Xi Jinping’s signature anti-corruption drive has probed nearly five million officials since 2012, a ruling Communist Party official said on Monday, a day after the Chinese President warned that the party cannot rest, even for a minute in the fight against corruption.
Addressing a press conference on the sidelines of the 20th Congress of the party, which began on Sunday, Xiao Pei, a deputy head of the party’s anti-graft body said that some 207,000 party officials were punished in the last 10 years.
Since Xi came to power in November 2012, more than 4.6 million officials around the country have been probed for corruption, Xiao said.
Xiao added these cases included 553 officials at the ministerial level and above.
The Congress with over 2,300 delegates is widely expected to endorse Xi for a third term, which will make him the only leader after the party founder Mao Zedong to continue in power for more than two-five year terms.
Critics say Xi effectively used his anti-graft campaign to consolidate power.
Ahead of the Congress, three top security officials were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve for corruption.
Ling Li, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of Vienna, said the party was expected to continue to use the anti-corruption drive as a tool to regulate its elites in the long term.
Anti-corruption has become and will remain the most potent tool to regulate elite politics in China in the next five years and beyond, she told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
It’s characterised as a self-revolution because it is an institutionalised approach to purge its own members from positions of power, an exceptional initiative voluntarily taken by the party itself, she said.
The anti-graft campaign figured high in Xi’s speech at the Congress on Sunday in which he warned that “as long as the breeding grounds and conditions for corruption still exist, we must keep sounding the bugle and never rest, not even for a minute, in our fight against corruption.”
Xi also spoke of serious hidden dangers inside the party, the country and the military have been removed.
“We have waged a battle against corruption on a scale unprecedented in our history. Driven by a strong sense of mission, we have resolved to ‘offend a few thousand rather than fail 1.4 billion’ and to clear our party of all its ills,” Xi added.
He pointed out that corruption is cancer to the vitality and ability of the party, and fighting corruption should be self-reformed.
There is zero tolerance in the Communist Party for senior cadres who collude with business, President Xi warned, pledging the toughest penalties for any offenders.
[We will] seriously deal with corruption intertwining political and economic problems, Xi told party delegates attending the Congress on Sunday.
[We must] resolutely put a stop to collusion between cadres in leading positions who become the spokespersons or agents of interest groups and powerful cliques,” he added.
Even though China’s economy is beset by problems ranging from a real estate crisis to youth unemployment, Xi Jinping did not offer any grand ideas to set the country back on track during his two-hour opening speech at the Communist Party Congress on Sunday.
The Chinese leader is expected to secure an unprecedented third term in power at the week-long congress. Priorities presented at the political gathering of more than 2,000 party members will also set China’s trajectory for the next five years or even longer.
In his speech Sunday, Xi struck a confident tone, highlighting China’s growing strength and rising influence under his first decade in power. He also repeatedly underscored the risks and challenges the country faces, including the Covid pandemic, Hong Kong and Taiwan — all of which he claimed China had come away from victorious.
But experts are concerned that Xi offered no signs of moving away from the country’s rigid zero-Covid policy or its tight regulatory stance on various businesses, both of which have hampered growth in the world’s second-largest economy.
“Yesterday’s speech confirms what many China watchers have long suspected — Xi has no intention of embracing market liberalization or relaxing China’s zero-Covid policies, at least not anytime soon,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a DC-based think tank.
“Instead, he intends to double down on policies geared towards security and self-reliance at the expense of China’s long-term economic growth.”
China is the world’s last major economy still enforcing strict zero-Covid measures, which aim to stamp out chains of transmission through border restrictions, mass testing, extensive quarantines, and uncompromising snap lockdowns.
And China’s economy is in bad shape. Growth has stalled, youth unemployment is at a record high, and the housing market is in shambles. Constant Covid lockdowns have not only wreaked havoc on the economy, but also sparked rising social discontent.
Last week, two large banners were hung on an overpass of a major thoroughfare in Beijing, protesting against Xi’s Covid policy and authoritarian rule. It was a rare protest against the top leadership in the country, signaling the frustration and anger among the public.
Many international organizations, including the IMF and World Bank, have recently downgraded China’s GDP growth forecasts for this year, citing zero-Covid as one of the major drags.
Xi, however, praised the government’s adherence to zero-Covid, saying it has “achieved significant positive results.”
Xi’s speech — a summary of the Communist Party’s work report, or action plan — was similarly short on concrete solutions to other challenges facing the economy in the near term.
“We believe the ongoing Party Congress may not be an inflection point for major policy changes,” Goldman Sachs analysts said on Sunday, adding that they believe China may not loosen its Covid restrictions until at least the second quarter of 2023.
On the property sector, Xi emphasized the need to provide affordable housing and dampen speculative demand — but there was no specific mention of the slump in real estate, whichhas mushroomed into a major crisis over the past few years, threatening both economic and social stability.
“We maintain our view that a comprehensive solution to the beleaguered property sector might not be introduced until after March 2023, when the political reshuffle is fully completed,” said Nomura analysts on Monday.
Nor did Xi mention record youth unemployment, which is mainly a result of his year-long crackdown on the tech industry set against the backdrop of punishing zero-Covid policies.
In the full version of the official 20th Party Congress work report,which was publishedshortly after his speech, Xi emphasized the need to continue the party’s “anti-monopoly” crackdown and regulate “excessive incomes,” a sign that he will continue to get tough on big businesses and wealthy individuals.
Beijing’s sweeping crackdown on the country’s private sector, under the banner of Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign, has pummeled several companies in sectors ranging from tech and finance to gaming and private education.
The government has defended the campaign as necessary for “social fairness” and narrowing income gaps.
In his speech, Xi also made clear that development was the “top priority” and stressed continued focus on “high-quality growth.”
That may dispel some market concerns that the government no longer cared much about economic growth, UBS analysts said.
However, to achieve Xi’s target of making China a “medium developed country” by 2035, the country’s annual real GDP growth needs to average around 4.7% a year from 2021 to 2035, the UBS analysts said. That could be “quite challenging,” they noted, adding they expect China’s potential growth to average between 4% to 4.5% a year this decade, and fall lower after 2030.
Meantime, a comparison between this year’s speech and the last one delivered by Xi in 2017 at the 19th party congress revealed a potentially worrying trend.
The frequency of words such as “security,” “people,” and “socialism” used in 2022 had increased compared to 2017, while that of “economy,” “market” and “reform” declined, Goldman analysts said.
The change was also noticed by Nomura analysts, who said it could point to “a shift in the party’s mandate.”
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
Beijing CNN
—
During China’s National Day holiday in early October, several expatriate friends and I took our young children – who are of mixed races and tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd – to the Great Wall on the outskirts of Beijing.
As we climbed a restored but almost deserted section of the ancient landmark, a few local families on their way down walked past us. Noticing our kids, one of their children exclaimed: “Wow foreigners! With Covid? Let’s get away from them…” The adults remained quiet as the group quickened their paces.
Understanding the big picture is timely as Xi is poised to break convention to assume a third term as the head of the Chinese Communist Party – the real source of his power instead of the ceremonial presidency – at the ruling party’s twice-a-decade national congress, which opened in Beijing on Sunday.
The Great Wall, a top tourist attraction that normally draws throngs of visitors during holidays, stood nearly empty when we went thanks to Xi’s insistence – three years into the global pandemic – on a policy of zero tolerance for Covid infections while the rest of the world has mostly moved on and re-opened.
China’s borders have remained shut for most international travelers since March 2020, while many foreigners who once called the country home have chosen to leave.
With the highly contagious Omicron variant raging through parts of the country, authorities had discouraged domestic travel ahead of National Day holiday. They are also sticking to a playbook of strict quarantine, incessant mass testing and invasive contact tracing – often locking down entire cities of millions over a handful of cases.
Unsurprisingly, holiday travel plummeted during the so-called “Golden Week” along with tourism spending, which fell to less than half of that in 2019, the last “normal” year.
And it’s not just one industry: Pessimism blankets other sectors, from automobile to real estate, as the world’s second-largest economy falters.
The Chinese economic slowdown poses a massive political challenge for Xi, whose party’s legitimacy in the past few decades has relied on rapid growth and rising incomes for 1.4 billion people. It’s also a harsh reality check for the international community: the world’s longtime growth engine is sputtering, just as the prospect of a global recession emerges.
But Xi’s costly “zero-Covid” intransigence is a natural outcome of the unprecedented amount of power he has amassed. For many Chinese officials, this policy is less about science and more about political loyalty to the country’s most powerful leader in decades.
