BEIJING (AP) — Italy and China signed a three-year action plan on Sunday to implement past agreements and experiment with new forms of cooperation, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on an official visit to the Chinese capital.
Meloni is trying to reset relations with China as fears of a trade war with the European Union are interwoven with continued interest in attracting Chinese investment in auto manufacturing and other sectors.
“We certainly have a lot of work to do and I am convinced that this work can be useful in such a complex phase on a global level, and also important at a multilateral level,” she said in remarks at the start of a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang.
Her five-day visit comes several months after Italy dropped out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a signature policy of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to build power and transportation infrastructure around the world to stimulate global trade while also deepening China’s ties with other nations.
Still, Italy remains keen to pursue an otherwise strong economic relationship with China. Stellantis, a major automaker that includes Italy’s Fiat, announced in May that it had formed a joint venture with Leapmotor, a Chinese electric car startup, to begin selling EVs in Europe.
Li, addressing Italian and Chinese business leaders after the meeting with Meloni, said that China’s push to upgrade its economy will increase demand for high-quality products, expanding opportunities for cooperation between companies from their two countries.
He pledged to open Chinese markets further, ensure that foreign companies get the same treatment as Chinese ones and create a transparent and predictable business environment, responding to frequently heard complaints from businesses operating in the world’s second-largest economy.
“At the same time, we hope the Italian side will work with China to provide a more fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies doing business in Italy,” he said.
Meloni told the business leaders that the two sides had signed an industrial collaboration memorandum that includes electric vehicles and renewable energy, which she described as “sectors where China has already been operating on the technological frontier for some time … and is sharing the new frontiers of knowledge with partners.”
Electric vehicles have also become a symbol of growing China-EU trade tensions, with the European Union imposing provisional tariffs of up to 37.6% on China-made electric vehicles in early July. The two sides are holding talks to try to resolve the issue by an early November deadline.
Meanwhile, China launched an anti-dumping investigation into European pork exports, just days after the EU announced it would impose the tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Meloni, who arrived in Beijing on Saturday, is making her first trip to China as prime minister. She has held talks with Li before, meeting in New Delhi last September during the annual G-20 summit, which brings together the leaders of 20 major nations.
Italy’s decision to join the Belt and Road Initiative in 2019 appeared to be a political coup for China, giving it an inroad into Western Europe and a symbolic boost in a then-raging trade war with the United States. But Italy says the promised economic benefits didn’t materialize, and its membership created friction with other Western European governments and the United States.
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Associated Press writer Giada Zampano in Rome contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a fresh broadside against one of the world’s most popular technology companies, the Justice Department is accusing TikTok of harnessing the capability to gather bulk information on users based on views on divisive social issues like gun control, abortion and religion.
Government lawyers wrote in documents filed late Friday to the federal appeals court in Washington that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance used an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.
TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about U.S. users, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said.
One of Lark’s internal search tools, the filing states, permits ByteDance and TikTok employees in the U.S. and China to gather information on users’ content or expressions, including views on sensitive topics, such as abortion or religion. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported TikTok had tracked users who watched LGBTQ content through a dashboard the company said it had since deleted.
The new court documents represent the government’s first major defense in a consequential legal battle over the future of the popular social media platform, which is used by more than 170 million Americans. Under a law signed by President Joe Biden in April, the company could face a ban in a few months if it doesn’t break ties with ByteDance.
The measure was passed with bipartisan support after lawmakers and administration officials expressed concerns that Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over U.S. user data or sway public opinion towards Beijing’s interests by manipulating the algorithm that populates users’ feeds.
”’Intelligence reporting further demonstrates that ByteDance and TikTok Global have taken action in response to (Chinese government) demands to censor content outside of China,” Casey Blackburn, a senior U.S. intelligence official, wrote in a filing that supported the government’s arguments.
The Justice Department warned, in stark terms, of the potential for what it called “covert content manipulation” by the Chinese government, saying the algorithm could be designed to shape content that users receive.
“By directing ByteDance or TikTok to covertly manipulate that algorithm, China could for example further its existing malign influence operations and amplify its efforts to undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions,” the brief states.
The concern, the Justice Department said, is more than theoretical, alleging that TikTok and ByteDance employees are known to engage in a practice called “heating” in which certain videos are promoted in order to receive a certain number of views. While this capability enables TikTok to curate popular content and disseminate it more widely, U.S. officials posit it can also be used for nefarious purposes.
Federal officials are asking the court to allow a classified version of the legal brief, which would not be accessible to the two companies.
Nothing in the redacted brief “changes the fact that the Constitution is on our side,” TikTok spokesperson Alex Haurek said in a statement.
“The TikTok ban would silence 170 million Americans’ voices, violating the 1st Amendment,” Haurek said. “As we’ve said before, the government has never put forth proof of its claims, including when Congress passed this unconstitutional law. Today, once again, the government is taking this unprecedented step while hiding behind secret information. We remain confident we will prevail in court.”
In the redacted version of the court documents, the Justice Department said another tool triggered the suppression of content based on the use of certain words. Certain policies of the tool applied to ByteDance users in China, where the company operates a similar app called Douyin that follows Beijing’s strict censorship rules.
But Justice Department officials said other policies may have been applied to TikTok users outside of China. TikTok was investigating the existence of these policies and whether they had ever been used in the U.S. in, or around, 2022, officials said.
The government points to the Lark data transfers to explain why federal officials do not believe that Project Texas, TikTok’s $1.5 billion mitigation plan to store U.S. user data on servers owned and maintained by the tech giant Oracle, is sufficient to guard against national security concerns.
In its legal challenge against the law, TikTok has heavily leaned on arguments that the potential ban violates the First Amendment because it bars the app from continued speech unless it attracts a new owner through a complex divestment process. It has also argued divestment would change the speech on the platform because it would create a version of TikTok lacking the algorithm that has driven its success.
In its response, the Justice Department argued TikTok has not raised any valid free speech claims, saying the law addresses national security concerns without targeting protected speech, and argues that China and ByteDance, as foreign entities, aren’t shielded by the First Amendment.
TikTok has also argued the U.S. law discriminates on viewpoints, citing statements from some lawmakers critical of what they viewed as an anti-Israel tilt on the platform during the war in Gaza.
Justice Department officials disputes that argument, saying the law at issue reflects their ongoing concern that China could weaponize technology against U.S. national security, a fear they say is made worse by demands that companies under Beijing’s control turn over sensitive data to the government. They say TikTok, under its current operating structure, is required to be responsive to those demands.
Oral arguments in the case is scheduled for September.
HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong’s leader said Tuesday that eight pro-democracy activists who now live in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia will be pursued for life for alleged national security offenses, dismissing criticism that the move to have them arrested was a dangerous precedent.
Chief Executive John Lee expressed his support for police efforts to arrest the eight. At his weekly media briefing, Lee said anyone, including their friends and relatives, who offered information leading to their arrests would be eligible for rewards offered by the police.
“The only way to end their destiny of being an abscondee who will be pursued for life is to surrender,” he said.
Hong Kong lawmakers on Thursday passed an amendment to a law to eliminate most directly elected seats on local district councils, the last major political representative bodies chosen by the public.
Hong Kong police have arrested four men they accused of providing financial support to people who fled overseas and are involved in activities endangering national security, escalating a high-profile crackdown on dissidents in the semi-autonomous Chinese city.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has criticized Hong Kong authorities over their pursuit of two pro-democracy activists who live in Australia.
Hong Kong police have offered rewards for information leading to the arrests of eight pro-democracy activists who went into exile abroad and are accused of violating the territory’s harsh National Security Law.
The arrest warrants were issued for former pro-democracy lawmakers Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok, lawyer Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat and activists Finn Lau, Anna Kwok and Elmer Yuen. They were accused of breaching the Beijing-imposed National Security Law by committing offenses such as collusion with foreign powers and inciting secession.
More than 260 people have been arrested under the law, which was enacted in 2020 as part of a broad crackdown on dissent in the territory, but the rewards of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($127,600) for information leading to each arrest are the first offered under the legislation.
The move quickly drew criticism from the U.S. and British governments, which took issue with the extraterritorial application of the security law. The U.S. said it marked a dangerous precedent that threatened human rights. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong tweeted that her country was “deeply concerned” by reports of Hong Kong authorities issuing arrest warrants for democracy advocates.
But Lee insisted that extraterritorial power exists in the security laws of many countries. He said his government will not be swayed by comments by overseas officials and politicians.
“I’m not afraid of any political pressure that is put on us because we do what we believe is right,” he said.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said China strongly deplored other countries’ “flagrant slandering” of its National Security Law for Hong Kong. “Justice will never be delayed or absent,” she said.
The row reflects a fresh source of contention between Beijing and the West over the alleged overseas reach of China’s enforcement agencies. China was reported to be running secret overseas police stations across North America, Europe and in other countries where Chinese communities include critics of the Communist Party who have family or business contacts in China. Beijing denied they are police stations, saying they exist mainly to provide citizen services such as renewing driver’s licenses.
Hong Kong Secretary for Security Chris Tang doubled down on the crackdown against the eight activists, saying authorities are seeking to cut access to their finances including freezing and confiscating their assets. Investigations will be conducted to find those who support them financially in Hong Kong and overseas, Tang said.
He warned that anyone who assists them in endangering national security may be violating the law.
Hong Kong’s action did not stop the activists from speaking up.
Law, who is accused of foreign collusion and inciting secession, said on Facebook that he was again being targeted by China’s Communist Party and that he felt the “invisible pressure.” However, he refused to surrender.
“All I did was reasonable, justifiable and peaceful advocacy work,” the British-based activist said.
Mung said in an online interview that even though he is not facing imminent arrest because he is now based in the U.K., he worries that the warrant could trigger some Chinese nationalists in Britain to threaten him. Still, he pledged to continue his advocacy work.
“The Chinese government is … trying to spread the fear not only in Hong Kong, but also outside Hong Kong,” he said. “If we just give up because of this kind of suppression, then it will … encourage the regime to do more suppression to silence the people.”
Yam told Australian media that the move was not completely unexpected. “The only remaining voices of dissent are now outside Hong Kong, and that’s where they’re expanding to next,” he said.
Anna Kwok tweeted that she would not back down. She reiterated her call to bar Lee, who was sanctioned by Washington over his involvement in the harsh crackdown on rights in Hong Kong, from attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings in November in the U.S.
Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997, has come under increasingly tight scrutiny by Beijing following months of mass pro-democracy protests in 2019.
Police on Monday acknowledged they will not be able to arrest the eight if they remain overseas.
Eunice Yung, a pro-Beijing lawmaker and the daughter-in-law of Yuen, supported the police move and said she cut ties with Yuen last August.
“All his acts have nothing to do with me,” she said on Facebook.
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that he has received an invitation for an official visit to China, but did not disclose whether or when the trip would take place.
The Israeli leader made the announcement during a meeting with visiting members of the U.S. Congress. The invitation follows several recent overtures by Beijing to increase its diplomatic footprint in the region and comes at a time of heightened friction between the Biden administration and Netanyahu’s ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox government.
