don’t want negotiations to succeed, or for the war to end soon”, but did not say who he meant.
The Chinese President, Mr Xi, is scheduled to deliver a “peace speech” on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Friday, 24 February, according to Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani.
Mr Tajani told Italian radio that Mr Xi’s speech would call for peace without condemning Russia, Reuters reported.
During their meeting, Mr Blinken and Mr Wang also exchanged strong words on the deepening row over an alleged Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the US.
Mr Blinken said during the meeting that the US would not “stand for any violation of our sovereignty” and that “this irresponsible act must never again occur.”
Mr Blinken told CBS that other nations were concerned about what he called China’s “surveillance balloon program” across five continents.
Mr Wang, meanwhile, called the episode a “political farce manufactured by the US” and accused them of “using all means to block and suppress China”. China has denied sending a spy balloon.
And on Sunday morning, Beijing warned that the US would “bear all the consequences”if it escalated the argument over the balloon. China would “follow through to the end” in the event “the US insists on taking advantage of the issue,” it said in a foreign ministry statement reported by Reuters.
The full interview with CBS, the BBC’s US broadcasting partner, is due to air on Sunday.
According to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, China is considering sending Russia arms and ammunition for the conflict in Ukraine.
According to Mr. Blinken, CBS News has learned that Chinese businesses are already giving Russia “non-lethal support” and that Beijing may do so in the future.
He warned that this escalation would have “severe ramifications” for China.
China has refuted claims that Russia has asked for military hardware.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and is yet to condemn Russia’s invasion – but he has sought to remain neutral in the conflict and has called for peace.
Mr Blinken was speaking to CBS after he met China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference.
He said that during the meeting he expressed “deep concerns” about the “possibility that China will provide lethal material support to Russia”.
“To date, we have seen Chinese companies… provide non-lethal support to Russia for use in Ukraine. The concern that we have now is based on information we have that they’re considering providing lethal support,” he said.
He did not elaborate on what information the US had received about China’s potential plans. When pressed on what the US believed China might give to Russia, he said it would be primarily weapons as well as ammunition.
The US has sanctioned a Chinese company for allegedly providing satellite imagery of Ukraine to the mercenary Wagner Group, which supplies Russia with thousands of fighters.
Mr Blinken told CBS that “of course, in China, there’s really no distinction between private companies and the state”.
If China provided Russia with weapons, that would cause a “serious problem for us and in our relationship”, he added.
Relations between Washington and Beijing were already poor after the US shot down an alleged Chinese spy balloon in early February. Both sides exchanged angry words, but equally both sides appeared embarrassed by the incident and seemed ready to move on.
But if China were to deliver weapons to help Russian forces in Ukraine, then US-Chinese relations would deteriorate much more severely.
Mr Blinken’s warning seems to be clearly designed to deter China from doing that.
Mr Blinken also said the US was worried about China helping Russia evade Western sanctions designed to cripple Russia’s economy. China’s trade with Russia has been growing, and it is one of the biggest markets for Russian oil, gas, and coal.
Nato members, including the US, are sending a variety of weapons, ammunition and equipment to Ukraine, including tanks. They have stopped short of sending fighter jets, and Mr Blinken would not be drawn on whether the US would help other countries supply jets.
“We’ve been very clear that we shouldn’t fixate or focus on any particular weapons system,” he said.
He did, however, say that the West must ensure Ukraine had what it needed for a potential counter offensive against Russia “in the months ahead”. Russia is currently trying to advance in eastern regions of Ukraine, where some of the fiercest fighting of the war has taken place.
Mr Wang said in Munich yesterday that China had “neither stood by idly nor thrown fuel on the fire” for the Ukraine war, Reuters reported.
Image caption,Chinese foreign affairs Minister Wang Yi delivered a speech in Munich on Saturday
China would publish a document that laid out its position on settling the conflict, Mr Wang said. The document would state that the territorial integrity of all countries must be respected, he said.
“I suggest that everybody starts to think calmly, especially friends in Europe, about what kind of efforts we can make to stop this war,” Mr Wang said.
He added that there were “some forces that seemingly don’t want negotiations to succeed, or for the war to end soon”, but did not say who he meant.
The Chinese President, Mr Xi, is scheduled to deliver a “peace speech” on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Friday, 24 February, according to Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani.
Mr Tajani told Italian radio that Mr Xi’s speech would call for peace without condemning Russia, Reuters reported.
During their meeting, Mr Blinken and Mr Wang also exchanged strong words on the deepening row over an alleged Chinese spy balloon that was shot down over the US.
Mr Blinken said during the meeting that the US would not “stand for any violation of our sovereignty” and said “this irresponsible act must never again occur”.
Mr Blinken told CBS that other nations were concerned about what he called China’s “surveillance balloon program” across five continents.
Mr Wang, meanwhile, called the episode a “political farce manufactured by the US” and accused them of “using all means to block and suppress China”. China has denied sending a spy balloon.
And on Sunday morning, Beijing warned that the US would “bear all the consequences” if it escalated the argument over the balloon. China would “follow through to the end” in the event “the US insists on taking advantage of the issue”, it said in a foreign ministry statement reported by Reuters.
Shifting our attention away from Northern Ireland for a time, Wang Yi, a diplomat for China, speaks at the Munich Security Conference.
Wang commented on a row between his country and the US, after Washington shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon which flew over American territory.
He denounced Washington’s handling of the incident, repeating Beijing’s assertion that the craft was no more than an uncrewed civilian airship which flew off course.
Wang went on to question whether the US planned to shoot down every balloon in Earth’s skies.
A large Chinese balloon that the US shot down earlier this month off the coast of South Carolina has all of its debris recovered. Despite China’s denials, analysis to date indicates that the balloon was used for surveillance.
Officials claim that the US is confident that Navy, Coast Guard, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) personnel have recovered all of the balloon’s wreckage from the ocean floor, including crucial payload gear that might reveal what data the payload was able to monitor and collect.
The US Northern Command stated in a statement on Friday that the balloon’s final remains were being sent to the FBI for study and that recovery efforts had concluded on Thursday.
In a statement on Friday, the US Northern Command said that the last remnants of the balloon were being sent to the FBI for study, and that recovery efforts had concluded on Thursday.
“Final pieces of debris are being transferred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory in Virginia for counterintelligence exploitation, as has occurred with the previous surface and subsurface debris recovered,” according to the statement.
The end of the recovery efforts came after several weeks of tense relations between Beijing and Washington, with China denying that the balloon was for surveillance purposes and accusing the US of overreaction.
Speaking to MSNBC News on Friday in Munich, US Vice President Kamala Harris said the US was confident that the balloon was being “used by China to spy on the American people”.
“That balloon was not helpful, which is why we shot it down,” Harris said.
The incident heightened tensions between the US and China.
Chinese military officials refused calls from their US counterparts after the balloon was shot down.
Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a scheduled visit to China following the balloon incident, which he said “undermined” the purpose of the trip. It has not been rescheduled.
However, the Biden administration has also said that the US is not seeking conflict with China, which has the second-largest economy in the world after the US and is seen as essential for tackling global issues such as the climate crisis.
“We are not looking for a new cold war,” Biden said in remarks on Thursday. “I expect to be speaking with President Xi. I hope we are going to get to the bottom of this, but I make no apologies for taking down that balloon.”
The US has also shot down three unidentified objects in US and Canadian airspace over the last several weeks, in a series of bizarre incidents that have prompted speculation and rumours about the origin and nature of the objects.
On Thursday, Biden said that the objects were harmless and probably connected to private entities or research, adding that it is not likely that the three objects were connected to the Chinese balloon that the US shot down off the coast of South Carolina on February 4.
Tensions between the two countries are not new: China and the US have previously traded accusations over issues like trade and technology, human rights violations, and China’s desire to bring the self-governing island of Taiwan under its control.
A Chinese man who concelaed a lottery win of 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) from his then-wife for two years has been ordered by a court of law to compensate the woman.
In 2021, the man, surnamed Zhou, won a lottery prize of 10 million yuan. After paying the mandatory tax, he was left with 8.43 million ($1.23 million). That was still lifechanging money for him and his family, only instead of sharing the wonderful news with his wife, he reportedly kept acting like nothing happened. On the day that the lottery prize was wired to his bank account, Zhou transferred 2 million to his sister and another 700,000 yuan to his ex-wife, to help her buy an apartment. He didn’t mention the lottery win to his wife for two years.
It’s unclear how Zhou’s wife found out about his decption, but the moment she did, she filed for a divorce and also sued him for her cut of the lottery prize. Since the two were married at the time of the win, the money is considered common property of the two spouses, but because Zhou had gone to great lengths to conceal the win from his wife, she actually asked for two thrids of the 2.7 million yuan he had sent his sister and former wife without her consent.
On February 1st, a Wenzhou court agreed to the woman’s request for 60 per cent of the concealed winnings, and no party has sought an appeal against the ruling.
The story went wiral on Chinese social media, with the vast majority of people blaming Zhou for keeping his wife in the dark about their common property for so long.
“He used the couple’s common property to buy a lottery ticket and won the top prize. He wanted to enjoy it alone?” one person asked rhetorically.
Interestingly, this is not a unique case. Just last November, we wrote about another Chinese man who collected his lottery prize in disguise so he could keep it a secret from his wife and kids.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has sharply raised its forecast for global crude oil demand because of the prospect of stronger economic growth in China.
In the first three months of the year, demand should be 500,000 industry-standard barrels – each containing 159 litres – per day higher than previously assumed, according to the monthly report of the association of leading industrialized countries published in Paris on Wednesday.
For the whole year, the IEA expects an increase of 2 million barrels per day to an average of 101.9 million barrels per day.
In the report the IEA points to the end of the coronavirus measures in China which had weighed heavily on the world’s second-largest economy last year and slowed demand for crude oil.
China’s opening up should provide a “welcome boost to the entire global economy,” the report says, adding that the country is “poised to resume its established role as the primary driver of global oil demand growth.”
Despite arguably growing demand in China, the IEA believes there will be too much supply in the global crude market in the first half of the year.
Even Russia’s 500,000 barrels per day cut in production from March, which was announced in response to Western sanctions, will not prevent the oversupply on the world market, the report found.
Chinese retirees have once again gathered in large numbers to protest the reduction of their medical benefits.
They gathered yet again on Wednesday in the cities of Dalian in the northeast and Wuhan, where Covid was first discovered.
Just weeks away from the annual National People’s Congress, which will elect a new leadership team, the second round of protests in seven days puts pressure on President Xi Jinping’s administration.
After provincial authorities announced they were reducing the amount of medical expenses retirees can claim back from the government, protests first broke out in Wuhan on February 8.
The majority of the protesters, according to social media footage, are elderly retirees who claim this is a response to the rising cost of healthcare.
Although such health insurance matters are handled at a provincial level, protests have spread to different parts of the country in what appears to be a renewed belief in the power of demonstrating in China.
At the end of last year, thousands of young Chinese took part in protests that eventually forced the government to overturn its strict zero-Covid measures – people had grown weary of the mass testing and sudden, sweeping lockdowns that had been smashing the economy.
But the abrupt change in policy placed China’s medical system under enormous strain, as the coronavirus quickly spread through the country. It led to an unknown number of deaths and reporting by the BBC appeared to show that a vast majority of those who died were elderly.
The plan has been sold as a means of trading off reimbursement levels to increase the scope of coverage to include more areas. However criticism of plan on social media has included the widely held view that Chinese officials are trying to recoup the vast amounts of money spent on compulsory Covid testing and other pandemic measures.
Officials in both Wuhan and Dalian said they had no knowledge of the most recent protests and, as such, had no comment to make. Calls to local police stations went unanswered.
Radio Free Asia reported that retired iron and steel workers made up a significant proportion of the original protest group in Wuhan.
The use of existing social network links could help to explain how these gatherings have been coordinated in a country where organising dissent against the government in any form is difficult and can lead to severe punishment, including prison sentences.
Video clips shared on social media showed elderly protestors singing the global Communist anthem, the Internationale. In the past, this song has been used as a means of indicating that demonstrators are not against the government or the Communist Party but merely want their grievances resolved.
A shopkeeper who witnessed this Wednesday’s protest in Wuhan told the BBC that police on both sides of a nearby road had blocked access to the area in order to prevent more people joining the hundreds of elderly demonstrators who were already chanting slogans.
Three years of the pandemic crisis followed by a tumultuous exit from zero-Covid have generated considerable public discontent over China’s health policies.
Image caption,China’s zero-Covid measures involved mass testing
Mr Xi had given the country’s Covid amelioration policies his personal stamp of approval and the Party has struggled to explain why such a sudden about-face was necessary.
The Chinese government had also publicly ridiculed other countries for opening up too early, claiming they had unnecessarily sacrificed their people as a result.
It then turned around and abandoned its own restrictions at an even greater speed than other nations had done, and did so after maintaining lockdowns and other harsh measures for much longer than anywhere else in the world.
Many here now believe that, as a result, livelihoods were unnecessarily destroyed.
On China’s Twitter-like Weibo social media platform, the hashtag #healthinsurance – in Chinese – has attracted millions of hits but was removed from the site’s “hot topics” section.
The hashtag matching the site of the most recent protests in Wuhan – Zhongshan Park – was censored and photos claiming to be of the demonstration have been removed.
The Japanese defence ministry “strongly suspects” that Chinese spy balloons have three times since 2019 violated Japanese airspace.
