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.

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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”.

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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Policy blueprint to be set out for year ahead and big personnel changes may be announced

Thousands of delegates are due to arrive in Beijing this weekend for China’s most high-profile political gathering, a closely observed series of meetings that will lay out the government’s policy blueprint for the year ahead.

The event, known as the “two sessions”, begins on Monday as China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC) convenes alongside a separate but parallel meeting of the country’s top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference.

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As a distracted world looks elsewhere, US and China have a common interest in halting Asia’s accelerating nuclear arms race

For western liberals and progressive champions of open, democratic government, a clutch of recalcitrant regimes around the world seems firmly stuck on what Barack Obama once called “the wrong side of history ”. Iran’s misogynistic theocrats and Myanmar’s genocidal generals are among the worst offenders.

Then there’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia, harking back to largely illusory former glories. Belarus, Syria, Nicaragua, Cambodia and Eritrea meet the regressive criteria, too. What all these regimes have in common is denial of the basic human right to self-determination – the individual’s right to have a say in how society is ordered.

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Wang Yi met with the president and other senior officials amid talk of cooperation within a frosty relationship.

An outpouring on social media for Li Keqiang, the former premier who died Friday, reflected public grief for an era of greater growth and possibility.