Collapsed buildings, idle chip plants, and damaged fighter planes: On Wednesday, Taiwan experienced its worst earthquake in 25 years, with a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale.
As our correspondent David Demes reports from Taiwan, the citizens of the democratically governed island appear surprisingly calm overall. They have learned from the tragedy of the last major earthquake in 1999, which claimed the lives of more than 2,400 people. Since then, disaster drills have been conducted every year. Despite this, the early warning system did not function perfectly everywhere. People in several cities did not receive warnings on their smartphones as intended. The technology did not consider the quake to be strong enough.
The EU Commission officially launched an investigation against two Chinese solar companies on Wednesday. The question is whether Beijing’s state subsidies gave them an unfair advantage over domestic bidders in a tender in Romania. If the allegations prove to be true, the Commission could ban the Chinese companies from participating in public tenders all over the EU.
However, this does little to help European solar manufacturers. They are demanding financial aid from Brussels to compete with cheap products from China. Some companies, such as the Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger, which operates a plant in Germany, have already drawn the consequences and are relocating parts of their production to the US, where generous subsidies are granted for renewables. Amelie Richter and Manuel Berkel analyze what levers the EU still has at its disposal.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 shook the east coast of Taiwan near the city of Hualien shortly before eight o’clock on Wednesday morning. The shockwaves damaged buildings and infrastructure even in Taipei, over a hundred kilometers away. It was the most severe earthquake to hit the island in 25 years. According to the latest figures at 10 p.m. local time, a total of nine people died, 1,011 were injured and 143 were still waiting to be rescued.
Cell phone videos from Hualien showed massive landslides, collapsed buildings and rescue teams in action. Lin Hsiao-wei was on her way home when she suddenly saw large boulders on the road towards Hualien. “When it started to shake, I first thought my car had broken down,” the 37-year-old manager told Table.Briefings. She turned around and returned to Taipei when it became clear that the road was no longer passable.
Taiwan was promised international support, including from Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida, Philippine President Marcos and the President of the European Council Michel. China also offered help. President Tsai Ing-wen expressed her gratitude in a post on X for the worldwide support and highlighted the work of the first responders.
Taiwan is located in a seismically active zone between the Eurasian and Philippine plates and is frequently hit by earthquakes. The previous quake in the south of the island in 2016 claimed 116 lives. The relatively few victims this time are probably due to the low population density in Hualien and the short duration of the quake, which lasted around one minute.
The worst earthquake in the island’s history is still etched in Taiwan’s collective memory: On the night of September 21, 1999, an earthquake killed more than 2,400 people, injured 10,000 and destroyed 100,000 homes. Taiwan learned its lessons from the tragedy. Earthquake resilience was improved through stricter building guidelines. September 21 was named National Disaster Prevention Day, on which annual awareness campaigns are held and the government’s earthquake and tsunami warning system is tested.
Vice President Lai Ching-te, who will take up the presidential office in May, arrived in Hualien in the afternoon with the Minister of the Interior and a group of deputies. Lai announced that railroad services between Hualien and northern Taiwan could be resumed as early as Thursday. He also promised emergency aid of 300 million TWD (around 8.67 million euros). However, Lai explained that rescue activities remained the top priority.
Shortly after the earthquake, 360,000 households were without electricity. The country’s last active nuclear power plant did not report any disruptions. In the western part of the island, the semiconductor companies TSMC, UMC and PSMC temporarily suspended parts of their highly complex and very sensitive production in the Hsinchu Science Park. According to a statement from chip giant TSMC: “To ensure the safety of personnel, some fabs were evacuated according to company procedure.” Facilities were also shut down. Both companies later stated that employees had returned to work. In the afternoon, TSMC announced that production would nevertheless be suspended for the time being. TSMC already had to stop production during previous earthquakes, which resulted in supply bottlenecks.