As new information emerged suggesting that unidentified aerial objects that had entered Japanese airspace in recent years were probably Chinese spy balloon flights, Japan issued a warning to China that violations of its airspace by surveillance balloons were “totally unacceptable.”
“As a result of further investigation of specific balloon-shaped flying objects that were confirmed in Japan’s airspace in the past, it is strongly suspected that they were unmanned surveillance balloons from China,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters on Wednesday.
Japan’s defence ministry said on Tuesday that it “strongly suspects” Chinese surveillance balloons had entered Japanese territory at least three times since 2019.
The ministry also said that it had “strongly demanded China’s government confirm the facts” of the incident and “that such a situation not occur again in the future”.
“Violations of airspace by foreign unmanned reconnaissance balloons and other means are totally unacceptable,” the ministry added.
Japan’s government is now considering relaxing requirements on the use of weapons by its armed forces in order to defend against intrusions of its airspace, the Kyodo news agency reported on Wednesday.
Relaxing the rules on engagement would allow Japan to shoot down aerial objects that violate its airspace. Currently,Japanese forces can only open fire in cases of legitimate self-defence or to avoid clear and present danger, Kyodo news agency reported.
Beijing hit back on Wednesday, saying Japan lacked proof to support its accusations.
“Japan is making groundless accusations and smearing China without conclusive evidence. We are resolutely opposed to that,” China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin told reporters.
Japan’s reassessment of past intrusions into its airspace has heightened since the United States shot down a Chinese balloon this month and briefed officials from 40 nations about the object, including Japan.
In the wake of the incident, the US military adjusted radar settings to detect smaller objects and discovered three more unidentified craft that US President Joe Biden also ordered shot down – one over Alaska, another over Canada and the third over Lake Huron off Michigan.
According to spokesman John Kirby, the objects “may be tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign.”
The three downed aircraft’s wreckage has not yet been found or recovered by US or Canadian authorities.
Beijing previously charged the US with having “a trigger-happy overreaction.”
China has denied that one of its balloons, which was destroyed by a US fighter jet earlier this month off South Carolina, was being used for espionage, saying it was merely a weather-monitoring airship that had blown off course.
At Tuesday’s daily news conference, Mr Kirby said it will be difficult to determine the purpose or origin of the three other objects that were destroyed over Alaska, Canada, and Michigan until the debris is found and analysed.
“We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] spying programme,” the White House National Security Council told reporters, “or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts.”
A “leading explanation” being considered by US intelligence, he added, was that “these could be balloons that were simply tied to commercial or research entities and therefore benign”.
But he noted that no company, organisation, or government had yet laid claim to the objects.
In the most recent strike – over Lake Huron – the first Sidewinder missile fired by a US F-16 warplane missed its target, the top US general has confirmed.
“First shot missed.” “Second shot hit,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley during a visit to Brussels on Tuesday.
“We go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear up to the max effective range of the missile. And in this case, the missiles land, or the missile landed, harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron.”
A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, meanwhile, criticised the American response.
“Many in the US have been asking, ‘what good can such costly action possibly bring to the US and its taxpayers?’” said Wang Wenbin on Tuesday.
Watch: ‘What’s going on?’ The mind-boggling balloon mystery in 61 seconds
Sensors from the alleged Chinese spy balloon shot down over the US on 4 February were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean on Monday, and are being analysed by the FBI.
Search crews found “significant debris from the site, including all of the priority sensor and electronics pieces identified” off the coast of South Carolina, said US Northern Command.
The Chinese balloon was being tracked by US intelligence since its lift-off from a base on Hainan Island on the south coast of China earlier this month, US media report.
Shortly after take-off the balloon drifted towards the US islands of Guam and Hawaii before moving north towards Alaska, American officials told CBS News, the BBC’s partner.
The unnamed officials say that its path indicates that it could have been blown off course by weather, but that it was back under the Chinese control again by the time it reached the continental US.
The entire US Senate received a classified briefing on Tuesday about the matter from military leaders.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the chamber would launch an inquiry into why the aircraft were not detected earlier.
“It’s a good question,” Mr Schumer told reporters. “We need to answer it.”
Western nations are “under the full press of Chinese espionage,” according to Sir Alex Younger, who oversaw the UK Intelligence Service from 2014 to 2020.
In the past week, the US military has shot down four objects, including a balloon believed to be a Chinese spy.
According to Sir Alex, the UK must impose restrictions on the nations it will tolerate because they “behave in an unacceptable way.”
A Chinese spy balloon was shot down by the US military on February 4 after flying over important military locations in North America. The object, according to China, was a weather balloon that went astray.
Since then, the three other “unidentified objects” have been downed across North America.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir Alex said “this balloon scenario demonstrates there is no trust” between China and western nations.
“This is a gross and really visibly transgression of the sovereignty of many nations.”
The UK must recognise “we’re in a competition” with China, Sir Alex said.
He said: “We need to wake up to this.”
“We need to double down on the strengths that we possess to face this systemic competition that’s going on.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said the government will do “whatever it takes” to keep the UK safe from spy balloons.
On Monday, the prime minister said a “quick reaction alert force” of RAF Typhoon jets was on standby 24/7 to police UK airspace.
The rapid response from Washington to Beijing’s accusation widens the dispute that started last week after the US military allegedly shot down what it believes to be aChinese spy balloon.
More than ten times in the previous year, China has accused the US of illegally using high-altitude balloons to fly over its territory. Each time, the US government has responded with a denial.
Days prior to the allegation on Monday, the US shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had travelled from Alaska to South Carolina, igniting a fresh crisis in relations between the two largest economies in the world. Beijing has maintained that the object was a weather craft that had veered off course.
“It is also common for US balloons to illegally enter the airspace of other countries,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a news briefing.
“Since last year, US high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace more than 10 times without the approval of Chinese authorities,” Wang said without giving details about how they had been dealt with or whether they had government or military links.
The US should “first reflect on itself and change course, rather than smear and instigate a confrontation”, Wang said.
The White House swiftly denied China’s assertions.
“Not true. Not doing it. Just absolutely not true,” national security spokesman John Kirby said in an interview with MSNBC. “We are not flying balloons over China.”
After the downing of the alleged Chinese airship last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken cancelled a visit to Beijing that many had hoped would put the brakes on the sharp decline in relations over Taiwan, trade, human rights and Chinese claims in the disputed South China Sea.
The US has since placed economic restrictions on six Chinese entities it said are linked to China’s aerospace programmes.
US Deputy Secretary of Commerce Don Graves has said his department “will not hesitate to continue to use” such restrictions and other regulatory and enforcement tools “to protect US national security and sovereignty”.
The US House of Representatives also voted unanimously to condemn China for a “brazen violation” ofUS sovereignty and efforts to “deceive the international community through false claims about its intelligence collection campaigns”.
Separately on Monday, the Philippines accused a Chinese coastguard ship of targeting a Philippine coastguard vessel with a military-grade laser and temporarily blinding some of its crew in the South China Sea. Manila called the incident a “blatant” violation of the Philippines’ sovereign rights.
Wang said a Philippine coastguard vessel had trespassed into Chinese waters without permission on February 6 and that Chinese coastguard vessels responded “professionally and with restraint”. China claims virtually all of the South China Sea and has been steadily building up its maritime forces and island outposts in the strategic waterway.
“China and the Philippines are maintaining communication through diplomatic channels in this regard,” Wang said.
In nine days, US fighter jets have shot down four flying objects. Here is what we currently know.
Concerns about North American security and strained relations with China have increased as a result of the shooting down of a large Chinese balloon off the US coast and the subsequent shooting down of three smaller objects over Canada, Alaska, and Lake Huron on the US-Canada border.
Here is what we know so far:
What were the four objects?
Late last month, a giant Chinese balloon – termed a “spycraft” by US officials – drifted for days through US skies before being shot down on February 4 by an F-22 jet off the South Carolina coast.
China insisted the balloon was conducting weather research and had gone astray.
The Pentagon said it had a gondola the size of three buses and was equipped with multiple antennas, and had solar panels large enough to power several intelligence-gathering sensors.
It also appeared to be able to steer itself, using winds and possibly a propulsion mechanism, officials said.
On February 10, US fighter jets downed another object off northern Alaska. It was much smaller than the previously shot-down balloon and lacked any system of propulsion or control, officials said.
On February 11, a US F-22 jet shot down a “high-altitude airborne object” over Canada’s far northwest Yukon territory, saying it posed a threat to the civilian flight. Canada described it as cylindrical and about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle car.
On February 12, President Joe Biden ordered US warplanes to down yet another unidentified object over Lake Huron. The object was described as an octagonal structure with strings hanging off it. It posed a hazard to civil aviation as it flew at about 20,000 feet (6,000 metres), officials said.
The Pentagon said none of the four objects appeared armed or posed any threat of attack.
Officials would not comment on the origin or function of the three objects that came after the Chinese balloon.
What has been recovered?
Military teams working from planes, boats and minisubs are scouring the shallow waters off South Carolina for debris from the balloon, with military images showing the recovery of a large piece.
Operations to recover the second object continue on sea ice near Deadhorse, Alaska. Recovery teams are searching for debris from the third object in the Yukon, while US and Canadian teams were preparing an operation to recover the fourth object’s debris.
Heino Klinck, former US deputy assistant secretary of defence for East Asia from 2019 to 2021, said there is concern about the lack of information about the flying objects over North America.
“It’s rather odd, frankly, that in a span of three days that the US air force shot down three objects in the air, and our government has yet to tell us anything about if there is a continuous threat or the origins of the aircraft,” Klinck told Al Jazeera.
What was the objects’ purpose?
US officials say the Chinese balloon, which flew over sensitive US nuclear missile sites, had surveillance equipment that could intercept telecommunications.
They said such balloons skirted US territory at least four times in the past six years, but none had flown deep into US territory.
The balloons were part of a “fleet” operated by China that has conducted surveillance on some 40 countries over five continents, US officials said.
Why so many objects now?
On Sunday, Melissa Dalton, assistant defence secretary for homeland defence, said after the Chinese balloon was detected, US air defence made adjustments to radar systems to be able to detect smaller and slower-moving objects in the atmosphere.
Analysts said normally, US and Canadian intelligence constantly receive huge amounts of raw data and generally screened some out to focus on the threat of incoming missiles, not slow-moving objects like balloons.
Beijing denounced the first balloon’s downing, saying it “seriously violated international practice”. It reserved the right “to use necessary means to deal with similar situations”.
Dalton said on Sunday that after Beijing rejected US overtures for several days, US officials have had “contacts” with China over the balloon.
Last week, the incident took place close to the Spratly Islands. It is the most recent escalation in the conflict in the South China Sea betweenChina and the Philippines.
In the disputed South China Sea, the Philippine Coast Guard claimed on Monday that the Chinese coast guard had fired a “military-grade laser light” at one of its ships.
The incident, according to Manila, temporarily rendered some of the ship’s crew members blind.
Officials reported that the incident happened on February 6 in the Spratly Islands, about 12 miles (20 kilometres) from Second Thomas Shoal.
Philippine troops are stationed on Second Thomas Shoal inside the BRP Sierra Madre, a derelict navy ship that has been grounded into the reef to assert Manila’s territorial claims.
“The deliberate blocking of Philippine government ships to deliver food and supplies to our military personnel on board the BRP Sierra Madre is a blatant disregard for, and a clear violation of, Philippine sovereign rights in this part of the West Philippine Sea,” said the Philippine Coast Guard, using the country’s official terminology for the stretch of waters close to its western coast.
What happened?
The Philippine Coast Guard said its patrol boat was supporting a “rotation and resupply mission” when a Chinese coast guard vessel shone a green laser at the bridge of the Philippine ship.
“The Philippine coast guard will continue to exercise due diligence in protecting the country’s territorial integrity against foreign aggression,” Philippines Admiral Artemio Abu said.
China has not yet commented on the claims.
It is not clear if the resupply mission was completed.
In a joint operation by the North American neighbours, a US fighter jet shot down an unidentified cylindrical object over Canada.
After a week-long saga over a rumoured Chinese spy balloon, North America appeared to be on high alert. The shootdown on Saturday was the second such action in as many days.
The shootdown was first reported by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who also promised that his country’s forces would recover and examine the aircraft’s wreckage.
Canadian defence minister Anita Anand declined to speculate on the origin of the object, which she said was small and cylindrical in shape. She stopped short of describing it as a balloon but said it was smaller than the Chinese balloon shot down off South Carolina’s coast a week ago, but similar in appearance.
She said it was flying at 12,100 metres (40,000 feet) and posed a risk to civilian air traffic when it was shot down at 3:41 EST (20:41 GMT).
“There is no reason to believe that the impact of the object in Canadian territory is of any public concern,” Anand told a news conference.
The Pentagon said the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) detected the object over Alaska late on Friday evening. US fighter jets from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, monitored the object as it crossed over into Canadian airspace, where Canadian CF-18 and CP-140 aircraft joined the formation.
“A US F-22 shot down the object in Canadian territory using an AIM 9X missile following close coordination between US and Canadian authorities,” Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder said in a statement
US President Joe Biden authorised the country’s military to work with Canada to take down the high-altitude craft after a call between Biden and Trudeau, the Pentagon said. The White House said Biden and Trudeau agreed to continue close coordination to “defend our airspace”.
“The leaders discussed the importance of recovering the object in order to determine more details on its purpose or origin,” the White House said in a statement.
