July 18, 2026

Southeast Asia Watch

Blurb:

The open-source AI agent framework OpenClaw has recently gone viral worldwide, drawing significant attention from the tech industry. By enabling AI to move beyond generating content to actually executing tasks, the framework is widely seen as a key step toward the AI agent era. A growing number of Chinese technology companies are actively exploring similar approaches and rolling out related products.

Moonshot AI was among the first to launch Kimi Claw, a native integration with OpenClaw. The product emphasizes zero-code deployment and one-click setup, while also offering free computing power subsidies for OpenClaw calls, lowering the barrier for users. The move has attracted a large influx of users and helped accelerate the company’s overseas expansion, with the number of paying international users surging and overseas revenue surpassing domestic revenue for the first time.

Blurb:

President Donald Trump’s actions in Venezuela and Iran are the first time that any president has made any progress against China’s decades old effort to peacefully subvert the U.S.

It is no secret that China has two goals: to seize control of Taiwan and to become the lone global superpower by 2049, the centennial of the communist control over the country. China is our primary geopolitical rival, if not our mortal enemy.

Over the past few decades, China has successfully subverted the U.S. through globalization. The U.S. now depends on China for antibiotics, energy, technology hardware and vital rare earth minerals and their processing. China could shut off exports of these and other goods, and our economy, society and security would be crippled.

Yes, China would hurt itself by doing these things, but China is an iron-fisted totalitarian state where any social unrest would be much more easily (read brutally) addressed than in the U.S.

Geopolitical analysts have observed that one of the hardest hit casualties of the fall of Iran’s Islamic Republic regime is America’s main competitor, China. Chairman Xi has spent a decade himself, and billions of dollars, cultivating Middle East relations, largely through its major supporter, Iran.

In addition to that, the failure of Chinese war tech to stop the absolute brutalization of Iran and help it mount an effective counter (so far) will cause its current allies and customers to second-guess both its military tech capabilities and its capacity to protect them from American aggression. China was also hoping on Iran’s continued support of radical militant Islam colonizing western countries would continue, accelerating the decline of the West, rendering it a feckless foe.

Blurb:

China Scrambles As U.S Israeli Strike On Iran Upends Xi’s Middle East Strategy  Rocky Mountain Voice
from news.google.com

The men in Zhongnanhai do not rattle easily. Decades of patient statecraft, a foreign policy built on studied ambiguity, and an economy engineered to absorb external shocks have granted Beijing’s leadership a remarkable tolerance for turbulence. Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.–Israeli military campaign now dismantling Iran’s military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion.

Xi Jinping is scrambling — and that word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, Xi faces an acutely dangerous moment — not because China faces a direct military threat but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.

Blurb:

China’s ongoing military corruption purges have created serious deficiencies in the command structure of its armed forces and are likely to have affected the readiness of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to a leading defence research centre.The purges, led by the Chinese president Xi Jinping, which have spanned the supreme central military commission, theatre commands, weapons procurement, development programmes, and defence academia, are expected to be incomplete, said London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) this week, according to Reuters.

Blurb:

The Justice Department announced Wednesday that a former U.S. Air Force major and longtime fighter pilot has been arrested on charges that he trained Chinese military pilots without authorization.

Gerald Eddie Brown Jr., 65, was taken into custody in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and is expected to appear in federal court on Thursday. Prosecutors allege that beginning around August 2023, Brown worked to arrange combat aircraft training for members of China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force and traveled to China in December 2023 to carry it out.

Federal officials were blunt.

“The United States Air Force trained Major Brown to be an elite fighter pilot and entrusted him with the defense of our Nation. He now stands charged with training Chinese military pilots.”

The Governor of New York and DNC-CCP party member Kathy Hochul handed New York’s vital data over to the Chinese Communist Party by allowing a country sworn to destroy our power to run their robotaxis, called Waymos, on American streets.

The company, Zeke, is a CCP-approved corporation that manufactures what are essentially street spies that members of the Democrat party appear more than ready to cosign. This, in part, is why this publication refers to the Democrats as the DNC-CCP, for they are frenemies working against the same enemy, America.

Blurb:

Who makes the Waymos flooding American streets? China – theblaze.com

Governor Kathy Hochul recently slowed, but did not stop, Waymo’s march into New York, blocking expansion beyond city limits while leaving the door wide open inside them.

These aren’t simply cars without drivers. Waymo’s robotaxis are mobile intelligence machines. They map infrastructure, catalogue faces, record ambient sound, and track movement patterns across entire cities — continuously and autonomously. Unlike a fixed security camera or an app you can delete, these vehicles move freely through neighborhoods, past hospitals, around government buildings, silently collecting everything in their path. The data never sleeps, and the cars never stop.

Numerous western media outlets ran an article on February 20, 2026 that claimed to be from an American sympathizer whistleblower from within who saw the arrest of Chairman Xi’s top rival, Zhang Youxia. Analysis of the article reveals this is agit prop aimed at Youxia. It romanticizes his arrest while sprinkling in accusations against him, including claims Youxia committed espionage.