The HSR high-speed train also had to suspend operations temporarily. Among other things, this led to disruptions in parliamentary operations, as many MPs commute to work by train. According to the Ministry of Defense, the earthquake also caused minor damage to six F-16 fighter jets. The squadron stationed at the air base in Hualien plays a vital role in intercepting Chinese aircraft that virtually enter Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) daily.
The government received criticism, particularly from the north of the country. Citizens in the northern cities of Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung and Taoyuan had not received an earthquake warning on their cell phones. This promptly led some to question whether Taiwan’s disaster control would be able to warn the population in the event of a military attack by China. Minister of the Interior Lin Yu-chang (DPP) blamed the system’s failure on an incorrect prediction of earthquake strength in these cities. The warning system only issues a warning when the expected magnitude exceeds four on the Richter scale. Ultimately, however, the quake in the capital, Taipei, reached a magnitude of over five.
Seismologists from the Central Weather Bureau say there may be further aftershocks with a magnitude of up to 7 on the Richter scale over the next few days.
For the first time, the EU Commission is officially investigating whether Chinese state subsidies have given solar companies an advantage over domestic bidders in a tender in Europe. There is “sufficient evidence” that two bidders have received“foreign subsidies that distort the internal market“, the Brussels authority announced on Wednesday. The Commission has therefore now launched a formal investigation into the two consortia.
Specifically, it concerns the tender for the construction and operation of the Rovinari Solar Park in Romania. The developers of the project are Oltenia Energy Complex and OMV Petrom. Two consortia that have submitted bids for this project are now affected by the EU investigation:
If the allegations are confirmed, the authority could ban the companies from accessing public tenders throughout the EU.
Even though the investigation is a novelty, it is unlikely to be of decisive help to European module manufacturers. Unlike the anti-subsidy investigation against electric car manufacturers from October 2023, this time the Commission is not taking action against imports of Chinese products per se, but only against a limited part of the market.
Wednesday’s measure is based on the newly created Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) from 2023, which specifically targets subsidies in public tenders – which is no longer the dominant market segment for photovoltaics. According to the German Solar Industry Association, around half of solar demand in Germany was accounted for by the home segment, i.e. small systems without tenders. In the case of large systems on open spaces or roofs, on the other hand, part of the expansion is purely private.
Furthermore, only a portion of public procurement procedures meet the FSR reporting thresholds. It obliges companies bidding for EU tenders worth more than 250 million euros to disclose the amount of state subsidies they have received if these were higher than 4 million euros.
There were mixed reactions from the solar industry on Wednesday. “We see this investigation as an important step. The Commission is proving that it is indeed acting under the legal framework for unfair trading practices to respond to the Chinese industry’s aggressive strategy on net-zero technologies“, said Johan Lindahl, Secretary General of the manufacturers’ association ESMC.
Others emphasize that this is not a comprehensive anti-subsidy investigation against all imports, as is the case with EVs. “We have not received any signals from the Commission in recent weeks that it would get out the big knife“, says a German solar manager. Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson herself had spoken out against this after the last meeting of EU energy ministers.
So far, the FSR has been used in a tender for a railroad project in Bulgaria. The EU Commission had also launched an investigation into state subsidies from abroad. The Chinese bidder CRRC Qingdao Sifang Locomotive responded last week by withdrawing from the tender.
European solar manufacturers have been complaining for months about the low-cost competition from China and are demanding aid from the state and Brussels. At the end of February, Glasmanufaktur Brandenburg asked the federal government for support in order to maintain production. In January, Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger threatened to close its plant in Freiberg, Saxony, in April without subsidies; the company recently sent out redundancy notices to around 400 employees. Meyer Burger had originally wanted to expand in Germany; now the company is relocating part of its production to the USA. This is because generous aid is flowing there.
However, little funding has been provided in Europe to date, even though the EU has set itself the goal of ensuring that at least 40 percent of all photovoltaic systems are produced domestically in Europe from 2030 under the planned Net-Zero Industry Act.