Shortly after the 3:41 pm (2041 GMT) downing of the object, aviation authorities also shut down part of the airspace over the northwest US state of Montana after detecting what they called a “radar anomaly,” the US Northern Command said.
In a sign of jitters over possible intrusions, Northern Command said US fighter jets took to the skies but “did not identify any object to correlate to the radar hits”. Skies were then reopened to commercial air traffic.
Suspected Chinese spy balloon
A day earlier, Biden ordered another shootdown of an unidentified flying object near Deadhorse, Alaska. The US military on Saturday remained tight-lipped about what, if anything, it had learned as recovery efforts were under way on the Alaskan sea ice.
The Pentagon on Friday offered only a few details, including that the object was the size of a small car, it was flying at about 12,100 metres and could not manoeuvre and appeared to be unmanned. US officials have been trying to learn about the object since it was first spotted on Thursday.
“We have no further details at this time about the object, including its capabilities, purpose or origin,” Northern Command said on Saturday.
It noted difficult arctic weather conditions, including wind chill, snow and limited daylight that could hinder search and recovery efforts.
“Personnel will adjust recovery operations to maintain safety,” Northern Command said.
On February 4, a US F-22 fighter jet brought down what the US government called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina, following its week-long journey across the US and portions of Canada. China’s government has said it was a civilian research vessel.
Some US legislators criticised Biden for not shooting down the Chinese balloon sooner. The US military had recommended waiting until it was over the ocean out of fear of injuries from falling debris.
US personnel have been scouring the ocean to recover debris and the undercarriage of electronic gadgetry since the shootdown of the 60-meter-high (200-foot-tall) Chinese suspected surveillance balloon.
The Pentagon has said a significant amount of the balloon had already been recovered or located, suggesting US officials may soon have more information about any Chinese espionage capabilities onboard the vessel.
Sea conditions on February 10 “permitted dive and underwater unmanned vehicle (UUV) activities and the retrieval of additional debris from the sea floor,” Northern Command said.
“The public may see US Navy vessels moving to and from the site as they conduct offload and resupply activities.”
In order to give Japanese troops more access to Philippine territory, the leaders of Japan and the Philippines have agreed to strengthen their defence ties.
The defence agreement was signed on Thursday by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. It will enable Japanese troops to participate in training exercises to address natural disasters and humanitarian needs in the Philippines.
The agreement could lead to similar agreements between Japan and other countries in Southeast Asia, where competition for geopolitical influence has increased amid a more assertive Chinese presence in the region. It is seen as a step towards greater military cooperation between Tokyo and Manila.
Kishida said the countries will continue talks to further strengthen and streamline their militaries’ joint exercises and other operations, while seeking also to expand the transfer of Japanese defence equipment and technology to the Philippines as well as strengthening cooperation trilaterally with the United States.
“After our meeting, I can confidently say that our strategic partnership is stronger than ever as we navigate together the rough waters buffeting our region,” Marcos said at a joint news conference with Kishida.
Taiwan, which lies between Japan and the Philippines, has become a focal point of intensifying Chinese military activity that Tokyo and Washington worry could escalate into war as Beijing has promised to take back Taiwan, which it views merely as a rogue province and not a sovereign state.
Marcos’s visit to Japan come shortly after he and US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin reached an agreement on allowing the US more access to Philippine military bases to keep China’s territorial ambitions in check.
The Philippine and Japanese leaders “resolved” to increase the defence capabilities of their own countries and strengthen overall security cooperation with reciprocal port calls and aircraft visits and the transfer of more defence equipment and technology, according to a joint statement released late on Thursday.
It said Japan will transfer air surveillance radar systems to the Philippines and provide related personnel training.
The leaders “expressed serious concerns about the situation in the East and China Seas and strongly opposed the actions including force or coercion that may increase tensions,” the statement said.
Kishida and Marcos also agreed to strengthen economic and cybersecurity, and confirmed Japan’s continuing assistance to the Philippine coastguard in reinforcing its capabilities, including the improvement of port facilities at Subic Bay, a former US naval base.
“President Marcos’s visit here gives us impetus for Japan and the Philippines to further elevate our cooperation in recent years to even higher levels as we contribute to the peace and stability of the region and the international community,” Kishida said at the news conference.
The countries also agreed on loan arrangements and extensions for Philippine infrastructure projects, including $3bn to finance major commuter rail projects.
The agreement with Manila comes after Kishida’s government in December adopted key security and defence upgrades, including a counterstrike capability that breaks from Japan’s post-World War II principle of self-defence only, while also doubling defence spending within five years.
Japan is the Philippines’ biggest source of bilateral development assistance, according to Manila, and its second-largest trading partner. Japan is also the only country to have a bilateral free trade agreement with the Philippines.
Marcos met with Japan’s Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako ahead of his talks with Kishida on Thursday and invited the imperial couple to visit the Philippines. He also plans to join talks with trade and business officials before returning to the Philippines on Sunday.
A US official says a suspected Chinese spy balloon that the US shot down this week was able to gather communications signals.
A senior State Department official revealed in a background briefing that it had numerous antennas capable of “intelligence collection operations.”
Congressmen from the US passed a non-binding resolution Thursday criticising China for the balloon.
China has refuted claims that the balloon was used for espionage.
It has claimed that the balloon was a weather instrument that got lost.
The US, however, believes the balloon is part of a wider fleet of surveillance balloons that has spanned five continents.
House of Representatives lawmakers called the balloon it a “brazen violation of United States sovereignty” as the body voted 419 to 0 on Thursday morning to condemn its use.
Its appearance in US airspace has provoked a diplomatic crisis and led US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a trip to China – the first such high level US-China meeting there in years. The US military used a fighter jet to shoot the balloon down over the Atlantic Ocean over the weekend.
China has said the decision to shoot down the balloon was “irresponsible” and did not “create a proper atmosphere for dialogue” between the two countries.
High resolution images revealed the balloon – which was about 200 ft (60 metres) tall – had large solar panels capable of operating “multiple active intelligence collection sensors” as well as antennas that were able to collect and geo-locate communications, the senior State Department official said on Thursday.
The US is considering taking action against groups linked to the Chinese government that were involved in the balloon’s flight, the State Department official said.
The latest US government information suggests that the craft indeed was some type of surveillance balloon, experts told the BBC.
“The types of antennas are meant for surveillance technology and this is not something you would expect for any type of scientific mission,” said Gregory Falco, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Civil and Systems Engineering.
It’s still not possible to glean exactly what type of data China might have been trying to gather on the balloon mission, experts said, but it may have intercepted radio, cell phone and other communications from the military bases it flew over, said Matt Kroenig, the senior director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.
The balloon’s large solar panels – as well as the fact that it was able to hover over US airspace for long periods of time – is concerning, Dr Falco said.
“They have a high-powered system that can do a lot of data relay,” said Dr Falco. “I don’t know exactly what they were collecting, but all the mechanics are there for getting a lot of data back to their satellites.”
The US may have taken countermeasures to prevent China from gathering data, including jamming equipment, Dr Kroenig said.
But it could have been “too little too late”, Dr Falco said, adding that there was likely a gap in time before the US was aware of the craft and could take action.
Watch: BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera explains the US/China row
US Congress hold balloon hearings
US intelligence, military and foreign policy officials began briefing members of Congress on Thursday about the balloon.
The hearings come amid mounting criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the incident from his political opponents.
On Wednesday, an open letter from Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Roger Wicker said they lack “a clear understanding” of the government’s response to the balloon.
Speaking to senators, US Army Lieutenant General Douglas Sims said that “the risk of Chinese intelligence collection was low to moderate” as the balloon flew over the US.
The potential of harming civilians on the ground if it was shot down over land, conversely, was “moderate to significant”.
Officials also defended the timing of the balloon’s destruction, saying that doing so over rough terrain in Alaska or the cold waters of the Northern Pacific would have made recovery efforts difficult and dangerous.
At a Wednesday news conference, Defence Department spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder confirmed that the US believed similar balloons had operated over North and South America, South East Asia, East Asia and Europe.
Due to concerns about national security, Australia will remove surveillance equipment made in China from defence facilities.
It follows the discovery of 900 pieces of surveillance hardware made by the companies Hikvision and Dahua on government properties during an audit.
Similar actions were taken by the UK and the US last year due to concerns that the Chinese government might access the device data.
These worries are unfounded, according to Hikvision. A request for comment from Dahua has not been met.
In almost every department, including the departments of foreign affairs and attorney general, cameras and security equipment were found to be installed on more than 200 buildings.
At least one unit was also found in the defence department, but the total number at defence sites is unknown.
Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles on Thursday said the government would find and remove the cameras from any defence locations to make them “completely secure”.
“I don’t think we should overstate [the seriousness]… but it’s a significant thing that’s been brought to our attention and we’re going to fix it,” he said, adding the devices pre-dated his time in office.
Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said the government will review whether the cameras on other government buildings need to be removed as well.
Shadow Minister for Cyber Security James Paterson, who requested the audit, says they do.
Australia has “no way” of knowing whether data collected by the devices is being handed over to Chinese intelligence agencies, he said.
China’s national security law can be used to compel any organisation or citizen to “support, assist and co-operate with the state intelligence work”.
Senator Paterson also argued Australia should not be supporting Hikvision and Dahua for “moral” reasons. He said both companies have been directly implicated in the alleged human rights abuses and mass surveillance of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Hikvision says it is “categorically false” to represent them as a threat to national security.
“No respected technical institution or assessment has come to this conclusion,” a spokeswoman said.
The company says it cannot access end users’ video data and therefore cannot transmit it to third parties, she said.
But in November, the UK also blocked the installation of any new surveillance cameras made by Dahua and Hikvision on “sensitive sites” due to security concerns. It also said it would review whether devices already in place should be removed.
Days later the US banned the sale and import of new communications equipment from five China-based companies including Dahua and Hikvision.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was unconcerned about how the Chinese government might react to the move. “We act in accordance with Australia’s national interest. We do so transparently and that’s what we will continue to do,” he told reporters.
Ties between China and Australia soured after Canberra banned Huawei from its 5G network in 2018, and China responded with trade restrictions and tariffs on Australian exports such as coal, lobsters, and wine.
But relations have been improving under the centre-left government, which came to power in May 2022.
As competition between the two nations grows, the fallout from the alleged Chinese “spy” balloon that flew over the United States has solidified a nearly bipartisan consensus in Washington about the need to “stand up” to Beijing.
Despite the heightened tensions, US officials emphasise that they are still open to dialogue with China. However, many politicians in Washington are using the incident as justification for tougher regulations.
During his annual State of the Union address, which was seen by an estimated 23.4 million TV viewers on Tuesday night, US President Joe Biden personally warned China against endangering US sovereignty.
“The Biden administration has shown that it is very concerned with attacks particularly from the right, from Republican critics, that they are being too soft on China,” said Tobita Chow, director of Justice Is Global, a project that advocates for a more sustainable international economy.
“And because of that pressure coming in from the right, I think we often see them leaning further in the direction of confrontational politics.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed a previously scheduled trip to Beijing over the balloon incident, which the Biden administration has called an “unacceptable” violation of American sovereignty.
The US military shot down the balloon on Saturday as it flew over the Atlantic Ocean, after days of debate and congressional calls to bring it down.
In his State of the Union speech, Biden said the US is not seeking confrontation in its competition with China but warned that Washington will stand up for its interests against Beijing.
“As we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country — and we did,” he said.
What do we know about the balloon?
Little is publicly known about the Chinese balloon or what it was doing in US airspace. Nonetheless, its presence caused a significant political stir and produced countless news headlines and wall-to-wall coverage.
China initially expressed regret for the incident, describing the balloon as a civilian airship used for meteorological research that “deviated far from its planned course”. Beijing later condemned the US hit to bring down the aircraft.
But the Pentagon insisted it was a “high-altitude surveillance balloon”, although US defence officials said the balloon did not pose a “military or physical threat”.
Still, some Republican lawmakers kept describing the aircraft as a risk to national security.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton denounced the Biden administration for allowing the balloon to traverse the continental US for days before shooting it down.
Cotton told Fox News earlier this week that he felt the delay in Biden’s response was “dangerous for the American people”. He also accused the administration of pushing to salvage Blinken’s visit to Beijing, which he described as “already ill-advised”.
US officials had previously said that, if the balloon were brought down over land, falling debris could “potentially cause civilian injuries or deaths or significant property damage”.
Christopher Heurlin, an associate professor of government and Asian studies at Bowdoin College in the US state of Maine, said while the balloon may not have been a direct threat to Americans, it created a “shock” in the country.
“We like to think in the United States that we live in North America and we’re oceans away from any kind of competitors — and in that sense, not very vulnerable,” Heurlin told Al Jazeera.
“Whereas having the spy balloon flying overhead, I think, does create some kind of visceral sense of vulnerability in the collective psyche.”
China has condemned the US hit on the balloon [Chad Fish via AP Photo]
As for Blinken’s trip, Heurlin said “political considerations” played a role in the decision to postpone it.
“I’m not sure that politically Biden would have been able to get away with sending Secretary of State Blinken to China under these circumstances,” he told Al Jazeera.
Chow, the director of Justice Is Global, agreed that the “panic” over the balloon likely led to postponing the visit.
“I think the Biden administration correctly judged that the balloon was not really that big of a deal,” Chow told Al Jazeera. “But they felt overwhelmed by this wave of media coverage and this very extreme freakout from the right.”