Netanyahu’s office said the “projected visit” to China would be his fourth as prime minister. It said it notified the Biden administration, which has a rocky relationship with China, about the invitation last month. It declined to comment on possible dates for the trip.
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is criticizing former President Donald Trump for being too friendly to China during his time in office while also warning that weak support for Ukraine would “only encourage” China to invade Taiwan.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has discussed his country’s interest in boosting economic ties with China during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing.
China’s muted reaction to the Wagner mercenary group uprising against Russia’s military belies Beijing’s growing anxieties over the war in Ukraine and how this affects the global balance of power.
Four people have died and three others are missing after landslides hit a county in China’s southwestern Sichuan province, leading authorities to evacuate more than 900 people.
China has taken a more strident role in Mideast diplomacy in recent months, brokering a deal to restore ties between Israel’s archenemy, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in April and hosting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Beijing earlier this month.
Israel and China have close economic relations, but Israel’s diplomatic and security ties with the U.S. have precluded closer collaboration with China.
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, returned to power in late 2022 after forming a coalition with ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox allies, the most hard-line and religious government in Israel’s 75-year history.
After launching an attempted overhaul of the country’s judiciary in January while Netanyahu is on trial on corruption charges, the government has faced weekly mass protests as well as criticism from Washington.
In light of that contentious judicial overhaul, as well as the government’s aggressive advancement of West Bank settlements, Netanyahu has not yet been invited for a White House visit. Such visits are normally standard practice for Israeli leaders.
China has so far not acted in an aggressive manner toward shipping in the South China Sea, but the very potential of action creates a clear threat to the economies of Japan and South Korea.
Kazuhiro Nogi | AFP | Getty Images
The following commentary is from Kevin Klowden, chief global strategist of Milken Institute.
News coverage of the weekend’s Group of Seven meetings focused on Ukraine, but China’s rising global presence was the other big topic on the G7 agenda. For two of East Asia’s biggest economies, in particular, the implications of that rise are critically important.
Most of the world is focused on the resource and military implications of Chinese claims to the islands in the region, and Beijing’s development of what is becoming the world’s largest navy. For Japan and South Korea, the threat to their supply chains and energy imports is a far more real and present issue.
In particular, Japan and South Korea are concerned about Chinese declarations which invoke not only the right to inspect cargo, but also the ability to restrict traffic. Neither Japan nor South Korea has any political interest in the ownership of the Spratly Islands, or in China replacing the United States as a dominant naval power. However, they have a strong economic stake in moving their energy imports and manufacturing components without fear of restriction. Even in a non-wartime situation, China has taken the position that the South China Sea is a controlled territory rather than open international waters under Chinese guardianship.
China has so far not acted in an aggressive manner toward shipping in the sea, but the very potential of action creates a clear threat to the economies of Japan and South Korea. China wouldn’t even have to directly stop vessels — it could merely electronically track specific cargo, or carry out inspections or diversions. Such actions would raise the specter of unpredictability and significantly rising costs.
For Japan and South Korea, the role taken by the United States in the post-World War II period was far less disruptive, not only because of their alliance but, more importantly, because the United States acted as a guarantor of free trade and protected movement through the corridor.
Linking the two countries to trading partners in Southeast Asia, India, and beyond is going to increase rather than decrease in importance.
Kevin Klowden
Milken Institute
Few people outside Japan or South Korea focus on or understand just how significant the South China Sea is when it comes to regional and even global energy supplies. Significantly, the sea is estimated to carry 30% of the world’s crude oil, supplying China and providing a vital lifeline for the energy-dependent economies of South Korea and Japan.
For Japan, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and subsequent nuclear accident at Fukushima only exacerbated that dependence. The resulting curtailment of Japan’s nuclear program has left the country dependent on energy imports, with as much as 98% of Japanese oil coming from the Middle East.
In many ways, South Korea is even more dependent on energy imports than Japan, making oil and natural gas imports especially significant.
The South China Sea is important in more than just energy. It also serves as a key passageway for Japan and South Korea’s global supply chains. Estimates suggest that the sea carries between 20% and 33% of global trade; for Japan, that figure reaches as much as 40%.
As global supply chains regionalize, the role of the South China Sea in the Japanese and South Korean economies will only grow. Linking the two countries to trading partners in Southeast Asia, India, and beyond is going to increase rather than decrease in importance.
Japan and South Korea have been able to rely on the stability of the South China Sea as a conduit for driving their economic growth, even as the global political situation has changed over the decades. Significant shifts, including the Vietnam War and the end of the Cold War, haven’t stopped trade in the sea from growing more and more important.
As the United States balances commitments in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, the three strongest economies of East Asia — China included — all have a vested interest in ensuring the stability of trade, supply chains and energy flows.
For South Korea and Japan, trade remains stable in the South China Sea for now. But with China increasingly looking to assert itself and change the status quo in its favor, it’s essential that both countries ask themselves: How much are they willing and able to concede to China in the region before it becomes untenable? And are they prepared with alternatives that will allow them to compete economically?
Knowing the answers to those questions and being prepared for a more Chinese-dominant future in the South China Sea is important for all three countries — even if the status quo holds for now.
BEIJING (AP) — Furious at U.S. efforts that cut off access to technology to make advanced computer chips, China’s leaders appear to be struggling to figure out how to retaliate without hurting their own ambitions in telecoms, artificial intelligence and other industries.
President Xi Jinping’s government sees the chips that are used in everything from phones to kitchen appliances to fighter jets as crucial assets in its strategic rivalry with Washington and efforts to gain wealth and global influence. Chips are the center of a “technology war,” a Chinese scientist wrote in an official journal in February.
China has its own chip foundries, but they supply only low-end processors used in autos and appliances. The U.S. government, starting under then-President Donald Trump, is cutting off access to a growing array of tools to make chips for computer servers, AI and other advanced applications. Japan and the Netherlands have joined in limiting access to technology they say might be used to make weapons.
Xi, in unusually pointed language, accused Washington in March of trying to block China’s development with a campaign of “containment and suppression.” He called on the public to “dare to fight.”
Despite that, Beijing has been slow to retaliate against U.S. companies, possibly to avoid disrupting Chinese industries that assemble most of the world’s smartphones, tablet computers and other consumer electronics. They import more than $300 billion worth of foreign chips every year.
The ruling Communist Party is throwing billions of dollars at trying to accelerate chip development and reduce the need for foreign technology.
China’s loudest complaint: It is blocked from buying a machine available only from a Dutch company, ASML, that uses ultraviolet light to etch circuits into silicon chips on a scale measured in nanometers, or billionths of a meter. Without that, Chinese efforts to make transistors faster and more efficient by packing them more closely together on fingernail-size slivers of silicon are stalled.
Making processor chips requires some 1,500 steps and technologies owned by U.S., European, Japanese and other suppliers.
“China won’t swallow everything. If damage occurs, we must take action to protect ourselves,” the Chinese ambassador to the Netherlands, Tan Jian, told the Dutch newspaper Financieele Dagblad.
“I’m not going to speculate on what that might be,” Tan said. “It won’t just be harsh words.”
The conflict has prompted warnings the world might decouple, or split into separate spheres with incompatible technology standards that mean computers, smartphones and other products from one region wouldn’t work in others. That would raise costs and might slow innovation.
“The bifurcation in technological and economic systems is deepening,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore said at an economic forum in China last month. “This will impose a huge economic cost.”
U.S.-Chinese relations are at their lowest level in decades due to disputes over security, Beijing’s treatment of Hong Kong and Muslim ethnic minorities, territorial disputes and China’s multibillion-dollar trade surpluses.
Chinese industries will “hit a wall” in 2025 or 2026 if they can’t get next generation chips or the tools to make their own, said Handel Jones, a tech industry consultant.
China “will start falling behind significantly,” said Jones, CEO of International Business Strategies.
Beijing might have leverage, though, as the biggest source of batteries for electric vehicles, Jones said.
Chinese battery giant CATL supplies U.S. and Europe automakers. Ford Motor Co. plans to use CATL technology in a $3.5 billion battery factory in Michigan.
“China will strike back,” Jones said. “What the public might see is China not giving the U.S. batteries for EVs.”
On Friday, Japan increased pressure on Beijing by joining Washington in imposing controls on exports of chipmaking equipment. The announcement didn’t mention China, but the trade minister said Tokyo doesn’t want its technology used for military purposes.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, Mao Ning, warned Japan that “weaponizing sci-tech and trade issues” would “hurt others as well as oneself.”
Hours later, the Chinese government announced an investigation of the biggest U.S. memory chip maker, Micron Technology Inc., a key supplier to Chinese factories. The Cyberspace Administration of China said it would look for national security threats in Micron’s technology and manufacturing but gave no details.
The Chinese military also needs semiconductors for its development of stealth fighter jets, cruise missiles and other weapons.
Chinese alarm grew after President Joe Biden in October expanded controls imposed by Trump on chip manufacturing technology. Biden also barred Americans from helping Chinese manufacturers with some processes.
To nurture Chinese suppliers, Xi’s government is stepping up support that industry experts say already amounts to as much as $30 billion a year in research grants and other subsidies.
China’s biggest maker of memory chips, Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp., or YMTC, received a 49 billion yuan ($7 billion) infusion this year from two official funds, according to Tianyancha, a financial information provider.
One was the government’s main investment vehicle, the China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, known as the Big Fund. It was founded in 2014 with 139 billion yuan ($21 billion) and has invested in hundreds of companies.
The Big Fund launched a second entity, known as the Big Fund II, in 2019 with 200 billion yuan ($30 billion).
In January, chip manufacturer Hua Hong Semiconductor said Big Fund II would contribute 1.2 billion yuan ($175 million) for a planned 6.7 billion yuan ($975 million) wafer fabrication facility in eastern China’s Wuxi.
In March, the Cabinet promised tax breaks and other support for the industry. It gave no price tag. The government also has set up “integrated circuit talent training bases” at 23 universities and six at other schools.
“Semiconductors are the ‘main battlefield’ of the current China-U.S. technology war,” Junwei Luo, a scientist at the official Institute of Semiconductors, wrote in the February issue of the journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Luo called for “self-reliance and self-improvement in semiconductors.”
The scale of spending required is huge. The global industry leader, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., or TSMC, is in the third year of a three-year, $100 billion plan to expand research and production.
Developers including Huawei Technologies Ltd. and VeriSilicon Holdings Co. can design logic chips for smartphones as powerful as those from Intel Corp., Apple Inc., South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. or Britain’s Arm Ltd., according to industry researchers. But they cannot be manufactured without the precision technology of TSMC and other foreign foundries.
Trump in 2019 crippled Huawei’s smartphone brand by blocking it from buying U.S. chips or other technology. American officials say Huawei, China’s first global tech brand, might facilitate Chinese spying, an accusation the company denies. In 2020, the White House tightened controls, blocking TSMC and others from using U.S. technology to produce chips for Huawei.