In any case, large parts of the solar industry itself are against punitive tariffs, as they would drive up prices and make the energy transition too expensive. The downstream industry in particular, which installs the systems for customers, rejects tariffs – because it is dependent on the cheap solar modules from China. The German solar industry also spoke out against higher tariffs. They would prefer money from the state, for example in the form of a so-called resilience program that provides financial support to domestic manufacturers in tenders.
This is precisely where the investigation comes in, at least to tackle excessive subsidies. If the specific allegations against the two consortia from China are confirmed, the Commission could ban the awarding of the solar park in Romania to the companies concerned or demand compensation measures from the groups. The result of the investigation is expected in three to four months.
On Wednesday, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce spoke of “great dissatisfaction with the misuse of the new tool by the responsible EU authorities“. The regulation is too broad and contains ambiguous definitions. Contribution: Christiane Kuehl
China intends to strengthen security cooperation with the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan. This was emphasized by China’s top police chief and Minister of Public Security, Wang Xiaohong, during a meeting with Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in Tashkent. Beijing is ready to enhance cooperation “in combating the ‘three forces’ of terrorism, separatism and extremism as well as cross-border crime,” reported the state news agency Xinhua.
According to reports, Wang also met with Uzbekistan’s Secretary of the National Security Council, Viktor Makhmudov and Interior Minister Pulat Bobojonov, and signed cooperation documents. President Mirziyoyev had also met with Erkin Tuniyaz, the chairman of the regional government of Xinjiang, last week. Uzbekistan does not share a border with China; Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan lie between them. ari
Violent storm winds have killed at least seven people in the southern Chinese province of Jiangxi since the weekend. Some 552 people had to be evacuated and, 2,751 houses were damaged. The extreme weather conditions started on March 31 and struck nine cities, including Nanchang and Jiujiang, affecting 93,000 people in 54 counties, according to the Jiangxi Provincial Flood Control Center.
On Sunday, violent storms led to gusts of wind that tore door-sized windows from their frames in two apartments in a high-rise building in the provincial capital of Nanchang. Local media reported that three people were blown out of their beds through the holes and fell to their deaths.
The storms are the worst in the region for more than a decade. Local authorities estimate economic damages to amount to 150 million yuan (21 million US dollars). rtr
The European Commission has finalized anti-dumping duties on imports of certain polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from China. The Brussels authority confirmed on Wednesday the provisional duties introduced at the end of November. These tariffs range between 6.6 percent and 24.2 percent, depending on the exporting manufacturer.
The anti-dumping duties will be in effect for a period of five years. The decision followed an investigation, which, according to the EU Commission, concluded that the Chinese imports were causing harm to the EU industry.
The impact of the tariffs on EU consumers is minimal. PET is primarily used in the production of plastic bottles. ari
US media have played a key role in shaping the Western public’s perception of China for decades. For Mike Chinoy, the first bureau chief of the US television station CNN in Beijing, their work thus has a tangible historical dimension. “Journalists write the first draft of history,” is one of the sentences he uses to describe the role of reporters as chroniclers and his own reports in China.
As part of the first generation of Western journalists in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinoy personally reported on the front line, including live coverage of the protests on Tiananmen Square in June 1989. More than three decades later, Chinoy has recounted the work of US journalists in China since the founding of the People’s Republic in his book “Assignment China.” In it, Chinoy presents the first-person accounts of numerous reporters, most of whom he interviewed, supplemented by historical background information.
The reports date back to the time of the Chinese Civil War and the Mao era, through the period of reform and opening up to the present day. Near the end of his book, Chinoy also recounts the odyssey of New York Times correspondent Chris Buckley, who traveled to Wuhan in the early days of the Covid pandemic and reported from the closed-off city.
Mike Chinoy first came to China with a student delegation in 1973. After earning his degree in journalism at Columbia University, he went to Hong Kong as a radio reporter in his mid-20s. From 1987, he helped set up the CNN bureau in Beijing. In the 2000s, he once again reported from Hong Kong as CNN’s Asia correspondent, focussing on North Korea and the Middle East, among other things, while always keeping an eye on China.