How we got here
The balloon incident came against the backdrop of growing animosity between Washington and Beijing.
Last year, the White House released a national security strategy that described China as the “most consequential geopolitical challenge” for the US. The Pentagon also prioritised competition with Beijing in its defence strategy.
Both assessments primarily focused on China, not Russia, despite the latter’s invasion of Ukraine, which has disrupted global supply chains for vital goods like food and energy and ushered in the most intense violence in Europe since World War II.
Ties between Beijing and Washington have soured over numerous points of tension in recent years, including trade issues, the status of Taiwan, China’s claims in the South China Sea and an ongoing US push against growing Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.
The US has also been warning China against coming to Russia’s aid in Ukraine.
So how did we get here?
As Washington’s so-called “war on terror” — initiated during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks — began to wind down, the US turned its focus to competing with China, whose economic power and push for global influence has been growing.
Chow said the root of the tensions is “neoliberal free-trade globalisation”. That economic framework, he explained, has been experiencing deeper systemic problems since the 2008 financial crisis and has led to “zero-sum competition, which then became the breeding ground for dangerous nationalist politics”.
Heurlin, the professor, linked the current state of affairs between the two countries to economics as well. He said that, with the loss of manufacturing jobs to outsourcing, the anger of many in the US has shifted to China
He added that since the rise of President Xi Jinping in 2012, Beijing has pursued an assertive foreign policy that includes a “vocal defence of Chinese interests”.
“That is something that they’ve been doing really to appeal to Chinese nationalists back home,” Heurlin told Al Jazeera.
“So I think on both sides, this is something that’s been happening for a while. And then especially once Donald Trump comes to the American presidency and starts the trade war with China, that’s when relations really start to bottom out.”
Ultimately, Heurlin said, the US government’s goal is to “maintain its status quo position as the most militarily and economically powerful country in the world”.
What’s next for US-China relations?
Despite the deteriorating relationship, officials in both countries continue to call for cooperation on shared global challenges — namely combatting climate change and the COVID pandemic — as well as warn against confrontation.
But for the foreseeable future, the tensions show no sign of subsiding.
“What we should anticipate is that conflict between the US and China is going to continue and build and escalate over time,” Chow said. “And if things don’t change, then yes, this is going to be a long-term great power conflict that is going to have enormous consequences for people in the US and China and around the world.”
Heurlin echoed that prediction but said he hopes that, with China ending its“zero COVID” policies, more people-to-people interactions between US and Chinese citizens would soften public opinion in both countries.
“It’s getting harder and harder to manage the US-China relationship from the perspective of both Beijing and Washington and I don’t think there really is any kind of magical solution,” he said.
A deal allowing for closer security ties between the two countries is anticipated to be signed by Philippine President Aquino and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
The visit of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to Japan is expected to open the door for improved security ties between the two nations.
Following the signing of an agreement last week granting the United States increased access to its military bases, Marcos paid his first visit on Wednesday. Additionally, it comes after the Philippine president informed his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, during a visit to Beijing last month that the Philippines would pursue an independent foreign policy.
At a press conference last week, Neil Imperial, the Philippines’ assistant secretary for Asian and Pacific Affairs, stated that Marcos wanted to “facilitate closer defense,
That sentiment is shared in Tokyo, which has been deepening security ties with nations that view China with concern.
“As the United States deepens its relationship with the Philippines, it’s important for regional security that Japan join in,” a Japanese defence ministry told the Reuters news agency. He asked not to be identified because he is not authorised to talk to the media.
In a pre-departure speech on Wednesday, Marcos said he would cultivate “complementary interests” which “converge with those of Japan.
“My bilateral visit to Japan is essential and is part of a larger foreign policy agenda to forge closer political ties, stronger defence, and security cooperation, as well as lasting economic partnerships with major countries in the region amid a challenging global environment,” he said.
President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. departed for Japan on Wednesday noon in a bid to strengthen Manila and Tokyo's collaboration in a wide range of areas, including agriculture, renewable energy, digital transformation, defense and infrastructure. Read: https://t.co/K7J8u1DNKupic.twitter.com/jxCZC26FjV
— Presidential Communications Office (@pcogovph) February 8, 2023
Marcos and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida are expected to sign an agreement on disaster relief that would facilitate joint drills in humanitarian assistance provision, according to The Japan Times. That agreement is seen as a possible first step towards establishing a broader legal framework that would allow Japanese forces to deploy to the Philippines more easily under a reciprocal access agreement, which sets out the legal status for visiting troops, The Japan Times reported.
It “would be a major contribution to the strategic alignment in the area from a deterrence standpoint”.
A year ago, Japan and Australia signed a visiting forces agreement, allowing them to deploy forces on each other’s soil, with Tokyo concluding a similar accord with the United Kingdom last month.
Those deals provide a framework for how Marcos and Kishida could also forge deeper military ties to counter their common adversary, say experts.
Japan plans to double its defence spending in the next five years, and Kishida’s government in December adopted key security and defence upgrades, including a counterstrike capability that breaks from Japan’s self-defence-only post-war principle.
Japan will also use its development assistance budget to support poorer nations as they strengthen their maritime safety and other security capabilities.
Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi said it was “indispensable for Japan to not only fundamentally reinforce its own defence power but also to improve the deterrence capability of like-minded countries” and prevent one-sided changes to the status quo.
“The Philippines is a critical security partner for Japan,” said Narushige Michishita, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo. “Any conflict in the Taiwan Strait would make the Philippine Sea strategically important,” he added.
Taiwan, which lies between Japan and the Philippines, has become a focal point of intensifying Chinese military activity that Tokyo and Washington worry could escalate into war as Beijing tries to capture what it views as a rogue province.
A Japanese military presence in the Philippines could also help Marcos counter Chinese influence in the South China Sea, much of which Beijing claims, including territory that Manila considers its own.
Marcos has promised not to lose an inch of territory in the strategic waterway, through which $3 trillion in ship-borne trade passes annually.
Beijing has said its intentions in the region are peaceful.
Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria, has outlined some strategies African countries might use to capitalize on their expanding populations.
According to him, Africa’s growing population – which is projected to hit 2.5 billion by 2050, has the ability to to serve as a liability to the continent.
Using his own country as an example, Olusegun Obasanjo said that by 2050, Nigeria’s population is projected to be at 400 million, a situation he said is currently troubling.
“We will be the third largest country in the world after China and India. Should the really be a great concern to us? I would say normally that it shouldn’t be because population can be a liability or an asset.
“Now, as we have it today, it is a great liability, and don’t let us deceive ourselves. In my country, Nigeria, where we are 225 million today, 20 million of our children that should be in school are not in school – that is the beginning of insecurity, whichever way you look at it,” he stressed.
Speaking at the Insiders and Outsiders Meeting the African Security Challenge in the 2020s, organised by the Brenthurst Foundation and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC), the former Nigerian president said that regardless of the situation, something good can come out of over-population.
He explained that an advantage that Africa can attain with its growing human resource, is to ensure that it equips the population with needed skills, education and knowledge in technology.
“Can we make population an asset? Of course, we can if we nurture our population from the womb; if we have food and nutrition security; if we give every child education. If everybody can acquire skills; if we give science and technology the attention it should be given.
“If we give every child employment, population will cease to be a liability; it will be an asset. But if we are not able to do this, as we have not been able to do it in the past, then there will be no hope, or any great expectation for our population. And once the population is depleted, then we have lack of protection, we have insecurity on our hands,” he stated.
The West African Security Roundtable – Insiders and Outsiders: Meeting the African Security Challenge in the 2020s was hosted by President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone, and Dr. Greg Mills, Head of the Brenthurst Foundation.
The event forms part of a series across the region: Accra, Abidjan, Dakar, Niamey, and Abeokuta.
On Friday, Ghana’s president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, requested Germany to “encourage” China, an adhoc member of the Paris Club, to support Ghana’s debt-restructuring efforts.
He stressed the importance of the Paris Club quickly forming a creditors committee with the participation of other official creditors in order to support the initiatives that would allow Ghana to resume economic growth.
The President made the call after receiving a visit from the German Finance Minister, Christian Lindner, at Jubilee House in Accra.
“We now have our relations with the Paris club and the common framework, and we are looking for as quickly as possible a creditor committee to be established, so we will have the body with whom we can engage to bring those discussions as quickly as possible.
“We have good relations with China. We will like you to encourage China to participate in these programmes as quickly as possible…A very important consideration for us is the financial stability fund that has been promised us as one of the key outcomes of these negotiations and definitely once again, your voice in trying to bring that into being is something that we would appreciate very much,” President Akufo-Addo told Finance Minister Lindner.
Linden, who was at the head of a delegation from his country, held bilateral talks with the President aimed at boosting relations and economic ties between the two nations. President Akufo-Addo told the minister that the main concern for his government was to conclude negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), particularly at the Board Level and seal a deal with the Bretton Woods institution by mid-March this year.
“Our main concern right now is the arrangements that we are in the process of concluding with the IMF…and the specific assistance that will be useful to us and help us fast-track the process.
“Our target is that by the middle of March, we should be before the Board for the full agreement. We have already taken one important step forward in concluding a staff-level agreement with the IMF and we are now looking to go the full haul in concluding the agreement. We are hoping that it will be done by the middle of March.
“One of the steps towards that has been the domestic debt exchange programme that we are on, which fortunately, we have quite a lot of difficulties, has now been virtually concluded,” he stated.
However, President Akufo-Addo stressed, that there was a vital need for other creditors to support the efforts that his government was undertaking to restructure both the external and domestic debts of the country, to enable the IMF deal to fall through quickly.
The President thanked the German government for providing assistance to Ghana in order to help that country get through its current economic challenges. He claimed that the German administration had established itself as a dependable ally and that Ghana will continue to view Germany as “a privileged partner” while it applies for an IMF bailout.
In order to address Ghana’s debt hardship, the IMF and Ghana struck a staff-level agreement on a $3 billion, three-year Extended Credit Facility. However, ratification of the plan is contingent on Ghana restructuring its internal and external debts completely.
China has urged “cool-headed” handling of a dispute over a giant Chinese balloon heading for the eastern US.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier called off a visit to Beijing, saying the “surveillance” balloon’s presence was “an irresponsible act”.
Later the US reported a second Chinese balloon floating over Latin America.
China expressed regret over the balloon over the US, saying it was a weather airship that had been blown astray. It was last spotted over Missouri.
It is expected to reach America’s east coast near the Carolinas this weekend.
The US has decided not to shoot down the high-altitude airship due to the danger of falling debris.
The incident comes amid fraying tensions between the US and China.
In a statement on Saturday, the Chinese foreign ministry said Beijing “never violated the territory and airspace of any sovereign country”.
It said its senior foreign policy official Wang Yi had discussed the incident with Mr Blinken over the phone, stressing that maintaining communication channels at all levels was important, “especially in dealing with some unexpected situations in a calm and reliable manner”.
It added that Beijing “would not accept any groundless conjecture or hype” and accused “some politicians and media in the United States” of using the incident “as a pretext to attack and smear China.”
According to US officials, the airship floated over Alaska and Canada before appearing over the US state of Montana, which is home to a number of sensitive nuclear missile sites.
The incident angered top US officials, with Mr Blinken saying he had told Beijing the balloon’s presence was “a clear violation of US sovereignty and international law” and “an irresponsible act”. He called it “unacceptable” and “even more irresponsible coming on the eve of a long-planned visit”.
America’s top diplomat had been set to visit Beijing from 5 to 6 February to hold talks on a wide range of issues, including security, Taiwan and Covid-19. It would have been the first high-level US-China meeting there in years.
But on Thursday, US defence officials announced they were tracking a giant surveillance balloon over the US.
While the balloon was, the Pentagon said, “travelling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic” and did “not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground”, its presence sparked outrage.
On Friday, China finally acknowledged the balloon was its property, saying that it was a civilian airship used for meteorological research, which deviated from its route because of bad weather.
And late on Friday, the Pentagon said a second Chinese spy balloon had been spotted – this time over Latin America.
“We are seeing reports of a balloon transiting Latin America. We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” said Pentagon press secretary Brig Gen Patrick Ryder. He provided no further details about its location.
China has so far made no public comments on the reported second balloon.
Many people have been baffled by reports of a possible Chinese spy balloon floating over the US, wondering why Beijing would choose to spy on the US mainland using such a crude device.
Although the capabilities of this specific balloon are unknown, experts claim that it primarily acts as a “signal” rather than a security risk.
Days before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to China, it was seen circling the state of Montana.
President Xi Jinping of China is expected to be met by the top US diplomat, who will be the first person in his position to do so.
“Beijing is probably trying to signal to Washington: ‘While we want to improve ties, we are also ever ready for sustained competition, using any means necessary’, without severely inflaming tensions.
“And what better tool for this than a seemingly innocuous balloon,” independent air-power analyst He Yuan Ming told the BBC.
Balloons are one of the oldest forms of surveillance technology. The Japanese military used them to launch incendiary bombs in the US during World War Two. They were also widely used by the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
More recently, the US has reportedly been considering adding high-altitude inflatables to the Pentagon’s surveillance network. Modern balloons typically hover between 24km-37km above the earth’s surface (80,000 ft and 120,000 ft).
The US Department of Defence on Thursday said the balloon is “significantly above where civilian air traffic is active”. It also said it had “very high confidence” that the balloon belongs to China.
