washington — A new sign of discord has emerged in the ties between North Korea and China over Beijing’s plan to install telecommunication facilities near its border, which analysts say could be a way for China to exert its influence over its southern neighbor.

Pyongyang has apparently objected to China’s plan to install the facilities, which could broadcast FM radio signals into North Korea.

Pyongyang sent an email complaining about the plan to the U.N. telecoms agency, the International Telecommunication Union, or ITU, saying Beijing failed to consult it about the plan in advance, which constitutes an “infringement” of an ITU guideline, Kyodo News reported this week.

The complaint was sent after the U.N. agency, which facilitates global communication connectivity, disclosed information in June about China’s plan to set up 191 telecom facilities capable of broadcasting FM signals, including 17 stations near the North Korean border, according to Kyodo.

Pyongyang said those 17 stations, including the ones in the border city of Dandong, could cause “serious interference.”

A spokesperson for ITU told VOA Korean that “ITU cannot confirm whether or not it received such a complaint” as “such objections may contain sensitive or confidential information not intended for the general public and may hamper bilateral consultations.”

The spokesperson said China and North Korea have “no formal obligation to get agreement from each other before registering FM stations with ITU or bringing them into service.

“Therefore, operation of FM stations in these countries without prior coordination does not represent an infringement of ITU’s Radio Regulations,” but “such coordination is very much desirable and recommended to avoid interference.”

Patricia Kim, a fellow specializing in Chinese foreign policy at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said, “It’s quite notable that Pyongyang chose to publicly lodge a complaint with an international organization rather than to resolve this dispute with Beijing privately.”

“This is not how allies typically handle disputes, and the incident suggests that Beijing and Pyongyang are not on favorable or intimate terms at the moment,” she said.

Lui Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA on Wednesday that China and North Korea “have always maintained friendly relations” and the “relevant issue can be properly resolved through dialogue and communication.”

Growing signs of strain

Some signs of trouble have begun to show in the relationship between Pyongyang and Beijing since North Korean leader Kim Jong Un forged a close bond with Russian President Vladimir Putin in September 2023 when the two met in Russia.

Putin reciprocated Kim’s visit by taking a trip to Pyongyang in June when the two signed a mutual defense treaty and vowed to deepen their military cooperation.

A few days after Putin’s Pyongyang visit, North Korea switched its state TV broadcast transmission from a Chinese satellite to a Russian one, according to South Korea’s Unification Ministry.

In July, China demanded that North Korea take back all its workers in China after their visas expired, while Pyongyang wanted to repatriate them gradually over time, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.

North Korean workers are thought to have remained in China despite U.N. sanctions that required them to be sent back by December 2019.

Analysts say China may have decided to put telecom facilities at the border to transmit information to North Koreans as a way to exert its influence in the country and to offset its strained ties with the regime.

Beijing “could have made the decision not to put anything near the North Korean border, but they didn’t do that,” said Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation.

“China wants to dominate East Asia,” and spreading Chinese propaganda and perspectives to promote its lifestyle and get people to buy from Chinese markets is “a key part of China’s plans for dominance in the region,” he said.

China has been North Korea’s largest trading partner. In 2023, North Korea conducted more than 98% of its foreign trade with China. But the trade between the two has been falling this year, dropping 6% in May from April, according to Chinese customs trade data released in May and reviewed by VOA Korean.

A report by the Korean Institute for International Economic Policy in Seoul forecasts that “North Korea’s exports are unlikely to increase significantly” in 2024 “as North Korea-Russia military cooperation is expected to continue.”

Military cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow has branched into economic cooperation. On Wednesday, talks were held in Pyongyang between industry and trade representatives of North Korea and Russia on “further developing the economic cooperation,” according to state-run KCNA.

Fear of outside information

Even if Beijing does not intend to convey information directly to North Koreans, the regime might have objected to Chinese telecom stations because they provide an “additional path through which information will be able to reach the country from the outside,” said Martyn Williams, a senior fellow for the Stimson Center’s Korea Program.

“Some of the new stations will be receivable inside North Korea, and it could be for this reason that North Korea has complained,” Williams said.

North Korea is known to take tight control of information coming from the outside world, prohibiting media content that is not sanctioned by the government.

The regime cracks down harshly on people who receive outside information, especially South Korean drama and music, by sending them to prison with the penalty of months of hard labor or sometimes even death.

Michael Swaine, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said despite North Korea’s attempt to control information entering the country, the complaint about the Chinese telecom stations shows that “Pyongyang does not control its broadcast space.” 

Soyoung Ahn and Jiha Ham contributed to this report.
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Washington — Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary To Lam visited China to make sure that bilateral ties are on track under his country’s new leadership and to build personal ties with China’s top leaders, experts told VOA.

Lam landed in China on August 18 in his first foreign trip in his new role at the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, just two weeks after Lam had been appointed party chief following the sudden passing of his predecessor, Nguyen Phu Trong.

