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For non-Chinese journalists, in Africa and elsewhere, working for Chinese state-run media offers generous remuneration and new opportunities. When CCTV launched its Washington headquarters in 2012, no fewer than five former or current BBC correspondents based in Latin America joined the broadcaster. One of them, Daniel Schweimler, who is now at al-Jazeera, said his experience there was fun and relatively trouble-free, though he didn’t think many people actually saw his stories. But foreign journalists working at Xinhua, the state-run news agency, see their stories reaching much larger audiences. Government subsidies cover around 40% of Xinhua’s costs, and it generates income...

The agreement reached by President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China to effectively pause their trade war and work toward a pact appears to be aimed at giving the two leaders some political breathing room after an escalating fight has begun inflicting economic damage on both sides of the Pacific. The temporary truce, forged over a working dinner on Saturday night in Buenos Aires, does little to resolve the deep differences between the two nations and is more a political agreement than a substantive one. Both sides immediately positioned the cease-fire as a domestic victory while staking out areas...

Former President George H.W. Bush, Bush 41, father of former President George W. Bush, died Friday night at the age of 94..... To the G20 summit... When they posed for a group picture Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bim Salman were at opposite ends of the picture..... The "big meeting" of the G20 summit is set for tonight when President Trump has dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping..... A 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Alaska at around 830am local time Friday, 1230pm Eastern US time..... A third week of Saturday "yellow jacket" protests in France against...

There are two links for this story. I started linking to the short video which I originally watched. It is from Asia Times. Basically it is almost an advertisement for the article. Runs about a minute and a half, although it mentions the major points from the article. Then there is an actual article in the Asia Times. I will also include a link to that article, for those who want to read the full thing.

A LITTLE NOTICED organizational change in China's maritime patrols is causing increasing anxiety among Western military officials and their allies in the region, who fear Beijing is seeking new leverage to advance its goals and raising the likelihood that an accidental encounter could escalate into conflict. The U.S. confirmed earlier this year that China has reorganized its coast guard to serve as a military branch rather than answer to law enforcement authorities. Militarizing the formerly civilian organization provides China with the firepower to harass and intimidate vessels from other countries who dispute China's claims to waterways. The change, which Beijing...

PORT MORESBY, PAPUA NEW GUINEA — For the first time in its 20-year history, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit ended in disarray Sunday when the 21 member countries could not reach consensus on a joint statement because of objections by one member — China. When the summit failed, to the disgust of the other diplomats, Chinese officials broke out in applause. But that was only the final incident in a week during which China’s official delegation staged a series of aggressive, bullying, paranoid and weird stunts to try to exert dominance and pressure the host nation and everyone else into...

President Trump and the First Lady have Dinner with President of China

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — High above Yemen’s rebel-held city of Hodeida, a drone controlled by Emirati forces hovered as an SUV carrying a top Shiite Houthi rebel official turned onto a small street and stopped, waiting for another vehicle in its convoy to catch up. Seconds later, the SUV exploded in flames, killing Saleh al-Samad, a top political figure. The drone that fired that missile in April was not one of the many American aircraft that have been buzzing across the skies of Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. It was Chinese.. Across the Middle East,...

At the crest of his political career Meng Hongwei, the first-ever Chinese president of Interpol, was proudly hailed by state media as a testimony to the international community’s “full recognition” of China’s law enforcement capacity and status as a country based on the rule of law. Less than a year after he took the helm of the global policing body, Meng hosted its general assembly in Beijing – only the second time in the country’s history. At the opening ceremony, he was given the rare privilege of sitting next to the country’s most powerful man, President Xi Jinping, who –...

In a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis in June, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed that Bejing “cannot lose even one inch of the territory” in the South China Sea. That’s about as plain a warning as one gets: China will defend, militarily, it’s outsized claims in a body of water through which one-third of all global trade passes. The U.S. would have little difficulty in taking out militarily significant targets on any of the islands in question. But that’s not really the point. Through the construction of these artificial islands-turned-military bases, China acted brazenly but in a calculated...

Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has carefully crafted an image of himself as a big-picture visionary, tasked with turning China into the world’s preeminent superpower. While Xi has focused on taking over the world, however, the average Chinese citizen appears increasingly frustrated with his inability to provide competent government functions like adequate education and health care. The result has been a wave of unprecedented public protests against Xi’s party, which has promised to bring all of China into a “new era” as a “moderately prosperous society.” From angry parents whose children received faulty vaccinations to Maoists outraged that a communist...

Trump administration officials have made thinly veiled calls for a military coup that would topple the Venezuelan dictatorship and pave the way for democracy. But some well-respected academics are warning that a military coup would more likely produce a Russia or China-backed anti-American dictatorship. Evan Ellis, a Latin America expert with the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, and Brian Fonseca, a professor at Florida International University who has written extensively about the Venezuelan military, are among those who believe that a military coup in Venezuela would probably lead to a pro-Russian or pro-China regime, rather than to a...

A large Spanish-language radio station in Mexico will soon begin broadcasting in Chinese in a deal critics say will bring Beijing propaganda to Chinese Americans throughout Southern California. A Federal Communications Commission filing on the sale of radio station XEWW AM 690 radio near Tijuana reveals the buyer has ties to Phoenix Satellite Television US, a subsidiary of Hong Kong's pro-Beijing Phoenix TV. According to government sources, signs that Phoenix is involved in the purchase of the radio station prompted the Trump administration last week to begin an investigation into the national security implications of the sale. Phoenix TV has...

China’s Xi Jinping turns out to be a jealous “god” indeed. The communist country’s long-known antipathy for religion has taken a more brutal form of late, the Associate Press reports, as Xi’s government has increasingly imposed a “Sinicized” form onto believers. The new policy has resulted in ethnic cleansing, forced re-education, and suppression of scriptures, including among the region’s Christians especially: Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is...

‘It is about Xi as the leader of the world’: Former detainees recount abuse in Chinese re-education centres Authorities in China’s far western Xinjiang province have made loyalty to President Xi Jinping a central part of an extensive political re-education campaign that requires detainees to swear allegiance to the Communist Party while forswearing a Muslim faith that they are told to repeat is “stupid.”Large numbers – researchers estimate the total in the hundreds of thousands – of people have been placed in Chinese facilities known as re-education centres, where they are forcibly indoctrinated. Many of those detained are Muslim Uyghurs...

For this week’s Big Ideas with Ben Weingarten podcast, my guest was Rachelle Peterson, director of research projects at the invaluable National Association of Scholars, and author of the groundbreaking report "Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education." Peterson’s investigation into these Chinese Communist Party-backed purported cultural exchange and language studies centers on U.S. college campuses — which she demonstrated were actually used to propagandize and penetrate our schools — preceded the recent disclosure of an FBI investigation into Confucius Institutes and a legislative effort to probe and counter their malign activities. Given China’s increasingly...

In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station. In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped the police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival. In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor. With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to...

Most observers take Xi Jinping’s ascension from China’s president to dictator as a sign of China’s national strength. But I see things differently — to the chagrin of even some members of my staff. Dictatorships are not imposed on healthy systems — especially in China. Historically, as China rises, it loses stability. When it loses stability, it installs a dictator. The dictator may take the form of an emperor or party chairman, but he is dictator nonetheless. It is in this context that I have begun to form a tentative theory: that Xi Jinping’s strength is a facade. One of...

Burning fake money and other paper effigies on certain days of the Chinese lunar calendar is a tradition many Chinese families, including Wang’s, keep in the hope that their ancestors will receive and enjoy gifts in the other world and be protected in this one. Wang had followed this practice since he was a child. But two months before leaving London after two years of study, Wang had been baptized against his parents’ wishes. Since the early 2010s, increasing numbers of Chinese students have studied abroad, mostly in English-speaking countries. Among them, as many as tens of thousands who converted...

China’s activities in the South China Sea have proven to be one of the most contentious geopolitical issues of the Trump Presidency. Leading up to a successful summit in Singapore between President Trump and North Korean leader Chairman Kim Jong Un, new data released by Israeli Private Intelligence Firm ImageSat shows that China removed anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles from Woody Island, in the South China Sea last week. Woody Island, also referred to as Yongxiang Island, is the largest of the Paracel Islands claimed by China in the South China Sea. In recent years, China has taken major steps to...