Washington threw up new hurdles for Chinese chip designers in August by imposing restrictions on software known as EDA, or electronic design automation, along with European, Asian and other governments to limit the spread of “dual use” technologies that might be used to make weapons.
In December, Biden added YMTC, the memory chip maker, and some other Chinese companies to a blacklist that limits access to chips made anywhere using U.S. tools or processes.
China’s foundries can etch circuits as small as 28 nanometers apart. By contrast, TSMC and other global competitors can etch circuits just three nanometers apart, ten times the Chinese industry’s precision. They are moving toward two nanometers.
To make the latest chips, “you need EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) tools, a very complicated process recipe and not just a couple of billion dollars but tens and tens of billions of dollars,” said Peter Hanbury, who follows the industry for Bain & Co.
“They’re not going to be able to produce competitive server, PC and smartphone chips,” Hanbury said. “You have to go to TSMC to do that.”
China’s ruling party is trying to develop its own tool vendors, but researchers say it is far behind a global network spread across dozens of countries.
Huawei said in a video on its website in December it was working on EUV technology. But creating a machine comparable to ASML’s might cost $5 billion and require a decade of research, according to industry experts. Huawei didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The day when China can supply its own EUV machine is “very far away,” said Hanbury.
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AP researcher Yu Bing in Beijing and AP Writer Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed.
PARIS (AP) — French President Emmanuel Macron will have to muster all his diplomatic adeptness and political acumen on a three-day state visit to China where the war in Ukraine will be front and center, along with tough talks on trade.
Macron is expected to warn China against sending weapons to Russia and instead ask that the country use its influence to support peace efforts.
Beijing claims to hold a neutral stance in the war, but has also stressed its “no-limits friendship” with Russia. China’s President Xi Jinping last month met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
China has refused to criticize Russia for its actions in Ukraine. A top French official acknowledged that Paris isn’t expecting to see a major shift in that position.
But France will push for initiatives helping ordinary Ukrainians and for possible avenues toward reaching a halfway solution to the war, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with the French presidency’s customary practices.
Paris and Beijing may find a point of convergence following Putin’s recent announcement that his country plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. China, without naming Russia, made clear its opposition to the planned deployment.
Macron will also seek to involve China deeper in global discussions on climate-related issues, as things are getting more complicated for him at home.
The 45-year-old leader has in recent weeks faced strong opposition among ordinary French citizens and lawmakers to his plan to raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. A surge of street protests resulted in a state visit by Britain’s King Charles III having to be postponed.
Trade will also be a major focus as Macron has asked European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to join him for a meeting with Xi that’s meant to show European unity especially on economic issues. The French president said last month that he took such an initiative because he is “attached to European coordination.”
China is both the EU’s commercial partner and a rival, Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner for Internal Market, said Monday on French news broadcaster FranceInfo. Breton said the message to Chinese authorities is that they “must stop trying to play one country against another.”
“Of course, China still is an important market for many European companies. But the (EU) internal market is a crucial market to China,” Breton added.
Macron will be accompanied by a delegation of over 50 CEOs including from French energy giant EDF, rail transport manufacturer Alstom and European plane-maker Airbus.
The top French official said negotiations were still being held on a potential deal with Airbus that would come on top of China’s 2019 order for 300 aircraft.
NGOs including the International Federation for Human Rights, International Campaign for Tibet and the Human Rights League have called on Macron to put human rights at the heart of his talks with Chinese authorities.
Macron “must strongly denounce privately but also publicly the repression against Chinese activists and human rights advocates, Hong Kong’s people, Uyghurs and Tibetans,” France’s Human Rights League President Patrick Baudouin said in a statement.
Macron’s office said human rights issues will be mentioned during the visit.
Macron, who last traveled to China in 2019 before the COVID-19 crisis, is to start his trip Wednesday in Beijing with a speech to the French community.
On Thursday, he will have meetings with the head of the National People’s Congress, Zhao Leji, and China’s new No. 2 leader, Premier Li Qiang, in addition to a meeting and a state dinner with Xi in the presence of von der Leyen.
On Friday, Macron will head to the southern Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou, where Xi’s father used to work as provincial governor in the 1980s.
The French president will answer questions there from some of the 1,000 Chinese students at Sun Yat-Sen university. He will then meet Xi again for a private dinner and later meet with Chinese investors.
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AP journalist Nicolas Garriga contributed to the story.
LUSAKA, Zambia (AP) — When Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Zambia on Friday for the final stop of her weeklong trip across Africa, she touched down at an airport that’s doubled in size and features glittering new terminals.
Rather than a symbol of promising local development, it’s a reminder of China’s deep influence. Beijing financed the project, one of many that has expanded its footprint on a booming continent that’s rich in natural resources, often generating goodwill among its citizens.
The global rivalry between the United States and China has been a recurring backdrop for Harris’ journey, and nowhere has that been more apparent than Zambia and her previous stop in Tanzania.
Besides the airport, China built a 60,000-seat stadium in Lusaka, plus roads and bridges around the country. Zambia is on the hook for all of the development with billions of dollars in debt. Tanzania is a major trading partner with China, and it has a new political leadership school funded by the Chinese Communist Party.
The developments have alarmed Washington, and President Joe Biden’s administration is worried that Africa is slipping further into Beijing’s sphere of influence.
Harris has played down the issue on her trip, preferring to focus on building partnerships independent of geopolitical competition. However, she has acknowledged there’s limited time for the U.S. to make inroads on the continent, telling reporters earlier in the trip that there is a “window” that is “definitely open now” for American investments.
At a news conference with Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema on Friday, Harris reiterated her call for “all bilateral official creditors to provide a meaningful debt reduction for Zambia” — an oblique reference to China — but she stressed that “our presence here is not about China.”
Hichilema said it would be “completely wrong” to view Zambia’s interests in terms of a rivalry between the U.S. and China.
“When I’m in Washington, I’m not against Beijing. When I’m in Beijing, I’m not against Washington,” he said, adding that “none of these relationships are about working against someone or a group of countries.”
China’s roots in both Tanzania and Zambia run deep. In the 1970s, Beijing built the Tazara Railway from landlocked Zambia to Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam port, allowing copper exports to circumvent white-minority-ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.
Today, China is Africa’s largest two-way trading partner, with $254 billion of business in 2021, according to the United States Institute of Peace. That’s four times the amount of trade between the U.S. and Africa. In addition, dealing with Beijing features less admonishments about democracy than with Washington.
“Most African countries are rightly unapologetic about their close ties to China,” Nigeria’s vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, tweeted on Thursday. “China shows up where and when the West will not and/or are reluctant.”
Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who has worked on Africa issues in Congress, expressed frustration over China’s growing influence on the continent.
“We switched from being the No. 1 trade partner or the No. 1 investment partner in two dozen countries, to China being the No. 1 trade and investment partner,” he told reporters aboard Air Force Two on the flight to Ghana at the beginning of Harris’ trip. “I think our challenge for this decade is to address that.”
Biden has been taking steps toward that, such as hosting a summit for African leaders in December, when he announced that he wants to commit $55 billion to the continent in the coming years.
Harris has made announcements as well during her trip, including more than $1 billion in public and private money for economic development, $100 million for security assistance in West Africa and $500 million to facilitate trade with Tanzania.
However, there’s skepticism about whether the U.S. will follow through on its promises, and Harris has been faced with not-so-subtle hints that Africa expects more. For example, the presidents of Ghana and Tanzania bluntly said they hope Biden chooses to visit their countries during his expected trip to Africa later this year, which would be his first to the continent as president.
By comparison, Tanzania was among the first countries that Chinese President Xi Jinping visited after becoming president in 2013. And after Xi secured a third term, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan was the first African head of state to visit Beijing.
“Kamala faces Chinese dominance in Tanzania,” the Tanzania Business Insight publication tweeted Wednesday.
Ian Johnson, a former China-based journalist who works at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations, said Beijing presents a powerful narrative in the developing world as a country that rapidly built its economy and pulled much of its population out of poverty.
African leaders think “let’s see what we can learn from China,” he said, adding that “there’s a certain fascination in how they did it.”
Johnson also said China views Africa differently than the U.S.
“We have a tendency to see Africa as a series of problems — wars, famines, something like that,” he said. “But in China’s eyes, Africa is much more of an opportunity.”
Edem Selormey, who conducts public opinion research at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, said the feeling is often mutual.
“China’s influence in Africa is largely seen as positive,” she said. “And the U.S. trails China in that regard.”
The difference, she said, is often about “what citizens see on the ground,” such as infrastructure projects, and “the U.S. has been missing from this picture for a while.”
John Kirby, a White House national security spokesman, said the debt that comes from China’s involvement is ultimately corrosive. He said African leaders are “beginning to realize that China is not really their friend.”
“China’s interests in the region are purely selfish, as opposed to the United States,” he said.
It’s a sentiment that draws scoffs in some corners of Africa.
“America is like playing the role of a big Uncle Sam in trying to defend African countries against what they think is the encroachment of China into the liberty of African countries through these loans,” said Tanzania-based analyst Mohamed Issa Hemed.
However, he added, “China is ahead of the U.S. in many, many ways.”
Daniel Russel, a former State Department official who is now at the Asia Society Policy Institute, summed up the African perspective as “enough with the lectures” about China. “They’ve got something we want. And they’ve got it right here.”
When it comes to U.S. hopes for Africa, he said, ”you can’t beat something with nothing.”
___ Anna reported from Nairobi, Kenya, and Meldrum from Johannesburg. Associated Press writer Evelyne Musambi in Nairobi, Kenya, contributed to this report.
A Silicon Valley Bank office is seen in Tempe, Arizona, on March 14, 2023. – With hindsight, there were warning signs ahead of last week’s spectacular collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, missed not only by investors, but by bank regulators. Just why the oversight failed remained a hot question among banking experts, with some focusing on the weakness of US rules. (Photo by REBECCA NOBLE / AFP) (Photo by REBECCA NOBLE/AFP via Getty Images)
Rebecca Noble | Afp | Getty Images
BO’AO, China — China’s small banks have problems — but they don’t carry the same risks as those exposed by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, said Zhu Min, vice president of the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, a state-backed think tank.
Issues at a handful of smaller Chinese banks have emerged in the last few years.
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Baoshang Bank went bankrupt, while some rural banks in Henan province froze accounts, prompting protests by customers worried about their savings.
Those banks’ problems reflect local issues, Zhu said Wednesday. He pointed out that while those Chinese banks’ structure and operations were unclear, they did not pose systemic risks to the broader economy.
After the last three to four years of Chinese regulatory action, the situation has also improved, Zhu said.
China’s major banks — known as the big five — are owned by the central government and rank among the largest in the world.
On the other hand, SVB reflects a macro risk, Zhu said, noting the U.S. mid-sized lender had adequate capital and liquidity before it collapsed.
Macro risks present a much more worrisome problem, he explained. The banking crisis in the U.S. involved a structural risk from savers moving funds to take advantage of higher interest rates, Zhu pointed out.