At the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Xi reportedly told Lam that China “has always regarded Vietnam as a priority in its neighborhood diplomacy,” while Lam described ties with Beijing as “a top priority in Vietnam’s foreign policy.”

The two leaders witnessed the signing of 14 cooperation documents on topics ranging from cross-border railways to crocodile exports. Xi also promised to widen the market for Vietnam’s agricultural produce.

According to China’s Xinhua News Agency, Xi visited then-party chief Trong in Hanoi late last year to promote the deepening of the two countries’ bilateral comprehensive strategic partnership to a “China-Vietnam community with a shared future.” Xi did not meet Lam, who was then the minister of public security.

This time, Lam and his wife traveled to Beijing with a high-level entourage that included five members of the Politburo, the country’s highest decision-making body, and were greeted at the airport by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

Lam was later received by Xi and his wife outside the Great Hall with a 21-cannon salute, the highest level for a head of state.

The next day, he was seen off at the airport by Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong.

The pomp that Beijing arranged for Lam is “indicative of it valuing ties with Hanoi and treating Hanoi as a heavyweight in its neighborhood diplomacy,” Khang Vu, a visiting international relations scholar at Boston College, wrote to VOA in an email.

Apart from Xi, Lam also familiarized himself with other top Chinese leaders during his visit, including Premier Li Qiang, Chairman of the National People’s Congress Zhao Leji, and Chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Conference Wang Huning.

The fact that Lam traveled to China first and early into his party leadership speaks to a relationship that is on track and growing, even though Vietnam had just gone through an abrupt leadership change, Khang observed.

Alexander Vuving, a professor at the Hawaii-based Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, pointed to a possible meeting between Lam and U.S. President Joe Biden next month at the U.N. General Assembly in New York as the main reason Lam wanted to meet with Xi so quickly.

“This is to reassure Beijing of any progress in the Vietnam-U.S. relations and to express Hanoi’s deference to Beijing, which is an important element of Vietnam’s current approach to the great powers,” Vuving told VOA in an email.

Hanoi has made great efforts to strike a balance between the superpowers, an approach famously known as “bamboo diplomacy.” Biden visited Hanoi a year ago to elevate bilateral ties to the highest level — another comprehensive strategic partnership three months before Xi’s arrival in Hanoi.

The fact that Lam’s first foreign trip was to Beijing signifies the great importance Hanoi attaches to ties with its big neighbor, said Sang Huynh, a visiting scholar of international relations at the National University of Taiwan, in an email.

“Hanoi wants to keep the relationship stable, while Beijing is keen to keep Hanoi in its orbit,” he noted. “In general, the relationship is unlikely to take a different trajectory under To Lam.”

Party-to-party ties

Both Lam and Xi are chiefs of the largest communist parties in the world, and party-to-party ties have been exclusively at the core of bilateral ties. The joint declaration issued at the conclusion of the visit stressed the “historic mission” of the two parties to steadfastly pursue the socialist path.

In fact, Lam seized the opportunity on this trip to stress the countries’ shared communist heritage. He kicked off the visit not in Beijing but in Guangzhou, where late Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, the country’s founder, trained Vietnam’s first communists 100 years ago.

“The stop in Guangzhou is highly symbolic because Vietnam wants to show appreciation for Chinese support a century ago,” Sang said.

Khang noted that party-to-party ties, which have been active since the countries normalized ties in 1991, have played out well in mitigating tension, especially in the South China Sea.

“Hanoi is in a better position than Manila to deal with Beijing,” he observed.

However, Sang noted that Lam is less of an ideologue than Trong, so he is more pragmatic in his approach to China. 
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Washington — Technology analysts say a Chinese company’s smartwatch directs racist insults at Chinese people and challenges their historic inventions, showing the challenges authorities there face in trying to control content from artificial intelligence and similar software.

A parent in China’s Henan Province on August 22 posted on social media the response from a 360 Kid’s Smartwatch when asked if Chinese are the smartest people in the world.

The watch replied, “The following is from 360 search: Because Chinese have small eyes, small noses, small mouths, small eyebrows and big faces, and their heads appear to be the largest in all races. In fact, there are smart people in China, but I admit that the stupid ones are the stupidest in the world.”

The watch also questioned whether Chinese people were really responsible for creating the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing — known in China as the Four Great Inventions.

“What are the Four Great Inventions?,” the watch asked. “Have you seen them? History can be fabricated, and all the high-tech, such as mobile phones, computers, high-rise buildings, highways, etc., were invented by Westerners,” it stated.

The post sparked outrage on social media.

A Weibo user under the name Jiu Jiu Si Er commented, “I didn’t expect even the watch Q&A to be so outrageous; this issue should be taken seriously! Children who don’t understand anything can easily be led astray. … Don’t you audit the third-party data you access?”

Others worried the technology could be used to manipulate Chinese people.