Online videos abound of local health workers swabbing fruits, animals and even shoes for Covid testing despite the absence of sound scientific basis. China’s only Covid-related deaths in September were 27 people who were killed when their bus crashed on its way to a quarantine facility. Still, officials nationwide have doubled down on enforcing draconian rules, especially ahead of the party congress, helped by the world’s most sophisticated surveillance technologies.
China had boasted more security cameras than any other country even before Covid. Now, in the age of smartphones, mandatory apps allow the government to check people’s Covid status and track their movement in real time. Authorities can easily confine someone to their home by remotely switching the health app to code red – and they did just that on several occasions to stop potential protesters from taking to the streets.
Whether physical lockdowns or digital manipulation, these measures born out of “zero-Covid” have proven such effective means of control in a system obsessed with social stability that many worry Xi and his underlings will never ditch the policy.
A series of recent articles published by the party’s mouthpieces had reinforced such concern by stressing the policy’s “correctness” and “sustainability,” even before Xi hailed “zero-Covid” as a resounding success story in his two-hour speech Sunday. And state media fills its coverage with depictions of the “grim reality” in foreign countries where leaders supposedly turn a blind eye to mass fatalities and suffering caused by Covid – in contrast to China’s apparent triumph in saving lives with “minimal overall cost.”
For years, Xi’s cyber police have been fortifying the country’s so-called “Great Firewall” – perhaps the world’s most extensive internet filtering and censorship system that blocks and deletes anything deemed “harmful” by the party. Now supported by artificial intelligence, censors quickly scrub clean any posts seen as contradicting the party line – including on Covid.
This potent mix of propaganda and control under Xi appears to have had its desired effect on a large segment of Chinese society, creating a buffer for the leadership by convincing enough people of the superiority of China’s system even as millions of their fellow countrymen grow resentful of “zero-Covid.” But this approach, combined with prolonged border closure and escalating geopolitical tensions, also provides fertile ground for xenophobia.
The local child’s remarks on the Great Wall reflected that. But the true danger of the “blame the foreigners” sentiment comes when adults in powerful positions take advantage of it in the face of mounting pressure on the domestic front.
Here’s Xi Jinping’s vision to make China great again
Since his ascent to the top in 2012, Xi’s ruling philosophy has become increasingly clear: Only he can make China great again by restoring the party’s – thus his – omnipresence and dominance, as well as the country’s rightful place on the global stage.
With China’s increasing economic and military might, coexistence with the West has given way to confrontation with the United States and its allies. Gone are the days of “hiding your strength and biding your time” – Chinese diplomats under Xi are proud warriors training fire on anyone who dares to question their government.
Underpinned by rising nationalism, China has started flexing military muscle beyond its shores. Tensions over Taiwan poses a real threat of war in Asia, as few doubt that “reunification” with the self-governed democratic island – long claimed by the Communist leadership despite having never ruled it – would be seen as the crown jewel of Xi’s legacy.
That outward power projection goes hand in hand with China’s sense of besiegement in a US-led world order, which Xi has made no secret of trying to reshape along with other autocrats like Russian President Vladmir Putin. Until that happens, though, the Chinese strongman’s instinct and demand for total control at home seem to have meant the erection of ever-higher barriers – in the real world and cyberspace – to keep out pesky outsiders, the perceived source of dangerous viruses and ideas.
A history paper released recently by a government-run research institute has gone viral as it, like Xi, upended a long-held consensus. Instead of denouncing the isolationist policy adopted by China’s last two imperial dynasties as a cause of their backward turn and eventual collapse, the authors defended its necessity to protect national sovereignty and security when faced with Western invaders.
The emperors of those dynasties, who also rebuilt parts of the Great Wall, failed to reverse their country’s decline back then. But the tools at their disposal were no match to the high-tech ones in the hands of China’s current ruler. Xi seems confident that his “walls” – among other things – will help him realize his oft-cited ultimate goal: the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Whether or not he succeeds, the world will feel the impact for years to come.
BEIJING (AP) — China plans to boost coal production through 2025 to avoid a repeat of last year’s power shortages, an official said Monday, adding to setbacks in efforts to cut climate-changing carbon emissions from the biggest global source.
China is a big investor in wind and solar, but jittery Communist Party leaders called for more coal-fired power after economic growth slumped last year and shortages caused blackouts. That prompted warnings that carbon emissions will rise faster through 2030, when they government says they should peak.
The ruling party aims for annual coal production to rise to 4.6 billion tons in 2025, a deputy director of the Cabinet’s National Energy Administration, Ren Jingdong, said at a news conference held during a ruling party congress. That would be a 12% increase over last year’s 4.1 billion tons.
Ensuring an adequate power supply is especially sensitive after economic growth slid to 2.2% over a year earlier in the first six months of this year, less than half the official target of 5.5%. The ruling party earlier called for this year’s production to rise by 300 million tons, or about 7% of last year’s output.
The challenges of relying on renewable sources were highlighted by a dry summer that left reservoirs in China’s southwest too low to generate hydropower. That forced power cuts in Sichuan province and the major city of Chongqing.
Beijing will “give full play to the ‘ballast role’ of coal and the basic regulating role of coal power,” Ren said. He said the country will “vigorously enhance oil and gas exploration and development.”
Ren said officials are trying to ensure China meets targets in the ruling party’s latest five-year development plan for non-fossil fuel sources to supply 20% of power by 2025 and 25% by 2030. He said that includes wind, solar, hydro, nuclear and geothermal.
China will “comprehensively build a clean energy supply system,” Ren said.
Another official, Zhao Chenxin, deputy director of the Cabinet’s planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, said plans include building 450 million kilowatts of “large-scale wind and solar bases” in the Gobi Desert in China’s north.
Beijing has spent tens of billions of dollars on solar and wind farms to reduce reliance on imported oil and gas and clean up its smog-choked cities. China accounted for about half of global investment in wind and solar in 2020.
Still, coal is expected to supply 60% of its power in the near future.
Authorities say they are shrinking carbon emissions per unit of economic output. The government reported a reduction of 3.8% last year, an improvement over 2020′s 1% gain but down from a 5.1% cut in 2017.
Last year’s total energy use increased 5.2% over 2020 after a revival of global demand for Chinese exports propelled a manufacturing boom, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Investigators inspect a site after shelling near an administrative building, in Donetsk, Ukrainian … [+] territory occupied by Russia. Sunday, Oct. 16, 2022. (AP Photo/Alexei Alexandrov)
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Dispatches from Ukraine. Day 235.
As Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues and the war rages on, reliable sources of information are critical. Forbes gathers information and provides updates on the situation.
Breaking: several countries called on their citizens to leave the territory of Ukraine.
Egypt. On October 14, Egypt reported that The Egyptian Embassy in Kyiv, without a clear explanation of the reason, urged members of the Egyptian community to depart Ukraine via available land routes with the neighboring countries.
China. On October 15, Consul General of China Zhang Meifang urged Chinese citizens to leave Ukraine “with the current grim security situation.” She added that the Embassy will assist in organizing the evacuation of people in need.
Serbia. Today, the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia in Kyiv announced its temporary closure “in order to protect the safety of its personnel.” Recalling that on February 13, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia recommended to its citizens to consider the possibility of temporarily leaving the territory of Ukraine, and to those citizens who were planning a trip to Ukraine, to postpone their trip. Russian mass media reported on several other countries that have called on their citizens to leave Ukraine immediately, but there is no official confirmation of this information yet.
About 9,000 Russian troops are currently arriving in the Republic of Belarus. “The first troop trains with Russian servicemen who are part of the RGF began to arrive in Belarus,” Valery Revenko, Assistant Minister of Defense of Belarus, wrote on Twitter. “The relocation will take several days. The total number will be a little less than 9 thousand people.” On October 10, the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, said that Russia and Belarus had agreed to deploy a joint regional grouping of troops due to the “escalation” on the western borders of Belarus. “If the threat level reaches the current level, as it is now, we begin to activate the grouping of the Union state.”
More than 11,200 houses, 479 industrial enterprises, 167 educational institutions and 64 hospitals were damaged or completely destroyed by Russia in the Luhansk region, stated the head of the Luhansk Regional State Administration. According to preliminary data, at least 18 sports facilities, 6 social welfare facilities, 64 health care facilities, 115 cultural facilities, 37 administrative buildings, 7 railway stations, and 48 livelihood facilities were damaged due to constant shelling and bombing of the region in eastern Ukraine. “The enemy purposefully destroyed the economy of the region. Today, it is impossible to carry out economic activities on the territory of the Luhansk region. Thousands of individual entrepreneurs, 3,408 enterprises, including 479 industrial enterprises, cannot work.”
