Tag: china

The EU thinks it “won” in Beijing trade talks. It couldn’t be more wrong.

Big news out of Beijing! On Friday, the EU’s trade chief, Maroš Šefčovič, announced a deal that could cut China’s exports of hybrids and plug-in hybrids to Europe by more than half. That’s several million fewer cars over four years. Diplomacy works!*

Here’s some context:

In October 2024, the EU put tariffs of up to 45% on Chinese battery EVs because of the CCP’s massive subsidies. Hybrids, though, still paid only the standard 10%. So what did Chinese automakers do? They switched to hybrids. Chinese hybrid imports went from 3,800 cars in October 2024 to about 50,000 in July 2026.

So the CCP increased its hybrid exports more than tenfold to get around the EU’s rules. Now it’s “agreeing” to cut them in half. And Brussels is calling that a win. Because the EU is run by a clumsy bureaucracy—and that’s me describing them generously.

Read the fine print, too. It’s a “shared understanding,” and Šefčovič didn’t say how it will actually be enforced. Meanwhile, the CCP got the EU to keep talking about price undertakings on the EV tariffs, which would mean China agrees to raise its own prices, and then the EU would remove the tariffs.

But the whole thing just shows how absolutely useless Europe’s bureaucracy is when it comes to countering the economic threat of the CCP.

The CCP agreed to back off partway on what it got by exploiting a loophole—the hybrids. And in return the CCP gets a shot at undoing the original EV tariffs that started all this.

See you in 2027, Europe, when the CCP finds the next loophole.

And by the way, Europe is wrong about why they should stop Chinese EVs. Bureaucrats think it’s about protecting local industry and manufacturing jobs. But everyone I know who has worked in intelligence agrees: Chinese cars are spy machines. So the optimal number of Chinese cars to have in Europe is zero.

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China Nominates Communist Health Official to Lead World Health Organization

The Chinese government has nominated one of its own, former China National Health Commission director Dr. Song Li, to become the next director-general of the World Health Organization (W.H.O.).

Reuters reported the nomination on Thursday morning and Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning confirmed it at a press conference.

Mao said the nomination was part of China’s bid to gain more influence in multinational organizations like W.H.O. after the United States withdrew support – an action taken by President Donald Trump in July 2020, in part because he said China already had far too much sway over the U.N. health agency.

“China has total control over the World Health Organization despite only paying $40 million per year compared to what the United States has been paying, which is approximately $450 million a year,” Trump said when announcing the withdrawal.

The Biden administration retracted Trump’s decision to withdraw in January 2021, but Trump once again signed an executive order to pull out of W.H.O. when he returned to office in January 2025.

“At a time when multilateralism is facing challenges and much remains to be done in advancing global health, the role of the W.H.O. director-general is particularly important in ensuring that the organization continues to develop steadily amid new changes and circumstances,” Mao said at her press conference on Thursday.

“China’s nomination of Dr Song Li demonstrates China’s willingness to work with all parties to build a community of health for all, and reflects China’s firm support for multilateralism and the W.H.O.,” she said.

“We believe that if Dr. Song Li is elected W.H.O. director-general, she will help the organization play a more active role in improving the health and wellbeing of all humanity,” she said.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted on Thursday that Song would become “the first person from mainland China to head the United Nations health agency.”

A doctor from Hong Kong named Margaret Chan held the post from 2007 to 2017, to be succeeded by the current director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. The director general of W.H.O. is appointed to a five-year term by the World Health Assembly (W.H.A.), and can be reappointed once, so Tedros must leave office in August 2027.

Song is the seventh candidate to be nominated so far to succeed Tedros. The others hail from Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Indonesia, Spain, and Botswana.

Song held the post of Director-General of the Department of Women and Child Health at China’s National Health Commission until last month. She also sits on the secretariat of the All-China Women’s Federation, an organ of the Chinese Communist Party that is directly supervised by Party leadership.

Song was educated at Shandong Medical University and Peking University, and was a “visiting scholar in global health” at Harvard for six months in 2010. She was involved in China’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, helping to create procedures for maternity and newborn care, and she helped to establish networks for treating pregnant women infected with the coronavirus.

Reuters quoted a former senior W.H.O. official who said China might use Song’s candidacy as “leverage to ​gain greater influence in the W.H.O. by making ​sure there are more Chinese senior officials at the organization.”

The U.S. is still the largest single contributor to W.H.O. by assessments, with China in fourth place, but the WHA suspended America’s voting rights in the organization in May because of “unpaid arrears.” 