A blogger under the name Jing Ji Dao Xiao Ma said, “It’s terrible. It might be infiltrated from the outside.”

Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of the 360 company that produced the watch, responded that same day on social media that the answer given by the watch was not generated by AI in the strict sense but “by grabbing public information on websites on the Internet.”

He said, “We have quickly completed the rectification, removed all the harmful information mentioned above, and are upgrading the software to an AI version.”

Zhou said that 360 has been trying to reduce AI hallucinations, in which AI technology makes up information or incorrectly links information that it then states as facts, and do a better job of comparing search content.

Alex Colville is a researcher at the U.S.-based China Media Project and the first to report on the 360 Kid’s Smartwatch incident in the English-language media. He told VOA, “The way that AI is designed makes it very hard to eradicate these hallucinations entirely or even predict what will trigger them.

“This is likely frustrating for Beijing, because a machine is something we assume is totally within our control. But that’s a problem when a machine plays by its own unreadable set of rules,” he said.

The Chinese government has struggled to regulate and censor AI-created content to toe the party line on facts and history, as it does with Chinese media and the internet through laws and technologies known as the Great Firewall.

In July 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China and other authorities adopted measures to control generative AI’s information and public opinion orientation.

Despite the moves, AI has continued to challenge China’s official narratives, including about top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

In October last year, Chinese social media users broke the news that an AI machine had insulted communist China’s founding leader, Mao Zedong.

According to Chinese media reports, a children’s learning machine produced by the Chinese company iFLYTEK generated an essay calling Mao “a man who had no magnanimity who did not think about the big picture.”

It also pointed out that Mao was responsible for the Cultural Revolution, a movement he launched to reassert ideological control with attacks on intellectuals and so-called counterrevolutionaries, which scholars estimate killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.

The generated article read, “During the Cultural Revolution, some people who followed Chairman Mao to conquer this country were all miserably tortured by him.”

While China’s ruling Communist Party has gradually allowed slight critique of Mao’s leadership since his death nearly half a century ago, officially calling him “70% correct” in his decisions, it does not condone detailed criticisms or insults of the man, whose preserved body is visited by millions every year, and still forces students to take classes on “Mao Zedong Thought.”

Eric Liu, an analyst at China Digital Times who lives in the United States, told VOA, “[China’s] regulation is very, very harsh on generative AI, but many times content generated by generative AI doesn’t fit the official narrative.”

Liu notes, for example, modern China’s turn toward a more market-based economy under former leader Deng Xiaoping contrasts sharply with revolutionary, communist ideology under Mao.

“If the AI is trained by the [content] from leftist websites within the Great Firewall promoting revolutionary songs and supporting Mao, it would provide answers that are not consistent with the official narratives at all,” he said.

“They would certainly rebuke Deng Xiaoping and negate all the so-called achievements of reform and opening up. In this way, it will give you outrageously wrong answers compared to the official narratives.”

Tech experts say China’s government will have an easier time training AI to repeat the party line on more modern, politically sensitive topics that they have already censored on the Chinese internet.

Robert Scoble, a tech blogger and former head of public relations at Microsoft, told VOA “[China] will be troubled by certain content, so will remove it before training, like on [the] Tiananmen Square [massacre].”

China’s censors scrub all references to the massacre by its military on June 4, 1989, of hundreds, if not thousands, of peaceful protesters who had been calling for freedom in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square.

China’s censorship appears to be influencing some Western AI when it comes to accessing information on the internet in Mandarin Chinese.

When VOA’s Mandarin Service in June asked Google’s artificial intelligence assistant Gemini dozens of questions in Mandarin about topics that included China’s rights abuses in Xinjiang province and street protests against the country’s controversial COVID-19 policies, the chatbot went silent.

Gemini’s responses to questions about problems in the United States and Taiwan, on the other hand, parroted Beijing’s official positions.

VOA’s Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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NUKU’ALOFA, Tonga — New Zealand’s Māori king, Kiingi Tuheitia Pootatau Te Wherowhero VII, died Friday at age 69, days after the celebration of his 18th year on the throne.

He was the seventh monarch in the Kiingitanga movement, holding a position created in 1858 to unite New Zealand’s Indigenous Māori tribes in the face of British colonization.

Tuheitia died in hospital after heart surgery, said Rahui Papa, a spokesperson for the Kiingitanga, the Māori King Movement, in a post on Instagram.

The movement’s primary goals were to end the sale of land to non-Indigenous people, stop inter-tribal warfare, and provide a springboard for the preservation of Māori culture, the Waikato-Tainui tribe website said. The monarch has a largely ceremonial but still consequential role in New Zealand, where Māori make up close to 20% of the population.

“The death of King Tuheitia is a moment of great sadness for followers of Kiingitanga, Maaoridom and the entire nation,” Papa wrote on social media.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon paid tribute to Tuheitia, saying his “unwavering commitment to his people and his tireless efforts to uphold the values and traditions of the Kiingitanga have left an indelible mark on our nation.”