But China expert Benjamin Ho said Beijing had more sophisticated surveillance technology at its disposal.
“They have other means to spy out American infrastructure, or whatever information they wanted to obtain. The balloon was to send a signal to the Americans, and also to see how the Americans would react,” explained Dr Ho – coordinator of the China programme at Singapore’s S Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
It may even be the case that China wanted the US to detect the balloon.
“It’s possible that being spotted was the whole point. China might be using the balloon to demonstrate that it has a sophisticated technological capability to penetrate US airspace without risking a serious escalation. In this regard, a balloon is a pretty ideal choice,” said Arthur Holland Michel from the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
Nevertheless, the experts point out that balloons can be fitted with modern technology like spy cameras and radar sensors, and there are some advantages to using balloons for surveillance – chief of which is that it is less expensive and easier to deploy than drones or satellites.
The balloon’s slower speed also allows it to loiter over and monitor the target area for longer periods. A satellite’s movement, on the other hand, is restricted to its orbital pass.
Although China has not admitted it launched the balloon, Mr Michel says it is unlikely anyone else could be responsible.
“The [US Department of Defence] would likely not say that it is a Chinese balloon unless they have a fairly high degree of certainty that that is what it is.”
The balloon’s anticipated flight path near certain missile bases suggests it is unlikely it has drifted off course, He Yuan Ming said.
Meetings between Mr. Blinken and President Xi Jinping and his Chinese counterpart were anticipated.
The visit would have taken place as tensions between the two nations are deteriorating.
According to China, the balloon veered off course due to bad weather and is used for meteorological research.
A statement from China’s Foreign Ministry said that it “regrets” the incident and will work with the US to resolve the issue.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, a senior state department official said that the conditions were not right for Mr Blinken to visit China but that another trip would be planned “at the earliest opportunity.”
The official added that Washington planned to maintain “open lines of communication” about the incident, which was described as “a clear violation” of US sovereignty.
While the official said that the US had acknowledged China’s claim about the balloon’s purpose, it stands by the Department of Defense’s assessment that it was being used for surveillance.
Mr Blinken’s visit was expected to take place on 5 and 6 February.
A US official quoted by the Associated Press said that the decision to abruptly halt the trip was made by Mr. Blinken and President Joe Biden.
China’s foreign ministry has apologised for what it called a civilian balloon that erred and entered American airspace.
The ministry claimed in a statement on Friday that the balloon that the US believed was being used for surveillance was actually a civilian “airship” that was being used for research, primarily for meteorological purposes.
According to the statement, the airship has little ability to steer and “deviated far from its planned course” due to winds.
It decided not to shoot down the balloon, which was potentially flying over sensitive sites, because of concerns of hurting people on the ground.
Reporting from the White House in Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett said that the balloon was first spotted by bystanders in the state of Montana.
“It was spotted by people on the ground who were wondering what was in the sky. That is how the US government first learned about this, incredibly,” she said. “It was then that the US government started tracking it.”
“There are going to have to be some answers as to why it was bystanders who first spotted this and not the military or the US government,” added Halkett.
Trip to Beijing
The news came as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was expected to make his first trip to Beijing this weekend. The visit has not been formally announced, and it was not immediately clear if the balloon’s discovery would affect his travel plans.
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning had earlier said she had no information on the trip. But she added China had “no intention of violating the territory and airspace of any sovereign country” and urged for calm while the facts were established.
Blinken would be the highest-ranking member of President Joe Biden’s administration to visit China, on a mission to mitigate a sharp downturn in relations between the countries amid trade disputes and concerns about Beijing’s increasingly aggressive stance towards Taiwan and in the South China Sea.
A senior US defence official told Pentagon reporters on Thursday that the US had “very high confidence” that the object spotted over its airspace in recent days was a Chinese high-altitude balloon and that it was flying over sensitive sites to collect information.
The official, who had spoken on condition of anonymity, had confirmed that one of the places the balloon was spotted was Montana, which is home to one of the nation’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base.
The official also said the US had assessed the balloon had “limited” value in terms of providing intelligence that could not be obtained by other technologies, such as spy satellites.
He said the balloon was travelling well above the height commercial aircraft fly at and did not present a threat to people on the ground.
Biden was briefed and asked the military to present options, according to a senior administration official, who was also not authorised to publicly discuss sensitive information. The senior defence official said the US prepared fighter jets, including F-22s, to shoot down the balloon if ordered.
Defence secretary Lloyd Austin and Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised against taking “kinetic action” because of risks to the safety of people on the ground. Biden accepted that recommendation.
Even though the balloon was over a sparsely populated area, its size would create a debris field large enough that it could have put people at risk.
The defence official would not specify the size of the balloon but said commercial pilots could spot it from their cockpits.
China’s brazen disregard for U.S. sovereignty is a destabilizing action that must be addressed, and President Biden cannot be silent.
The balloon’s appearance adds to national security concerns among US lawmakers about China’s influence in the country, ranging from the prevalence of the hugely popular smartphone app TikTok to purchases of American farmland.
“China’s brazen disregard for US sovereignty is a destabilising action that must be addressed,” Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy tweeted.
The Pentagon said on February 2, 2023, that it was tracking a Chinese spy balloon flying high over the United States that appeared to be surveilling highly sensitive nuclear weapons sites [File: Eva Hambach/AFP]
For almost three years, borders have been closed, dividing families and disrupting tourism and other industries.
After nearly three years of closure, China has announced that it will completely reopen its borders with the territories ofHong Kong and Macau, eliminating COVID-19 testing requirements and daily quotas.
The Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council announced on Friday that all remaining restrictions would be lifted at midnight on February 6 and that group tours would be permitted to resume.
After Beijing abandoned the “zero COVID” strategy, which had divided families, cut off tourism, and choked businesses, limited border crossings between Hong Kong and the mainland resumed in January.
Hong Kong leader John Lee said on Friday that partial reopening had been “orderly, safe and smooth”.
Hong Kong has been largely sealed off for much of the past three years as its government sought to follow Beijing’s pandemic policies with mandatory quarantine of up to three weeks for arrivals, as well as intensive testing and screening.
The former British colony began to unwind some of its rules in the middle of 2022, and Lee announced that the territory would now scrap the longstanding requirement for all visitors to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
People from the mainland have long made up the vast majority of visitors to Hong Kong, with about 51 million arrivals in 2018, nearly seven times the city’s population.
The prolonged pandemic restrictions are estimated to have cost the territory about $27bn and local officials are hoping an influx of visitors will revitalise the once-vibrant tourism and retail industries.
The full opening of the borders comes a day after Lee rolled out a rebranding campaign to woo overseas tourists, pledging more than half a million free flights and “no isolation, no quarantine and no restriction.
Outdoor masking remains compulsory in Hong Kong, although Lee has said the policy could be scrapped once cases of flu ease.
The US is keeping tabs on a possible Chinese surveillance balloon that has recently been seen flying over important locations.
Defense officials stated that they had no doubt that China was the owner of the “high-altitude surveillance balloon.” Most recently, it was spotted flying over Montana in the west.
However, military authorities decided against shooting it down due to worries about the risk of falling debris.
China is yet to respond.
Canada announced on Friday that it was keeping an eye on “a possible second incident” involving a surveillance balloon, but it did not identify the possible perpetrator. According to the statement, it closely collaborates with the US to “protect Canada’s sensitive information from threats from foreign intelligence.”
The object flew over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands and through Canada before appearing over the city of Billings in Montana on Wednesday, officials said.
A senior defence official speaking on condition of anonymity said the government prepared fighter jets, including F-22s, in case the White House ordered the object to be shot down.
Top military leaders, including Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin and General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, met on Wednesday to assess the threat. Mr Austin was travelling in the Philippines at the time.
Montana, a sparsely populated state, is home to one of only three nuclear missile silo fields in the country, at Malmstrom Air Force Base, and officials said the apparent spy craft was flying over sensitive sites to collect information.
But they advised against taking “kinetic action” against the balloon because of the danger falling debris might pose to people on the ground.
The defence official, however, said there was no “significantly enhanced threat” of US intelligence being compromised because American officials “know exactly where this balloon is and exactly where it’s passing over”.
He added that there was also no threat to civilian aviation as the balloon was “significantly” above the altitude used by commercial airlines.
The official said the balloon is unlikely to give much more information than China can already collect using satellites.
The US had raised the matter with Chinese officials in their embassy in Washington DC and in Beijing, the official added.
During Thursday’s briefing at the Pentagon, officials declined to disclose the aircraft’s current location. They also refused to provide more details of the object, including its size.
“There have been reports of pilots seeing this thing even though it’s pretty high up in the sky,” the unnamed defence official said. “So you know, it’s sizable.”
They added that such surveillance balloons had been tracked in the past several years, but this one was “appearing to hang out for a longer period of time this time around”.
It confused social media users in Montana, with some posting images of a pale, round object high in the sky. Others reported seeing US military planes in the area, apparently monitoring the object.
Billings office worker Chase Doak told theAssociated Press news agency that he noticed the “big white circle in the sky” and went home to get a better camera.
“I thought maybe it was a legitimate UFO,” he said. “So I wanted to make sure I documented it and took as many photos as I could.”
Chinese state media has not reported on the incident, but it is being widely discussed on Chinese social media, with many amused at the reported use of balloons for surveillance.
“We have so many satellites, why would we need to use a balloon,” wrote one user on Weibo.
Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, slammed China’s alleged balloon.
“The level of espionage aimed at our country by Beijing has grown dramatically more intense & brazen over the last 5 years,” he tweeted.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a Republican, said in a statement that he had been briefed on the “deeply troubling” situation.
Speaking at an unrelated event in Washington DC on Thursday, CIA Director William Burns made no mention of the balloon, but called China the “biggest geopolitical challenge” currently facing the US.
The alleged spy craft is likely to increase tensions ahead of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China next week. It will be the first visit to the country by a Biden administration cabinet secretary.
The top US diplomat will be in Beijing to hold talks on a wide range of issues, including security, Taiwan and Covid-19.
He will also meet Chinese President Xi Jinping, as the Financial Times reported on Thursday.
Balloons are one of the oldest forms of surveillance technology. Compared to other airborne surveillance devices, they can be operated cheaply without personnel while remaining airborne for long periods of time.
This comes after the tiny nation signed a security agreement with Beijing last year, a move that took Washington and its allies by surprise.
It happened after the US announced it would open its Honiara post, which had been closed since 1993 due to worries about China’s expanding military aspirations.
The opening of the embassy on Wednesday was missed by the Solomons’ PM.
However a foreign ministry spokesman said the re-established US embassy was welcomed by the government.
The region is strategically crucial for the US as a gateway to Asia for Pacific allies like Australia. Washington’s diplomatic presence has until now largely been centred in its Papua New Guinea post.
But US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday said the Honiara embassy would help advance the US-Pacific partnership goals – signed last year – of keeping the region a place where “democracy can flourish”.
The embassy opening comes at “an important moment for the region we share”, he said in a video statement.
“Because more than any other part of the world – the Indo-Pacific region including the Pacific islands – will shape the world’s trajectory in the 21st Century.”
The United States of America is pleased to announce the opening of its Embassy in Honiara. We are committed to strengthening the enduring relationship between the U.S. and Solomon Islands! pic.twitter.com/tLGR37TkCb
The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.View original tweet on Twitter
Concerns about Beijing’s increasing influence and military expansion in the Pacific has prompted the US and Australia to step up their focus there in recent years.
Last September, US President Joe Biden invited 14 Pacific island nations to theWhite House for the first-ever in-person summit. Washington signed a sweeping partnership and development agreement with the island nations.
Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare also signed up to the deal despite reports in the lead-up that he might abstain.
Beijing last year had also accelerated efforts to gain influence in the region – to mixed effect.
While it inked a security deal with the Solomons in March, it failed to secure a trade and security deal with 10 regional countries a few months later despite a lobbying tour from China’s then Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
“China has no intention of competing with anyone, let alone engaging in geopolitical competition, and has never established a so-called sphere of influence,” said Mr Wang during the tour.
In recent times, Fiji, one of the biggest and most influential Pacific islands, has also announced it will cancel a police training exchange with China – formerly a close partner.
Fiji’s new government – elected in December – has indicated it prefers stronger ties with its traditional Pacific partners Australia and New Zealand over China.
Australia and NZ are also both members of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – the region’s main bloc.
Several Pacific countries have advocated for regional unity in the face of superpower tensions and on Monday, many welcomed the announcement that Kiribati would return as a member.
Kiribati had withdrawn from the PIF last year in a move the country’s opposition said had been influenced by Beijing. The country’s leader had then said the forum wasn’t adequately addressing the concerns of Micronesian countries.
Dr Meg Keen from the Australia-based Lowy Institute said the US re-engagement was welcomed but it would remain to be seen “if the announcements are backed up by actions”.
She said the region could see a “diverse range of partnerships” as Pacific islands pursue development goals and funding.
The new US embassy also comes as Washington has been re-negotiating agreements with three island nations in the North Pacific – Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands – who give exclusive military use rights to the US.
On Monday, Stoltenberg made the appeal in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
He is in the city for the first leg of a trip to Asia that will also stop in Japan and is intended to strengthen ties with the democratic allies in the region in light of the conflict in the Ukraine and the escalating rivalry with China.
In meetings with senior South Korean officials, Stoltenberg argued that events in Europe and North America are interconnected with other regions, and that the alliance wants to help manage global threats by increasing partnerships in Asia.
