Far East Watch
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German carmakers have long complained of high costs and onerous red tape while critics contend the companies themselves need to restructure and improve how they are run.
Volkswagen boss Blume – who also told staff that four plants might need to close – said in April that he was open to Volkswagen’s Chinese partners using its plants.
However, the group has since sought to dampen speculation of any imminent deals.
Other carmakers in Europe are also partnering with Chinese firms.
Jeep and Fiat owner Stellantis said in May it had formed a joint venture with China’s Dongfeng to share manufacturing, sales and engineering operations on the continent.
South Korea has passed a new law that penalizes journalists for sharing “fake news.” The Journalists Association of Korea said of the law, “Even if a law’s objective is legitimate, it could erode the foundations of democracy if it’s enforced in a way that discourages the media and ordinary citizens from freely criticizing and scrutinizing those in power.”
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WASHINGTON — A court in eastern China on Monday sentenced a former local official to death over taking bribes that authorities said amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars during a three-decade period.
Yang Youlin, a former economic development official in the Jiangsu Province capital of Nanjing on China’ s east coast, “illegally accepted property and assets” valued over 2.21 billion yuan ($325 million) from 1993 to 2023, the Changzhou Intermediate People’s Court said in a statement.
It appears Chairman Xi has not yet consolidated power after what appeared to be an attempted coup a few months ago. It has been announced 6 top PLA Generals, including the powerful procurement head, have been fired. The charges are corruption connected to taking money through the procurement process.
In the wake of a wave of crackdowns on Christians by Chairman Xi’s China, President Trump has successfully convinced the leader to let a Christian pastor go free. The pastor is Ezra Jin Mingri, who appears to have been released as a token “gift” to President Trump. He was released two months after President Trump’s Beijing visit.
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Bangkok — China’s military test-launched a long-range ballistic missile Monday from one of its nuclear-powered submarines in the South Pacific, drawing protest and concern from countries in the region.
The missile was launched at 12:01 p.m. and carried a dummy warhead, according the official Xinhua News Agency.
China last conducted a missile test in the Pacific two years ago, firing an intercontinental ballistic missile with a dummy warhead. That previous launch in international waters was the first in decades, since 1980.
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China’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, the Fujian, has sailed through the Taiwan Strait, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry
TAIPEI, Taiwan — China’s newest and most powerful of its three aircraft carriers sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday, the Taiwanese defense ministry said, a day after Taiwan began a five-day military exercise on responding to a Chinese attack.
The Fujian carrier first sailed through the narrow body of water separating China and Taiwan in a trial run last September. It later transited the strait for the first time as a fully commissioned military vessel in December.
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BEIJING — The Philippines defense secretary and his family have been banned from entering China over comments he has made about Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Thursday.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro and his wife and kids are banned from entering China, including Hong Kong, while individuals and groups in China are also banned from having any sort of transaction with Teodoro, the ministry said in a statement
Teodoro is known for using strong language to counter China’s claims over the strategic waters, calling them a “fiction and lie” that no Southeast Asian country would accept.
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Taiwan may feel distant to most Europeans, but a Chinese takeover of the island would send shockwaves from Washington to Tokyo, Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister François Chih-chung Wu told Euronews Next.
“If China attacks Taiwan, France, Europe, the United States, and Japan will all be affected. Taiwan will be in a terrible situation — but so will you,” he warned.
The deputy minister pushed back on China’s claim over Taiwan as part of its territory since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. Beijing has never ruled out using force to bring the self-governing island under its control and refuses to recognise it as a sovereign state, insisting it be referred to internationally as “Chinese Taipei,” a designation that reflects China’s position that there is only “one China” and that Taiwan is part of it.
Taiwan itself officially goes by the Republic of China, a name dating back to the government that fled to the island after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces.
Taiwan’s history is far more complex than the narrative that it has always been part of China, Wu said, with the island ruled by the Dutch, the Spanish, the Qing Empire and Japan at different times.
The Qing Dynasty administered part of Taiwan for more than a hundred years, but it was only between 1885 and 1894 that it attached any real importance to the island and established it as a province — a mere ten years of genuine strategic interest that challenges the current Chinese claims of continued sovereignty.
“China was not the only country there,” he said, arguing this history does not justify Beijing’s ambitions.
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China’s President travelled to North Korea for the first time in seven years, underscoring the strategic importance of ties between the two neighbours.
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Chinese Coast Guard patrols to the east of Taiwan are a “provocative act” and the military will closely coordinate with the island’s Coast Guard in responding, Defence Minister Wellington Koo said on Monday.
China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, was angered after Japan and the Philippines said in May that they would begin formal talks on delimiting their maritime boundaries, viewing that as involving waters off Taiwan.
Delimitation is the process of legally establishing the outer limits of a state.
Late on Saturday, Chinese state media said ships had been sent to carry out a “special maritime traffic law-enforcement operation” in the waters east of Taiwan in response to the Japanese and Philippine announcement.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard sent its own ships to warn away the Chinese ones and said on Sunday they had been “expelled” from restricted waters.
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On May 8, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan broke a grueling six-month stalemate by passing a landmark $25 billion defense budget, catching many observers off guard. The vote brought sudden end to an agonizing legislative deadlock that had pushed U.S.-Taiwanese relations to the edge. For months, long-simmering frustration in Washington over Taiwan’s defense trajectory has threatened to boil over, catalyzed by an unprecedented bipartisan open letter from U.S. senators, demanding that Taiwan authorize the pending defense packages.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping may not need to launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan to put the island, the U.S. and the global tech economy in crisis, according to national security experts.
Some advisers to President Donald Trump reportedly fear Xi could move against Taiwan within the next five years following Trump’s recent summit with the Chinese leader, Axios reported. One Trump adviser told the outlet the summit signaled a “much higher likelihood” that Taiwan could be “on the table” during that window, warning that the highly vulnerable U.S. semiconductor supply chain would not be ready for such a crisis.
National security experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that this is simply not the reality on the ground.