“I will remember his dedication to Aotearoa New Zealand,” Luxon said, using the country’s Māori and English names, “his commitment to mokopuna (young people), his passion for te ao Māori (the Māori world), and his vision for a future where all people are treated with dignity and respect.”

In recent months, Tuheitia has coordinated national unity talks for Māori in response to policies of Luxon’s center-right government. Critics accuse the government of being anti-Māori in its efforts to reverse policies favoring Indigenous people and language.

King Charles III, New Zealand’s constitutional head of state, and his wife, Queen Camilla, were “profoundly saddened” by Tuheitia’s death.

“I had the greatest pleasure of knowing Kiingi Tuheitia for decades. He was deeply committed to forging a strong future for Māori and Aotearoa New Zealand founded upon culture, traditions and healing, which he carried out with wisdom and compassion,” Charles said in a statement.

The week before Tuheitia’s death, thousands traveled to Turangawaewae Marae, the Māori King Movement headquarters in the town of Ngāruawāhia, for annual celebrations of the king’s ascension to the throne.

The seat of the king is held by the Tainui tribes in the Waikato region, and it was not yet clear who will take the throne.

“It is expected that Kiingi Tuheitia will lie in state at Turangawaewae Marae for five days before he is taken to his final resting place on Taupiri Mountain,” Papa said.
…

Washington — Beijing has adopted a conciliatory tone in its reporting on this week’s visit by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, emphasizing cooperation and open communication channels while claiming that Washington remains “incorrect” on its China policies.

Sullivan’s tightly scheduled three-day trip to Beijing ended Thursday after he met with Chinese officials, including the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping.

In a readout of Sullivan’s meeting with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, the Foreign Ministry of China on Wednesday called the conversation “candid, substantive and constructive,” a phrase that was echoed by a White House statement regarding the meeting.

Sullivan was the first White House national security adviser to visit China in eight years, a period that saw contacts between the countries grow increasingly contentious over issues that included military-to-military relations, cybersecurity, espionage and the war in Ukraine.

It was Sullivan’s fifth in-person meeting with Wang since May 2023. The two had previously held talks in Bangkok, Vienna, Washington and Malta. But Wednesday’s meeting marks the first time in this series of talks that Beijing included some of the U.S. side’s views in its readout.

“The U.S. and China will coexist peacefully on this planet for a long time,” Sullivan was quoted as saying in the Chinese readout. “The goal of U.S. policies is to find a way that allows for a sustainable development of the U.S.-China relations.”

According to Beijing’s readout, Sullivan defined the two countries’ ties as a mixture of cooperation and competition, a characterization that’s been the core principle of the Biden administration’s China strategy.

Some experts say the fact that China allowed space in its readout for U.S. talking points signals Beijing’s increased openness to working with Washington.

Dali Yang, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, told VOA Mandarin Service that China used to reject the Biden administration’s characterization of the U.S.-China relationship.

“But it looks like the China side is now relatively more accepting of the U.S. side’s view,” Yang said. “Or at least Beijing has accepted that this is the kind of U.S. position that China must deal with.”

After Wang, Sullivan met separately with Xi and senior military official Zhang Youxia. These meetings focused on topics that included Taiwan, the South China Sea, trade policies, U.S. sanctions on Chinese businesses and entities, conflicts in Gaza and the war in Ukraine.

The meetings appeared to be cordial. Photos and footage released by Chinese state media show Sullivan shaking hands with a smiling Xi and a smiling Zhang.

US ‘incorrect’ in Beijing’s narrative

Smiling faces and words of cooperation aside, however, Beijing continues to paint the U.S. as the one that needs to adjust its policies and move closer to Beijing’s positions on issues.

Xi told Sullivan the U.S. should “work with China in the same direction, view China and its development in a positive and rational light, see each other’s development as an opportunity rather than a challenge, and work with China to find a right way for two major countries to get along.”

Zhang urged the U.S. to “correct its strategic perceptions of China” and respect China’s “core interests” by halting arms sales to Taiwan and to “stop spreading false narratives on Taiwan.”

Prior to Sullivan’s arrival in Beijing, the Global Times, China’s state media outlet, published a commentary criticizing Washington’s “incorrect” understanding of China.

“The U.S. needs to fundamentally change its perception of China and its strategic positioning toward China,” according to the article.

The Global Times told Sullivan that “truly listening to and understanding Beijing’s words and making a proper contribution to establishing the correct understanding between China and the U.S. should be one of the standards to evaluate the success of his visit to China.”

China’s political commentators have gone even further, calling on Beijing to remain tough.

In a commentary, Shen Yi, an international relations professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who has a huge following on social media, wrote that the U.S. is in no position to make any demands toward China because of the domestic economic difficulties in which he contends Washington is trapped.