The U.S. Federal Reserve has aggressively hiked interest rates in an attempt to ease decades-high inflation in the country. The U.S. dollar has strengthened against other currencies, while Treasury yields have risen to multi-year highs.
The current U.S. banking problem contrasts with the 2008 financial crisis that stemmed from Lehman Brothers’ exposure to mortgage-backed securities, he added.
Zhu, formerly deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was speaking with reporters on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia on Wednesday. The annual event hosted by China is sometimes considered Asia’s version of Davos.
The forum this year emphasized the need for cooperation amid global uncertainty — and highlighted China’s relative stability in its emergence from the pandemic.
China’s economy in 2022 grew by just 3%, the slowest pace in decades, as the real estate slump and Covid controls weighed on growth. The country ended its stringent zero-Covid policy late last year, and has been trying to attract foreign business investment.
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Consumption remains a clear weak spot in China’s economy, Zhu said. He expects advanced manufacturing and China’s push for reducing carbon emissions to remain growth drivers.
Private, non-state-owned companies have taken the lead in China’s so-called green transformation, Zhu said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and new Premier Li Qiang have spoken repeatedly in the last few weeks about support for privately run businesses.
Xi has said he saw increased unity under the ruling Chinese Communist Party as necessary for building up the country.
New rules released this month give the party a more direct role in regulating China’s financial industry.
Zhu said he expects this overhaul to streamline financial oversight, and warned of a period of adjustment. However, he said that overall, it would make financial regulation more efficient and transparent in China.
Correction: This story has been updated to accurately reflect that China’s major banks are known as the big five.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — China’s global influence campaign has been surprisingly robust and successful in Utah, an investigation by The Associated Press has found.
The world’s most powerful communist country and its U.S.-based advocates have spent years building relationships with Utah officials.
Legislators in the deeply conservative and religious state have responded by delaying legislation Beijing didn’t like, nixing resolutions that conveyed displeasure with China’s actions and expressing support in ways that enhanced the Chinese government’s image.
The AP’s investigation relied on dozens of interviews with key players and the review of hundreds of pages of records, text messages and emails obtained through public records’ requests.
Beijing’s success in Utah shows “how pervasive and persistent China has been in trying to influence America,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI counterintelligence agent who lives in Utah.
“Utah is an important foothold,” he said. “If the Chinese can succeed in Salt Lake City, they can also make it in New York and elsewhere.”
Here are some key takeaways:
LEGISLATIVE AND PR VICTORIES
The AP review found that China and its advocates won frequent legislative and public relations victories in Utah.
Utah lawmakers recorded videos of themselves expressing words of encouragement for the citizens of Shanghai in early 2020, which experts said likely helped the Chinese Communist Party with its messaging.
The request came from a Chinese official as the government was scrambling to tamp down public fury at communist authorities for reprimanding a young doctor, who later died, over his warnings about the dangers posed by COVID-19.
Around the same time, Utah officials were thrilled when China’s authoritarian leader Xi Jinping sent a letter to fourth grade students in Utah. A Republican legislator said on the state Senate floor that he “couldn’t help but think how amazing it was” that Xi would take the time to write such a “remarkable” letter. Another GOP senator gushed on his conservative radio show that Xi’s letter “was so kind and so personal.”
The letter was heavily covered in Chinese state media, which quoted Utah students calling Xi a kind “grandpa” — a familiar trope in Chinese propaganda.
State lawmakers have frequently visited China, where they are often quoted in state-owned media in ways that support Beijing’s agenda.
“Utah is not like Washington D.C.,” then-Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes, a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, told the Chinese state media outlet in 2018 as the former president ratcheted up pressure on China over trade. “Utah is a friend of China, an old friend with a long history.”
FBI SCRUTINY
Utah Republican Sen. Jake Anderegg told the AP he was interviewed by the FBI after introducing a 2020 resolution expressing solidarity with China in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. It won nearly unanimous approval. A similar resolution, proposed by a Chinese diplomat, was publicly rejected by Wisconsin’s Senate.
Anderegg said the language was provided to him by Dan Stephenson, the son of a former state senator and employee of a China-based consulting firm.
Stephenson and another Utah resident, Taowen Le, are among China’s most vocal advocates in Utah.
Both men have supported and sought to block resolutions, set up meetings between Utah lawmakers and Chinese officials, accompanied legislators on trips to China and provided advice on the best way to cultivate favor with Beijing, according to emails and interviews. Both have ties to what experts say are front groups for Beijing.
After embassy officials tried unsuccessfully last year to get staff for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox to schedule a get-together with China’s ambassador to the U.S., Le sent the governor a personal plea to take such a meeting.
“I still remember and cherish what you told me at the New Year Party held at your home,” Le wrote in a letter adorned with pictures of him and Cox posing together. “You told me that you trusted me to be a good messenger and friendship builder between Utah and China.”
Both men said their advocacy on China-related issues were self directed and not at the Chinese government’s behest. Le told AP he has been interviewed twice over the years by the FBI.
The FBI declined to comment.
TAILORED APPROACH
Security experts say that China’s campaign is widespread and tailored to local communities. In Utah, the AP found, Beijing and pro-China advocates appealed to lawmakers’ affiliations with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, which is the state’s dominant religion and one that has long dreamed of expanding in China.
Le, who converted to the church decades ago, has quoted scripture from the Bible and the Book of Mormon in his emails and letters to lawmakers, and sprinkled in positive comments that Russell Nelson, the church’s president-prophet, has made about China.
PART OF BROADER TREND
Beijing’s success in Utah is part of a broader trend of targeting “sub-national” governments, like states and cities, experts say.
It is not unusual for countries, including the U.S., to engage in local diplomacy. U.S. officials and security experts have stressed that many Chinese language and cultural exchanges have no hidden agendas. However, they said, few nations have so aggressively courted local leaders across the globe in ways that raise national security concerns.
In its annual threat assessment released earlier this month, the U.S. intelligence community reported that China is “redoubling” its local influence campaign in the face of stiffening resistance at the national level. Beijing believes, the report said, that “local officials are more pliable than their federal counterparts.”
Authorities in other countries, including Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, have sounded similar alarms.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington told the AP that China “values its relationship with Utah” and any “words and deeds that stigmatize and smear these sub-national exchanges are driven by ulterior political purposes.”
___
Suderman reported from Washington. AP writer Fu Ting in Washington contributed to this story.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — China’s global campaign to win friends and influence policy has blossomed in a surprising place: Utah, a deeply religious and conservative state with few obvious ties to the world’s most powerful communist country.
An investigation by The Associated Press has found that China and its U.S.-based advocates spent years building relationships with the state’s officials and lawmakers. Those efforts have paid dividends at home and abroad, the AP found: Lawmakers delayed legislation Beijing didn’t like, nixed resolutions that conveyed displeasure with its actions and expressed support in ways that enhanced the Chinese government’s image.
Its work in Utah is emblematic of a broader effort by Beijing to secure allies at the local level as its relations with the U.S. and its western allies have turned acrimonious. U.S. officials say local leaders are at risk of being manipulated by China and have deemed the influence campaign a threat to national security.
Beijing’s success in Utah shows “how pervasive and persistent China has been in trying to influence America,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI counterintelligence agent who lives in Utah.
“Utah is an important foothold,” he said. “If the Chinese can succeed in Salt Lake City, they can also make it in New York and elsewhere.”
Security experts say that China’s campaign is widespread and tailored to local communities. In Utah, the AP found, Beijing and pro-China advocates appealed to lawmakers’ affiliations with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, which is the state’s dominant religion and one that has long dreamed of expanding in China.
Beijing’s campaign in Utah has raised concerns among state and federal lawmakers and drawn the attention of the Justice Department.
A state legislator told the AP he was interviewed by the FBI after introducing a resolution in 2020 expressing solidarity with China early in the coronavirus pandemic. A Utah professor who has advocated for closer ties between Washington and Beijing told the AP he’s been questioned by the FBI twice. The FBI declined to comment.
‘DECEPTIVE AND COERCIVE’
Beijing’s interest in locally focused influence campaigns is not a secret. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, said during a trip to the U.S. in 2015 that “without successful cooperation at the sub-national level it would be very difficult to achieve practical results for cooperation at the national level.”
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington told the AP that China “values its relationship with Utah” and any “words and deeds that stigmatize and smear these sub-national exchanges are driven by ulterior political purposes.”
It is not unusual for countries, including the U.S., to engage in local diplomacy. U.S. officials and security experts have stressed that many Chinese language and cultural exchanges have no hidden agendas. However, they said, few nations have so aggressively courted local leaders in ways that raise national security concerns.
In its annual threat assessment released earlier this month, the U.S. intelligence community reported that China is “redoubling” its local influence campaigns in the face of stiffening resistance at the national level. Beijing believes, the report said, that “local officials are more pliable than their federal counterparts.”
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center in July warned state and local officials about “deceptive and coercive” Chinese influence operations. And FBI Director Christopher Wray last year accused China of seeking to “cultivate talent early—often state and local officials—to ensure that politicians at all levels of government will be ready to take a call and advocate on behalf of Beijing’s agenda.”
Those concerns have arisen amid escalating disputes between the U.S. and China over trade, human rights, the future of Taiwan and China’s tacit support for Russia during its invasion of Ukraine. Tensions worsened last month when a suspected Chinese spy balloon was discovered and shot down in U.S. airspace.
LEGISLATIVE AND PR VICTORIES
U.S. officials have provided scant details about which states and localities the Chinese government has targeted. The AP focused its investigation on Utah because China appears to have cultivated a significant number of allies in the state and its advocates are well-known to lawmakers.
Relying on dozens of interviews with key players and the review of hundreds of pages of records, text messages and emails obtained through public records’ requests, the AP found China won frequent legislative and public relations victories in Utah.
China-friendly lawmakers, for example, delayed action for a year to ban Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes at state universities, according to the legislation’s sponsor. The Chinese language and cultural programs have been described by U.S. national security officials as propaganda instruments. The University of Utah and Southern Utah University closed their institutes by last year.
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<p>AP correspondent Sam Metz reports that despite warnings that cultural exchanges could be aimed at manipulating lawmakers, China has been customizing its approach in Utah, forming ties with leaders affiliated with the Mormon church.</p>
In 2020, China scored an image-boosting coup when Xi sent a note to a class of Utah fourth-graders thanking them for cards they’d sent wishing him a happy Chinese New Year. He encouraged them to “become young ‘ambassadors’ for Sino-American friendship.”
Emails obtained by the AP show the Chinese Embassy and the students’ Chinese teacher coordinated the letter exchange, which resulted in heavy coverage by state-controlled media in China.
A Chinese state media outlet reported the Utah students jubilantly exclaimed: “Grandpa Xi really wrote back to me. He’s so cool!” Portraying China’s most authoritarian leader in decades as a kindly grandfather is a familiar trope in Chinese propaganda.