W.H.O. said it reduced its base budget by about 21 percent after President Trump signed his executive order to withdraw in January. The W.H.A. said that it will not officially recognize U.S. withdrawal until it pays all of its unpaid dues.

Argentina also withdrew from W.H.O. last year, but unlike the United States, it had no legal right to withdraw included with its membership, whether its dues are paid or not. To date, W.H.O. has never formally accepted the withdrawal of a member nation.

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US To Deploy Anti-Ship Missile System To Japanese Island Near Taiwan

The US military will deploy an anti-ship missile system to Japan’s westernmost island of Yonaguni, which lies just 68 miles east of Taiwan, an unprecedented move that will ratchet up tensions with China.

US Marines will deploy with the Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, as part of Keen Sword, the largest joint US-Japanese biennial military exercise.

The NMESIS has a range of about 115 miles, putting it within striking range of vessels patrolling the eastern coast of Taiwan. According to The South China Morning Post, China has stepped up coast guard and naval activity in the area in response to maritime boundary talks announced in May between Japan and the Philippines.

Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert, told China’s Global Times that the deployment increases the risk of miscalculation between the US and China and that Beijing may respond by conducting its own military drills in the area.

The Okinawa Defense Bureau first disclosed the deployment on October 1, and it will also include a Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or Maidas, a ground-based air defense system also used by the Marine Corps’ littoral force.

The first Marine Littoral Regiment was established in 2022 as part of the Marine Corps’ Force Design strategy, which is explicitly focused on preparing for a potential conflict with China. The idea was to create mobile Marine units equipped with anti-ship missiles and other weapons that can rapidly deploy along what is known as the First Island Chain, a string of archipelagos stretching from Japan’s southern islands through Taiwan and the Philippines and into the southern South China Sea.

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Warnings of Chinese WHO Takeover Strengthen the Case for US Withdrawal

Warnings that America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization will expand China’s influence raise a question for European governments: Why must American taxpayers finance the resistance to Beijing? Washington was the WHO’s largest donor, yet its contributions failed to resolve the administration’s concerns about Chinese influence. If European governments believe remaining in the organization can restrain China, they must explain how they intend to accomplish what they expected the United States to do.

The Trump administration refused on September 25, 2026, to back a UN political declaration on pandemic preparedness. By then, President Donald Trump had taken the United States out of the WHO, ended talks on the WHO Pandemic Agreement, and turned down changes to the International Health Regulations. To justify those moves, the administration pointed repeatedly to China’s sway over the organization.

At the September UN meeting, the U.S. representative opposed language in the declaration tied to pathogen access and benefit sharing, a framework still under negotiation, among other concerns. China’s delegate called for progress on the pandemic agreement and urged developed countries to provide financial and technological support to developing nations. The objections prevented adoption by consensus that day, leaving the declaration for further consideration by the General Assembly.

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FBI Arrests Alleged Chinese Foreign Agent at LAX as She Attempts to Board Flight to Shanghai — Accused of Surveilling Taiwanese President’s Son and Family for CCP

Federal agents arrested an alleged Chinese foreign agent at Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday as she was preparing to leave the United States for Communist China.

Wanying “Heather” Zhang, 34, of Irvine, California, was taken into custody by the FBI at LAX and charged in a federal criminal complaint with acting as an agent of the People’s Republic of China without notifying the U.S. Attorney General.

Federal prosecutor Bill Essayli announced the arrest on Sunday, saying Zhang was caught attempting to depart for China.

“We just arrested a Chinese foreign agent at LAX attempting to depart for China,” Essayli announced on his official X account. 

According to Essayli, Zhang allegedly traveled to Seattle in 2025 at the direction of PRC officials and conducted surveillance on a close relative of a Taiwanese government official.

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California Man Accused Of Routing More Than $300 Million In Restricted Servers To China

A California man has been arrested on federal charges accusing him of helping route more than $300 million in export-controlled computer servers to China through Malaysia and Singapore.

Greg Lui, 38, also known as Yiu Kong Lui, of San Gabriel, was arrested Oct. 1 after a federal grand jury returned a three-count indictment two days earlier.

Lui was the chief executive officer and owner of Earthmade Computer Inc., a company based in City of Industry, California, and established in November 2023. He was also the registered agent of another company, Coindigger, that did business as Earthmade.

Earthmade has not been charged in the case. The company did not respond by publication time to a request for comment.

Lui is charged with conspiracy to violate U.S. export-control laws, outbound smuggling, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege payments from Malaysia flowed into Earthmade’s U.S. bank accounts and were then used to buy restricted servers from American manufacturers.