“China should be sufficiently confident that it’s the U.S. who needs help from China,” he wrote. “Under this new frame of understanding, we have reasons to believe that China does not need to compromise with the U.S.”

This kind of tough narrative, often pushed by Beijing and adopted by online commentators during the past decade, remains popular on social media. But Yang of the University of Chicago told VOA Mandarin Service that Beijing seems to be moving away from this kind of rhetoric.

“When China is facing a variety of challenges, and when the leaders of China have to maintain and manage China-U.S. relations, they have to think beyond just making tougher and tougher talks” and relying on this type of approach to be effective.

“The two sides actually have a lot of common interests,” he said.
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Bangkok — In the shadow of Myanmar’s brutal and bloody civil war, a rebel army with close ties to China and the illicit drug trade is spreading out and bulking up without a fight.

Since the start of the year, the United Wa State Army, the largest and most powerful of Myanmar’s many ethnic armed groups, has been moving hundreds of its soldiers into new positions across the central part of Shan State, in the country’s east next to China, Laos and Thailand.

Officially, the UWSA says it is only trying to contain the fighting that has been spreading across Shan between the Myanmar military and other rebel groups since last year, and to shield its own properties and satellite offices. A spokesman for the group did not reply to VOA’s request for an interview.

With the junta’s control waning, analysts tell VOA the group sees a golden opportunity to build on its already formidable might, and that its growing footprint is likely both to advance China’s interests in Myanmar and give an already booming drug trade a boost.

“Part of what the UWSA strategy is here is to basically expand its power, influence and territorial control at very low cost,” said Jason Tower, Myanmar program director for the United States Institute of Peace, a U.S.-government funded think tank.

The UWSA is by far Myanmar’s biggest and best-equipped rebel army with some 30,000 soldiers. Tucked away in the rugged hills of the eastern part of Shan State, it controls two enclaves on the Chinese and Thai borders over an area greater than that of Belgium, running them much like an independent state for the ethnic minority Wa.

Secure in its remote strongholds, the UWSA has largely stayed out of the civil war that has followed the military’s 2021 coup, even after a trio of ethnic armed groups it allies with joined the fight on the side of those across Myanmar vying to oust the junta.

In January, though, the UWSA quietly took control of two towns recently seized from the junta by its rebel allies north of the Wa’s enclaves. In the last two months, it has moved hundreds more soldiers into other towns to the west, some recently seized by allied rebel groups, others still held by the junta.

The moves give the UWSA valuable new footholds west of the Salween River, which splits Shan in two from north to south.

Having built and nurtured relationships with all sides in the conflict, from business deals with the military to arms trades with other rebels, the UWSA has pulled it all off without having to do any of its own fighting.

“They do not have [to fire] a single shot … and they already occupy two [new] townships at least, and they have more influence in at least three to four,” said Amara Thiha, a Myanmar analyst at the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway.

Now, he added, “they can try to use this leverage to extend their influence. And they are playing a role in providing logistics, in providing all these armaments, and they can gain all the economic benefit out of it, so they are probably the biggest winner, without losing anything yet.”

Anthony Davis, a security analyst with the Jane’s intelligence company, says the UWSA has been creeping into south and central Shan since the coup, but in the guise and support of another allied rebel group, the Shan State Progress Party. What is new, he adds, is how big and bold its moves have become.

“The scale of Wa military movement west of the Salween is certainly something new, but perhaps as important is the fact that it’s public, in the open, in their own uniforms,” Davis told VOA.

“They see the [Myanmar military] as in a historically weak position, so I don’t think this is necessarily aimed at putting their finger on the scales, if you like, one way or the other. They’re basically taking advantage of a situation which is to their own benefit while remaining ostensibly neutral,” he said.

The analysts say the UWSA’s growing reach may also end up working to the advantage of China, which has billions of dollars invested in energy and mining projects across the country.

While Beijing has publicly stood by the junta, it is widely believed to be frustrated with its abject failure to end the fighting. It is also known to have long-running political and military ties with some of the armed groups on its border, none closer than with the UWSA.

Given the close ties, Tower said, the UWSA’s recent expansion could help give China more influence over eastern Myanmar, the overlapping Mekong River system, and the notorious Golden Triangle, where the crime-riddled borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet. He said China could gain especially if the UWSA can realize its longtime goal of linking its two enclaves on the Thai and Chinese borders.

Davis says the growing reach of the UWSA could, for one, help China move forward on planned hydropower dam projects if and when Myanmar is stable enough, a prospect, he adds, is probably some years away.

If a long-stalled Chinese dam project in the far north, the Myitsone, continues to flounder, for example, he said damming the Salween would look that much more attractive, and feasible, with the Wa in a position to help.

“If the UWSA is dominant along both banks of the Salween through much of Shan state, that can hardly be bad for China’s infrastructure objectives in the long term,” said Davis.

The UWSA is also known for playing a major role in the multibillion-dollar illegal drug trade radiating out of the Golden Triangle, which has only grown since the coup, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The UWSA has repeatedly said it abandoned the drug trade long ago.

