China’s Export Machine Keeps Pumping Ahead of Trump Visit—After record trade surplus in 2025, new figures suggest tensions will persist
@LandersWSJ @TByGraceZhu
wsj.com/economy/trade/…
wsj.com/economy/trade/… China’s shipments of goods abroad surged at the beginning of the year and its trade surplus rose, showing the country’s export juggernaut is chugging along ahead of President Trump’s visit to Beijing later this month.
wsj.com/economy/trade/…

China Has Spent Years Preparing for the Iran Oil Crisis—Massive oil stockpiles and a shift to electric vehicles help insulate the economy from supply disruptions in the Mideast
@BrianSpegele
wsj.com/world/china-ha…
wsj.com/world/china-ha… @BrianSpegele BEIJING—The turmoil in the global energy market from war in the Middle East is exactly the sort of emergency scenario that China has long been preparing for.
wsj.com/world/china-ha…

FT op-ed: “China’s growth target is a global problem…The target is not based in economics. It’s a political goal…Pursuing that aim, Beijing has been overinvesting for years, but lately it has been dumping the excess output it can’t sell at home.”
ft.com/content/cb69fb… FT op-ed: “In the past, China’s export volumes rose with prices; this decade, Beijing has dropped export prices by nearly 20 per cent, producing a 40 per cent surge in volume…As a share of global GDP, no nation has ever had a larger trade surplus.”
ft.com/content/cb69fb…

China’s Xi Places His Top General Under Investigation as Military Purges Heat Up—Gen. Zhang Youxia is most senior member of military hierarchy to face dismissal since fallout of 1989 Tiananmen protests
@ByChunHan @Lingling_Wei
wsj.com/world/china/ch…
wsj.com/world/china/ch… @ByChunHan @Lingling_Wei Chinese leader Xi Jinping has placed his most senior general under investigation, extending a relentless crackdown on military corruption and disloyalty that has swept through the top ranks of one of the world’s most powerful armed forces.
wsj.com/world/china/ch…

NYT: “China quietly mobilized thousands of fishing boats twice in recent weeks to form massive floating barriers of at least 200 miles long, showing a new level of coordination…to impose control in contested seas.”
@ChuBailiang @amy_changchien
nytimes.com/interactive/20… @ChuBailiang @amy_changchien Last week, about 1,400 Chinese vessels abruptly dropped their usual fishing activities or sailed out of their home ports and congregated in the East China Sea. By Jan. 11, they had assembled into a rectangle stretching more than 200 miles.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

NYT: The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly.—As warfare is reinvented in Ukraine, and Silicon Valley races to maintain its A.I. lead, China’s battery dominance is raising alarms far beyond the auto industry.
nytimes.com/2025/12/23/cli… Chinese battery dominance has long been a problem for auto manufacturing, but now is increasingly being viewed as a national security threat. Currently, U.S. military forces rely on Chinese supply chains for some 6,000 individual battery components.
nytimes.com/2025/12/23/cli…

China’s Sprint for Tech Dominance Can’t Hide an Economy Full of Holes—Self-sufficiency push has made China a tougher competitor to the U.S., but it comes with enormous waste
@BrianSpegele @TByGraceZhu
wsj.com/world/china/ch…
wsj.com/world/china/ch… @BrianSpegele @TByGraceZhu BEIJING—In cities and small towns across China, two seemingly contradictory facts are simultaneously true: China is closing the gap with the U.S. for global technological dominance, and yet big parts of its economy are a mess.
wsj.com/world/china/ch…

The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S.-Born Babies Via Surrogate—Videogame executive Xu Bo, said to have more than 100 children, and other elites build mega-families, testing citizenship laws
@BenFoldy @Lingling_Wei
wsj.com/us-news/chines…
wsj.com/us-news/chines… @BenFoldy @Lingling_Wei Inside a closed Los Angeles courtroom, something wasn’t right. Clerks working for family court Judge Amy Pellman were reviewing routine surrogacy petitions when they spotted an unusual pattern: the same name, again and again.
wsj.com/us-news/chines…

Biden administration official Melanie Hart: “I exited my time in government feeling like transatlantic cooperation on China was the big missing piece. We did our absolute best in every way to pull Europe along and find ways to collaborate on China.”
thewirechina.com/2025/10/26/mel… Hart: “I was deeply disappointed in Europe’s ability to follow through on actual solutions…Europe insists on bringing a butter knife to a gunfight again and again, and it was frustrating to not be able to move beyond that.”
thewirechina.com/2025/10/26/mel…

Most-Wanted Fentanyl Producer Is Extradited to the U.S. After Brazen Escape—Zhi Dong Zhang, one of the Justice Department’s most-wanted , fled house arrest in Mexico. He was in Cuban custody.
@PerezEnMexico @Jose_deCordoba wsj.com/world/americas…
wsj.com/world/americas… @PerezEnMexico @Jose_deCordoba MEXICO CITY—The accused Chinese drug boss was this close to the perfect getaway. In July, Zhi Dong Zhang escaped from house arrest in Mexico, where he was set to be extradited to the U.S. on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges.
wsj.com/world/americas…

.@KaiserKuo: “We have witnessed not merely the rise of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought—about development, political systems, and civilizational achievement itself.”
sinicapodcast.com/p/the-great-re… @KaiserKuo Kuo: “China is now shaping the trajectory of development, setting the pace…For Americans especially, the deeper psychic shock lies in the recognition that modernity is no longer something they authored and others merely inherit.”
sinicapodcast.com/p/the-great-re…