Dnipropetrovsk Region. At night, the city was shelled 30 times from barrel artillery, almost fifty strikes from a BM-21 Grad multiple launch rocket system were recorded, as reported by the Deputy Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine. During the attack, 6 people were injured, 2 were hospitalized. Russian Forces shelled 3 nine-story buildings, 21 private houses, damaged 5 power lines and many other objects. The shelling caused several fires and more than 1,500 families were left without electricity.
Kharkiv Region. The head of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration, Oleh Synyehubov, reported that yesterday the Russian army shelled several settlements near the contact line and the border with the Russian Federation. According to the regional Center of Emergency Medical Assistance, 3 people were hospitalized with injuries in the Kupyansk district: 2 men aged 36 and 48, and a 69-year-old woman. Synyehubov also added that 555 explosive objects in the Kharkiv region were defused during the day by the pyrotechnic units of Ukraine’s State Emergency Service.
On The Cultural Front
The American streaming service of films and series, Netflix NFLX , has acquired the rights to show seven Ukrainian films. These are the first of a large package of films on Ukraine, the rights to which Netflix has purchased, the distributor Film.ua Distribution confirmed in a comment to The Village Ukraine. “…our full meters are actually needed by the viewer, create interest and admiration. All this inspires us to continue working on the local and global distribution of Ukrainian films and series.”
Among the films that are already available on the service: “My Thoughts Are Silent” by Antonio Lukich, “The Rising Hawk” by Akhtem Seitablaev and John Wynn, “Stars Exchange” by Oleksiy Daruga, “Devoted” by Khrystyna Syvolap, “Foxter & Max” by Anatoliy Mateshko, “The Stronghold” by Yuriy Kovalyov, “The Guide” by Oles Sanin.
The Russian authorities, under the pretext of “evacuation,” are going to expropriate artifacts from Crimean museums and institutions as well as those in other temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories, according to the website of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine. “Such mass removal of cultural values from the territory of Ukraine by the Russian occupiers will be comparable to the looting of museums during the Second World War and should be qualified accordingly.” The Ministry of Culture said.
The ministry appealed to UNESCO and all international partners to prevent another violation of international law by Russia and to refuse cooperation with Russian museums and other institutions. The Russian plan for “external evacuation” from the museums of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea to the territory of the Russian Federation provides for the priority removal of the most valuable objects. In particular, archaeological finds made of precious metals.
Elon Musk has a penchant for the letter “X.” He calls his son with the singer Grimes, whose actual name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X.” He named the company he created to buy Twitter “X Holdings.” His rocket company is, naturally, SpaceX.
For months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has expressed interest in creating his own version of China’s WeChat — a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments — for the rest of the world. At least, that is, once he’s done buying Twitter after months of legal infighting over the $44 billion purchase agreement he signed in April.
There are just a few obstacles. First is that a Musk-owned Twitter wouldn’t be the only global company in pursuit of this goal, and in fact would probably be playing catch-up with its rivals. Next is the question of whether anyone really wants a Twitter-based everything app— or any other super app — to begin with.
Start with the competition and consumer demand. Facebook parent Meta has spent years trying to make its flagship platform a destination for everything online, adding payments, games, shopping and even dating features to its social network. So far, it’s had little success; nearly all of its revenue still comes from advertising.
Google, Snap, TikTok, Uber and others have also tried to jump on the super app bandwagon, expanding their offerings in an effort to become indispensable to people as they go about their day. None have set the world on fire so far, not least because people already have a number of apps at their disposal to handle shopping, communicating and payments.
“Old habits are hard to break, and people in the U.S. are used to using different apps for different activities,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. Enberg also notes that super apps would likely suck up more personal data at a time when trust in social platforms has deteriorated significantly.
Musk kicked off the latest round of speculation on Oct. 4, the day he reversed his attempts to get out of the deal and announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter after all. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted without further explanation.
But he’s provided at least a little more detail in the past. During Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk told the crowd at a factory near Austin, Texas, that he thinks he’s “got a good sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better.”
And he’s dropped some strong hints that handling payments for goods and services would be a key part of the app. Musk said he has a “grander vision” for what X.com, an online bank he started early in his career that eventually became part of PayPal, could have been.
“Obviously that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years,” Musk said in August. “So it’s kind of something that I thought would be quite useful for a long time. I know what to do.”
But it’s not clear that WeChat’s success in China means the same idea would translate for a U.S. or global audience. WeChat usage is almost universal in China, where most people never had a computer at home and skipped straight to going online by mobile phone.
Operated by tech giant Tencent Holding Ltd., the platform has made itself a one-stop shop for payments and other services and is starting to compete in entertainment. It is also a platform for health code apps the public is required to use prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
China has 1 billion internet users, and nearly all of them go online by mobile phone, according to the government-sanctioned China Internet Network Information Center. Only 33% use desktop computers at all — and mostly in addition to mobile phones. Tencent says WeChat had 1.3 billion users worldwide as of the end of June.
Tencent and its main Chinese competitor, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, aim to make apps that offer so many services that users can’t easily switch to another app. They’re not the only ones.
WeChat has added video calls and other message features as well as shopping, entertainment and other features. Government agencies use it to send out health, traffic and other announcements. WeChat’s payment function, meanwhile, is so widely used that coffee shops, museums and some other businesses refuse cash and will take payment only through WeChat or the rival Ant app.
There is no comparable app in the U.S., despite tech companies’ efforts.
It’s worth remembering that Musk’s grand visions don’t always work out the way he appears to expect. Humans are nowhere near colonizing Mars and his promised fleet of robotaxis remains about as far from reality as the metaverse.
Twitter’s user base is also tiny relative to those at its social-platform competitors. While Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all passed the 1 billion mark long ago, Twitter has about 240 million daily users.
“Musk would not only have to overcome the hurdle of convincing consumers to change how they behave online, but also that Twitter is the place to do it,” Enberg said.
__
Associated Press Writer Joe McDonald contributed to this story.
Elon Musk has a penchant for the letter “X.” He calls his son with the singer Grimes, whose actual name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X.” He named the company he created to buy Twitter “X Holdings.” His rocket company is, naturally, SpaceX.
Now he also apparently intends to morph Twitter into an “everything app” he calls X.
For months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has expressed interest in creating his own version of China’s WeChat — a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments — for the rest of the world. At least, that is, once he’s done buying Twitter after months of legal infighting over the $44 billion purchase agreement he signed in April.
There are just a few obstacles. First is that a Musk-owned Twitter wouldn’t be the only global company in pursuit of this goal, and in fact would probably be playing catch-up with its rivals. Next is the question of whether anyone really wants a Twitter-based everything app— or any other super app — to begin with.
Start with the competition and consumer demand. Facebook parent Meta has spent years trying to make its flagship platform a destination for everything online, adding payments, games, shopping and even dating features to its social network. So far, it’s had little success; nearly all of its revenue still comes from advertising.
Google, Snap, TikTok, Uber and others have also tried to jump on the super app bandwagon, expanding their offerings in an effort to become indispensable to people as they go about their day. None have set the world on fire so far, not least because people already have a number of apps at their disposal to handle shopping, communicating and payments.
“Old habits are hard to break, and people in the U.S. are used to using different apps for different activities,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. Enberg also notes that super apps would likely suck up more personal data at a time when trust in social platforms has deteriorated significantly.
Musk kicked off the latest round of speculation on Oct. 4, the day he reversed his attempts to get out of the deal and announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter after all. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted without further explanation.
But he’s provided at least a little more detail in the past. During Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk told the crowd at a factory near Austin, Texas, that he thinks he’s “got a good sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better.”
And he’s dropped some strong hints that handling payments for goods and services would be a key part of the app. Musk said he has a “grander vision” for what X.com, an online bank he started early in his career that eventually became part of PayPal, could have been.
“Obviously that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years,” Musk said in August. “So it’s kind of something that I thought would be quite useful for a long time. I know what to do.”
But it’s not clear that WeChat’s success in China means the same idea would translate for a U.S. or global audience. WeChat usage is almost universal in China, where most people never had a computer at home and skipped straight to going online by mobile phone.