Mike Chinoy has been living in Taiwan since 2018. A research project took him there, and in the wake of the Covid pandemic, he decided to move his center of life to Taipei. From there, Chinoy looks at China from a distance – just as he did at the beginning of his career – and like many other Western journalists who have been expelled from China in recent years.
Previous generations of China observers already struggled with this distance. To make China politically comprehensible from afar, Chinoy first argues for a meticulous study of Chinese state media and other official sources. “We need to find our inner Father Lászlo Ladány,” says Chinoy, alluding to a Hungarian Jesuit priest who lived in Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1980s. At the time, Ladány analyzed government sources from the People’s Republic in detail and gained indispensable insights for foreign reporting on China.
On the other hand, Mike Chinoy firmly believes that no amount of studying sources can replace a reporter’s personal view. The fact that China is again restricting this view is a huge loss. He believes that this will backfire on the government in Beijing. A lot could be gained if they allowed stories that included both critical and positive perspectives on China, he says. Like any society, China is diverse and complex. Most journalists want to do this justice.
However, one consequence of the restrictions is that there is less room for differentiated perspectives and purely political reporting dominates. “As a result, the confrontation between China and the West continues to intensify,” laments Chinoy. Because of these adversities, Chinoy feels there is still an enormous need to tell in-depth social stories from China. Leonardo Pape
Today marks the start of Qingming, the festival commemorating the dead in China. Traditionally, paper banknotes and cardboard objects are burned to help the dead in the afterlife.
This year, mock-ups of ice cream, seafood, maotai, razors, and air conditioners can be found on the Taobao shopping channel. To help the environment, some manufacturers are even offering paper made from cellulose nitrate, which contains fewer pollutants.
And yet the tradition is under threat: Earlier this week, local authorities in some provinces banned the production and sale of “superstitious” grave offerings. This sparked heated debates on the internet about the pros and cons. Previously, a video had gone viral in which a man in Nantong in Jiangsu province had built a life-size house out of paper to burn.
Collapsed buildings, idle chip plants, and damaged fighter planes: On Wednesday, Taiwan experienced its worst earthquake in 25 years, with a magnitude of 7.2 on the Richter scale.
As our correspondent David Demes reports from Taiwan, the citizens of the democratically governed island appear surprisingly calm overall. They have learned from the tragedy of the last major earthquake in 1999, which claimed the lives of more than 2,400 people. Since then, disaster drills have been conducted every year. Despite this, the early warning system did not function perfectly everywhere. People in several cities did not receive warnings on their smartphones as intended. The technology did not consider the quake to be strong enough.
The EU Commission officially launched an investigation against two Chinese solar companies on Wednesday. The question is whether Beijing’s state subsidies gave them an unfair advantage over domestic bidders in a tender in Romania. If the allegations prove to be true, the Commission could ban the Chinese companies from participating in public tenders all over the EU.
However, this does little to help European solar manufacturers. They are demanding financial aid from Brussels to compete with cheap products from China. Some companies, such as the Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger, which operates a plant in Germany, have already drawn the consequences and are relocating parts of their production to the US, where generous subsidies are granted for renewables. Amelie Richter and Manuel Berkel analyze what levers the EU still has at its disposal.
An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 shook the east coast of Taiwan near the city of Hualien shortly before eight o’clock on Wednesday morning. The shockwaves damaged buildings and infrastructure even in Taipei, over a hundred kilometers away. It was the most severe earthquake to hit the island in 25 years. According to the latest figures at 10 p.m. local time, a total of nine people died, 1,011 were injured and 143 were still waiting to be rescued.
Cell phone videos from Hualien showed massive landslides, collapsed buildings and rescue teams in action. Lin Hsiao-wei was on her way home when she suddenly saw large boulders on the road towards Hualien. “When it started to shake, I first thought my car had broken down,” the 37-year-old manager told Table.Briefings. She turned around and returned to Taipei when it became clear that the road was no longer passable.