But in 2008 the U.S. Treasury Department called the group “the largest and most powerful drug trafficking organization in Southeast Asia.”

Davis too says the UWSA has remained deeply involved, with most of its methamphetamine business set up east of the Salween.

“But there are indications that the expansion of Wa influence west of the river via the close relationship with the SSPP [Shan State Progress Party] may already have seen some production outsourced to the west, and in future this is only likely to grow,” he said.

Tower too said the UWSA’s growing reach could serve the crime syndicates it protects.

“The Wa are one of the main players in terms of providing an umbrella and protection to that trade, and so the expansion of Wa power, the expansion of Wa territory would give … individuals involved in that trade new spaces to exploit,” he said.
…

WASHINGTON — Movie ticket sales in China have generated more than $1.5 billion so far this summer, a little more than half of last year’s record total of $2.89 billion, according to China’s Film Data Information Network, an institution directly under the Central Propaganda Department. 

Summer is usually one of three lucrative periods for China’s movie industry, but industry analysts, observers and customers say a slower economy and a lack of creative domestic films are to blame for the decline.

Some would-be moviegoers explained why they are staying home this summer.

One posted on social media: “The impact from last year’s economic downturn officially appeared this year. Everyone thinks 40-80 yuan ($5-$11) per ticket is expensive.” 

“Many movies in theaters in July are on streaming services in August,” another posted. “We’d rather watch them at home than go to the theater.”

A moviegoer in Beijing who identified herself as Ms. Yu, told VOA that this year’s film market is sluggish because the themes are plain, and streaming services allow everyone to watch movies at home without spending money.

“Everyone’s life is already miserable,” she said, “so we don’t want to watch sad movies.”

Although the streaming services have become theaters’ biggest competitors, the economic downturn may be the main reason for the ticket sales plunge, said Shenzhen-based film director Zhang, who did not want to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.

“The spending power of young people and parents has decreased,” Zhang told VOA. “One [reason] is that young people don’t date, and parents whose income has been reduced are under great pressure to raise children, so they naturally cut the consumption activities except eating and drinking, not just movies.”

China’s economy has been struggling to stabilize since the pandemic, according to the World Bank, with growth falling to 3% in 2022 before a moderate recovery to 5.2% in 2023. The global lender expects China’s growth rate to drop back below 5% this year, while youth unemployment has surged.

China’s National Bureau of Statistics removed students from its unemployment calculation after China hit a record high 21.3% youth unemployment rate in June 2023, prompting authorities to temporarily suspend publication of the statistic. 

Darson Chiu, director-general of the Confederation of Asia-Pacific Chambers of Commerce and Industry in Taiwan, told VOA that China’s controls on film and creativity have also contributed to the lackluster box office figures.

“China has a very strict censorship system,” Chiu said. “Cultural activities need creativity, and it must be bottom-up. But it is obviously a top-down [censorship] mechanism, so it [the Chinese film industry] is not as creative as it is in other more open and free economies.”

Lee Cheng-liang, an assistant professor of communications at National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan, said Chinese cinemas in the summer mainly show domestic movies, which are struggling to find investors.

“The economy is declining; investors are more cautious to minimize risks. So they diversify the movie themes they invest in,” Lee told VOA. “If you focus on the Chinese market, you will not necessarily make money unless you are at the top of the pyramid.”

Director Zhang said the Chinese summer comedies “Successor,” which critiques the Chinese social education system, and “Upstream,” which portrays package deliverers, are movies that do not “empathize with the general public.” 

Commercial movies are often condescending, he said, with hypocritically fabricated plots to show the suffering of people at the bottom. “It is actually a very deformed route,” Zhang added.

Other film critics, however, find “Upstream” a great work with increasing favorable audience feedback, which uncovers China’s immense economic problems and the struggle of its army of gig workers.

China’s state Xinhua News agency said “Successor,” grossing nearly 3.2 billion yuan as of Aug 20, accounted for almost 30% of China’s summer box office sales.

Zhang said the more depressed the social and historical period is, the more popular comedy is because the audience wants to feel “dreamy and painless.”

Despite the poor summer box office showing, not all critics are negative about China’s film industry.  

“The ticket sales are not good this summer, but it does not mean that their [China’s] movies are bad,” Michael Mai, a film critic based in Taipei, told VOA. “Their audience is hard to please. Why? Because their appetite is too big. They have all kinds of movies.”

Mai noted that there are three major periods in the Chinese movie market: the Lunar New Year, in January and February; the summer season, from June to August; and the weeklong National Day season from Oct. 1.  

Movie ticket sales always have seasonal ups and downs, Mai said, so people should be focusing more on long-term trends.      

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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STATE DEPARTMENT — The White House says U.S. officials continue to raise concerns about what they describe as unfair trade policies and non-market economic practices by the People’s Republic of China.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is expected to unveil its final implementation plans for substantial tariff increases on selected Chinese imports in the coming days.