Operated by tech giant Tencent Holding Ltd., the platform has made itself a one-stop shop for payments and other services and is starting to compete in entertainment. It is also a platform for health code apps the public is required to use prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
China has 1 billion internet users, and nearly all of them go online by mobile phone, according to the government-sanctioned China Internet Network Information Center. Only 33% use desktop computers at all — and mostly in addition to mobile phones. Tencent says WeChat had 1.3 billion users worldwide as of the end of June.
Tencent and its main Chinese competitor, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, aim to make apps that offer so many services that users can’t easily switch to another app. They’re not the only ones.
WeChat has added video calls and other message features as well as shopping, entertainment and other features. Government agencies use it to send out health, traffic and other announcements. WeChat’s payment function, meanwhile, is so widely used that coffee shops, museums and some other businesses refuse cash and will take payment only through WeChat or the rival Ant app.
There is no comparable app in the U.S., despite tech companies’ efforts.
It’s worth remembering that Musk’s grand visions don’t always work out the way he appears to expect. Humans are nowhere near colonizing Mars and his promised fleet of robotaxis remains about as far from reality as the metaverse.
Twitter’s user base is also tiny relative to those at its social-platform competitors. While Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all passed the 1 billion mark long ago, Twitter has about 240 million daily users.
“Musk would not only have to overcome the hurdle of convincing consumers to change how they behave online, but also that Twitter is the place to do it,” Enberg said.
——
Associated Press Writer Joe McDonald contributed to this story.
Elon Musk has a penchant for the letter “X.” He calls his son with the singer Grimes, whose actual name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X.” He named the company he created to buy Twitter “X Holdings.” His rocket company is, naturally, SpaceX.
Now he also apparently intends to morph Twitter into an “everything app” he calls X.
For months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has expressed interest in creating his own version of China’s WeChat — a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments — for the rest of the world. At least, that is, once he’s done buying Twitter after months of legal infighting over the $44 billion purchase agreement he signed in April.
There are just a few obstacles. First is that a Musk-owned Twitter wouldn’t be the only global company in pursuit of this goal, and in fact would probably be playing catch-up with its rivals. Next is the question of whether anyone really wants a Twitter-based everything app— or any other super app — to begin with.
Start with the competition and consumer demand. Facebook parent Meta has spent years trying to make its flagship platform a destination for everything online, adding payments, games, shopping and even dating features to its social network. So far, it’s had little success; nearly all of its revenue still comes from advertising.
Google, Snap, TikTok, Uber and others have also tried to jump on the super app bandwagon, expanding their offerings in an effort to become indispensable to people as they go about their day. None have set the world on fire so far, not least because people already have a number of apps at their disposal to handle shopping, communicating and payments.
“Old habits are hard to break, and people in the U.S. are used to using different apps for different activities,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. Enberg also notes that super apps would likely suck up more personal data at a time when trust in social platforms has deteriorated significantly.
Musk kicked off the latest round of speculation on Oct. 4, the day he reversed his attempts to get out of the deal and announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter after all. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted without further explanation.
But he’s provided at least a little more detail in the past. During Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk told the crowd at a factory near Austin, Texas, that he thinks he’s “got a good sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better.”
And he’s dropped some strong hints that handling payments for goods and services would be a key part of the app. Musk said he has a “grander vision” for what X.com, an online bank he started early in his career that eventually became part of PayPal, could have been.
“Obviously that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years,” Musk said in August. “So it’s kind of something that I thought would be quite useful for a long time. I know what to do.”
But it’s not clear that WeChat’s success in China means the same idea would translate for a U.S. or global audience. WeChat usage is almost universal in China, where most people never had a computer at home and skipped straight to going online by mobile phone.
Operated by tech giant Tencent Holding Ltd., the platform has made itself a one-stop shop for payments and other services and is starting to compete in entertainment. It is also a platform for health code apps the public is required to use prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
China has 1 billion internet users, and nearly all of them go online by mobile phone, according to the government-sanctioned China Internet Network Information Center. Only 33% use desktop computers at all — and mostly in addition to mobile phones. Tencent says WeChat had 1.3 billion users worldwide as of the end of June.
Tencent and its main Chinese competitor, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, aim to make apps that offer so many services that users can’t easily switch to another app. They’re not the only ones.
WeChat has added video calls and other message features as well as shopping, entertainment and other features. Government agencies use it to send out health, traffic and other announcements. WeChat’s payment function, meanwhile, is so widely used that coffee shops, museums and some other businesses refuse cash and will take payment only through WeChat or the rival Ant app.
There is no comparable app in the U.S., despite tech companies’ efforts.
It’s worth remembering that Musk’s grand visions don’t always work out the way he appears to expect. Humans are nowhere near colonizing Mars and his promised fleet of robotaxis remains about as far from reality as the metaverse.
Twitter’s user base is also tiny relative to those at its social-platform competitors. While Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all passed the 1 billion mark long ago, Twitter has about 240 million daily users.
“Musk would not only have to overcome the hurdle of convincing consumers to change how they behave online, but also that Twitter is the place to do it,” Enberg said.
——
Associated Press Writer Joe McDonald contributed to this story.
Protest banners hanging off Sitong Bridge in Beijing on October 13.
China’s online censorship went into overdrive after a rare protest took place on a busy overpass in Beijing which openly criticized Xi Jinping’s uncompromising zero-Covid policy and authoritarian rule, stoking pent-up tensions among the Chinese public.
Photos circulated on Twitter on Thursday showing two protest banners strewn over the Sitong Bridge in Beijing’s Haidian district in broad daylight, with plumes of smoke billowing from the bridge.
“Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. Don’t be a slave, be a citizen,” read one banner.
“Go on strike, remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping,” reads the other.
When CNN arrived at Sitong Bridge around 3:30 p.m. Thursday, no protesters or banners could be seen – as if nothing ever happened.
Some context: Public protest against the top leadership is extremely rare in China with dissenters facing imprisonment or worse.
Thursday’s show of discontent was even more striking given the run-up to important political meetings, when authorities turn Beijing into a fortress to maintain security and stability.
Censorship: Users on Chinese social spoke out to express their support and awe of the brazen defiance. Some shared the Chinese pop hit “Lonely Warrior” in a veiled reference to the protester, who some called a “hero,” while others swore never to forget, posting under the hashtag: “I saw it.”
Many posts were taken down and accounts were suspended indefinitely after commenting on – or alluding to – the protest on Chinese social media such as Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, and WeChat, the super app.
Key words were immediately restricted from search results on the apps, such as “Sitong Bridge” and ”Haidian” – the site of the protest. Terms like “Beijing,” “warrior,” “brave man,” and even “courage” were also restricted.
Lockdown, test, repeat: China’s zero-Covid strategy means that even one infection can trigger a city-wide lockdown, ordering people to stay at home or be transported to a quarantine center for isolation.
The Chinese government’s draconian zero-Covid policy has fueled growing public frustration, as unpredictable cycles of lockdowns and mass testing upended daily life and wreak havoc on the economy.
What to watch for: Hopes that China might ease pandemic restrictions after the Party Congress have all but been crushed as the Communist Party maintained its hardline approach.
In the week leading up to the important meeting, state-run mouthpiece People’s Daily published three commentaries reiterating that China will not let its guard down.
China’s President Xi Jinping kicks off the ruling party’s 20th National Congress — held once every five years — with an opening speech at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Oct. 16, 2022. The week-long event is expected to pave the way for him to stay on for an unprecedented third five-year term.
Noel Celis | AFP | Getty Images
BEIJING — Chinese President Xi Jinping affirmed Sunday the country’s recent shift away from rapid growth and greater focus on national self-sufficiency, especially in technology.
Xi was speaking at the opening ceremony of the ruling Communist Party of China’s 20th National Congress, held once every five years. His same speech in 2017 had begun with much discussion of China’s economic growth.
In contrast, Xi on Sunday began his remarks with greater emphasis on China’s “national rejuvenation” and opposition to Taiwan independence.
Xi briefly mentioned in that opening section how the country’s Covid policy has achieved “positive results” in coordination with economic development. He did not state whether the policy would end or continue.
China’s Covid controls helped the country quickly return to growth in 2020. But the controversial “zero-Covid” policy has become increasingly stringent this year, prompting investment banks to repeatedly slash growth estimates for China.
Looking ahead, Xi emphasized the country needed a solid technological foundation in order to achieve its modernization goals. Some areas he mentioned included boosting the quality of China’s manufactured products, the country’s capabilities in space transportation and digital development.
“Without solid material and technological foundations we cannot hope to build a great modern socialist country,” Xi said in Chinese, according to an official English translation.