Xi’s letter garnered positive attention in Utah, too. A Republican legislator said on the state Senate floor that he “couldn’t help but think how amazing it was” that the Chinese leader took the time to write such a “remarkable” letter. Another GOP senator gushed on his conservative radio show that Xi’s letter “was so kind and so personal.”
Dakota Cary, a China expert at the security firm Krebs Stamos Group, said in making such comments Utah lawmakers are “essentially acting as mouthpieces for the Chinese Communist Party” and legitimizing their ideas and narratives.
“Statements like these are exactly what China’s goal is for influence campaigns,” he said.
SPY AGENCY INTEREST
China’s interest in Utah is not limited to its officials and advocates who are engaged in diplomacy, trade and education. U.S. officials have noted that China’s civilian spy agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), has shown an interest in Utah, court records show.
In January, former graduate student Ji Chaoqun was sentenced to eight years in prison on charges related to spying for China. The Chicago student told an undercover agent he’d been tasked by his spy handlers “to meet people, some American friends.” He was baptized at a Latter-day Saints church and told the undercover agent he’d “been going to Utah more often lately” before his arrest, according to his Facebook page and court records.
Ron Hansen, a former U.S. intelligence official from Utah, pleaded guilty to trying to sell classified information to China. Hansen said China’s spy service had tasked him with assessing various U.S. politicians’ views towards China. The FBI found the names of Utah elected officials among sensitive files he stored on his laptop, court records show. Hansen was sentenced in 2019 to serve 10 years in federal prison.
Hansen was well known in Utah political circles and helped organize the first ever annual U.S.-China National Governors Forum, which was held in 2011 in Salt Lake City, according to court records and interviews. The U.S. State Department cancelled the forums in 2020 due to concerns about Chinese influence efforts.
‘UTAH IS NOT LIKE WASHINGTON D.C.’
The AP found groups of up to 25 Utah lawmakers routinely took trips to China every other year since 2007. Lawmakers have partially used campaign donations to pay for the trade missions and cultural exchanges, while relying on China and host organizations to pay for other expenses.
On the trips, they’ve forged relationships with government officials and were quoted in Chinese state-owned media in ways that support Beijing’s agenda.
“Utah is not like Washington D.C.,” then Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes, a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, told the Chinese state media outlet in 2018 as the former president ratcheted up pressure on Beijing over trade. “Utah is a friend of China, an old friend with a long history.”
In an interview last month with the AP, Hughes said the trips to China made him “bullish” about the country and prospects of improving trade. However, he said he now believes the visits were pretexts for Chinese officials to influence him and other lawmakers.
“It’s a trip not worth taking,” Hughes said.
Utah doesn’t require public officials to report in detail their foreign travel or personal finances, so it’s difficult to determine lawmaker’s financial ties to China. Some of Utah’s most pro-China legislators, however, have China-related personal business connections.
Sen. Curt Bramble told Courthouse News Service last year that his role as a part-time legislator and as a business consultant sometimes overlap and that he “had clients in China — a dozen at times — some of them on legislative tours, some on consulting.”
In an interview with AP, Bramble said none of his clients are based in China; they only do business there. He declined to name them.
Bramble, a Republican who represents a conservative district, also rejected fears of undue Chinese influence in Utah.
“China’s not going anywhere. China’s going to be a world force. They’re going to be a player for the foreseeable future and trying to understand what that implies for the United States or for the state of Utah and get a concept of that seems to be a valuable endeavor,” he said.
TIES FORGED BY TWO UTAH RESIDENTS
Many of the Utah-China ties have been forged by two state residents with links to the Chinese government or to organizations that experts say are alleged front groups for China, including its civilian spy agency, the AP found.
The two men advocated for and against resolutions, set up meetings between Utah lawmakers and Chinese officials, accompanied legislators on trips to China and provided advice on the best way to cultivate favor with Beijing, according to emails and interviews.
In reviewing the AP’s findings, legal experts said the men’s connections with Chinese officials suggest that they should register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA. The law generally requires anyone who works on behalf of a foreign entity to influence lawmakers or public perception, but its scope is the subject of significant debate and enforcement has been uneven.
“If I were representing either of these individuals, I would have significant concerns about FARA exposure,” said Joshua Ian Rosenstein, an attorney who handles such matters.
One of the men, Taowen Le, has championed China to religious and political leaders in Utah for decades. Le, a Chinese citizen, moved to Utah in the 1980s and has been a professor of information technology at Weber State University since 1998. Le converted in 1990 to the Mormon faith.
From 2003 through 2017, Le had another job — as a paid representative of China’s Liaoning provincial government. Provincial governments are largely controlled by Beijing and Liaoning has had a longstanding “sister” relationship with Utah.
Le’s advocacy continued after he said he left Liaoning’s payroll, emails and interviews show. He has frequently forwarded messages from Chinese government officials to Utah lawmakers and helped the Chinese Embassy set up meetings with state officials.
After embassy officials tried unsuccessfully last year to get staff for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox to schedule a get-together with China’s ambassador to the U.S., Le sent the governor a personal plea to take the meeting.
“I still remember and cherish what you told me at the New Year Party held at your home,” Le wrote in a letter adorned with pictures of him and Cox posing together. “You told me that you trusted me to be a good messenger and friendship builder between Utah and China.”
State Senate President Stuart Adams turned to Le when Utah was scrambling to obtain large quantities of drugs that Adams thought could be used as potential treatment against the coronavirus in early 2020, emails and interviews show.
Le, who belongs to the same congregation as Adams, said in an email to another lawmaker that he was able to get the Chinese Embassy to assign two staffers to work “tirelessly” on the request until it was fulfilled.
RELIGIOUS SALES PITCH
A hallmark of Le’s approach is to utilize his religion in his pitches to lawmakers. He quoted scripture from the Bible and the Book of Mormon in his emails, text messages and letters, and sprinkled in positive comments that Russell Nelson, the church’s president-prophet, has made about China.
Chinese officials have tried to cultivate friendly ties with the church. When visiting Utah, China’s diplomats and officials often meet top church members as well as lawmakers, emails and other records show.
Expanding to China has been a top goal for the church, which plays a heavy role in Utah politics and the state’s overall identity. Many of the state’s residents lived abroad as missionaries, and several of Utah’s public schools have robust K-12 Chinese immersion programs.
While the church has historically been an outspoken advocate for religious freedom, Le sought to stop Utah lawmakers from supporting religious figures or groups discriminated against by the Chinese government.
When a Utah lawmaker sponsored a resolution in 2021 condemning China’s well-documented and brutal crackdown of its minority Muslim Uighurs, Le chastised the legislator in text messages and compared unflattering media coverage of the Chinese government to that of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr.
“Pray to God and seek guidance from the Holy Spirit as you ponder about these issues instead of solely relying on those biased media reports,” Le said.
The resolution failed that year and a similar one introduced in January did not receive a hearing.
CHINA’S ‘ADVANTAGES’
Le has served as a board member of the China Overseas Friendship Association, which has ties to the United Front Work Department — a Chinese Communist Party organization the U.S. government says engages in covert and malign foreign influence operations.
A United Front publication profiled Le in 2020 after he attended a meeting in Beijing of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a prestigious advisory body controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
Le told the AP he was interviewed by the FBI in 2007 and 2018 about his Chinese government ties. He said his advocacy has always been self-directed.
“I don’t consider myself a lobbyist because I’m not a lobbyist. I’m just someone who cherishes the relationship between the U.S. and China,” Le said in an interview in his Weber State office.
Adams, the Senate president, said he feels otherwise.
“I do believe he’s lobbying,” Adams said. “He advocates very hard on China.”
LAWMAKER’S SON TURNED CHINA ADVOCATE
Another Utah resident whom lawmakers said regularly has advocated better relations with China was Dan Stephenson, the son of a former state senator and employee of a China-based consulting firm.
Emails and other records show Stephenson advised the Utah senate president on how to make a good impression with a Chinese ambassador and assisted a Chinese province in its unsuccessful efforts to build a ceramics museum in Utah.
Stephenson has promoted China in Utah for several years and has boasted of being well connected with government officials there.
“I’ve heard more than once from the mouths of Chinese government officials that China is prioritizing their relationship with Utah,” Stephenson told lawmakers at a committee hearing. That testimony came shortly after Stephenson accompanied Republican state Sen. Jake Anderegg on a trip to Shanghai and Beijing that included meetings with officials at China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A few months after that trip, Stephenson provided Anderegg with the draft language for a pro-China resolution the state senator introduced in 2020 expressing solidarity with China during the pandemic, Anderegg told the AP.
The resolution passed with near unanimous approval.
A Chinese diplomat’s efforts to win passage of a similar resolution in Wisconsin failed, with the state’s senate president publicly blasting it as a piece of propaganda.
Anderegg told the AP that he was interviewed by FBI agents seeking information about the Utah resolution’s origins.
“It seemed rather innocuous to me,” Anderegg said of his resolution. “But maybe it wasn’t.”
Stephenson said the FBI has not contacted him and no Chinese government official played a role in the resolution.
TIES TO ALLEGED FRONT GROUPS
Stephenson has links to Chinese groups allegedly active in covert foreign influence operations, documents show.
He is a partner in the Shanghai-based consulting firm Economic Bridge International. The company’s chief executive, William Wang, is a Chinese citizen and council member of the China Friendship Foundation for Peace and Development, according to an online biography. The group is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front.
Stephenson, also once worked for the China Academy of Painting, which has been used by China’s Ministry of State Security as a front for meeting and covertly influencing elites and officials abroad, according to Alex Joske, the author of the recently published book “Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World.”
Stephenson said he worked only briefly — without pay — for the China Academy of Painting. He added he did not witness any spy agency involvement.
WORK ALIGNED WITH CHINESE GOVERNMENT’S DESIRES
Stephenson said he’s never taken any action at the direction of the Chinese government and never accepted compensation from it.
“I work to promote Utah’s economy, to help American companies succeed in China, and to encourage healthy people-to-people and commercial ties,” Stephenson said.
His work sometimes aligned with what Chinese government officials were seeking and in ways experts say likely helped the Chinese Communist Party’s messaging.
Stephenson urged Utah’s elected officials to make videos to air on Shanghai television to boost the spirits of that city’s residents early in 2020 as they battled COVID-19, according to emails obtained by AP.
“You cannot buy this type of positive publicity for Utah in China,” Stephenson said in an email pitching the videos.
The request originated with the Shanghai government, according to Stephenson’s email, and came as officials in China were scrambling to tamp down public fury at communist authorities for reprimanding a young doctor, who later died, over his repeated warnings about the disease’s dangers.
Many lawmakers recorded videos reading sample scripts Stephenson provided, and a compilation of those videos was uploaded to a Chinese social media website. The compilation ends with dozens of lawmakers in unison shouting “jiayou!”- a Chinese expression of encouragement — on the Utah House and Senate floors.
___
Suderman reported from Washington. AP writer Fu Ting in Washington contributed to this story.
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.
PARIS (AP) — France announced Friday it is banning the “recreational” use of TikTok, Twitter, Instagram and other apps on government employees’ phones because of concern about insufficient data security measures.