Taiwan was promised international support, including from Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida, Philippine President Marcos and the President of the European Council Michel. China also offered help. President Tsai Ing-wen expressed her gratitude in a post on X for the worldwide support and highlighted the work of the first responders.
Taiwan is located in a seismically active zone between the Eurasian and Philippine plates and is frequently hit by earthquakes. The previous quake in the south of the island in 2016 claimed 116 lives. The relatively few victims this time are probably due to the low population density in Hualien and the short duration of the quake, which lasted around one minute.
The worst earthquake in the island’s history is still etched in Taiwan’s collective memory: On the night of September 21, 1999, an earthquake killed more than 2,400 people, injured 10,000 and destroyed 100,000 homes. Taiwan learned its lessons from the tragedy. Earthquake resilience was improved through stricter building guidelines. September 21 was named National Disaster Prevention Day, on which annual awareness campaigns are held and the government’s earthquake and tsunami warning system is tested.
Vice President Lai Ching-te, who will take up the presidential office in May, arrived in Hualien in the afternoon with the Minister of the Interior and a group of deputies. Lai announced that railroad services between Hualien and northern Taiwan could be resumed as early as Thursday. He also promised emergency aid of 300 million TWD (around 8.67 million euros). However, Lai explained that rescue activities remained the top priority.
Shortly after the earthquake, 360,000 households were without electricity. The country’s last active nuclear power plant did not report any disruptions. In the western part of the island, the semiconductor companies TSMC, UMC and PSMC temporarily suspended parts of their highly complex and very sensitive production in the Hsinchu Science Park. According to a statement from chip giant TSMC: “To ensure the safety of personnel, some fabs were evacuated according to company procedure.” Facilities were also shut down. Both companies later stated that employees had returned to work. In the afternoon, TSMC announced that production would nevertheless be suspended for the time being. TSMC already had to stop production during previous earthquakes, which resulted in supply bottlenecks.
The HSR high-speed train also had to suspend operations temporarily. Among other things, this led to disruptions in parliamentary operations, as many MPs commute to work by train. According to the Ministry of Defense, the earthquake also caused minor damage to six F-16 fighter jets. The squadron stationed at the air base in Hualien plays a vital role in intercepting Chinese aircraft that virtually enter Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) daily.
The government received criticism, particularly from the north of the country. Citizens in the northern cities of Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung and Taoyuan had not received an earthquake warning on their cell phones. This promptly led some to question whether Taiwan’s disaster control would be able to warn the population in the event of a military attack by China. Minister of the Interior Lin Yu-chang (DPP) blamed the system’s failure on an incorrect prediction of earthquake strength in these cities. The warning system only issues a warning when the expected magnitude exceeds four on the Richter scale. Ultimately, however, the quake in the capital, Taipei, reached a magnitude of over five.
Seismologists from the Central Weather Bureau say there may be further aftershocks with a magnitude of up to 7 on the Richter scale over the next few days.
For the first time, the EU Commission is officially investigating whether Chinese state subsidies have given solar companies an advantage over domestic bidders in a tender in Europe. There is “sufficient evidence” that two bidders have received“foreign subsidies that distort the internal market“, the Brussels authority announced on Wednesday. The Commission has therefore now launched a formal investigation into the two consortia.
Specifically, it concerns the tender for the construction and operation of the Rovinari Solar Park in Romania. The developers of the project are Oltenia Energy Complex and OMV Petrom. Two consortia that have submitted bids for this project are now affected by the EU investigation:
If the allegations are confirmed, the authority could ban the companies from accessing public tenders throughout the EU.
Even though the investigation is a novelty, it is unlikely to be of decisive help to European module manufacturers. Unlike the anti-subsidy investigation against electric car manufacturers from October 2023, this time the Commission is not taking action against imports of Chinese products per se, but only against a limited part of the market.
Wednesday’s measure is based on the newly created Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR) from 2023, which specifically targets subsidies in public tenders – which is no longer the dominant market segment for photovoltaics. According to the German Solar Industry Association, around half of solar demand in Germany was accounted for by the home segment, i.e. small systems without tenders. In the case of large systems on open spaces or roofs, on the other hand, part of the expansion is purely private.
