Huawei is on the highway

The Philadephia Orchestra played last night, in commemoration of their groundbreaking tour of China in 1973 that helped break the ice between the U.S. and China.

Yesterday, exactly 50 years to the day after they played Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony in Beijing, I listened to them play it in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, along with a composition by my wife. Most of the audience was American or Chinese, and it was a moving celebration of our common humanity. (You can read more about the event here, and there will be a Sinica Podcast on it next week).

Unfortunately, just before the concert, news broke about the renowned Uyghur anthropologist Rahile Dawut. She is famous for her research into Uyghur customs and folklore, but she is, or was, a Communist Party member whose achievements were previously recognized by the Chinese political and academic establishment. She disappeared in 2017, and yesterday her fate was made public: life behind bars on trumped-up charges of endangering state security.

The contrast between the concert and the news about Rahile Dawut is one of the many often-brutal contradictions that we must face as we try to understand China. It won’t help us to wish the bad news away or ignore it, but it’s also true that the China story is about many other things too: It’s about Huawei figuring out how to make chips despite U.S. bans (see our top story below), it’s about Chinese parents and students dealing with school lunch problems, and the increasing nationalism of school curricula which some fear will hurt their future job prospects (scroll down for details).

We’re going to tackle all of these issues — the good, the bad, the human, the inhuman, the beautiful, and the ugly — at our NextChina ‘23 Conference in New York on November 1 and 2, from the latest developments in semiconductors and AI to the human rights situation in Xinjiang and Tibet. We’re nearly out of tickets, please click through to secure your space.

Jeremy Goldkorn Editor-in-Chief

• The phone’s radio frequency front-end module, in previous models made by U.S. and Japanese firms, was made by China’s Beijing OnMicro Electronics.
• Guangzhou Runxin Information Technology made the phone’s radio frequency transceiver.

The shift to domestic suppliers comes after Huawei has struggled for years under harsh U.S.-led restrictions on what it can buy. But now, Huawei’s and the Chinese state’s years of investments are beginning to pay off.

More on The China Project:

Advanced packaging is the frontier of semiconductor technology, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is in the lead, and the repercussions extend far beyond circuitry for U.S.-Taiwan relations, reports Margaret Siu.

China is going to use less coal, despite reports to the contrary. Hydro, wind, and solar power are stabilizing, and China’s burning of the dirtiest of fossil fuels is near the plateau it must reach before coal is dethroned, reports David Fishman.

Chinese tech companies are racing to create and monetize generative AI, the tech that ChatGPT recently made famous. Paul Triolo and Anarkalee Perera give us the full download on the state of the industry in China.

During a live broadcast last week, the beauty influencer responded to a question about the high price tag of a 79 yuan ($11) eyebrow pencil. Li reacted in annoyance:

How is that expensive?! The price has been the same for so many years. Don’t talk nonsense. It’s difficult for domestic brands…Sometimes you need to look to yourself for the answers. Has your salary increased over so many years? Have you worked hard?

Fans aren’t happy, and they bring us our Phrase of the Week: Austin Li is out of touch (哪李贵了 nǎlǐ guìle).

But that has not deterred the authorities from continuing their campaign of repression: News broke yesterday that the Chinese government has given a life sentence to Professor Rahile Dawut, an acclaimed Uyghur anthropologist and expert on Uyghur folklore and traditions, on charges of endangering state security.

More on The China Project:

General Lǐ Shàngfú 李尚福, China’s defense minister, has disappeared, and is probably under investigation for corruption.

Indonesia has a tricky balancing act to pull off right now. Like many countries, it’s stuck between a Chinese rock and an American hard place, and that’s part of the reason it did not join BRICS, reports Randy Mulyanto from Jakarta.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense reported a “recent new high” of 103 Chinese aircraft around the island. It’s the second record-breaking military drill that China has conducted near Taiwan in the past week.

China’s top diplomat is in Russia to prepare the way for Putin’s visit to China in October while Syrian President Assad touched down on an Air China plane in Hangzhou for a rare foreign visit.

The many business projects between China and Trinidad and Tobago. Seeing its oil draining away, Trinidad is seeking to become a logistics hub for international trade, capitalizing on its position between Latin America and the Panama Canal. So, naturally, China was one of its go-tos, writes Alex Colville.

BRI at 10: China builds roads to combat its image problem in Central Asia. China wants to “tell its story well,” but is that possible in a region where Sinophobia runs deep? This is Part 2 of our four-part Belt and Road Dispatch by Jacob Mardell.

The move is controversial as many young Chinese are caught between a belief in the importance of cultural confidence and the need to exist in a globalized world in which English carries economic privileges and professional opportunities.

More on The China Project:

Chinese companies that make pre-cooked, ready-to-eat food are trying to create a new market in schools. Parents hate it.

“My bosses made a bet that I would quit. I haven’t…yet.” China’s youth unemployment rate is soaring, and competition for good jobs is fiercer than ever. At the same time, young people are choosing to exit the rat race, jump between jobs, or quit working altogether. What gives? Li Yijuan takes a closer look in this personal essay.

Profiling both prominent and lesser-known individuals working to expose dark truths about some of the grimmest periods of the PRC’s history, including the Great Leap Forward famine and the violence of the Cultural Revolution, Johnson argues that the efforts of China’s “counter-historians” have managed to survive the stepped-up efforts of Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 to control the historical narrative completely.

More podcasts:

Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met briefly in South Africa, but it did nothing to stall the downward spiral in relations between the two Asian powers. Hear all about it from Ananth Krishnan The Hindu newspaper, one of the foremost experts on Sino-Indian relations, who joins hosts Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden on the China-Global South Podcast.

The EU said it will launch an investigation into Chinese subsidies for electric vehicles in a bid to ward off cheap imports, a move Beijing said could negatively impact trade ties. Meanwhile, Beijing denied that it has banned Apple iPhones in government agencies, the PBOC lowered reserve requirement ratios to juice lending, and more on this week’s Caixin-Sinica Business Brief.

China’s Foreign Ministry was among the first major governments to welcome the African Union as the newest member of the G20 this week. The big question now is what will the AU do now that it has a seat at the table? Listen to the China in Africa Podcast.

On our TikTok channel:

Syria is seeking financial support from China, but are the risks for China too great?

In a bid to revitalize and rebrand, Hong Kong seems to be turning to digital assets.

• At 10:22 pm, on September 18, 1931, World War II began. That’s an oversimplification, needless to say. Any event as immense and complex as the Second World War does not start at a single moment. But September 18, 1931 was the date that explosives detonated along the route of the South Manchurian Railway, and as James Carter writes in This Week in China’s History, the events of that Friday night are underwhelming, almost ridiculous, in the context of what they sparked.

Click here to subscribe to events updates from The China Project, sent to your inbox every Monday.

More events from The China Project:

NEXTChina ‘23 will be the China thought-leadership event of the year. Network and learn from experts on the global energy transition, geopolitics, semiconductors, AI, finance and investments, and more.

Click here to subscribe to events updates from The China Project, sent to your inbox every Monday.