The move follows similar restrictions on TikTok in democratic countries amid fears about the popular video-sharing app’s Chinese connections. But the French decision also encompassed other platforms widely used by government officials, lawmakers and President Emmanuel Macron himself.
The French Minister for Transformation and Public Administration, Stanislas Guerini, said in a statement that ’’recreational″ apps aren’t secure enough to be used in state administrative services and ”could present a risk for the protection of data.”
The ban will be monitored by France’s cybersecurity agency. The statement did not specify which apps are banned but noted that the decision came after other governments took measures targeting TikTok.
Guerini’s office said in a message to The Associated Press that the ban also will include Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, gaming apps like Candy Crush and dating apps.
Exceptions will be allowed. If an official wants to use a banned app for professional purposes, like public communication, they can request permission to do so.
Case in point: Guerini posted the announcement of the ban on Twitter.
The U.S., Britain, the European Union and others have banned TikTok on government phones. Western governments worry Chinese authorities could force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance Ltd., to hand over data on international users or push pro-Beijing narratives.
The company’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, pushed back on assertions that TikTok or ByteDance are tools of the Chinese government during questioning by U.S. lawmakers Thursday. The company has been reiterating that 60% of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors.
A law China implemented in 2017 requires companies to give the government any personal data relevant to the country’s national security. There’s no evidence that TikTok has turned over such data, but fears abound due to the vast amount of user data it collects.
BEIJING (AP) — U.S. lawmakers have grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about data security and harmful content, with some pushing to ban the popular short-video app nationwide.
Chew, a native of Singapore, told the lawmakers that TikTok prioritizes user safety as he sought to avert a U.S. ban on the app by downplaying its ties to China.
Both Republican and Democratic representatives aggressively questioned Chew on topics including TikTok’s content moderation practices, its data security plans, and past spying on journalists.
Here’s a look at some of the concerns about TikTok and its ownership.
WHY DOES WASHINGTON SAY TIKTOK IS A THREAT?
TikTok, which has over 150 million American users, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese technology firm ByteDance Ltd., which appoints its executives.
ByteDance is based in Beijing but registered in the Cayman Islands, as is common for privately owned Chinese companies. Its headquarters is in Beijing’s northwestern Haidian district, home to key universities and a hub for tech startups. TikTok has dual headquarters in Singapore and Los Angeles.
Founded by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming in 2012, ByteDance is said to be valued at around $220 billion — nearly half of its 2021 valuation of $400 billion. Publicly traded Chinese tech companies and privately held ones like ByteDance have plunged in value since the ruling Communist Party tightened control over the industry with anti-monopoly and data security crackdowns.
Western governments worry Chinese authorities could force ByteDance to hand over TikTok data on American users, exposing sensitive information. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Friday that China’s government has never and will not ask companies to “collect or provide data, information or intelligence” held in foreign countries, adding the U.S. “has not provided any evidence so far to prove that TikTok threatens U.S. national security.”
ByteDance says 60% of its shares are owned by non-Chinese investors such as U.S investment firms Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Japan’s SoftBank Group. Employees own 20% and its founders the remaining 20%.
Some details of the relationship between TikTok and ByteDance remain unclear to outsiders.
WHAT CHINESE RULES WORRY WESTERN GOVERNMENTS?
China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law states that “any organization” must assist or cooperate with state intelligence work while a separate 2014 Counter-Espionage Law says “relevant organizations … may not refuse” to collect evidence for an investigation.
Since ByteDance, which owns TikTok, is a Chinese company, it would likely have to abide by these rules if Chinese authorities asked it to turn over data.
Laws and regulations are only one aspect of the Communist Party’s pervasive control. There are no legal limits on the party’s powers. The authorities also can threaten to cancel licenses, conduct regulatory or tax investigations and use other penalties to compel compliance by Chinese and foreign companies operating in China.
The party sometimes conveys orders using “window guidance,” or informal communication in private. It has used crackdowns to tighten control over technology companies and force them to align with its goals.
The Chinese government has also sought more direct control over companies by getting seats on boards of directors.
MUST TIKTOK TURN OVER DATA IF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT SAYS SO, EVEN WITH “ PROJECT TEXAS?”
TikTok has promised to protect data on American users by storing it on servers operated by an outside contractor, Oracle Corp., in what’s known as “Project Texas.” Chew, the TikTok CEO, said all new U.S. user data is stored in the United States and the company should finish deleting older U.S. data from non-Oracle servers this year.
The fear is that ByteDance would have to hand over information it obtained from TikTok if ordered to do so by Chinese authorities, but Chew has said Project Texas will put U.S. data out of China’s reach.
ByteDance disclosed in December that four employees gained access to data about reporters and people connected to them while looking for how information about the company was leaked. Chew told the lawmakers China-based ByteDance employees may still have access to some U.S. data but that won’t be the case once Project Texas is complete.
In November, TikTok’s head of privacy for Europe said some employees in China had access to information about users in Britain and the European Union.
DOES THE COMMUNIST PARTY HAVE ANY INFLUENCE ON BYTEDANCE?
In Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers repeatedly tried to pin down Chew on whether ByteDance had links to China’s communist rulers.
He deflected questions about whether staff and top executives are Communist Party members.
“I do know that the founder himself is not a member of the Communist Party, but we don’t know the political affiliation of our employees because that’s not something we ask,” Chew said.
When questioned whether ByteDance was effectively controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, Chew said he disagreed.
After a lawmaker said the Communist Party holds a “golden share” in ByteDance that allows it to control one ByteDance board seat, Chew said, “That’s not correct.”
In China, so-called golden shares held by official investment funds are one way for Beijing to gain more oversight over business by giving them a 1% stake in companies.
Chew pushed back when lawmakers claimed that the Communist Party owns shares in ByteDance that give it a vote in how the company is run. “The Communist Party doesn’t have voting rights in ByteDance,” Chew said.
ByteDance’s main Chinese subsidiary is the license-holder for some of its video and information platforms that only serve the China market.
WHAT IS DOUYIN AND WHAT IS TIKTOK’S RELATIONSHIP WITH IT?
Douyin is ByteDance’s short-video platform for the China market. It’s similar to TikTok, but its content is restricted by Chinese censorship rules that prohibit material deemed subversive or pornographic – a point emphasized by U.S. lawmakers worried about harmful content viewed by young people.
The Communist Party’s extensive internet filters block most users in China from seeing TikTok. ByteDance has said TikTok has “no affiliation” with Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., the subsidiary that operates Douyin; Toutiao, a news and short-video platform, and other services.
HOW DID CHINA REACT TO THE TIKTOK CEO’S WASHINGTON TESTIMONY?
Most of the social media reaction in China was sympathetic to Chew, with praise for how he handled the hostile questions lobbed at him.
Comments on Douyin and microblogging platform Weibo were critical of U.S. lawmakers for asking Chew leading or “trap” questions. Many commenters used a Chinese saying that means “If you want to accuse someone, there’s always a way.”
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Associated Press Business Writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
Youth turnout surged in the three elections since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, helping Biden eke out victories in swing states in 2020, pick up a Democratic Senate seat in the 2022 election and stem potential losses in the House.
But the 80-year-old president has never been the favorite candidate of young liberals itching for a new generation of American leadership. As Biden gears up for an expected reelection campaign, a potential TikTok ban and the Alaska drilling could weigh him down.
Meanwhile, his plan to wipe out billions of dollars in student loan debt is in jeopardy at the Supreme Court. The effort, announced shortly before last year’s midterms, was an attempt by Biden to keep a promise he made after defeating progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary campaign in 2020.
The risk for Biden is less that young left-of-center voters will vote Republican and more that they would sit out an uninspiring election altogether.
“I’m a Democrat, but I’m not voting for Biden,” said Mark Buehlmann, a 20-year-old Arizona State University student who said he likely would abstain if Biden is the Democratic nominee, as expected. “He’s maybe capable of doing a good job, but he’s not capable of gathering the troops, rallying the people. Especially the Democratic voter base. I don’t think he’s a strong candidate.”
TikTok allows users, 150 million of whom are in the United States, to post short, creative videos for friends and strangers. Its algorithm has an uncanny ability to figure out what interests its users and serve up videos they’ll enjoy. It’s become a supremely popular — some say addictive — place for young people to find entertainment and community.
Western governments are growing increasingly worried that TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, might give browsing history or other data about users to China’s government or promote propaganda and disinformation. The U.S. and other nations have banned TikTok from government-owned devices, as have several states.
The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment, part of Biden’s Treasury Department, has threatened to ban TikTok if ByteDance doesn’t sell its stake in the app, according to a Wall Street Journal report this month.
Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, but the move was blocked in court and later rescinded when Biden took office and ordered an in-depth study of the issue.
ByteDance says it’s working to address security concerns and has plans to route traffic through servers owned by Oracle, a Silicon Valley-based tech company.
Biden administration officials insist that political concerns aren’t weighing into the national security review underway, but they’re also not blind to it.
Both political parties have reoriented around staking out tougher economic and security positions on China’s rise, and Biden has come under increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers to take action against TikTok.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo offered hyperbolically, “The politician in me thinks you’re going to literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”
But it’s clear that the Biden White House and his likely reelection campaign are keenly aware of the app’s massive domestic reach and demographic skew toward Democratic-leaning younger voters.
Highlighting Biden’s balancing act, Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a progressive New York Democrat popular on the left, held a news conference this past week with TikTok creators who have built popular and profitable channels on the social network “in support of free expression.”
Lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew for nearly six hours Thursday over data security and harmful content. They responded skeptically during a tense House committee hearing to his assurances that the app prioritizes user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections.
“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said.
In interviews at Arizona State, one of the largest college campuses in the U.S. and a contributor to Biden’s narrow 10,000-vote win in the swing state, young people described a TikTok ban as somewhere between an annoyance and an inevitability — but not something that would change their views of the president.
“Most people don’t really think about those kinds of things,” Lucas Vittor, a 19-year-old business administration student from Houston, said of a TikTok ban. “I think that they’ll probably just see it as, ‘He’s an oppressive leader, an old dude, he doesn’t know about social media.’”
If TikTok disappears, another app will emerge to capture the attention of young people, Vittor predicted. Other social media platforms, including YouTube and Instagram, have incorporated similar algorithm-driven video features, though some find them clunky compared with TikTok.
“It’s not really Biden’s issue,” said Ginny Xu, a 20-year-old chemical engineering student from Goodyear, Arizona. “It’s more of a bipartisan thing — ‘safety’ from China.”
Losing access to TikTok would be disappointing, Xu said, but it wouldn’t dissuade her from voting for Biden if there’s no better Democratic choice.
Her friend, 20-year-old chemical engineering student Maddie Bruce, agreed.
“I just am not a big Joe Biden fan,” Bruce said. She would prefer to see another Democrat run, but she would still vote for Biden, she said.
Forcing TikTok’s Chinese parent to sell its stake in the U.S. company could provide a convenient middle ground: minimizing the national security threat while avoiding having access to the app cut off for tens of millions of users.