Speaking at the Chey Institute for Advanced Studies in Seoul, he thanked South Korea for its nonlethal aid to Ukraine but urged it to do more, adding there was an “urgent need” for ammunition. Russia calls the invasion a “special operation”.
He pointed to countries like Germany and Norway that had “longstanding policies not to export weapons to countries in conflict” that were revised after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
“If we believe in freedom, democracy, if we don’t want autocracy and totalitarian to win then they need weapons,” he said.
South Korea is an increasingly important global arms exporter and has recently signed deals to sell hundreds of tanks to European countries, including NATO-member Poland. But South Korean law bans the export of weapons to countries in active conflict, which Seoul has said makes it difficult to provide arms directly to Kyiv.
South Korea opened its first diplomatic mission to NATO last year.
Stoltenberg said it was unclear when the conflict in Ukraine would end, saying Putin was preparing for “more war” and actively acquiring weapons from countries, including North Korea.
Pyongyang on Sunday denied sending weapons to Moscow, accusing the United States of spreading a “groundless rumor”.
“Trying to tarnish the image of [North Korea] by fabricating a non-existent thing is a grave provocation that can never be allowed and that cannot but trigger its reaction,” said Kwon Jong Gun, director general of North Korea’s Department of US Affairs.
He also called it “a foolish attempt to justify its offer of weapons to Ukraine”.
Earlier this week, US President Joe Biden promised 31 Abrams tanks, one of the most powerful and sophisticated weapons in the US army, to help Kyiv fight off Moscow’s invasion.
After a US general raised eyebrows with a memo predicting war in two years, a top Republican in the US Congress claims the likelihood of conflict with China over Taiwan “is very high.”
In a memo dated February 1 but released on Friday, General Mike Minihan, who heads the Air Mobility Command, wrote to the leadership of its roughly 110,000 members, saying, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”
Michael McCaul, the new chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the US House of Representatives, on Sunday told Fox News “I hope he is wrong… I think he is right though.”
General Minihan’s views do not represent the Pentagon, but show concern at the highest levels of the US military over a possible attempt by China to exert control over Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.
Both the US and Taiwan will hold presidential elections in 2024, potentially creating an opportunity for China to take military action, Minihan wrote.
If China failed to take control of Taiwan bloodlessly then “they are going to look at a military invasion in my judgement. We have to be prepared for this”, McCaul said.
He accused the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden of projecting weakness after the bungled US pullout from Afghanistan, which could make war with China more likely.
“The odds are very high that we could see a conflict with China and Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific,” McCaul said.
The White House declined to comment on McCaul’s remarks.
‘Highly unlikely’
Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he disagreed with Minihan’s assessment.
Smith told Fox News Sunday that war with China is “not only not inevitable, it is highly unlikely. We have a very dangerous situation in China. But I think generals need to be very cautious about saying we’re going to war, it’s inevitable”.
The United States needs to be in a position to deter China from military action against Taiwan, “but I’m fully confident we can avoid that conflict if we take the right approach”, Smith said.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said earlier this month that he seriously doubted that ramped-up Chinese military activity near the Taiwan Strait was a sign of an imminent invasion of the island by Beijing.
On Saturday, a Pentagon official said the general’s comments were “not representative of the department’s view on China”.
According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of severe Covid cases and fatalities is on the decline.
It added that despite the fact that many people gathered with their families for the Lunar New Year holidays last week, there had been “no obvious rebound.”
Concerns have long been voiced regarding Covid reporting from China.
However, experts claim that the reported decline now fits with the anticipated timing of this major wave’s end.
The virus tore through Chinese cities and towns after authorities lifted zero-Covid restrictions in December. However, fever clinic visit rates have dropped over 90% through January, and hospitalization rates are down over 85%.
Fears that the virus could surge again during the festive period have also not yet been realised.
In its report, the CDC said: “There has not been an obvious rebound in COVID cases during the Lunar New Year holidays.”
“In this time, no new variant has been discovered, and the country’s current wave is coming to an end.”
It also reported a sharp decline in the daily Covid death toll reported by hospitals – from a peak of 4,300 deaths on 4 January to 896 deaths on 23 January.
Infectious diseases expert Hsu Li Yang told the BBC: “This drop in deaths follows the decline in the first huge wave of cases after China relaxed its restrictions, which is understandable and has been seen in virtually every country experiencing a large COVID wave.”
“We will know soon if the Lunar New Year celebrations will trigger another surge in China cases, but it is unlikely to match what was experienced in December and the earlier part of January 2023.”
One of China’s leading epidemiologists and former heads of the CDC, Zeng Guang, had earlier this month warned that cases would surge in rural areas during the new year.
However, the CDC said there had been no immediate spike following the holiday period.
It’s estimated that 226 million passenger trips were taken during the Lunar New Year festive season from 22-27 January – a 70% increase from last year when pandemic restrictions were still in place across many parts of China.
According to CDC data, Covid deaths halved in consecutive weeks in January. A total of 12,658 deaths were recorded between 13-19 January, while 6,364 deaths were recorded the following week.
In December, Beijing abruptly ended draconian Covid curbs that had seen millions of its citizens locked down over the past three years.
That led to a severe spike in Covid infections and deaths, with some experts estimating a majority of the population contracted Covid in the weeks following.
A Peking University study said that as of January 11, some 900 million people in China had been infected with the coronavirus, amid multiple reports of overcrowded hospitals and crematoria.
However, Chinese authorities initially maintained that there had only been seven deaths since the end of zero-COVID on December 7, after narrowing their definition of what counts as a COVID death.
The National Health Commission later reported almost 60,000 Covid-related deaths between 8 December and 12 January, after it began including deaths from underlying conditions as well as respiratory failure caused by Covid.
China’s official Covid data is believed to be vastly underreported, and authorities stopped releasing daily caseload reports last month.
Beijing has said it has been sharing COVID data in “a timely, open, and transparent manner in accordance with the law.”
The biggest luxury brandin the world reported healthy sales fueled by the holiday shopping season.
LVMH claimed that despite geopolitical unrest and a high cost of living, they had a second consecutive record year for revenue and profits.
In the last three months of the year, sales increased by 9% to almost $25 billion (£19.9 billion).
Strong growth experienced by the company in the US, Europe, and Japan offset losses incurred in China as a result of COVID lockdowns.
In Asia, LVMH did experience a 20% drop in growth in the first nine months as the world’s second largest economy doubled down on its zero-COVID policy.
However, LVMH chairman and chief executive Bernard Arnault said he felt cautiously optimistic about “green shoots” in China.
“We have every reason to be confident, indeed optimistic about China,” Mr Arnault said at the group’s earnings presentation.
He pointed to their Macau stores as a sign of what could come. “Business is back, the Chinese are buying,” he said.
LVMH brands include Tiffany’s, Christian Dior, Sephora, Hennessey and Moët.
Its designer label Louis Vuitton did exceptionally well. Its revenue surpassed $21.7bn for the first time. The label recently launched a new collaboration with Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama, who is known for her art made of colourful dots.
LVMH’s earnings are viewed by analysts as a bellwether in the luxury market.
Bain and Company said they see a boost in spending on personal luxury goods overall.
“The personal luxury market is projected to see further growth of at least 3-8% next year, even given a downturn in global economic conditions,” according to a report from the consulting company.
Earlier this month, LVMH made changes to its leadership staff. Mr Arnault, one of the world’s richest men, appointed his daughter as the head of the fashion house Dior. Delphine Arnault, 47, replaced Pietro Beccari – who took over as chief executive of Louis Vuitton.
All five of Mr Arnault’s children hold management positions at brands in the group.
According to the Chinese government, Washington should stop pressuring Beijing to reduce Zambia’s debt and instead concentrate on preventing a domestic government default that might have an impact on the world economy.
“The biggest contribution that the US can make to the debt issues outside the country is to cope with its own debt problem and stop sabotaging other sovereign countries’ active efforts to solve their debt issues,” the Chinese embassy in Zambia said in a statement on Tuesday.
The US government has a cap of $31.4 trillion on how much it can borrow, and it reached that limit on Thursday.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen implemented “extraordinary measures” to ensure the US government can continue paying its bills in the short term and then travelled to Africa. On a visit to Zambia, she said it was crucial for the country to address its heavy debt burden with China.
The country failed to make a $42.5m bond payment in November 2020, becoming Africa’s first sovereign nation to default during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s taken far too long already to resolve this matter,” Yellen said on Monday.
Washington is trying to woo African nations as the influence on the continent of its rivals Russia and China grows.
During her visit to Africa, which also included Senegal and South Africa, Yellen pushed to expand US trade and business ties.
“The United States is all in on Africa, and all in with Africa,” Yellen said on Friday in Dakar as she touted the fruits of a new “mutually beneficial” US economic strategy towards Africa.
In responding to Yellen, China zeroed in on the battle between Republican lawmakers and Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration over raising the US debt limit to allow more borrowing to keep the government running.
“Even if the US one day solves its debt problem, it is not qualified to make groundless accusations against or press other countries out of selfish interests,” the Chinese embassy statement said.
Chinese development banks have emerged as major lenders to poor countries around the world for natural resources, transport and power projects although that lending has fallen sharply and steadily since 2016, according to Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center.
New loan commitments dropped to eight projects totalling $3.7bn in 2021, down from a peak of 151 projects worth $80bn in 2016, according to data compiled by the centre.
At present, 22 low-income African countries are either already in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress, according to the UK-based Chatham House. Chinese lenders account for 12 per cent of Africa’s private and public external debt, which increased more than fivefold to $696bn from 2000 to 2020.
Washington has repeatedly expressed concern in recent weeks over Beijing’s alignment with Moscow as Russia wages its invasion of Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in December said he expected his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to visit in 2023. If it were to take place, analysts say the visit could be interpreted as a public show of solidarity amid the war in Ukraine.
He also blamed the US for the deterioration in relations between the world’s two largest economies, saying Beijing has “firmly rejected” Washington’s “erroneous China policy” of applying pressure on trade and technology and criticising China over human rights and its claims to a broad swath of the Western Pacific.
The northern Shanxi province’s coffin manufacturers have been quite busy. Expert carvers are seen carving intricate ornamentation into the recently-cut wood. They claim that they haven’t had time to stop lately.
One villager, a customer, told us that at times the coffins have sold out. Laughing with a dose of the black humour you find in the area, he added that those in the funeral industry had been “earning a small fortune”.
There has been much debate about the real number of Covid deaths in China, after the virus ripped through its megacities.
Some 80% of the population – more than a billion people – have been infected since China scrapped restrictions in December, according to leading epidemiologist Wu Zunyou. Last weekend China reported 13,000 Covid-related deaths in less than a week, adding to the 60,000 deaths it has counted since December.
But these deaths have been in hospitals. In rural areas there are only sparse medical facilities and those who die at home are mostly not being counted.
There is not even an official estimate for the number of village deaths. But the BBC found evidence of a considerable, mounting death toll.
We visited a crematorium and they too have been busy, mourners dressed in white walking forward carrying the ceremonial box which would eventually contain the remains of a loved one.
In another village, we saw one man and woman loading huge tissue paper birds onto the back of a flatbed truck. “They’re cranes. You ride the crane into the afterlife,” the woman said.
As they packed up other elaborate, Buddhist images newly made from tissue paper they said they’d had an explosion in demand for their funeral decorations, two or three times what’s normal.
Everyone we met in this part of Shanxi who is connected to the funeral industry told us a similar story about an increase in deaths and they all attributed it to the coronavirus.
Image caption,Wang Peiwei is determined to put on a good funeral for his sister-in-law
“Some sick people are already very weak,” one man said as he continued to load the truck. “Then they catch Covid, and their elderly bodies can’t handle it.”
We followed the truck to where the artworks were being delivered and met Wang Peiwei, whose sister-in-law had just died.
The mother-of-two in her 50s had suffered from severe diabetes for years and then she caught the coronavirus.
“After she got Covid she had a high fever, and her organs began to fail. Her immune system wasn’t strong enough to make it,” said Mr Wang.
The courtyard at the family house was filling up with decorations for the ceremony. Mr Wang told us there were still more images, flowers and the like to come.
Standing in front of a tent in the courtyard where her body was covered up he explained that, on the day of the funeral, 16 people would carry her coffin and bury her in accordance with tradition.
He said that, though the cost of funeral arrangements had skyrocketed because of the number of Covid deaths, they would pay the extra money in her honour.
“She was a great person. We must hold a grand event to send her off, the best we can afford,” he said.
Every year, hundreds of millions of younger people go back to their hometowns at this time to celebrate the Lunar New Year. It’s China’s most important festival.
The villages they are returning to are now places where mostly older people live – people who are more vulnerable to Covid.
Image caption,Millions of people have travelled back to their hometowns from big cities
There has been great concern that this year’s Spring Festival mass migration could quickly spread the coronavirus into more remote areas, to deadly effect.
The government warned those in the cities not to go home this year if their elderly relatives had not yet been infected.
Doctor Dong Yongming, who operates a very small village clinic, thinks at least 80% of residents there had already caught Covid.
“All the villagers come to us when they’re sick,” he said. “We’re the only clinic here.”
Most who had died there had underlying diseases, he said.
In terms of managing the medicine they had as Covid hit the village, Dr Dong said they would not sell medicine to people beyond their needs.
“For example, I would only give out four Ibuprofen tablets per person,” he said. “They don’t need two boxes. It’ll just be wasted.”