Blurb:

Xi Jinping’s Propaganda Machine Planted a Fake Insider Account to Frame Zhang Youxia  Vision Times
from news.google.com

On Feb. 20, just days before the National People’s Congress—the CCP’s rubber-stamp legislature—was set to review “representative qualifications and personnel appointments,” a lengthy article appeared on overseas platforms claiming to reveal the inside story of Zhang Youxia’s arrest. For months, Zhang, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, China’s top military command body, has been involved in a power struggle with CCP general secretary Xi Jinping.

The anonymous author described himself as “a pro-American figure within the CCP’s decision-making apparatus,” someone who “passed through facial-recognition security at the west gate of Zhongnanhai,” the walled compound in central Beijing where China’s top leaders work, “and waited for the elevator in the hallway outside the Politburo meeting room.” He promised to recount “the entire process of Zhang Youxia’s downfall, from start to finish, without omitting a single word.”

The problem is that his account contained far too many words, and far too many conveniently placed details…

Beneath the thriller-style narrative, the article methodically laid out three accusations against Zhang Youxia, each designed to destroy his reputation among different audiences.

Regarding the nuclear espionage charge, the article claimed that on Jan. 8, 2026, Gu Jun—the head of China National Nuclear Corporation, a state-owned enterprise overseeing the country’s entire civilian and military nuclear infrastructure—was taken from his home by operatives of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party body Xi Jinping has reportedly used to target political rivals under the guise of “anti-corruption” enforcement.

According to the account, Gu held access to the entire nuclear weapons chain, from uranium enrichment to warhead miniaturization to missile reentry guidance. The article claimed that on his third day in custody, Gu broke under interrogation and implicated Zhang, saying he had passed nuclear missile parameters to the Americans through intermediaries, including maneuvering algorithms for the Dongfeng-41’s reentry warheads and trigger sequences for miniaturized fusion devices. The article then quoted Xi slamming his hand on the table and shouting: “This is treason!”

The key phrase in the account was that Gu “confessed to everything.” In the CCP’s extralegal detention system, where suspects are held incommunicado with no legal counsel and subjected to physical and psychological torture, “confessions” are manufactured to order. Everything that followed was designed to be accepted as fact by readers swept along by the narrative.

Blurb:

CHINA has been accused of a massive nuclear expansion as well as carrying out secret tests by the US.

The latest accusations come as the United States bids to force Beijing to join a future arms control treaty.

The US has accused China of not disclosing their nuclear weapons capabilities and of carrying out secret weapons testing, as displayed in a Chinese propaganda videoCredit: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation
China has denied the claims by Christopher Yeaw – Trump’s assistant secretary of state for arms control and non-proliferationCredit: AFP
US intelligence agencies have claimed Chinese explosive test s were carried out in 2020, despite satellite imagery not showing evidence of any activity.

Blurb:

Drones are increasingly violating American airspace. We know that tens of thousands of drone sightings on our southern border are connected with the Mexican drug and human trafficking cartels. But dozens of other drone sightings at sensitive military installations suggest hostile nation-state actors, most likely China.

As drone operations in Russia’s war on Ukraine show, the threat is no longer hypothetical — it is active and escalating. Unfortunately, a dangerous combination of bureaucratic inertia and misplaced priorities has left our borders and military installations vulnerable.

Signs within China point to instability continuing in the wake of Chairman Xi’s recent purge of an attempted coup that appears to have been led by the-then second most powerful man in China, Zhang Youxia. Zhang was well-respected by the military, and they appear willing to send public signals they continue to support him.

That signal came through their newspaper, the Liberation Army Daily, which featured an article signaling support for an historic figure like Zhang Youxia, Zhang Guotao, who broke with Mao Zedong in the 30s. This was the first of six similar articles released following the reported arrest of Zhang Youxia.

Blurb:

Xi Jinping Has Turned China’s Military Against Him, and the Party’s Own Newspaper Proves It  Vision Times
from news.google.com

On Feb. 11, the Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of China’s military, published yet another article invoking Zhang Guotao, a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party who broke with Mao Zedong in the 1930s and is remembered in Party mythology as the archetype of treachery and “splitting the Party and the army.” The article accused Zhang Guotao of “carrying out activities to split the Party and the Red Army,” language that transparently targets two recently purged military leaders: Zhang Youxia, the former vice chairman of China’s top military command body (the Central Military Commission), and Liu Zhenli, the former chief of the Joint Staff Department, China’s most senior operational military commander.

This was the sixth such article since Jan.16, the date that online sources say Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli were physically detained, eight days before their purge was officially announced on Jan. 24. All six articles share a revealing pattern: every one of them invokes the historical villain Zhang Guotao, and every one of them avoids mentioning Zhang Youxia or Liu Zhenli by name. The gap between the fury of the rhetoric and the absence of the actual targets’ names speaks volumes about how politically explosive these purges remain.

The six articles, with their dates and titles, are:

Jan. 18: “Courage Is Measured by What You Fear and What You Don’t”

Feb. 2: “Political Army-Building Special: Strong Organizations Make a Strong Army”