Furthermore, only a portion of public procurement procedures meet the FSR reporting thresholds. It obliges companies bidding for EU tenders worth more than 250 million euros to disclose the amount of state subsidies they have received if these were higher than 4 million euros.
There were mixed reactions from the solar industry on Wednesday. “We see this investigation as an important step. The Commission is proving that it is indeed acting under the legal framework for unfair trading practices to respond to the Chinese industry’s aggressive strategy on net-zero technologies“, said Johan Lindahl, Secretary General of the manufacturers’ association ESMC.
Others emphasize that this is not a comprehensive anti-subsidy investigation against all imports, as is the case with EVs. “We have not received any signals from the Commission in recent weeks that it would get out the big knife“, says a German solar manager. Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson herself had spoken out against this after the last meeting of EU energy ministers.
So far, the FSR has been used in a tender for a railroad project in Bulgaria. The EU Commission had also launched an investigation into state subsidies from abroad. The Chinese bidder CRRC Qingdao Sifang Locomotive responded last week by withdrawing from the tender.
European solar manufacturers have been complaining for months about the low-cost competition from China and are demanding aid from the state and Brussels. At the end of February, Glasmanufaktur Brandenburg asked the federal government for support in order to maintain production. In January, Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger threatened to close its plant in Freiberg, Saxony, in April without subsidies; the company recently sent out redundancy notices to around 400 employees. Meyer Burger had originally wanted to expand in Germany; now the company is relocating part of its production to the USA. This is because generous aid is flowing there.
However, little funding has been provided in Europe to date, even though the EU has set itself the goal of ensuring that at least 40 percent of all photovoltaic systems are produced domestically in Europe from 2030 under the planned Net-Zero Industry Act.
In any case, large parts of the solar industry itself are against punitive tariffs, as they would drive up prices and make the energy transition too expensive. The downstream industry in particular, which installs the systems for customers, rejects tariffs – because it is dependent on the cheap solar modules from China. The German solar industry also spoke out against higher tariffs. They would prefer money from the state, for example in the form of a so-called resilience program that provides financial support to domestic manufacturers in tenders.
This is precisely where the investigation comes in, at least to tackle excessive subsidies. If the specific allegations against the two consortia from China are confirmed, the Commission could ban the awarding of the solar park in Romania to the companies concerned or demand compensation measures from the groups. The result of the investigation is expected in three to four months.
On Wednesday, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce spoke of “great dissatisfaction with the misuse of the new tool by the responsible EU authorities“. The regulation is too broad and contains ambiguous definitions. Contribution: Christiane Kuehl
China intends to strengthen security cooperation with the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan. This was emphasized by China’s top police chief and Minister of Public Security, Wang Xiaohong, during a meeting with Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev in Tashkent. Beijing is ready to enhance cooperation “in combating the ‘three forces’ of terrorism, separatism and extremism as well as cross-border crime,” reported the state news agency Xinhua.
According to reports, Wang also met with Uzbekistan’s Secretary of the National Security Council, Viktor Makhmudov and Interior Minister Pulat Bobojonov, and signed cooperation documents. President Mirziyoyev had also met with Erkin Tuniyaz, the chairman of the regional government of Xinjiang, last week. Uzbekistan does not share a border with China; Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan lie between them. ari
Violent storm winds have killed at least seven people in the southern Chinese province of Jiangxi since the weekend. Some 552 people had to be evacuated and, 2,751 houses were damaged. The extreme weather conditions started on March 31 and struck nine cities, including Nanchang and Jiujiang, affecting 93,000 people in 54 counties, according to the Jiangxi Provincial Flood Control Center.
On Sunday, violent storms led to gusts of wind that tore door-sized windows from their frames in two apartments in a high-rise building in the provincial capital of Nanchang. Local media reported that three people were blown out of their beds through the holes and fell to their deaths.