However he said he believed the worst of this Covid wave was already behind them: “We haven’t had any patients in recent days.”
Those who die in this region are buried in the fields. Farmers then continue to plant crops and raise livestock around the mounds of their ancestors.
Driving along the road we noticed fresh mounds of earth with red flags placed on the top. A lot of them. A farmer herding goats confirmed that they were new graves.
“Families have been burying elderly people here after they die. There are just too many,” he said.
Image caption,Fresh graves dot the nearby fields
In his village of a few thousand, he said that more than 40 residents had died during the most recent Covid wave.
“One day someone would die, then the next day someone else. It’s been non-stop over the past month,” he said.
But in the countryside here, they are quite philosophical about life and death. This farmer said people would still celebrate the new year like they always have.
“My son and daughter-in-law will come back soon,” he said.
I asked if locals were worried that family members returning could mean more infections.
“People shouldn’t worry. No fear!” he said. “You will still become infected even if you hide. Most of us have already got it and we are fine.”
He, and many others are hoping that Covid’s most deadly work has already been done and that, for the time being at least, their energy can be spent on being with the living rather than burying the dead.
Zambia’s finance minister says China has shown “optimism” in negotiations to ease the country’s debt, a day after US treasury secretary said Beijing was a barrier to ending the crisis.
The country is straining under an immense debt burden and became Africa’s first nation to default on its debts during the pandemic, when it failed to make a payment in 2020.
Talks to try to ease Zambia’s debt have been dragging on – with China being blamed by some.
But Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane, soon after meeting Secretary Janet Yellen in the capital, Lusaka, told the BBC’s Newsday programme that he was encouraged by the last meeting with the creditors:
Quote Message: I don’t want to accuse anyone… but there is an internationally constituted common framework which governs how countries should be able to access debt relief.
I don’t want to accuse anyone… but there is an internationally constituted common framework which governs how countries should be able to access debt relief.
Quote Message: What encourages me is that from the last meeting of the official creditors, there seems to be optimism – including the Chinese.”
What encourages me is that from the last meeting of the official creditors, there seems to be optimism – including the Chinese.”
He added that talks on restructuring the debt could be completed by the end of March.
Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency said, a warship outfitted with hypersonic cruise missiles will participate in joint exercises with the navies of China and South Africa in February.
The participation of the Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov of the Fleet of the Soviet Union was first mentioned in an official report on Monday.
The frigate is equipped with Zircon missiles, which have a range of more than 1,000 km and can travel at nine times the speed of sound (620 miles).
The missiles and the Avangard glide vehicle, which entered combat service in 2019, are the centerpiece of Russia’s hypersonic arsenal.
“‘Admiral Gorshkov’ … will go to the logistic support point in Syria’s Tartus, and then take part in joint naval exercises with the Chinese and South African navies,” TASS said in its report, citing an unidentified defence source.
The South African National Defence Force has said the drills will run from February 17-26 near the port cities of Durban and Richards Bay on South Africa’s east coast.
It said on Thursday that the joint exercise aims “to strengthen the already flourishing relations between South Africa, Russia and China”.
The exercise will be the second involving the three countries in South Africa, after a drill in 2019, the defence force added.
The Gorshkov held exercises in the Norwegian Sea earlier this month after President Vladimir Putin sent it to the Atlantic Ocean in a signal to the West that Russia would not back down over the war in Ukraine.
Putin has previously said the frigate and its Zircon missiles have “no analogues in the world”.
The Russian president sees the weapons as a way to pierce the United States’s increasingly sophisticated missile defences.
Russia, the US and China are in a race to develop hypersonic weapons, seen as a way to gain an edge over any adversary because of their speed and their manoeuvrability, features which make them harder to detect.
Alvin Chau, the leader of the illegal gambling industry in Macau, was found guilty on more than 100 counts and given an 18-year prison term.
The 48-year-old was found guilty in a case involving illegal bets totaling HK$823.7 billion ($105 billion; £85.7 billion).
Chau, a well-known and colourful figure in the neighbourhood casino business, had refuted the accusations.
Only one Chinese city—Macau, a former Portuguese colony—allows casino gambling.
Chau was the chairman and founder of Suncity Group. It was Macau’s biggest operator of junkets, or organised trips for wealthy gamblers to casinos.
It arranged for high rollers from mainland China to travel to Macau and gamble in the city’s casinos, and offered loans to them. It also collected debts for casinos, and operated VIP rooms across Macau’s casinos.
The businessman, nicknamed “Junket King,” resigned in December 2021, days after his arrest.
Prosecutors had accused Chau of creating and leading a criminal syndicate that had facilitated undeclared bets. They said that as a result the government lost more than HK$8.26 billion in tax income.
The court ruled in favour of the prosecutors for most of the charges, but acquitted Chau of money laundering. The high-profile case also involves 20 other defendants.
The gambling industry has been hit hard by coronavirus restrictions as well as a crackdown by the Chinese government’s on money being moved out of the mainland.
In September, a court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou jailed more than 30 people for cross-border gambling in connection with Chau’s case.
Suncity shut all of its VIP rooms after Chau’s arrest. But even before that the number of junkets in Macau had been on constant decline. There are now only 36 junket operators left, down from 100 in 2019, according to official figures.
The President of the Ghana Union of Traders Associations (GUTA), Joseph Obeng has predicted that the cedi will see a further depreciation till the end of January.
He said the current depreciation of the cedi can be blamed on repatriation of the dollar to China by Chinese resident in Ghana,
He said, at this time of the year, these Chinese return to their home country for holidays.
Speaking in an interview on Joy FM’s Top Story on Tuesday, Mr Obeng explained that the situation would persist till the repatriation of the dollar is contained.
“Until we have a permanent solution to this repatriation and all that, for this particular month of January it will continue to see the depreciation of the cedi,” he said.
The dollar has begun a steady appreciation over the cedi in the last few weeks prompting fear the country is heading back to the dark days of 2022 when the cedi depreciated.
The Bank of Ghana is today quoting the exchange rate at ¢10.30 to the dollar but the rate is slightly higher in the commercial space with some quoting ¢12.50.
But despite the rise, the Governor of the central bank, Dr Ernest Addison is confident the worst days of the cedi are over.
According to him, the poor performance of the currency in 2022 will not repeat itself.
This, he said can be made possible if the debt exchange programme is successful.
“Government has announced a debt standstill and that debt standstill means that the outflows – the money used to service foreign debt will not go out anymore.
“That gives us a lot of room and takes pressure from the foreign exchange market. So because of that debt standstill, I can say that we should expect the currency to remain relatively stable.
“I can stick my neck out that we will not see the sort of things we saw in 2022 if everything works well,” he said.
But the GUTA President thinks otherwise.
He explained the reason for the demand in dollars which has caused the cedi to depreciate.
“…When the masters of the economy are going for their vacation we see the peak of the exchange rate and this is what has happened this time round also. The Chinese are going for their vacation…Mostly at that time, they take a chunk of our resources and leave the shores of the country and send our limited resources to their home countries.”
He added that “other masters of the economy are the expatriates – the people owning the economy in areas of banking, communication etc.”
Mr Obeng noted that until there is a mechanism to retain some of the repatriations, the demand for the dollar will be perennial.
Fans are excited as Marvel movies makes a triumphant return to the Chinese box office after a nearly four years embargo.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever arrives on 7 February, followed by Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania two weeks after.
They will be the first Marvel films to play in Chinese theatres since Spider-Man: Far from Home in July 2019.
Chinese officials have never explained why Marvel movies were blocked from screening in the country.
But the apparent ban began at a time when tensions between the US and China reached a high amid a trade war.
There was also no reason given by Marvel for the turnaround, in its brief announcement on Chinese social media network Weibo on Wednesday about the film release dates.
But it still drew jubilant reactions from movie lovers. “I feel like I’m dreaming,” said one user, while another exclaimed, “I have missed you so much”.
“Can you also re-release Spider-Man and Doctor Strange?” pleaded one fan, referencing movies that had been released during the hiatus and never hit the big screen in China.
The loss of the Chinese market in recent years has possibly cost Disney hundreds of millions of dollars.
The first Black Panther movie in 2018 took in US$105m (£86m) at Chinese theatres, while the second Ant-Man movie that same year generated $121m, according to Box Office Mojo.
The screening of foreign films is tightly controlled in China, which imposes a yearly quota. A division of the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department, the China Film Administration, decides if a foreign movie can be released in the country.
Disney has previously refused requests from some countries, including China, to edit movies such as Eternals and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness to remove references to same-sex relationships.
An innocent-looking photo ultimately led to Zheng Xiaoqing’s demise as a former employee of energy giant General Electric Power.
According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment, the US citizen hid confidential files stolen from his employers in the binary code of a digital photograph of a sunset, which Mr Zheng then mailed to himself.
It was a technique called steganography, a means of hiding a data file within the code of another data file. Mr Zheng utilised it on multiple occasions to take sensitive files from GE.
GE is a multinational conglomerate known for its work in the healthcare, energy and aerospace sectors, making everything from refrigerators to aircraft engines.
The information Zheng stole was related to the design and manufacture of gas and steam turbines, including turbine blades and turbine seals. Considered to be worth millions, it was sent to his accomplice in China. It would ultimately benefit the Chinese government, as well as China-based companies and universities.
Zheng was sentenced to two years in prison earlier this month. It is the latest in a series of similar cases prosecuted by US authorities. In November Chinese national Xu Yanjun, said to be a career spy, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for plotting to steal trade secrets from several US aviation and aerospace companies – including GE.
It is part of a broader struggle as China strives to gain technological knowhow to power its economy and its challenge to the geopolitical order, while the US does its best to prevent a serious competitor to American power from emerging.
The theft of trade secrets is attractive because it allows countries to “leapfrog up global value chains relatively quickly – and without the costs, both in terms of time and money, of relying completely on indigenous capabilities”, Nick Marro of the Economist Intelligence Unit told the BBC.
Last July FBI director Christopher Wray told a gathering of business leaders and academics in London that China aimed to “ransack” the intellectual property of Western companies so it can speed up its own industrial development and eventually dominate key industries.
He warned that it was snooping on companies everywhere “from big cities to small towns – from Fortune 100s to start-ups, folks that focus on everything from aviation, to AI, to pharma”.
At the time, China’s then foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Mr Wray was “smearing China” and had a “Cold War mentality”.
‘China seeks to topple our status’
In the DOJ statement on Zheng, the FBI’s Alan Kohler Jr said China was targeting “American ingenuity” and seeking to “topple our status” as global leader.
Zheng was an engineer specialising in turbine sealing technology and worked on various leakage containment technologies in steam turbine engineering. Such seals optimise turbine performance “whether by increasing power or efficiency or extending the usable life of the engine”, the DOJ said.
Gas turbines that power aircraft are central to the development of China’s aviation industry.
Aerospace and aviation equipment are among 10 sectors that the Chinese authorities are targeting for rapid development to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign technology and eventually surpass it.
But Chinese industrial espionage is targeting a wide range of other sectors too.
According to Ray Wang, founder and CEO of Silicon Valley-based consultancy Constellation Research, they include pharmaceutical development and nanotechnology – engineering and technology conducted at the nanoscale for use in areas such as medicine, textiles and fabrics and automobiles. A nanometre is a billionth of a meter.
It also includes pharmaceuticals, bioengineering – mimicking biological processes for purposes such as the development of biocompatible prostheses and regenerative tissue growth.
Mr Wang cited an anecdote by a former head of research and development for a Fortune 100 company, who told him that “the person he entrusted the most” – someone so close that their children grew up together – was eventually found to be on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party.
“He kindly explained to me that the spies are everywhere,” he said.
Image caption,China needs technological knowhow to power its economy and its challenge to the geopolitical order
In the past industrial espionage from countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore was a concern, Mr Marro said. However once indigenous firms emerge as innovative market leaders in their own right – and so start to want to protect their own intellectual property – then their governments start passing legislation to take the issue more seriously.
“As Chinese firms have become more innovative over the past decade, we’ve seen a marked strengthening of domestic intellectual property rights protection in tandem,” Mr Marro said.
China has also gained expertise by making foreign companies hand over technology under joint venture agreements in exchange for access to the Chinese market. Despite complaints the Chinese government has always denied accusations of coercion.
Hacking deal a ‘joke’
There have been attempts to rein in hacking specifically.
In 2015 the US and China struck a deal in which both sides pledged not to carry out “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage”.
By the following year, the US National Security Agency had accused the Chinese of violating the agreement, although it did acknowledge that the quantity of attempts to hack government and corporate data had dropped “dramatically”.
But observers say the deal’s overall impact has been minimal. Mr Wang said it was a “joke” due to a lack of enforcement. Chinese cyber-espionage in the US has been “pervasive” and extends to academic labs. “It has been going on in every aspect of Western businesses,” he told the BBC.
However Lim Tai Wei from the National University of Singapore noted that there were no “definitive uncontested studies” on the extent of the phenomenon.
“Some believe that there was a short dip in Chinese cyber espionage against the US, but resumed its former level thereafter. Others believe it failed due to the overall breakdown in US-China relations,” he said.
Meanwhile the US is now directly trying to block China’s progress in the key semiconductor industry – vital for everything from smartphones to weapons of war – saying China’s use of the technology poses a national security threat.