Since the party’s 19th National Congress, the U.S. has increased its pressure on China. The Biden administration has called China a strategic competitor and this month announced new export controls on semiconductors — in an effort to maintain a U.S. edge in tech over China.
Xi did not mention specific countries in his nearly two-hour-long speech.
However, he dedicated one section to stating how the country would emphasize education for developing its own talent in science, and accelerate the launch of national projects with “strategic” and “long-term importance.” He did not provide further details.
He also did not leave out growth plans altogether. Xi said the country would aim to boost productivity, make its supply chains more resilient and expand overall economic output.
The speech in general laid out a framework for Xi’s near-term plan for China, which he said is to “basically realize socialist modernization” between the years 2020 and 2035.
He cast prior success — in building the world’s second-largest economy and becoming a “major destination for global investment” — as achievements already in the books.
The Chinese Communist Party has already announced 100-year development goals — to “build a moderately prosperous society in all respects” by 2021 and “build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious” by 2049.
Xi’s list of “essential requirements” for Chinese modernization began with upholding the leadership of the Communist Party of China, followed by “high-quality development.”
The list included achieving common prosperity — moderate wealth for all rather than just a few — and “harmony between humanity and nature.”
On Sunday, Xi spoke of promoting a “healthy” online environment. He said the country would encourage getting rich through hard work and expand its middle class. He indicated China would standardize an unspecified mechanism for wealth accumulation.
He did not specifically address China’s ongoing troubles in real estate, but repeated prior statements about speeding up measures to encourage both house purchases and rentals.
Xi warned of “dangerous storms” on the journey ahead, and called for commitment to the party’s leadership, “reform and opening up” and other principles.
BEIJING — China opened a twice-a-decade Communist Party conference Sunday at the end of which leader Xi Jinping is expected to receive a third five-year term, breaking with recent precedent and establishing him as arguably the most powerful Chinese politician since Mao Zedong.
Xi was delivering a lengthy report at the opening in which he extolled the achievements of the past five years and said the party would strive to meet its modernization goals to achieve what it calls the “rejuvenation” of the nation.
“The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is an irreversible, historical course,” he said to the more than 2,000 delegates attending the opening, held in the massive Great Hall of the People that overlooks Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing.
With Xi expected to remain, little change is foreseen in China‘s economic and foreign policies, as well as his intolerance of criticism and hardline approach to COVID-19 including quarantines and travel bans.
The weeklong congress is the 20th in the history of the century-old party, which has ruled China for more than 70 years. As with most Chinese political events, little information has been released beforehand and the outcome will only be announced next weekend, after days of closed-door sessions.
The congress will likely approve an amendment to its charter that could further elevate Xi’s status as leader.
The spokesperson for the congress, Sun Yeli, offered few details at a news conference Saturday about what changes would be enacted, He said they would “meet new requirements for advancing the party’s development and work in the face of new circumstances and new tasks.”
The previous congress in 2017 incorporated Xi’s ideology, known as Xi Jinping Thought, into the party constitution. The ideology is vague but emphasizes reviving the party’s mission as China’s political, economic, social and cultural leader and its central role in achieving national rejuvenation.
Xi, who has been leader for 10 years, has already amassed great power, placing himself in charge of domestic affairs, foreign policy, the military, the economy and most other key matters through party working groups that he leads.
The congress comes as China’s economy is facing major headwinds from a sharp slowdown in the real estate sector and the toll on tourism, shops and manufacturing from COVID-19 quarantines and other restrictions.
The expected coronation for China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping has officially begun, as the ruling Communist Party convenes a week-long meeting to extoll his first decade in power – and to usher in a likely new era of strongman rule.
Amid heightened security, escalated zero-Covid restrictions and a frenzy of propaganda and censorship, the party kicks off its most consequential national congress in decades in Beijing on Sunday morning.
At the 20th Party Congress, Xi, who came to power in 2012, is poised to secure a third term as the party’s general secretary, breaking with recent precedent and paving the way for potential lifelong rule.
The expected anointment will cement the 69-year-old’s status as China’s most powerful leader since late Chairman Mao Zedong, who ruled China until his death aged 82. It will also have a profound impact on the world, as Xi doubles down on an assertive foreign policy to boost China’s international clout and rewrite the US-led global order.
At the heart of the Chinese capital, nearly 2,300 handpicked party delegates from around the country have gathered in the Great Hall of the People for the highly choreographed event.
Sitting in neat rows with face masks on, they await Xi to deliver a lengthy work report that will take stock of the party’s achievements over the past five years and lay out in broad strokes its policy priorities for the next five.
Observers will be closely watching for signs of the party’s policy direction when it comes to its uncompromising zero-Covid policy, handling of steep economic challenges, and stated goal of “reunifying” with Taiwan – a self-governing democracy Beijing claims as its own despite never having controlled.
The meetings will be mostly held behind close doors throughout the week. When delegates reemerge at the end of the congress next Saturday, they will conduct a ceremonial vote to rubber stamp Xi’s work report and approve changes made to the party constitution – which might bestow Xi with new titles to further strengthen his power.
The delegates will also select the party’s new Central Committee, which will hold its first meeting the next day to appoint the party’s top leadership – the Politburo and its Standing Committee, following decisions already hashed out behind the scenes by party leaders before the congress.
The congress will be a major moment of political triumph for Xi, but it also comes during a period of potential crisis. Xi’s insistence on an uncompromising zero-Covid policy has fueled mounting public frustration and crippled economic growth. Meanwhile, diplomatically, his “no-limits” friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin has further strained Beijing’s ties with the West following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
In the lead-up to the congress, officials across China drastically ramped up restrictions to prevent even minor Covid outbreaks, imposing sweeping lockdowns and increasingly frequent mass Covid tests over a handful of cases. Yet infections caused by the highly transmissible Omicron variant have continued to flare. On Saturday, China reported nearly 1,200 infections, including 14 in Beijing.
Public anger toward zero-Covid came to the fore Thursday in an exceptionally rare protest against Xi in Beijing. Online photos showed two banners were unfurled on a busy overpass denouncing Xi and his policies, before being taken down by police.
“Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. Don’t be a slave, be a citizen,” one banner reads.
“Go on strike, remove dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping,” read the other.
The Chinese public have paid little attention to the party’s congresses in the past – they have no say in the country’s leadership reshuffle, or the making of major policies. But this year, many have pinned their hopes on the congress to be a turning point for China to relax its Covid policy.
A series of recent articles in the party’s mouthpiece, however, suggest that could be wishful thinking. The People’s Daily hailed zero-Covid as the “best choice” for the country, insisting it is “sustainable and must be followed.”
On Saturday, on the eve of the congress, party spokesman Sun Yeli told a news conference China’s Covid measures have ensured the country’s extremely low rate of infections and deaths, and enabled “sustained and stable operations of the economy and society.”
“With everything considered, China’s epidemic prevention measures are the most economical and effective,” Sun said.
“Our prevention and control strategies and measures will become more scientific, more accurate, and more effective,” he said. “We firmly believe that the dawn is ahead, and persistence is victory.”
BEIJING: China reserves the right to use force over Taiwan as a last resort in compelling circumstances, though peaceful reunification is its first choice, a Communist Party spokesman said on Saturday.
Reunification of China and Taiwan meets the interests of all, including Taiwan compatriots, Sun Yeli told a news conference in Beijing.
President Xi Jinping is poised to win a third five-year term as general secretary of the ruling party, the most powerful job in the country, at the congress to be held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for a week starting on Sunday.
Elon Musk has a penchant for the letter “X.” He calls his son with the singer Grimes, whose actual name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X.” He named the company he created to buy Twitter “X Holdings.” His rocket company is, naturally, SpaceX.
Now he also apparently intends to morph Twitter into an “everything app” he calls X.
For months, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO has expressed interest in creating his own version of China’s WeChat — a “super app” that does video chats, messaging, streaming and payments — for the rest of the world.. At least, that is, once he’s done buying Twitter after months of legal infighting over the $44 billion purchase agreement he signed in April.
There are just a few obstacles. First is that a Musk-owned Twitter wouldn’t be the only global company in pursuit of this goal, and in fact would probably be playing catch-up with its rivals. Next is the question of whether anyone really wants a Twitter-based everything app— or any other super app — to begin with.
Start with the competition and consumer demand. Facebook parent Meta has spent years trying to make its flagship platform a destination for everything online, adding payments, games, shopping and even dating features to its social network. So far, it’s had little success; nearly all of its revenue still comes from advertising.