Prosecutors allege the conspiracy began no later than October 2023 and continued through at least Aug. 12, 2026. The indictment’s detailed transaction examples are concentrated in 2024, when Lui and others allegedly bought high-end computer servers and graphics processing units, or GPUs, from U.S. manufacturers and routed them through Malaysia and Singapore before they ultimately reached China.

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Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month

Amid a barrage of news stories warning about superintelligent machines rendering humanity extinct, a CNN story describing the opposite scenario – one in which the US military’s reliance on brittle chatbots almost brought the US into war with China – went mostly unnoticed by the public.

The biggest international AI news of the past three weeks was the Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon’s resignation. According to him, OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight towards self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. Coxon’s description of a “terminator” scenario, a machine becoming much smarter than humanity and deciding to wipe us out, captured the public’s, journalists’ and politicians’ attention, stirring waves of fear-inducing, credulous reporting, and policy actions.

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, issued a mandate to create an “AI kill-switch”; New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, is similarly exploring the possibility of having “AI kill-switches”; and Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar introduced legislation to “ban artificial superintelligence”.

While so many of us were focused on fictional superintelligent machines that we were told could hypothetically cause human extinction, however, there was a more serious story being reported.

A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.

A CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.

It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.

Unlike the terminator, “rogue AI”, scenario, this incident didn’t galvanize lawmakers into announcing calls for regulation so as to avoid potential human extinction. Media outlet after media outlet didn’t warn the public that we almost triggered a war against a nuclear superpower because of our military’s reliance on error-prone chatbots.

We describe the large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots as stochastic parrots, that is, models that are designed to regurgitate the patterns of the data they are trained on. News coverage describing them as “powerful” “rogue” models that could render humanity extinct all on their own, bolsters perceptions of tools based on these models being infallible enough to merit usage in stakes as high as warfare.

Even CNN’s more critical coverage describes the chatbot used by the US military as presenting “profound risks” because it is “powerful, new and relatively poorly understood technology”.

In fact, today’s LLMs and the chatbots they power are not poorly understood, nor are they powerful in the sense of being effective tools for this use case. They are systems for generating plausible-looking text, built out of enormous, haphazardly collected datasets and then “fine-tuned” (that is, further trained) to be especially appealing to their intended users.

CNN wasn’t able to learn which chatbot product was used in this case, but the LLM powering the product was probably fine-tuned to output text with the stylistic hallmarks of intelligence reports. Both the basic functionality and the risks of such a model have been well-understood and well-documented for years, including in our 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

Claims that system behavior is mysterious arise from deliberate mystification on the part of those selling those systems, and a misapprehension of what their output is by those procuring and using it.

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Zelenskiy Looks To Spread Economic War To China, India

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed in a Wall Street Journal interview published around the time of the UN General Assembly that China and India are the two most useful countries to Russian President Vladimir Putin in relation to sanctions. He repeated these accusations on European media this morning.

It is energy trade with these two countries that is currently financing the war, Zelensky said. United States, China and India collectively putting pressure on Russia is enough to bring an end to the war, he added.

Although he identified a “lack of a consistently strong position from China and India” in his address to partners, Zelensky struck a softer note on New Delhi in a subsequent Fox interview, saying he believed that “for the most part, India is with us” and that it was only energy trade with Russia that remained an open question.

Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian crude oil made up only a marginal portion of India’s total oil imports. However, in the years following the invasion, crude imports from Russia became a major component of total oil imports for the country, with Indian refineries purchasing roughly $140 billion worth of Russian crude between 2022 and mid-2025, according to analysis of trade data published by European research institutions in July 2026.

Of Russia’s total crude exports in July 2026, 37% went to India, while 50% went to China, according to the same analysis. While most of these exports would currently find their way to third countries, it is Europe that is currently reluctant to purchase Russian crude at prices comparable to those offered by other producers in the Middle East, typically at a discount.

China’s role in enabling Putin to work around sanctions extends far beyond the energy trade, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said in a November 2025 report. The report, entitled Energy, called China “a decisive enabler of Russia’s sanctions evasion and export-control evasion.” This was based on higher oil and gas imports from Russia by China as well as an increase in the trade of dual-use goods, which could also be used for military purposes.

Barter deals involving grain and raw materials for Russian-made military equipment have also been reported to be used by the Kremlin to reduce reliance on dollar-denominated transactions and on the services of Western banks, in addition to trade of cars, electronics and industrial components made by Chinese companies that are replacing similar goods from Western manufacturers on Russian markets.