In October, Washington announced some of the broadest export controls yet, requiring licences for companies exporting chips to China using US tools or software, no matter where they are made in the world. Washington’s measures also prevent US citizens and green card holders from working for certain Chinese chip companies. Green card holders are US permanent residents who have the right to work in the country.
Mr Marro says that while these measures will slow China’s technological advance, they will also accelerate China’s efforts to remove US and other foreign products from its tech supply chains.
“China has been trying to do this for years, with muted success, but these policy goals now command greater urgency as a result of the recent US controls,” he said.
With China also invoking its own national security, the scramble for a technological edge between the world’s two biggest economies is only likely to intensify further.
But Mr Wang reckons that the US still holds the advantage.
“My cyber-security friends tell me when they hack Chinese sites, the only worthwhile tech [they can find there] is US intellectual property,” he said.
China’s population has decreased for the first time in 60 years as a result of a record-low national birth rate of 6.77 births per 1,000 people.
The population in 2022 – 1.4118 billion – fell by 850,000 from 2021.
China’s birth rate has been declining for years, prompting a slew of policies to slow the trend.
But seven years after scrapping the one-child policy, it has entered what one official described as an “era of negative population growth”.
The birth rate in 2022 was also down from 7.52 in 2021, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, which released the figures on Tuesday.
In comparison, in 2021, the United States recorded 11.06 births per 1,000 people, and the United Kingdom, 10.08 births. The birth rate for the same year in India, which is poised to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, was 16.42.
Deaths also outnumbered births for the first time last year. China logged its highest death rate since 1976 – 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, up from 7.18 the previous year.
Earlier government data had heralded a demographic crisis, which would in the long run shrink China’s labour force and increase the burden on healthcare and other social security costs.
Results from a once-a-decade census announced in 2021 showed China’s population growing at its slowest pace in decades. Populations are also shrinking and ageing in other East Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea.
“This trend is going to continue and perhaps worsen after Covid,” says Yue Su, principal economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Ms Su is among experts who expect China’s population to shrink further through 2023.
“The high youth unemployment rate and weaknesses in income expectations could delay marriage and childbirth plans further, dragging down the number of newborns,” she added.
And the death rate in 2023 is likely be higher than what it was pre-pandemic due to Covid infections, she said. China has seen a surge of cases since it abandoned its zero-Covid policy last month.
China’s population trends over the years have been largely shaped by the controversial one-child policy, which was introduced in 1979 to slow population growth.
Families that violated the rules were fined and in some cases, even lost jobs. In a culture that historically favours boys over girls, the policy had also led to forced abortions and a reportedly skewed gender ratio from the 1980s.
The policy was scrapped in 2016 and married couples were allowed to have two children. In recent years, the Chinese government also offered tax breaks and better maternal healthcare, among other incentives, to reverse, or at least slow, the falling birth rate.
But these policies did not lead to a sustained increase in the births. Some experts say this is because policies that encouraged childbirth were not accompanied by efforts to ease the burden of childcare, such as more help for working mothers or access to education.
In October 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping made boosting birth rates a priority. Mr Xi said in a once-in-five-year Communist Party Congress in Beijing that his government will “pursue a proactive national strategy” in response to the country’s ageing population.
Apart from dishing out incentives to have children, China should also improve gender equality in households and workplaces, said Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan, director of the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Family and Population Research.
Scandinavian countries have shown that such moves can improve fertility rates, she added.
“They are not in a doomsday scenario right away,” says Paul Cheung, Singapore’s former chief statistician, adding that China has “plenty of manpower” and “a lot of lead time” to manage the demographic challenge.
Observers say merely raising birth rates will not resolve the problems behind China’s slowing growth.
“Boosting fertility is not going to improve productivity or increase domestic consumption in the medium term,” said Stuart Gietel-Basten, a public policy professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “How China will respond to these structural issues would be more crucial.”
In less than a month, China has reported 60,000 COVID-related fatalities, the first significant death toll since the country abandoned its zero-COVID policy.
China reported 59,938 COVID-related deaths between December 8 and January 12, according to officials.
Despite there being evidence of hospitals and crematoriums being overrun, China has frequently been accused of underreporting coronavirus deaths.
Most of those who passed away were older than 80 and had underlying medical conditions.
The figures, include 5,503 deaths caused by respiratory failure directly due to the virus, and 54,435 caused by underlying conditions combined with the virus.
The real total is likely to be higher because which the figures refer only to deaths recorded at medical facilities.
Last month, Beijing changed the way it categorises Covid deaths, only counting towards its total those who died of respiratory failure directly induced by the virus.
The World Health Organisation criticised the definition, describing it as “too narrow”.
Beijing has always contended that its figures are accurate, calling on the WHO to “uphold a scientific, objective and just position”.
Officials said that the peak of patients hospitalised with severe Covid was in early January, although the number subsequently remained high.
They said that they would continue to monitor the situation in rural areas, focusing on early detection and prioritising treatment of the most vulnerable.
According to Indonesia’s navy chief, a warship has been deployed to the North Natuna Sea to monitor a Chinese coast guard vessel that has been active in a resource-rich maritime area claimed by both countries.
Laksamana Madya Muhammad Ali, the chief of the Indonesian navy, told Reuters on Saturday that a warship, maritime patrol plane, and drone had been deployed to monitor the Chinese vessel.
“The Chinese vessel has not conducted any suspicious activities. However, we need to monitor it as it has been in Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) for some time,” he said.
Ship tracking data shows the Chinese vessel, CCG 5901, has been sailing in the Natuna Sea and particularly near to Indonesia’s Tuna Block gas field and Vietnam’s Chim Sao oil and gas field since December 30, the Indonesian Ocean Justice Initiative told Reuters.
China’s CCG 5901 is the world’s largest coast guard vessel and is nicknamed the “the monster” due to its size. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) gives vessels navigation rights through an EEZ.
But the presence of the well-known Chinese vessel may signal increasing Chinese assertiveness and comes after Vietnam and Indonesia concluded an agreement on the boundaries of their EEZs in the area. Indonesia also recently approved a development plan for the Tuna gas field, involving an estimated investment of more than $3bn to commence production.
In 2017, Indonesia renamed the northern reaches of its exclusive economic zone as the North Natuna Sea. This was part of a push back against China’s maritime territorial ambitions and claims in the South China Sea. Indonesia maintains that under UNCLOS, the southern end of the South China Sea – since renamed North Natuna Sea – is its exclusive economic zone.
Vessels from Indonesia and China shadowed each other for months in 2021, near a submersible oil rig that had been performing tests in Indonesia’s gas-field development area. At the time, China urged Indonesia to stop the test drilling, claiming the activities were taking place in its territory.
China claims the Indonesian maritime area is within its expansive territorial claim in the South China Sea, which is marked by a U-shaped “nine-dash line”. That Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague found the nine-dash line to have no legal basis in 2016.
As Jo Wang, an event planner in Beijing, watched her family members fall ill with Covid-19 one by one late last month she had a single goal: find antiviral pills to protect her elderly grandfather when his turn came.
After three days of trying and failing to purchase a box of Pfizer’s Paxlovid on an e-commerce platform, she got lucky, scoring the Covid treatment via an official channel on the fourth day and receiving it by mail on the sixth. But Wang, who was breaking the rules by seeking the prescription proactively – before her grandfather fell ill – was also wracked with guilt.
“I felt really bad at that time … you don’t know how many days it will take to buy this medicine, it is completely unknown. And you don’t know how long the people in your family can hold on,” she said, stressing her fear that if she waited until the 92-year-old fell ill, it would be too late to get the pills, which are most effective early in the illness. “It’s a very desperate situation.”
Wang is not the only resident scrambling to secure Western medications as a wave of Covid-19 overwhelms China, driving up demand for treatment – especially for the country’s large undervaccinated elderly population.
In recent weeks, many have turned to the black market where hawkers claim to sell Covid treatments ranging from illegal imports of Indian-made generics of Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck’s molnupiravir to the bonafide product –up to nearly eight times the market price.
Rising frustration over the shortages wascompounded by an announcement Sunday that the government had failed to reach an agreement with Pfizer to include Paxlovid under its national insurance plan, with officials saying the price asked was too high. That decision could mean that after March 31, the drug will only be available to those who can afford to pay full price, with current rates reportedly around 1,900 yuan ($280) per course.
Paxlovid has been shown to reduce the risk of death and hospitalization in high risk patients when used soon afterthe onset of symptoms. Last February, the drug, widely used in developed countries, became the first oral pill specifically for Covid to be authorized in China.
China did agree to cover two other treatments used for Covid-19 in the latest talks – the traditional Chinese medicine Qingfei Paidu and the homegrown antiviral pill Azvudine. There is limited data on how well Azvudine protects against severe disease.
The pricing pitfall and shortages, nearly a year after the pill was first authorized and months after Pfizer tapped a domestic drugmaker for local production, showthe challenges facing China as its governmentgrapples with demand for treatments for its population of 1.4 billion after abruptly dropping its Covid controls last month.
Currently, Pfizer’s imported pill is available in community hospitals in some cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou, according to state media. It is also sold on several e-commerce platforms, where there is some suggestion in local reports that supply constraints are easing.
But there are questions about how broadly the pills will be distributed across China and if there is sufficient medical resources to prescribe them – an urgent issue as the outbreak shifts from urban hubs to smaller cities and rural China. Experts say procurement appears to be decentralized, with the pills more readily available at hospitals in better resourced major cities and tougher to find elsewhere.
On Monday, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said the company had ramped up exports, sending millions of courses of Paxlovid to China in the past couple weeks, and was working with its domestic partner Zhejiang Huahai to manufacture Chinese-made Paxlovid in the first half of this year, according to Reuters.
But Bourla, speaking at a conference in San Francisco, also quashed hopes the company might reach a deal with China for domestic drugmakers to produce a generic version of the drug to be sold in-country – denying a January 6 Reuters report that such an arrangement was being discussed.
US-based Merck, known as MSD internationally, on Wednesday said on its WeChat account that it would take legal action against some manufacturers that are supplying unauthorized versions of its Covid drug. The company said it would also partner with domestic firm Sinopharm to supply China with its pill, which is sold under the brand name Lagevrio. Neither Western firm currently holds a patent for the drugs in China, according to a WHO-affiliated database, though both have filed for one.
But as the immediate shortages – and issues of cost – play out in one of the world’s largest generic drug-producing countries, they also throw the spotlight on global issues related to intellectual property rights, according to experts who examine access to medicines.
Two Chinese companies slated to manufacture generic versions of Paxlovid have already submitted their products for evaluation by the World Health Organization (WHO), according to the WHO-affiliated Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) – a signal that they are ready to begin producing the medicine.
Those companies, Zhejiang Huahai and Apeloa Pharmaceutical, along with two others in China, were granted sublicenses in 2022 to make the full generic pill to supply 95 lower and middle income markets – not including China – under an earlier deal between Pfizer and the MPP, an organization that facilitates access to treatments for people in poorer countries.
“At the scale of the health crisis taking place (in China), the most logical next step (would be) that these licenses are expanded to include allowing domestic supply in China, including from other producers (in the region),” said Ellen ‘t Hoen, a former executive director of the MPP and current head of the Medicines Law & Policy project.
However, if the drug developer was unwilling to take that step – as Bourla indicated Pfizer was on Monday – there are measures China could take, such as pledging to protect companies that make generic supplies or importing generics from elsewhere, using legal measures allowed under the World Trade Organization rules during health emergencies, ‘t Hoen said.
That potential has been discussed in public forums in China. Commentators there point out the country has no track record of using these flexibilities, which are often employed with caution by countries, given their potential to irk foreign pharmaceutical companies and the countries where they are based.
In China’s case, concerns about impacting the local economy – in which foreign pharmaceutical firms are major employers – was likely a key reason for the government’s reticence to use such measures, said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Beijing this month called on authorities to enhance oversight of online sales of drugs and crack down on price gouging, false advertising and the infringement of intellectual property.
China may be hoping that more domestic antiviral pills in development are able to fill the void. Throughout the pandemic, its regulators have largely opted for homegrown tools to confront the virus – with Beijing yet to approve a foreign Covid vaccine.
Health officials have recently sought to assure the public about affordable access to treatments and downplay the potential impact of the government’s failure to include Paxlovid in its national insurance scheme. A top health official on Wednesday said that hundreds of pills to alleviate Covid symptoms were already covered by insurance and new viral treatments were in the pipeline.
State-run nationalist tabloid Global Times on Monday ran an opinion piece blaming “US capital forces” for China’s inability to cut a deal with Pfizer to include the pills in the national insurance.
“During the past days, a growing number of US politicians and media outlets have been making shrill ‘warnings’ about the epidemic in China … If they do care about it, why don’t Pfizer drop some pursuit of the profit, and cooperate with China with a little more sincerity?” said the article.
Bourlaon Monday said talks broke off after China had asked for a lower price than Pfizer is charging for most lower middle income countries.
In a separate statement to CNN, Pfizer declined to comment on what price it had offered, but said: the company “will continue to collaborate with the Chinese government and all relevant stakeholders to secure an adequate supply of Paxlovid in China” and remained “committed to fulfilling the Covid-19 treatment needs of Chinese patients.”
But for those who have been grappling with the immediate problems of gaining access to medicines for themselves and their families, like Wang in Beijing, there is a feeling – for now anyway – that the system isn’t working.
“It’s cruel … no matter how we feel, there’s nothing we can do,” she said. “It’s not the case that your effort or expectation can make the situation better.”