China’s Economy Shows Signs of Summer Slowdown—Broad slowdown hits world’s second-largest economy as trade uncertainties loom, property sector weakens
@hannahmiao_ @ByXiaoXiao @TByGraceZhu
wsj.com/economy/chinas…
wsj.com/economy/chinas… @hannahmiao_ @ByXiaoXiao @TByGraceZhu Signs of weakness in China’s economy stretched into August, adding pressure on Beijing to step up efforts to stimulate near-term growth.
wsj.com/economy/chinas…

How China’s New Naval and Air Sites Would Aid an Attack on Taiwan—Satellite images show major infrastructure expansion, including on the Taiwan Strait
@NiharikaSM
wsj.com/world/china/ch…
wsj.com/world/china/ch… @NiharikaSM China is undertaking a large-scale build-out of infrastructure along its east coast, including air and naval sites that show its growing readiness for a potential conflict over Taiwan.
wsj.com/world/china/ch…

China Ups Surveillance of Troubled People to Quell Rising Unrest—Communist Party’s new ‘society work’ agency helps with emotional and economic setbacks while monitoring dissatisfied people
@ByChunHan @shenlulushen
wsj.com/world/china/ch…
wsj.com/world/china/ch… @ByChunHan @shenlulushen A 68-year-old man in China’s Zhejiang province barged into a local government office last year and declared he couldn’t go on living. His neighbors were bullying him, he claimed, and he threatened to take revenge.
wsj.com/world/china/ch…

“Navigating the President’s Policy Whiplash on China—Is it a trade war or a big deal? Six months into his second term, President Trump’s China policy seems to be a bit of both—and neither.”
@Lingling_Wei
wsjchina.cmail20.com/t/d-e-suhslt-d… @Lingling_Wei You could feel that sense of strategic whiplash everywhere at last week’s Aspen Security Forum. A main question many asked wasn't just what the White House would do next on China, but whether it had a coherent plan at all.
wsjchina.cmail20.com/t/d-e-suhslt-d…

How the Trauma of the One-Child Policy Lingers in China—Beijing tends to brush off the impact of its policies, be it its Covid restrictions or the Great Leap Forward, urging citizens to look ahead. But the one-child policy is hard to shake off.
@QiLiyan
wsjchina.cmail20.com/t/d-e-skdlhly-… @QiLiyan “For one thing, it accelerated the demographic bind China faces of now–dropping birthrates and a rapidly aging population. The policies to control the population have given way to new ones to strongly encourage births.”
wsjchina.cmail20.com/t/d-e-skdlhly-…

Chinese AI Companies Dodge U.S. Chip Curbs by Flying Suitcases of Hard Drives Abroad—Engineers carry data to countries where Nvidia chips are available, frustrating Washington’s aims
@raffaelehuang @lizalinwsj
wsj.com/tech/china-ai-…
wsj.com/tech/china-ai-… @raffaelehuang @lizalinwsj KUALA LUMPUR—In March, four Chinese engineers flew to Malaysia from Beijing, each carrying a suitcase packed with 15 hard drives. The drives contained 80 terabytes of spreadsheets, images and video clips for training an artificial-intelligence model.
wsj.com/tech/china-ai-…

“Although Xi has clearly consolidated his authority as China’s paramount leader, he now appears to be delegating key aspects of governance—particularly in economic policymaking—to his deputy, Premier Li Qiang.”
@neilthomas123 @ChinaFile
chinafile.com/reporting-opin… @neilthomas123 @ChinaFile “Xi seems to be transitioning from hands-on control to a more oracular leadership style: preserving ultimate decision-making authority while entrusting more day-to-day policymaking to the loyalists.”
chinafile.com/reporting-opin…

How Images of the Dalai Lama Landed a Tibetan Woman in China’s Dragnet—Rare account of woman who escaped Tibet sheds new light on China’s policies aimed at bringing the region to heel
@triptilahiri @austinramzy @pokharelkrishna
wsj.com/world/china/da…
wsj.com/world/china/da… @triptilahiri @austinramzy @pokharelkrishna DHARAMSHALA, India—Nam Kyi, a young Tibetan activist, had been out of prison for only a few years when she was picked up by Chinese police in 2022.
wsj.com/world/china/da…

Beijing Doesn’t Want America to See Its Trade-War Pain—Plunging trade has already led to job cuts; ‘it is very painful’
@Lingling_Wei @raffaelehuang
wsj.com/world/china/be…
wsj.com/world/china/be… China has signaled that as a nation it is better able to tolerate the pain of a prolonged tariff war than the U.S. But cracks are starting to show, suggesting how deeply that pain is already setting in across its economy.
wsj.com/world/china/be…

China, Philippines Make Rival Claims in Disputed South China Sea—Both countries plant flags on a collection of sand bars, heightening a standoff between Beijing and Manila, a U.S. ally
@gksteinhauser @austinramzy
wsj.com/world/asia/chi…
wsj.com/world/asia/chi… @gksteinhauser @austinramzy China and the Philippines have staked rival claims to a spit of land in the South China Sea, moves that could further inflame tensions in one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
wsj.com/world/asia/chi…