Google, Snap, TikTok, Uber and others have also tried to jump on the super app bandwagon, expanding their offerings in an effort to become indispensable to people as they go about their day. None have set the world on fire so far, not least because people already have a number of apps at their disposal to handle shopping, communicating and payments.
“Old habits are hard to break, and people in the U.S. are used to using different apps for different activities,” said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence. Enberg also notes that super apps would likely suck up more personal data at a time when trust in social platforms has deteriorated significantly.
Musk kicked off the latest round of speculation on Oct. 4, the day he reversed his attempts to get out of the deal and announced that he wanted to acquire Twitter after all. “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted without further explanation.
But he’s provided at least a little more detail in the past. During Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in August, Musk told the crowd at a factory near Austin, Texas, that he thinks he’s “got a good sense of where to point the engineering team with Twitter to make it radically better.”
And he’s dropped some strong hints that handling payments for goods and services would be a key part of the app. Musk said he has a “grander vision” for what X.com, an online bank he started early in his career that eventually became part of PayPal, could have been.
“Obviously that could be started from scratch, but I think Twitter would help accelerate that by three to five years,” Musk said in August. “So it’s kind of something that I thought would be quite useful for a long time. I know what to do.”
But it’s not clear that WeChat’s success in China means the same idea would translate for a U.S. or global audience. WeChat usage in almost universal in China, where most people never had a computer at home and skipped straight to going online by mobile phone.
Operated by tech giant Tencent Holding Ltd., the platform has made itself a one-stop shop for payments and other services and is starting to compete in entertainment. It is also a platform for health code apps the public is required to use prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
China has 1 billion internet users, and nearly all of them go online by mobile phone, according to the government-sanctioned China Internet Network Information Center. Only 33% use desktop computers at all — and mostly in addition to mobile phones. Tencent says WeChat had 1.3 billion users worldwide as of the end of June.
Tencent and its main Chinese competitor, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, aim to make apps that offer so many services that users can’t easily switch to another app. They’re not the only ones.
WeChat has added video calls and other message features as well as shopping, entertainment and other features. Government agencies use it to send out health, traffic and other announcements. WeChat’s payment function, meanwhile, is so widely used that coffee shops, museums and some other businesses refuse cash and will take payment only through WeChat or the rival Ant app.
There is no comparable app in the U.S., despite tech companies’ efforts.
It’s worth remembering that Musk’s grand visions don’t always work out the way he appears to expect. Humans are nowhere near colonizing Mars and his promised fleet of robotaxis remains about as far from reality as the metaverse.
Twitter’s user base is also tiny relative to those at its social-platform competitors. While Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all passed the 1 billion mark long ago, Twitter has about 240 million daily users.
“Musk would not only have to overcome the hurdle of convincing consumers to change how they behave online, but also that Twitter is the place to do it,” Enberg said.
——
Associated Press Writer Joe McDonald contributed to this story.
BANDUNG, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia is preparing to start Southeast Asia’s first high-speed rail service that will cut travel time between two cities from the current three hours to about 40 minutes.
The railway line, which connects Indonesia’s capital Jakarta and Bandung, the heavily populated capital of West Java province, is part of China’s Belt and Road infrastructure initiative.
As the Jakarta-Bandung portion of the rail project approached 90% completion, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo on Thursday visited Bandung’s Tegalluar station — one of the railway’s four stations — where eight train cars and an inspection train that arrived from China in early September were parked.
“We hope with the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed train, the mobility of goods and people can be faster and improved, and our competitiveness will also be stronger,” Widodo told reporters during the visit.
Widodo also expected the bullet train to benefit other sectors.
Earlier reports said Widodo would invite his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to ride on the China-made bullet train after the Group of 20 biggest economies summit in Bali next month. However, Widodo told reporters Thursday, the plan is still being discussed with Xi and “it is still not final yet.”
The train cars were designed and built by China’s CRRC Qingdao Sifang railway company. September’s delivery was CRRC’s first export of high-speed trains in its 11-train contract for KCIC400AF eight-car trains and one KCIC400AF-CIT inspection train. The contract, worth $364.5 million, was awarded to CRRC in April 2017.
The rail line construction that began in 2016 was originally expected to start operating in 2019 but was delayed until June 2023 due to disputes that involved land purchases and environmental issues.
The 142.3-kilometer (88.4-mile) railway worth $7.8 billion is being constructed by PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia-China, or PT KCIC, a joint venture between an Indonesian consortium of four state-owned companies and China Railway International Co. Ltd. The joint venture said the trains will be the fastest in Southeast Asia.
The CRRC claimed that the KCIC400AF train can reach speeds up to 350 kilometers (217 miles) per hour, pass curves with a minimum radius of 150 meters (492 feet), and is equipped with electric motors, each with a power of 625,000 watts. The cars will be divided into three classes: VIP, first and second, and several cars with large spaces between seats will be allocated for passengers with limited mobility.
The manufacturer said the trains are specifically modified to adapt to Indonesia’s tropical climate, and are equipped with an improved security system that has the ability to track earthquakes, floods and other emergency conditions. The length of the eight-car train is 208.9 meters (685.3 feet).
The rail deal was signed in October 2015 after Indonesia selected China over Japan in competitive bidding, and financed by a loan from the China Development Bank for 75%. The remaining 25% is the consortium’s own funds.
The project is part of a 750-kilometer (466-mile) high-speed train plant that would cut across four provinces on the main island of Java and end in the country’s second-largest city of Surabaya.
Jakarta’s subway — a Japan-backed venture — was inaugurated in 2019 as part of the capital’s efforts to ease traffic congestion. Its second phase will soon be completed and the United Kingdom and Japan have offered the country soft loans for its third phase, said transportation minister Budi Karya Sumadi.
The government has completed other rail projects, including light-rail transit services in Palembang and Jakarta, while five other cities, including on Indonesia’s tourist island of Bali, have LRT plans in the pipeline.
____
Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Taiwan lifted all its COVID-19 entry restrictions on Thursday, allowing tourists unfettered access to the self-ruled island after over 2 1/2 years of border controls.
Hong Kong and Taiwan, together with mainland China, required most visitors to complete a mandatory quarantine period throughout the pandemic, even as most countries reopened their borders to tourists.
Visitors are no longer required to quarantine upon entry, or take any PCR tests. Instead, they will need to monitor their health for a week after arriving, and obtain a negative result on a rapid antigen test the day they arrive. If people want to go out during the weeklong monitoring period, they need a negative test from either that day or the day before.
There are also no longer any restrictions on certain nationalities being allowed to enter Taiwan.
Dozens of visitors from Thailand were among the first to arrive under the new rules at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport, which serves the capital Taipei, on a Tiger Air flight that landed shortly after midnight.
Tourists like 32-year-old Mac Chientachakul and his parents were excited to visit the island.
“Hot pot is my favorite dish in Taiwan,” Chientachakul said. “It’s my first thing to do … I miss it so much.”
Sonia Chang, a travel agent, said the changes are good for both the the tourism industry and Taiwanese residents, who can now travel abroad without having to quarantine when they get home.
Valaisurang Bhaedhayajibh, a 53-year-old business development director of a design firm, called the new rules convenient.
“We don’t have to do the test before coming here, and also after arriving,” he said. “We are still required to do the self-test every two days, and everything has been provided” by Taiwanese authorities, including the rapid testing kits.
At a welcome ceremony in the Taoyuan airport’s arrival hall, the travelers from Thailand were met by the Taiwan Tourism Bureau’s director, Chang Shi-chung, who handed out gifts.
Taiwan’s tourism bureau estimated that a total of 244 tourists from some 20 tour groups will arrive Thursday.
With both Hong Kong and Taiwan getting rid of restrictions and welcoming back tourists, mainland China remains one of the few places in the world adamant in keeping borders closed and sticking to a “zero-COVID” strategy to stamp out the virus. Hong Kong ended its mandatory quarantine policy for inbound travelers late last month, requiring just a three-day self-monitoring period.
___
Associated Press writer Zen Soo contributed from Singapore.
The unanimous decision by OPEC+ to cut productions has come under fire by the U.S., with Saudi Arabia facing criticism for being short-sighted. However, the growing hydrocarbon industry in Africa is sending a message to America: Engage, or business will go to China and India.
Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
Hong Kong CNN
—
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he inherited a country at a crossroads.
