Torbjørn Færøvik's Blog, page 101

China Raises Military Budget as Trump Nominee Warns of 'Catastrophic' War

China will raise defense spending by 7.2 percent for a third consecutive year, the country said Wednesday, as it continues a military buildup that a Trump Pentagon nominee has warned is geared toward war with the United States. The figure, which state media noted marks the 10th consecutive year of single-digit growth, was released during the annual session of China's rubber-stamp congress this

China slams Trump’s return to the ‘law of the jungle’

If every country were to put itself first, the ‘law of the jungle’ would return, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Friday in response to a question from CNN’s Steven Jiang about US President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy.“There are more than 190 countries in the world,” the Chinese diplomat said during a news conference in Beijing. “Should everyone stress ‘my country first’ and

INTERNATIONAL CRITICISM FOLLOWS THAILAND’S DEPORTATION OF 40 UYGHURS TO CHINA

Thailand’s government deported 40 Uyghur asylum seekers to China in a secretive overnight operation last week. The group was carried to Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport in trucks with covered windows several hours after midnight on Wednesday, and then shipped to Kashgar in an unscheduled China Southern Airlines flight before 5:00 a.m. on Thursday. The Chinese government then announced that the “

China’s propaganda machine raises profile of model soldier Lei Feng

Lauded by supreme leader Mao Zedong as a role model, 1960s soldier and folk hero Lei Feng is getting renewed attention in China under President Xi Jinping’s push for patriotic education. The ruling Communist Party’s propaganda machine has been churning out stories about Lei washing his comrades' feet and darning their socks after a long march, propaganda posters of him helping villagers lay

Hong Kong court overturns Tiananmen vigil group convictions

Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal on Thursday overturned the convictions of jailed human rights lawyer Chow Hang-tung and two fellow organizers of a candlelit vigil for victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, although the three have already served their sentences. The ruling was a rare legal upset for the government’s ongoing crackdown on dissent.The court ruled unanimously that Chow, a former

Chinese warships under close watch near Australian waters

The Australian navy deployed three vessels and surveillance aircraft to “keep a close eye” on a Chinese task group that has been operating “in the vicinity of Australia” since mid-February, the Australian defense minister said.  Richard Marles, who is also a deputy prime minister, said in an interviewon Thursday that three Anzac-class frigates - HMAS Stuart, HMAS Warramunga and HMAS

Behind the Exodus of U.S. Law Firms from China

In early December, U.S. law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison announced plans to close its office in Beijing. In 1981, Paul Weiss became one of the earliest foreign law firms to open an office in Beijing, but it is one of the latest of a growing number of American and global firms to leave China or shrink China operations. In early December, Mayer Brown spun off its Hong Kong

China’s crackdown on dissent: over 1,500 convicted in six years, report finds

Chinese authorities have arbitrarily detained thousands of people for peacefully defending or exercising their rights over the past six years and convicted 1,545 prisoners of conscience, a rights group said on Wednesday. Chinese Human Rights Defenders, or CHRD, a non-government organization of domestic and overseas Chinese rights activists, said the scope and scale of wrongful detention by

Letters call on UK residents to hand Hong Kongers over to China for reward

Calls are growing for the British government to take action to protect Hong Kongers in the country from the China’s “long-arm” law enforcement after the neighbors of two wanted pro-democracy activists received anonymous letters urging them to bring the activists to the Chinese Embassy in London. The letters repeat the exact wording of Hong Kong police wanted notices offering bounties of HK$1

DeepSeek hasn’t just disrupted OpenAI. Chinese tech giants are being upended too

DeepSeek’s advances have roiled global stock markets and AI players. Now, its influence is spreading quickly at home, with some of China’s biggest tech companies, many of which had been developing their own chatbots, racing to incorporate the open-source model into their own services. In early February telecoms giant Huawei said it would run DeepSeek on its own computing hardware composed of its