The storms are the worst in the region for more than a decade. Local authorities estimate economic damages to amount to 150 million yuan (21 million US dollars). rtr
The European Commission has finalized anti-dumping duties on imports of certain polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from China. The Brussels authority confirmed on Wednesday the provisional duties introduced at the end of November. These tariffs range between 6.6 percent and 24.2 percent, depending on the exporting manufacturer.
The anti-dumping duties will be in effect for a period of five years. The decision followed an investigation, which, according to the EU Commission, concluded that the Chinese imports were causing harm to the EU industry.
The impact of the tariffs on EU consumers is minimal. PET is primarily used in the production of plastic bottles. ari
US media have played a key role in shaping the Western public’s perception of China for decades. For Mike Chinoy, the first bureau chief of the US television station CNN in Beijing, their work thus has a tangible historical dimension. “Journalists write the first draft of history,” is one of the sentences he uses to describe the role of reporters as chroniclers and his own reports in China.
As part of the first generation of Western journalists in China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, Chinoy personally reported on the front line, including live coverage of the protests on Tiananmen Square in June 1989. More than three decades later, Chinoy has recounted the work of US journalists in China since the founding of the People’s Republic in his book “Assignment China.” In it, Chinoy presents the first-person accounts of numerous reporters, most of whom he interviewed, supplemented by historical background information.
The reports date back to the time of the Chinese Civil War and the Mao era, through the period of reform and opening up to the present day. Near the end of his book, Chinoy also recounts the odyssey of New York Times correspondent Chris Buckley, who traveled to Wuhan in the early days of the Covid pandemic and reported from the closed-off city.
Mike Chinoy first came to China with a student delegation in 1973. After earning his degree in journalism at Columbia University, he went to Hong Kong as a radio reporter in his mid-20s. From 1987, he helped set up the CNN bureau in Beijing. In the 2000s, he once again reported from Hong Kong as CNN’s Asia correspondent, focussing on North Korea and the Middle East, among other things, while always keeping an eye on China.
Mike Chinoy has been living in Taiwan since 2018. A research project took him there, and in the wake of the Covid pandemic, he decided to move his center of life to Taipei. From there, Chinoy looks at China from a distance – just as he did at the beginning of his career – and like many other Western journalists who have been expelled from China in recent years.
Previous generations of China observers already struggled with this distance. To make China politically comprehensible from afar, Chinoy first argues for a meticulous study of Chinese state media and other official sources. “We need to find our inner Father Lászlo Ladány,” says Chinoy, alluding to a Hungarian Jesuit priest who lived in Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1980s. At the time, Ladány analyzed government sources from the People’s Republic in detail and gained indispensable insights for foreign reporting on China.
On the other hand, Mike Chinoy firmly believes that no amount of studying sources can replace a reporter’s personal view. The fact that China is again restricting this view is a huge loss. He believes that this will backfire on the government in Beijing. A lot could be gained if they allowed stories that included both critical and positive perspectives on China, he says. Like any society, China is diverse and complex. Most journalists want to do this justice.
However, one consequence of the restrictions is that there is less room for differentiated perspectives and purely political reporting dominates. “As a result, the confrontation between China and the West continues to intensify,” laments Chinoy. Because of these adversities, Chinoy feels there is still an enormous need to tell in-depth social stories from China. Leonardo Pape
Today marks the start of Qingming, the festival commemorating the dead in China. Traditionally, paper banknotes and cardboard objects are burned to help the dead in the afterlife.
This year, mock-ups of ice cream, seafood, maotai, razors, and air conditioners can be found on the Taobao shopping channel. To help the environment, some manufacturers are even offering paper made from cellulose nitrate, which contains fewer pollutants.
And yet the tradition is under threat: Earlier this week, local authorities in some provinces banned the production and sale of “superstitious” grave offerings. This sparked heated debates on the internet about the pros and cons. Previously, a video had gone viral in which a man in Nantong in Jiangsu province had built a life-size house out of paper to burn.