As for India, its purchases of Russian Urals have been described by Indian officials and refiners as strictly market-driven and not part of any political alignment with Moscow. In fact, the largest buyer of Russian oil of all, India, is currently subject to the possibility of being hit with tariffs of up to 100% on its Russian oil imports under the recently signed Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Whether or not Trump will use this authority to pressure the two major Asian buyers of Russian oil remains to be seen, but Ukrainian officials have pointed to the role of key Russian missile producers operating through jurisdictions including China, as one of the key components of ongoing sanctions evasion by the Kremlin.

Trade between China and Russia totaled $135 billion in the first half of 2026, with Russia’s exports to China including energy products as well as raw materials, and China’s exports including cars, electronics and industrial goods that would otherwise have been imported from the West.

Zelenskiy’s efforts to increase economic pain on Russia by targeting China and India is a sign of desperation, as Russia continues to take territory in the east and pressures Ukrainian infrastructure via overnight strikes.

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Trump asked China’s president if he wants to buy US arms, ambassador says

The U.S. ambassador to China says President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping if he wanted to buy weapons from the United States.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has justified the pending U.S. arms sale to Taiwan to Chinese President Xi Jinping by downplaying it as just one of many sales Washington makes around the world — even asking Xi if he’d be in the market for U.S. arms, Trump’s ambassador to China said on Sunday.

David Perdue said Trump raised the prospect of the arms sales from the U.S. to its ascendant geopolitical rival, an unlikely offer that if consummated would upend generations of U.S. policy toward China and Taiwan and potentially expose U.S. technology to a potential foe. Perdue, speaking to Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday” days after Trump hosted Xi for a state visit in Washington, didn’t specify when the offer was made.

Bream had cited concerns from Republican and Democratic lawmakers over delayed aid packages and weapons orders to Taiwan, the self-ruled democracy, to defend itself from China’s threat to invade the island. Bream asked if the U.S. is denying Taiwan to appease the Chinese president, who visited Trump last week.

Perdue pushed back on the suggestion, stating that Trump “is as strong on Taiwan as I’ve ever seen anybody” and has sold it plenty of weapons. Perdue also said Trump and Xi continue to talk about future U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.

“But President Trump continues to say, ‘Hey, we sell arms to other people around the world,’” Perdue said. “He actually asked President Xi, would he like to buy some, at one point.”

The U.S. is bound by its own laws to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself. While not recognizing Taiwan as a country, the U.S. is the island’s strongest informal backer and arms provider. But multiple U.S. leaders have left ambiguous whether they would commit military force to defend the U.S. ally should China invade.

China has pressed Washington to halt the arms sales, most prominently during a previous summit in May between Trump and Xi in Beijing. After that meeting, the United States paused the sale of a record-breaking $14 billion package — and Trump described arms sales to Taiwan as a “very good negotiating chip” with China.

In their private talks at the White House last week, Xi pressed Trump to oppose Taiwan independence, according to Chinese state media.

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U.S. Amb. to China: ‘Don’t Know’ When Taiwan Military Sale Will Happen, ‘Trump Has a Schedule of His Own’

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” U.S. Ambassador to China David Perdue said that “we don’t know” when the sale of $14 billion in military hardware for Taiwan that is on President Donald Trump’s desk will be signed, “President Trump has a schedule of his own.” And there hasn’t been any change to U.S. policy on Taiwan.

Co-host Bill Hemmer asked, “Did anything change with regard to the U.S. position on Taiwan in these meetings?”

Perdue answered, “Absolutely not. In Busan, it didn’t even come up. In May, President Xi brought it up. President Trump listened actively. And, in this meeting, it came up briefly. But let me be very clear, President Trump, since he was inaugurated, has not changed the position on the United States’ One China Policy. We fully support the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three Communiqués, and the Six Assurances. President Trump, again, echoed that position of the United States federal government. We have not changed our position on Taiwan, we don’t support independence, but we really don’t support coercion, either.”

Hemmer then asked, “There is a $14 billion military hardware sale that is on his desk and has been there for some time that has not yet been signed that would go directly to helping Taipei defend itself. When will that be signed?”

Perdue responded, “Well, we don’t know. President Trump has a schedule of his own. And he has already sold 50% more arms to Taiwan than any other president since 1979. So, he’s already demonstrated that support. But, again, our position is, we want peace in the strait, we want a peaceful resolution. This is between the people of Taiwan and the people of China.”

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