China’s president arrives as EU anti-subsidy investigations and tensions over espionage, Ukraine and Taiwan continue

China’s president, Xi Jinping, is to visit Europe next week for the first time in five years, in a tour that will take in the unlikely trifecta of France, Hungary and Serbia.

The visit comes as China pushes to avoid a trade war with the EU, while attitudes towards Beijing in the bloc are hardening after multiple spying scandals and China’s ongoing support for Russia in the war in Ukraine.

End of secretary of state Antony Blinken’s three-day visit marks upsurge in military activity after period of relative calm

Taiwan has reported that a dozen Chinese warplanes flew sorties close to the island on Saturday, in a sudden surge of military activity just hours after the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, left Beijing following talks with President Xi Jinping and top Chinese officials.

Before Blinken’s three-day visit to China , US officials had pointed to a period of relative calm in the Taiwan strait over the past few months, after years of aggressive Chinese military manoeuvres and threats, as a factor in improving US-Chinese relations since Joe Biden held a summit meeting with Xi in November.

Olaf Scholz says Chinese president agreed to back June peace talks that Russia is not attending while Xi says efforts for a resolution must involve both sides

Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, says he has urged Xi Jinping to press Russia to end its “senseless” war in Ukraine and that the Chinese president has agreed to back a peace conference in Switzerland.

Scholz said after a meeting with Xi in Beijing on Tuesday that “China’s word carries weight in Russia”.

Olaf Scholz says European cars should have equal access to Chinese customers

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The chancellor of Germany has urged industry bosses in China to play fair by not overproducing cheap goods or infringing copyright rules.

Speaking on a three-day visit to China where he is travelling with leading business representatives and three government ministers, Olaf Scholz said he, in turn, would encourage the European Union not to be driven by self-interested protectionism, in which governments restrict international trade to help domestic companies.

Chinese leader used meeting with Ma Ying-jeou to promote peaceful ‘reunion’ as only alternative to annexation, say analysts

Xi Jinping has met the former Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou, in what analysts said was an attempt to promote peaceful unification as the only alternative to military annexation of Taiwan.

Ma, who was leading a student delegation to China, met Xi in Beijing at the Great Hall of the People, a venue typically reserved for foreign leaders meeting with senior Chinese officials. Xi used the meeting to emphasise his belief that Taiwan and China were destined for what he terms “reunification”.

The former British territory was a flawed success. Xi Jinping has ended that with the punitive and hastily passed article 23

So farewell, Hong Kong. The vibrant, pulsating city-state that grew, under British rule, into one of the world’s great financial, business, cultural and tourism hubs has finally been brought to heel. Browbeaten, abused, silenced. Trust Xi Jinping, China’s dementor president, to suck out all the joy. Last Wednesday was the UN’s International Day of Happiness. But it was a sad, bad day for Hong Kong.

That was the moment residents woke up to the news that Hong Kong’s puppet legislature, acting on Beijing’s orders, had unanimously abolished its right to think, speak and act freely. Eating noodles is a seditious act now, if the noodles have secret foreign connections. Under new security laws , known as article 23, life imprisonment awaits those who defy the behemoth to the north.

While the Russian election results were condemned in the west, the reaction across Asia, Africa and Latin America show a new global dynamic is emerging

After Vladimir Putin’s landslide presidential election victory on Sunday, western governments lined up to characterise the win as unfair and undemocratic.

The elections underlined the “depth of repression” in Russia, according to British foreign minister David Cameron, while the US state department said the jailing and disqualification of opponents meant the process was “ incredibly undemocratic ”.

Fighting deflation, a sinking property market and weak internal demand, Beijing has set itself a challenging goal in 2024

Chinese leaders who have been predicting an end to the country’s deflation would have been heartened by official statistics this week showing consumer prices had increased for the first time in six months .

The news came as the ruling Communist party used its annual gathering in Beijing to declare the economy would clock up growth of “around 5%” in 2024 . However in his speech, Premier Li Qiang warned dutiful delegates they “should not lose sight of worst-case scenarios and should be well prepared for all risks and challenges”.

Countries are placing a higher priority on resilience and security in the wake of the pandemic and as tensions grow

In 2012, shortly before becoming China’s top leader, Xi Jinping visited the Port of Los Angeles to discuss boosting trade. What then looked like a locus of cooperation has now become another site for suspicion as Sino-American relations remain tense. Last month, the Biden administration announced $20bn of funding for port infrastructure, much of it to replace cargo cranes that have almost all been made by a state-owned Chinese firm. The US is concerned because the sophisticated pieces of equipment manage information about containers and their contents, their origins and their destinations – and can be remotely programmed and controlled. It wants to restart domestic production of the cranes, which have not been made in the US for decades.

The move comes amid a much broader economic rethinking: what the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, last year described as “a paradigm shift from the primacy of open markets to the primacy of security; from ‘just in time’ to ‘just in case’”. The pandemic was a wake-up call, forcing nations to scrutinise their supply chains, and ask whether they had sacrificed resilience for efficiency. The climate crisis is already affecting logistics: low rainfall in Panama has forced the authorities to limit vessels using the canal . Cyber-attacks by criminal actors are another concern. The Japanese port of Nagoya was put out of action by a ransomware attack last summer. But current conflicts and geopolitical divides are driving the changes.