Outwardly, China seemed an unstoppable rising power. It had recently overtaken Japan as the world’s second-largest economy, the country still basking in the afterglow of the dazzling 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
But deep within the high walls of Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound where Xi spent time as a child visiting his late father Xi Zhongxun, a liberal-minded vice premier, China’s new leader saw a country in crisis.
Rampant corruption plagued the Communist Party and stoked popular discontent, chipping away at the legitimacy of a regime Xi’s father helped bring to power. The quest to get rich over decades of economic reform created a gaping wealth gap and hollowed out the official socialist ideology, fueling a crisis of faith. And as the Arab Spring toppled dictators in the Middle East, the rise of social media in China offered a rare space for public dissent, amplifying calls for social justice and political change.
Xi took these perceived challenges head on. Born a “princeling” – the offspring of revolutionary heroes who founded Communist China – the Chinese leader saw himself as savior, entrusted by the party to steer it away from threats to its survival.
But instead of following in the reformist footsteps of his father, Xi opted for a path of total control. Combining the old authoritarian playbook and new surveillance technology, he has eliminated his rivals, tightened his grip on the economy and made the party omnipresent in China – embedding his own cult of personality in daily life.
Xi also touted the “Chinese dream” of national rejuvenation, offering a tempting vision to restore China to its past glory and reclaim its rightful place in the world.
“Xi Jinping sits on top of the party, the party sits on top of China, and China sits on top of the world. That’s basically the program,” said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia.
Ten years on, Xi’s China is richer, stronger and more confident than ever, yet it is also more authoritarian, inward-looking and paranoid than it has been in decades. It has bolstered its international clout, at the expense of its relations with the West and many of its neighbors.
At a key party congress beginning on Sunday, Xi is poised to be appointed to a norm-breaking third term. It will be his coronation as China’s most powerful leader since Chairman Mao Zedong, paving the way for potential lifelong rule.
But as Xi grapples with a sharp economic downturn, growing frustration with his uncompromising zero-Covid policy and surging tensions with the United States and its allies, the sense of crisis that beset his rise to power has continued to haunt him, and is set to shape his rule in the years – if not decades – to come.
Xi saw the party’s crisis up close during his ascent to the top in 2012, when a sensational scandal brought down a prominent political rival and threatened to derail the leadership handover.
Bo Xilai, a fellow “princeling” and charismatic leader of the mega city of Chongqing, was vying for promotion into the top leadership when his police chief attempted to defect to a US consulate, accusing Bo of trying to cover up his wife’s murder of a British businessman. Party leaders feuded over how to deal with the fallout. Eventually, Bo was investigated and expelled from the party weeks before the five-yearly power reshuffle. Bo and his wife are today both serving life in prison.
Having risen through the ranks in the bustling coastal provinces during China’s reform and opening up, Xi would have seen no shortage of local corruption. But the blatant abuse of power and deep rifts at the very top of the leadership exposed in Bo’s scandal likely aggravated Xi’s sense of peril for the party’s survival.
“Our party faces many grave challenges and there are many pressing problems within the party that need to be solved, in particular corruption,” Xi said in his first speech hours after being appointed the top leader.
Within weeks, he launched the most brutal and long-lasting “war on graft” the party had ever seen. The sweeping purges targeted not only the corrupt, but also Xi’s political enemies, including powerful leaders who were accused of plotting a coup with Bo to seize power.
The crackdown instilled discipline, loyalty and a culture of fear, stifling opposition as Xi moved to amass power into his own hands. He styled himself as a strongman, eschewing the collective rule that was alleged to have exacerbated factionalism under his comparably weak predecessor Hu Jintao. In just four years, Xi asserted himself as the “core” of the party leadership, demanding its 96 million members to “unify their thinking, willpower and action” around him.
“(Xi) thinks the only instrument with which he can rule China at home and make gains abroad is a unified, strong, and powerful Communist Party. So he has made it his mission to strengthen the party under his rule,” said McGregor at the Lowy Institute. “He’s both strengthened himself, and he’s strengthened the party as a vehicle for himself.”
Consolidating the party from within was only part of his plan. Xi also set out to fortify the party’s grasp over the country. “Government, the army, society and schools, east, west, south, north and center – the party leads them all,” he said at the party congress in 2017.
Under Xi, the party reasserted itself in all aspects of life. It revitalized once-dormant grassroots party cells and set up new branches in private and foreign companies. It tightened its grip on the media, education, religion and culture, strangled civil society, and unleashed harsh crackdowns on Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
Xi also ramped up the party’s control of the economy, especially its once-vibrant private sector. His sweeping regulatory crackdown brought tycoons to heel and wiped out trillions of dollars of market value from Chinese firms.
In the online sphere, extensive censorship and real-life retaliation tamed social media. Instead of serving as a catalyst for social and political reforms, it became an amplifier for party propaganda and a breeding ground for nationalism.
The pervasive social control reached new heights during the pandemic. In the name of fighting Covid, 1.4 billion Chinese citizens lost their freedom of movement to the whims of the party and the prowess of the surveillance state. Cities across China are trapped in rolling, draconian lockdowns, sometimes for months on end, with millions of people confined to their homes or massive quarantine camps.
For Xi, safeguarding the party’s primacy is a painful lesson drawn from the Cultural Revolution, when the Communist establishment was attacked by Mao’s “red guards” and lost control over society.
Hundreds of thousands died in the turmoil, including Xi’s half-sister who was persecuted to death. Xi’s father was purged and tortured. Xi himself was incarcerated, publicly humiliated and sentenced to hard labor in an impoverished village at age 15.
“Arguably, his emphasis on party authority, and stopping individuals who disagree with the party from criticizing (it), is a result of his phobia of chaos because of what he saw happened to himself, his mother, his father and siblings,” said Joseph Torigian, an expert on Chinese politics at American University and author of an upcoming biography on the elder Xi.
Many Chinese who survived the Cultural Revolution – including some party elites – came away with a conviction to prevent a similar catastrophe from happening again, China needed the rule of law, constitutionalism and protection of individual rights. But Xi arrived at a very different conclusion.
“(He) believed that to achieve political order you needed to have a powerful leader, a powerful party, not creating a system in which people had rights that went too far, because they would only abuse them and hurt other individuals,” Torigian said.
So instead of turning against the party, Xi devoted himself to it. In interviews with state media, Xi spoke of how his seven years as a “sent-down youth” toughened him up and strengthened his resolve to serve the party and the people. “I was distilled and purified, and felt like a completely different man,” he told the People’s Daily in 2004.
Xi’s obsession for control was also shaped by the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he has repeatedly cited as a cautionary tale for the Chinese Communist Party.
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and beliefs had been shaken,” Xi told senior officials in a speech months after taking the helm of the party.
To address China’s own crisis of faith, Xi cracked down on religion, reinvigorated the party’s official Marxist ideology and promoted his own eponymous philosophy. “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” is enshrined in the party charter and dominates party speeches and meetings. It also permeates billboards, newspaper front pages and cinema screens, and is taught in classrooms across the country – to children as young as 7.
At the center of “Xi Jinping Thought” is the notion of the Chinese dream: the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” – a vision Xi unveiled just weeks after coming to power.
It has since become a hallmark of his rule, shaping many of his policies at home and abroad.
“Xi Jinping is a man with a mission. He believes that he knows the ways to take China to the promised land of national rejuvenation,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at SOAS University of London.
“He is going back to his mythical visions of Chinese history, when China was the greatest civilization and country in the world. And the rest of the world (should) just respect, admire and follow the leadership of China.”
To be sure, many Chinese are proud of their country’s achievements. Under Xi, China declared an end to extreme poverty, modernized its military, emerged as a leader in next-generation technology and greatly expanded its global influence. It is striving to become the dominant power in space, commands the world’s largest navy, and makes its weight felt as an emerging superpower.
For others, Xi’s Chinese dream has turned into their living nightmare. In the country’s far west, Muslim minorities are arbitrarily incarcerated, forcibly assimilated and closely surveilled. In Hong Kong, pro-democracy supporters saw their freedom and hope crushed in a city changed beyond recognition. Across the country, numerous rights lawyers, activists, journalists, professors and businessmen are languishing in jail, or silenced by fear. In Xi’s eyes, they are all perceived threats to his quest for a strong and unified nation, and thus must be remolded or eliminated.
But increasingly, the sheen of the Chinese dream is coming off for ordinary people, too – young professionals who chose to “lie flat” in the face of intense pressure, depositors who lost their life savings in rural banks, homebuyers who refused to pay mortgages on unfinished homes, as well as business owners, laid-off workers and residents pushed to the brink by Xi’s relentless zero-Covid lockdowns. Some of them might have previously rooted for Xi and his vision, but are now paying the price for his policies.