The young have never voted at the same rates as their parents and grandparents, but their participation has ticked up markedly since the start of the Trump presidency.
The 2018 and 2022 midterms brought the highest levels of youth turnout of the past three decades, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, which studies young voters.
And when they do vote, young people vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.
Biden won 63% of voters age 18 to 24, compared with 34% for Trump, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate. Republican House candidates did better with young voters in last year’s midterms, but Democrats still had a 14-percentage point advantage, winning voters 24 and younger 54% to 40%.
“If Democrats are looking for their secret weapon, young voters are it,” said Jack Lobel, spokesperson for Voters of Tomorrow, which organizes young voters online and in person. “For Democrats especially, who already have young voters basically on their side, we are the untapped potential that campaigns are looking for.”
A TikTok ban might irritate a lot of young voters, but Biden can point to a strong record of standing up for young people’s interests, Lobel said.
Marisol Ortega, a 21-year-old journalism student from Glendale, Arizona, said many of her peers are looking for someone younger and more exciting, even if they’ll likely hold their nose and vote for him.
“Joe Biden has been a name in American politics for a very, very long time,” Ortega said. “I think people are just kind of ready for something new.”
Still, the Biden administration irked environmentalists and young people by approving the huge Willow oil drilling project on Alaska’s North Slope.
Young activists have been particularly active in pushing to drastically reduce oil drilling and move away from reliance fossil fuels. Before the president’s decision, a #StopWillow campaign garnered millions of views on TikTok urging Biden to block the project.
“He has delivered a lot for young people, and that’s why our advice to the administration was, ‘This is not the right direction to head on this issue,’” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, a youth organizing group.
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AP White House Correspondent Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.
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This story was first published on March 25, 2023. It was updated on March 27, 2023, to correct that the 2018 and 2022 midterms, not 2020, brought the highest levels of youth turnout of the past three decades.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified Thursday at a congressional hearing over concerns about user data collected by the popular video-sharing app and potential Chinese spying.
Under his helm, TikTok reached 150 million users in the U.S., the majority of them teens and young adults who are attracted to the app’s simple interface and addictive algorithm that serves up short videos on just about any imaginable topic.
Lawmakers have said they’re worried about American data falling into the hands of the Chinese government and claim it threatens national security and user privacy and could be used to promote pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation.
Chew attempted to persuade lawmakers not to pursue a ban on the app or force Chinese parent company ByteDance to give up its ownership stake, testifying that TikTok prioritizes the safety of young users. He says the company plans to store all U.S. user data on servers maintained and owned by the software giant Oracle.
Here’s a closer look at Chew:
WHAT IS HIS BACKGROUND?
Chew, 40, is a native of Singapore, where he lives with his wife, Vivian Kao, and their two children. He graduated in 2006 from University College London and worked for two years at Goldman Sachs before moving to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree at Harvard Business School. Chew had a two-year internship with Facebook.
After earning his MBA, he became a partner at venture capital firm DST Global, where he worked for five years and helped facilitate investment in the company that became ByteDance. He then worked for five years at Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone company, before being appointed TikTok CEO in 2021, replacing Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive. Chew reports to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.
WHAT’S HIS REPUTATION?
The U.S. public knows relatively little about Chew compared with Silicon Valley social media giants such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, said Brooke Erin Duffy, who studies social media platforms as an associate professor of communications at Cornell University.
“Chew has been in the background on public discourse until now, so he doesn’t have the same reputation we would associate with the Silicon Valley set, especially Zuckerberg,” Duffy said.
Most Americans likely first heard of Chew when he released a video this week speaking directly to TikTok’s U.S. users, she said, “so he doesn’t have the same reputation as someone we know, and (we) don’t have sense of who he is.”
But Chew is well-respected within the U.S. and China tech communities, and was considered a good fit for TikTok because of his background in investment banking and his time at Facebook and DST Global, said Dan Ives, managing director of New York-based Wedbush Securities.
“He gained a lot of respect just by taking that high risk, in-the-hot seat role at TikTok,” Ives said, adding that the company likely thought he was the right person to ease tensions with U.S. lawmakers.
HOW DID HE DO IN HIS TESTIMONY?
Chew’s decision to emphasize TikTok’s reach in the U.S. might have backfired, and “actually strengthened U.S. lawmakers’ argument that TikTok poses a threat to both national security and young people,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence.
Enberg said there was little Chew could say to convince lawmakers that TikTok is not monitored or influenced in some way by the Chinese government.
Ives said Chew’s testimony was always going to be fraught, but his lack of concrete answers about data access and security was “a disaster” and likely set the stage for a ban.
“It was a perfect storm and lawmakers were ready,” Ives said.
But Shelly Palmer, a professor of advanced media at Syracuse University who studies social network business models, said Chew did the best he could given the grilling he received from lawmakers who “in my opinion were not actually listening” but instead were grandstanding.
“I don’t think he has the ability, because of who he is and what he does, to be satisfying to this audience,” said Palmer, adding that he believed Chew’s answers were not unlike those given by CEOs from U.S.-based social media companies who have been questioned in the past about privacy.
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Webber reported from Fenton, Michigan. Associated Press writer Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this story.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made a surprise visit Tuesday to Kyiv, engaging in dueling diplomacy with Asian rival President Xi Jinping of China, who met in Moscow with Russian President Vladimir Putin to promote Beijing’s peace proposal for Ukraine that Western nations have all but dismissed as a non-starter.
The two visits, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) apart, highlighted how countries are lining up behind Moscow or Kyiv during the nearly 13-month-old war. Kishida, who will chair the Group of Seven summit in May, became the group’s last member to visit Ukraine and meet President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after paying tribute to those killed in Bucha, a town that became a symbol of Russian atrocities against civilians.
Xi and Putin announced no major progress toward implementing the Chinese peace deal, although the Russian leader said it could be a basis for ending the fighting when the West is ready. He added that Kyiv’s Western allies have shown no interest in that.
U.S. officials have said any peace plan coming from the Putin-Xi meeting would be unacceptable because a cease-fire would only ratify Moscow’s territorial conquests and give Russia time to plan for a renewed offensive.
“It looks like the West indeed intends to fight Russia until the last Ukrainian,” Putin said, adding the latest threat is a British plan to give Ukraine tank rounds containing depleted uranium.
“If that happens, Russia will respond accordingly, given that the collective West is starting to use weapons with a nuclear component,” he said, without elaborating. Putin has occasionally warned that Russia would use all available means, including possibly nuclear weapons, to defend itself, but also has sometimes backed off such threats.
Putin’s comment referred to remarks Monday by U.K junior Defense Minister Annabel Goldie, who wrote: “Alongside our granting of a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, we will be providing ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds which contain depleted uranium. Such rounds are highly effective in defeating modern tanks and armored vehicles.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the plan shows that the British “have lost the bearings,” and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said “it marked another step, and there aren’t so many of them left.”
But weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former commander of Britain’s Royal Tank Regiment, said it was “reckless” of Putin “to try and suggest Britain is sending nuclear material” to Ukraine. He said depleted uranium is a common component of tank rounds, possibly even used by Russia.
“Putin insinuating that they are some sort of nuclear weapon is bonkers,” he told The Associated Press. “Depleted uranium is completely inert. There is no way that you could create a nuclear reaction or a nuclear explosion with depleted uranium.”
Beijing insists it is a neutral broker in Ukraine, and Xi said after his talks with Putin: “We adhere to a principled and objective position on the Ukrainian crisis based on the goals and principles of the U.N. Charter.” The Chinese plan seeks to “actively encourage peace and the resumption of talks,” he said.
In a joint statement, Russia and China emphasized the need to “respect legitimate security concerns of all countries” to settle the conflict, echoing Moscow’s argument that it sent in troops to prevent the U.S. and its NATO allies from turning the country into an anti-Russian bulwark.
“Russia welcomes China’s readiness to play a positive role in the political and diplomatic settlement of the Ukrainian crisis” and the “constructive ideas” contained in Beijing’s peace plan, the statement said. It added: “The parties underline that a responsible dialogue offers the best path for a lasting settlement … and the international community should support constructive efforts in this regard.”
After meeting Kishida, Zelenskyy told reporters his team had sent his own peace formula to China but hasn’t heard back, adding that there were “some signals, but nothing concrete about the possibility of a dialogue.”
Kishida called Russia’s invasion a “disgrace that undermines the foundations of the international legal order” and pledged to “continue to support Ukraine until peace is back on the beautiful Ukrainian lands.”
Hours before Xi and Putin dined at a state dinner in glittering Kremlin opulence, Kishida laid flowers at a church in Bucha for the town’s victims.
“Upon this visit to Bucha, I feel a strong resentment against cruelty,” he said. “I would like to represent the people in Japan, and express my deepest condolences to those who lost their loved ones, were injured as a result of this cruel act.”
U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel noted the “two very different European-Pacific partnerships” that unfolded Tuesday.
“Kishida stands with freedom, and Xi stands with a war criminal,” Emanuel tweeted, referring to Friday’s decision by the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin, saying it wanted to put him on trial for the abductions of thousands of children from Ukraine.
Kyiv’s allies pledged more support. Washington is accelerating its delivery of Abrams tanks to Ukraine, sending a refurbished older version that can be ready faster, the Pentagon announced. The aim is to get the 70-ton behemoths to the war zone by fall.
The Russia-China front against the West was a prominent theme of Xi’s visit. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused NATO of seeking to become the world’s dominant military force. “That is why we are expanding our cooperation with China, including in the security sphere,” he said.
Putin is keen to show he has a heavyweight ally and market for Russian energy products under Western sanctions. He and Xi signed agreements on economic cooperation, noting Russian-Chinese trade rose by 30% last year to $185 billion and is expected to top $200 billion this year.
Russia stands “ready to meet the Chinese economy’s growing demand for energy resources” by boosting deliveries of oil and gas, he said, while listing other areas of cooperation, including aircraft and shipbuilding industries and other high-tech sectors.
Whether China will provide military support is a key question. Western officials “have seen some signs” Putin also wants lethal weapons from Beijing, though there is no evidence it has granted his request, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in Brussels.
Further contacts are planned. Xi said he invited Putin to China this year to discuss a regional initiative that seeks to extend Beijing’s influence through economic cooperation.
Moscow and Beijing have both weathered international condemnation of their human rights records. The Chinese government is accused of atrocities against Uighur Muslims in its far western Xinjiang region. The allegations include genocide, forced sterilization and the mass detention of nearly 1 million Uighurs. Beijing has denied the allegations. Russia has been accused of war crimes in Ukraine, charges it denies.
Both China and Japan have enjoyed recent diplomatic successes that emboldened their foreign policy.
Japan, which has engaged in territorial disputes over islands with both China and Russia, is particularly concerned about the Beijing-Moscow relationship. Both nations have conducted joint military exercises near Japan’s coasts.