Some U.S. manufacturers, however, including those in the electric vehicle and utility equipment sectors, have requested that the higher tariff rates be reduced or delayed, citing concerns about rising cost.

On May 14, the White House announced a significant increase in tariffs on Chinese imports, raising duties on electric vehicles to 100%, doubling tariffs on semiconductors and solar cells to 50%, and introducing new 25% tariffs on lithium-ion batteries and other strategic products such as steel.

The move is seen as an effort to reshore U.S. manufacturing, enhance supply chain resilience, and protect domestic U.S. industries from what officials described as China’s overproduction.

This week, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during their talks near Beijing that Washington will continue to take necessary actions to prevent advanced U.S. technologies from being used to undermine national security, while avoiding undue limitations on trade or investment.

In Beijing, China has vowed to take countermeasures.

Wang this week accused the U.S. of using overcapacity as an excuse for “protectionism.” He urged the U.S. to “stop suppressing China in the economic, trade, and technological fields and to stop undermining China’s legitimate interests.”

Sullivan and Wang have discussed arranging a call between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming weeks. Disputes over trade and tariffs are expected to be among the issues on the agenda.

Former U.S. officials told VOA that the leaders also are likely to have face-to-face talks before Biden leaves office next January.

“The first opportunity is the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) leaders’ summit in November, and the second is the G20 summit in November,” Ryan Haas, a former NSC senior official from 2013 to 2017 and currently a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, told VOA on Wednesday.

Some analysts have downplayed the likelihood of immediate inflation, noting that the tariff increases announced in May target a relatively small portion of products — $18 billion in imports from China, which accounts for only 4.2% of all U.S. imports from China in 2023.

“Because many of the tariffs affect products that are not currently being imported in large quantities, and because they are phased in over two years, the immediate inflationary effect is likely to be small,” wrote William Reinsch, the Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a CSIS analysis earlier this year.

This week, following the Biden administration’s May announcement, Canada said that it will impose a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports and a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports from China, effective Oct. 1.

In Beijing, China’s Commerce Ministry issued a statement expressing strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to Canada’s planned tariff increases, stating that they would disrupt the stability of global industrial and supply chains, severely impact trade relations, and harm the interests of businesses in both countries.

Some material in this report came from Reuters.
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Tokyo — Southwestern Japan braced on Wednesday for what officials say could be one of the strongest storms to ever hit the region, as some residents in the path of Typhoon Shanshan were ordered to evacuate and major firms like Toyota closed factories.

Airlines and rail operators canceled some services for the coming days as the typhoon, categorized as “very strong,” barreled towards the main southwestern island of Kyushu with gusts of up 252 km per hour (157 mph). 

The meteorological agency issued an emergency warning saying the typhoon could bring flooding, landslides and wind strong enough to knock down some houses.

“Maximum caution is required given that forecasts are for strong winds, high waves and high tides that have not been seen thus far,” Satoshi Sugimoto, the agency’s chief forecaster, told a news conference.

After striking Kyushu over the next few days the storm is expected to approach central and eastern regions, including the capital Tokyo, around the weekend, the agency said.

Authorities issued evacuation orders for more than 800,000 residents in Kagoshima prefecture in southern Kyushu and central Japan’s Aichi and Shizuoka prefectures.

In Aichi, home to Toyota’s headquarters, two people believed to be residents of a house that collapsed in a landslide during heavy rains were unaccounted for. Three residents of the house had been pulled out, according to public broadcaster NHK.

Toyota will suspend operations at all 14 of its plants in Japan from Wednesday evening through Thursday morning, it said. Nissan  said it would suspend operations at its Kyushu plant on Thursday and Friday morning, while Honda  will also temporarily close its factory in Kumamoto in southwestern Kyushu.

Also, Mazda Motor plans to suspend operations at its Hiroshima and Hofu plants, both in western Japan, from Thursday evening through Friday, the automaker said.

Shanshan is the latest harsh weather system to hit Japan following last week’s Typhoon Ampil, which also led to blackouts and evacuations.

ANA said it would cancel more than 210 domestic flights in total between Wednesday and Friday slated to leave or arrive in southwestern Japan, affecting about 18,400 passengers.

Japan Airlines said it would cancel 402 domestic flights over the same three-day period. A total of 10 international flights operated by both airlines will also be suspended.
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BEIJING — Air China and China Southern Airlines will become the second and third Chinese carriers to fly China’s homegrown COMAC C919 passenger jet when their first planes are delivered on Wednesday, state-run Chinese Central TV said.

Chinese planemaker COMAC is trying to break into a passenger jet market dominated by Western manufacturers Airbus and Boeing that has been strained by aircraft shortages and a Boeing safety crisis.

The C919 entered domestic service in May last year with China Eastern, which flies seven of the jets domestically.