The most disillusioned are seeking a way out. “Run philosophy” has become a Chinese buzzword, advocating emigration to escape what some see as a doomed future under Xi’s rule. Xi has repeatedly touted that China is rising and the West is in decline – a conviction strengthened by America’s political polarization, and his belief that China’s superior political model has enabled it to fight Covid better than Western democracies. But the growing number of disciples of “run philosophy” is an outright rejection of that narrative, showing many Chinese have no faith in his promise to make China great again.
Underpinning Xi’s Chinese dream is a bitter sense of resentment toward the West, rooted in the nationalistic narrative that before the party took power, China suffered a “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers and was invaded, carved up, occupied and weakened.
In recent years, American measures to counter China’s rising influence has only reinforced its sense of being under siege from Western powers, McGregor said.
“It has a visceral, emotional appeal in China. It’s very powerful. I think Xi understands that and he intends to harness that to his own ends,” he said.
As a leader-in-waiting, Xi had already shown a strong disdain for foreign criticism of China. “There are some foreigners with full bellies who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us,” Xi told members of the Chinese community in Mexico on a visit as vice-president in 2009. “China does not export revolution, hunger or poverty. Nor does China cause you headaches. Just what else do you want?”
But Xi’s starkest warning to the West came last summer, when he presided over a grand celebration marking the party’s centenary. Standing on top of Tiananmen, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the towering entrance to the Forbidden City palace of imperial China, Xi declared the Chinese nation will no longer be “bullied, oppressed or subjugated” by foreign powers. “Anyone who dares to try, will find their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” he said to thundering applause from the crowd.
Since coming to power, Xi has repeatedly warned against the “infiltration” of Western values such as democracy, press freedom and judicial independence. He has clamped down on foreign NGOs, churches, Western movies and textbooks – all seen as vehicles for undue foreign influence.
Abroad, Xi embarked on an aggressive foreign policy. “Xi thinks this is China’s moment. And to seize that moment, he has to be assertive and take risks,” McGregor said.
Under Xi, China has openly competed for global clout with the United states, leveraging its economic heft to gain geopolitical influence. Its ties with the West are at their most fraught since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre – and they were further soured by Beijing’s tacit support for Moscow following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Xi and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin share a deep suspicion and hostility toward the US, which they believe is bent on holding China and Russia down. They also share a vision for a new world order – one that better accommodates their nations’ interests and is no longer dominated by the West.
But it remains to be seen how many countries are willing to join that alternative perspective. Views of China have grown more negative during Xi’s decade in power across many advanced economies, and in some, unfavorable views reached record highs in recent years.
Beijing’s sweeping claims of sovereignty have also antagonized many of its neighbors in the region. China built and militarized islands in the South China Sea, raised military tensions over a disputed island chain with Japan, and engaged in bloody border conflicts with India. It has also ramped up military intimidation of Taiwan, a self-governing democracy Xi has vowed to “reunify” with the mainland.
For its part, the US has awakened to the competition with China, and is working with allies and like-minded partners to take a raft of measures against Beijing on geopolitics, trade and technology.
That difficult international environment, along with the toll of zero-Covid and the economic headwinds, poses a big challenge for Xi in the years ahead.
But for the coming week, the party congress will be all about celebrating Xi’s victory. According to the party’s most updated official history, Xi has brought China “closer to the center of the world stage than it has ever been.”
Mao may have founded Communist China. But according to the party’s narrative, it is Xi who will lead the country to its rebirth as the new global superpower. Whether he can succeed will have a profound impact on the world.
A worker disinfects the Sanlitun shopping complex in Beijing in June as stores in the area were closed for three days after a Covid outbreak. There’s greater caution on China this year, as stringent Covid controls drag on and as growth takes a backseat. Analysts note longer-term trends of China’s reduced dependency on foreign investment and intellectual property.
Kevin Frayer | Getty Images News | Getty Images
BEIJING — China is no longer just another emerging market play. Now, the country is becoming its own beast — with all the risks and rewards that come with being a world power.
There’s greater caution on China this year, as stringent Covid controls drag on and as growth takes a backseat. Analysts note longer-term trends of China’s reduced dependency on foreign investment and intellectual property.
That’s all on top of Beijing’s crackdown on the internet tech sector and real estate developers in the last two years.
Foreign investors are reacting. The share of Chinese stocks in the benchmark MSCI emerging markets index fell from a peak of 43.2% in October 2020 to 32% in July 2022, Morgan Stanley analysts pointed out.
In the meantime, exchange-traded funds tracking emerging markets — but not China — saw assets under management surge from $247 million at the end of 2020 to $2.85 billion as of July 2022, the report said.
WisdomTree last month became the latest firm to launch an emerging markets ex-China fund, following Goldman Sachs earlier in the year.
This mood has shifted from China being one of the most attractive places to invest in the world … to the fact that the rivalry [with the U.S.] has introduced an uncertainty element and quite a substantial risk element
Ketan Patel
co-founder and CEO of Greater Pacific Capital
“We definitely hear clients [saying], maybe given the current political environment, maybe dial[ing] down China could be a better strategy,” said Liqian Ren, leader of quantitative investment at WisdomTree.
So far, she said, the number of clients excluding China isn’t “overwhelming,” and by metrics such as per capita GDP the country remains an emerging market.
The category includes Brazil and South Korea and refers to economies with generally faster growth than developed economies such as the U.S. — and more risk.
“This mood has shifted from China being one of the most attractive places to invest in the world and how much certainty there was perceived to be in policy, to the fact that the rivalry [with the U.S.] has introduced an uncertainty element and quite a substantial risk element,” Ketan Patel, co-founder and CEO of Greater Pacific Capital, said last month.
People aren’t going to ignore China, “but the level of excitement has changed,” said Patel, former head of Goldman Sachs’ Strategic Group.
And rather than seeing China as a developing country — which it is especially in rural areas — foreign investors would see it more “as a great power opportunity,” Patel said. He also chairs the Force for Good initiative, which promotes investment as a way to achieve sustainable development worldwide.
Beijing is also presenting itself as a great power.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has pushed the country not only to be self-sufficient in tech and energy, but lead other nations with alternative — if not competing — systems for finance, navigation and international relations. Those include a Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative.
Within China, the government under Xi has increased its role in the economy.
The share of state-owned enterprises in the top 10 Chinese companies rose by 3.6 percentage points between 2020 and 2021, despite an overall decline of 10 percentage points over the last decade, Rhodium Group said. In all, the report said those state businesses account for more than 40% of the top 10 — well above the open-economy average of 2%.
“We also cannot accurately measure informal barriers to market competition—for example, informal discrimination against foreign and private companies, industrial policies, or the presence of Communist Party committees,” the report said.
The growing role of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi is now a greater concern for finance — an industry in which China has recently allowed more foreign ownership.
An internal party committee, or office, gathers together a company’s employees who are members of the Communist Party of China. They may then hold events such as studying “Xi thought.”
New rules from the China Securities Regulatory Commission that took effect in June say securities investment funds in China need to set up an internal party office.
When asked about the new rules, the securities regulator said they are in line with corporate governance principles and Chinese law, and there’s “no need to worry at all” about data security, according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese.
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It’s unclear what role such party offices play in business operations, said Daniel Celeghin earlier this year, when he was managing partner at consulting firm Indefi.
But before the pandemic, he said, at least one large Western asset manager decided not to set up a subsidiary in China because once they learned establishing a party cell would be required, “that overcame all of the potential commercial gains.”
Funds such as a few from WisdomTree offer ways to invest in emerging markets without putting investors’ money into state-owned enterprises.
In China, the market capitalization of non-state-owned companies has grown to about 47%, up from 35% a decade ago, according to Louis Luo, investment director of multi-asset at Abrdn.
The upcoming Chinese Communist Party congress will be more of a “confirmation of what’s been in place,” Luo said, adding that he expects a return of some policies that are more market-friendly. Sectors he’s betting on for the long term include consumption, green tech and wealth management.
Even with slower growth, China’s future attractiveness may lie in just offering an alternative to investing in other countries.
Global markets have been roiled this year by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks’ attempts to curb inflation by aggressively hiking interest rates. But the People’s Bank of China has been going in the opposite direction.
A fundamental difference between emerging markets and developed ones is how independently they can make their monetary policy from the United States, Luo said. “From that point of view, I think China stands up.”