Beijing’s diplomatic foray follows its recent success in brokering a deal between Iran and its chief Middle Eastern rival, Saudi Arabia, to restore relations after years of tensions. The move displayed China’s influence in a region where Washington has long been the major foreign player.
Kishida became Japan’s first postwar leader to enter a war zone.
Due to its pacifist principles, Japan’s support for Ukraine has been limited to nonlethal equipment and humanitarian supplies. It has contributed more than $7 billion to Ukraine and accepted more than 2,000 displaced Ukrainians, despite its strict immigration policy.
Tokyo joined the U.S. and European nations in sanctioning Russia over the invasion. By contrast, China has refused to condemn Moscow’s aggression and criticized Western sanctions against Moscow, while accusing NATO and Washington of provoking Putin’s military action.
Japan fears the possible impact of a war in East Asia, where China’s military has grown increasingly assertive and has escalated tensions around self-ruled Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.
In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said of Kishida’s trip: “We hope Japan could do more things to deescalate the situation instead of the opposite.”
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Associated Press writers Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, Lolita C. Baldor in Washington and Jill Lawless in London contributed.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is putting out the word that planned stopovers in the United States by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in the coming weeks fall in line with recent precedent and should not be used as a pretext by China to step up aggressive activity in the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan’s office of the president confirmed on Tuesday that Tsai is tentatively scheduled to transit through New York on March 30 before heading to Guatemala and Belize. She’s expected to stop in Los Angeles on April 5 on her way back to Taiwan. The office did not provide details of her itinerary while in the U.S.
Ahead of Taiwan’s announcement, senior U.S. officials in Washington and Beijing have underscored to their Chinese counterparts in recent weeks that transit visits through the United States during broader international travel by the Taiwanese president have been routine over the years, according to a senior administration official. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
In such unofficial visits in recent years, Tsai has met with members of Congress and the Taiwanese diaspora and has been welcomed by the chairperson of the American Institute in Taiwan, the U.S. government-run nonprofit that carries out unofficial relations with Taiwan. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the planned stopovers—administration officials stress they are not official visits—are “business as usual” and consistent with longstanding U.S. policy.
“There’s no reason for China to overreact,” Kirby said about the expected unofficial visit. “Heck, there’s no reason for China to react.”
Tsai transited through the United States six times between 2016 and 2019 before slowing international travel with the coronavirus pandemic. In reaction to those visits, China rhetorically lashed out against the U.S. and Taiwan.
State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said “the unofficial nature of our relations with Taiwan remains unchanged.”
Following Pelosi’s August visit, Beijing launched missiles over Taiwan, deployed warships across the median line of the Taiwan Strait and carried out military exercises near the island. Beijing also suspended climate talks with the U.S. and restricted military-to-military communication with the Pentagon.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, has said he would meet with Tsai when she is in the U.S. and has not ruled out the possibility of traveling to Taiwan in a show of support.
Beijing sees official American contact with Taiwan as encouragement to make the island’s decades-old de facto independence permanent, a step U.S. leaders say they don’t support. Pelosi, D-Calif., was the highest-ranking elected American official to visit the island since Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997. Under the “one China” policy, the U.S. recognizes Beijing as the government of China and doesn’t have diplomatic relations with Taiwan but has maintained that Taipei is an important partner in the Indo-Pacific.
U.S. officials are increasingly worried about China’s long-stated goals of unifying Taiwan with the mainland and the possibility of war over Taiwan. The self-ruled island democracy is claimed by Beijing as part of its territory. The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which has governed U.S. relations with the island, does not require the U.S. to step in militarily if China invades but makes it American policy to ensure Taiwan has the resources to defend itself and to prevent any unilateral change of status by Beijing.
The difficult U.S.-China relationship has only become more complicated since Pelosi’s visit.
Last month, President Joe Biden ordered a Chinese spy balloon shot out of the sky after it traversed the continental United States. And the Biden administration in recent weeks has said that U.S. intelligence findings show that China is weighing sending arms to Russia for its ongoing war in Ukraine, but it does not have evidence that suggests Beijing has decided to follow through on supplying Moscow.
The Biden administration postponed a planned visit to Beijing by Secretary of State Antony Blinken following the balloon controversy but has signaled it would like to get such a visit back on track.
The White House on Monday also said officials are in talks with China about possible visits by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo focused on economic matters. Biden has also said he expects to soon hold a call with China’s Xi Jinping.
Kirby said “keeping those lines of communication open” is still valuable.
Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi met in Moscow on Tuesday for a second day of talks, the first face-to-face meeting between the allies since before Russia launched its Ukraine invasion more than a year ago.
The Taiwanese government earlier this month said that Tsai planned stops in New York and Southern California during an upcoming broader international trip.
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AP journalists Johnson Lai in Taipei and Josh Boak and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed reporting.
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This story has been corrected to show China lashed out against the U.S., not against China.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A requirement that travelers to the U.S. from China present a negative COVID-19 test before boarding their flights expired Friday after more than two months as cases in China have fallen.
The restrictions were put in place Dec. 28 and took effect Jan. 5 amid a surge in infections in China after the nation sharply eased pandemic restrictions and as U.S. health officials expressed concerns that their Chinese counterparts were not being truthful to the world about the true number of infections and deaths. The requirement from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expired for flights leaving after 3 p.m. Eastern time Friday.
When the restriction was imposed, U.S. officials also said it was necessary to protect U.S. citizens and communities because there was a lack of transparency from the Chinese government about the size of the surge or the variants that were circulating within China.
The rules imposed in January require travelers to the U.S. from China, Hong Kong and Macau to take a COVID-19 test no more than two days before travel and provide a negative test before boarding their flight. The testing applies to anyone 2 years and older, including U.S. citizens.
China saw infections and deaths surge after it eased back from its “zero COVID” strategy in early December after rare public protests against a policy that confined millions of people to their homes and sparked protests and demands for President Xi Jinping to resign.
But as China eased its strict rules, infections and deaths surged, and parts of the country for weeks saw their hospitals overwhelmed by infected patients looking for help. Still, the Chinese government has been slow to release data on the number of deaths and infections.
The U.S. decision to lift restrictions comes at a moment when U.S.-China relations are strained. Biden ordered a Chinese spy balloon shot down last month after it traversed the continental United States. The Biden administration has also publicized U.S. intelligence findings that raise concern Beijing is weighing providing Russia weaponry for its ongoing war on Ukraine.
DENPASAR, Indonesia (AP) — A direct flight from China landed in Indonesia’s resort island of Bali for the first time in nearly three years on Sunday after the route was suspended due to the pandemic.
At least 210 people were on board the chartered plane operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air from Shenzhen in China’s southern Guangdong province.
Some Chinese tourists who arrived at the airport in Bali said they were glad to have the chance to travel internationally again after China ended its strict COVID-19 restrictions.
“I feel very happy and relaxed. It was a long time we did not go abroad,” said An Pei, a Chinese tourist who was on the flight.
The flight followed the Chinese government’s decision to lift travel restrictions announced on January 8 and it coincided with the start of the Lunar New Year, which was being marked Sunday.
The Shenzhen-to-Bali route will operate once a week during its initial phase, according to a statement from Danang Mandala Prihantoro, a spokesperson for Lion Air.
Indonesia is targeting 255,000 tourists from China in 2023. Indonesia recorded 94,924 visits from China from January to October 2022. More than 2 million tourists from China visited Indonesia each year before the pandemic.
The return of Chinese tourists is expected to support the overall target of foreign tourist arrivals this year. Indonesia aims to record 3.5 million to 7.4 million foreign visits, said Sandiaga Uno, the Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy, in a statement Friday. China is one of the largest markets for inbound tourism in Indonesia.
“Based on online travel agent data in China, there has been an increase in search volume for overseas tourist destinations by 430%. Indonesia is in the top 5 searches and Bali’s search volume has increased by 250%,” Uno said.
Indonesia’s government is exploring ways to attract more Chinese tourists, including the possibility of direct flights from three main cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
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Find more of AP’s Asia-Pacific coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/asia-pacific
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin and North Carolina have joined at least 22 other states in banning the popular social media app TikTok on state-owned devices, including Mississippi, Indiana, Louisiana and South Dakota.
Congress also recently banned TikTok from most U.S. government-issued devices over bipartisan concerns about security.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. It has been targeted by critics who say the Chinese government could access user data, such as browsing history and location. U.S. armed forces also have prohibited the app on military devices.
TikTok is consumed by two-thirds of American teens and has become the second-most popular domain in the world. But there’s long been bipartisan concern in Washington that Beijing would use legal and regulatory power to seize American user data or try to push pro-China narratives or misinformation.
Here’s a look at the action in Wisconsin and North Carolina and the broader debate over TikTok:
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WHY DID WISCONSIN AND NORTH CAROLINA BAN TIKTOK?
Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers cited concerns about privacy, safety and security, after consulting with the FBI and emergency management officials about the app. Evers’ order applies to most state agencies, with some exceptions like criminal investigators who may be using the app to track certain people.
The University of Wisconsin System, which employs 40,000 faculty and staff, is also exempt. But a UW System spokesperson said despite the exemption, the university was conducting a review and moving toward placing restrictions on the app being used on devices in order to protect against serious cybersecurity risks.
Both Evers and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper also prohibited the use of WeChat, a Chinese instant messaging app, on state devices.
“It’s important for us to protect state information technology from foreign countries that have actively participated in cyberattacks against the United States,” Cooper said. “Protecting North Carolina from cyber threats is vital to ensuring the safety, security, privacy, and success of our state and its people.”
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WHAT ARE THE CONCERNS ABOUT TIKTOK?
Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that TikTok user data could be shared by owner ByteDance Ltd. with China’s authoritarian government. U.S. officials also worry that the Chinese government might use TikTok to push pro-China narratives or misinformation.
Fears were stoked by news reports last year that a China-based team improperly accessed data of U.S. TikTok users, including two journalists, as part of a covert surveillance program to ferret out the source of leaks to the press.
There are also concerns that the company is sending masses of user data to China, in breach of stringent European privacy rules.
Additionally, there’s been concern about TikTok’s content and whether it harms teenagers’ mental health.
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WHO HAS PUSHED FOR RESTRICTIONS?
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump and his administration sought to ban dealings with TikTok’s owner, force it to sell off its U.S. assets and remove it from app stores. Courts blocked Trump’s efforts to ban TikTok, and President Joe Biden rescinded Trump’s orders after taking office but ordered an in-depth study of the issue. A planned sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets was shelved.
In Congress, concern about the app has been bipartisan. Congress last month banned TikTok from most U.S. government-issued devices over bipartisan concerns about security.
The Senate in December approved a version of the TikTok ban authored by conservative Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a vocal critic of big tech companies.
But Democratic U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, of Illinois has co-sponsored legislation to prohibit TikTok from operating in the U.S. altogether, and the measure approved by Congress in December had the support of Democratic U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
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WHAT DOES TIKTOK SAY?
“We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok,” Jamal Brown, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in an emailed statement.
TikTok is developing security and data privacy plans as part of an ongoing national security review by President Joe Biden’s administration.