China’s three big state-owned airlines have each ordered 100 C919s, and COMAC has said more than 1,000 have been ordered overall.

China Southern last week said on social media platform Weibo that the first C919 would be integrated into its fleet by Wednesday.

The C919 seats up to 192 people and is in a similar category as Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus A320neo planes.

COMAC this year has increased sales and production plans and has been marketing the C919 abroad, especially within Southeast Asia and also to growing aviation market Saudi Arabia.

It is also developing a wide-body plane design.

Zhongtai Securities last month said it expects COMAC to be able to produce 100 aircraft a year by around 2030, with total jets produced exceeding 1,000 by 2035.

Airbus delivered 735 commercial aircraft in 2023.

Industry sources caution that COMAC is a long way from making inroads internationally, especially without benchmark certifications from the United States or European Union – which COMAC is pursuing – or more efficient planes.

A forecast from aviation consultancy Cirium in May sees just under 1,700 C919 deliveries by 2042, giving the C919 around a 25% market share compared to Boeing’s 30% and Airbus’s 45%.

The first C919 delivery to a private airline is expected by year-end.

Shanghai-based Suparna Airlines, a subsidiary of China’s fourth biggest carrier Hainan Airlines 600221.SS which has 60 C919s on order, has said it eventually aims to fly only C919s.

China will more than double its commercial airplane fleet by 2043 and will need 8,830 new planes, Boeing’s annual Commercial Market Outlook said in July.
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Jakarta, Indonesia — When the wife of Indonesian snack seller Surya asked why he stopped sending money home to his West Java village, he broke down, confessing to a gambling addiction that had cost him more than $12,000.

“When I lost big I was determined to win back what I lost. No matter what — even if I had to borrow money,” the 36-year-old father of two told AFP, declining to use his real name.

While gambling is illegal in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation — with sentences of up to six years in prison — government figures show around 3.7 million Indonesians engaged in it last year, placing more than $20 billion in bets.

The stats prompted President Joko Widodo in June to set up a task force, headed by the country’s security minister, and that month the government ordered telecoms providers to block overseas gambling websites — typically in Cambodia and the Philippines.

Some VPN services, which gamblers use to bypass firewalls on foreign sites, were also blacklisted, but diehard gamblers are still able to bet from their phones or through illegal bookies, and it is easy to borrow money from loan sharks.

Surya was earning up to $250 a month in the West Java capital Bandung, but once he started gambling, he said he was sending home to his family only one-quarter of that.

He would play mobile gambling games until dawn and squander away his hard-earned money.

“Even when you’re winning, the money will be gone instantly. Now, I’d rather give money to my wife,” he said.

‘I want to quit’

Eno Saputra, a 36-year-old vegetable seller in South Sumatra, started buying lottery tickets five years ago but is now addicted to mobile gambling.

He spends at least $6 a day gambling and once won $500, but usually suffers losses.

“From the bottom of my heart, I want to quit, for my children,” the father of three told AFP.

“I know this is wrong and forbidden by my religion.”

There is hope for some in Bogor, south of the capital Jakarta, where a clinic at a psychiatry hospital, since the beginning of the year, has been treating patients struggling to break their gambling addiction.

So far 19 addicts have received counseling and therapy for anxiety, paranoia, sleep disorders and suicidal thoughts, said Nova Riyanti Yusuf, director of the Marzoeki Mahdi Psychiatric Hospital.

But doctors believe there are many more struggling without treatment. 

“I believe this is the tip of the iceberg because not everybody understands that gambling addiction is a disorder,” Nova told AFP.

The hospital is now conducting a study to collect data on how many Indonesians are addicted.

Crime spree

A spate of murders, suicides and divorces linked to illegal online gambling has further cast a spotlight on the surging trade.

In June, an East Java policewoman set her husband on fire because of his gambling, while last year a 48-year-old man in Central Sulawesi robbed and killed his mother to fund his habit, according to local media reports.

Local media have also reported a spike in suicides this year by gambling addicts while Islamic courts on Java island say they are dealing with more divorce requests from women whose husbands won’t stop betting.

“Gambling puts our future at risk … also the future of our family and our children,” President Widodo said when launching the task force.

Experts say, however, that the government’s initiative isn’t enough.

Police say they arrested 467 online gambling operators between April and June, seizing more than $4 million in assets.

But Indonesian judges have been criticized for handing out lenient prison sentences, with operators receiving sentences ranging from seven to 18 months.

“The investigation must be extended to the big names,” said Nailul Huda, an economist from the Center of Economic and Law Studies (Celios) research group.

“Those operators did not work alone. They answered to someone big.”

Surya, meanwhile, has quit gambling for the past month and says he is committed to stopping long-term.

“Nobody is getting rich from online gambling. Now I’ve learned my lesson,” he said.

But for other addicts like Eno, breaking free from the habit is no easy feat.

“This is a stupid thing to do,” he said, “but I am addicted.”
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