(Preview) The Final Biden-Xi Meeting; PRC Messaging to the World; Mass Attacks and the Party Response; Trump Transition Updates
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Hello and welcome to Sharp China. I'm Andrew Sharp and you are listening to a free preview of today's episode. And it's this idea that from the Chinese perspective or from the argument that Huang is making is that it's also effectively a way to deal with the quote unquote so-called overcapacity and things like solar panels. Yeah.

I mean, it's actually really smart if they could do it. It's really smart. And it's strategically beneficial. Right. And good for the climate. So we'll see if they actually figure out a way to, you know, maybe that's sort of the way they deal with instead of committing to, you know, Y amount. $100 billion worth of resources. Yeah. Which they already have sort of can't sell anyway. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, and it is interesting because in some ways it's well-intentioned, but it also raises security concerns if the entire world shifts to energy that then is reliant on China for supply chain sourcing. So...

That's part of the dilemma with all of this as we move forward. Certainly from the US perspective, one of the lessons we should all have learned is how much blood and treasure has the US wasted because of addiction to oil and reliance on Saudi Arabia and OPEC? Why would the US do it again with another country?

let's build more nuclear power uh is my takeaway from the last several years um and maybe we will begin to do that china is doing that as well china is very active in china's way ahead of energy yeah china is is way ahead of building nuclear power indeed um

So one story I wanted to mention just because it was interesting to me as I prepped this week, Brad Stetzer, who was formerly at USTR, he shared this FT story on Twitter. This was the Financial Times in late October.

An Italian tomato sauce magnet has urged Brussels to protect farmers from the unfair competition posed by cheap paste made in China's Xinjiang region and restore the, quote, dignity of Italy's staple red fruit.

Francisco Muti, chief executive of the eponymous maker of ingredients including passata, pulp and canned tomatoes, warned that Italy's tomato industry risked being undercut by tomato paste made by Chinese state enterprises in Xinjiang, where the UN Human Rights Commissioner has documented widespread human rights abuses against the local Muslim Uyghur minority, including forced labor. Beijing has denied the allegations.

China is estimated to account for nearly 23% of this year's global tomato production, up from about 18% in 2023, according to the World Processing Tomato Council. Chinese tomato paste costs half as much as Italian products.

I mentioned that only because I had no idea that China produced tomatoes anywhere near that scale. Didn't know that the World Processing Tomato Council exists.

And this story, it was just a reminder to me of how diverse and powerful the PRC export regime has become. I don't imagine you have any hot tomato takes, but I wanted to mention it just to make listeners aware that this trade exists because I thought it was interesting. No, and I think you don't mess with Italians and their tomatoes. Right, yeah.

I haven't spent a lot of time in Italy. I'd love to spend more time. And if we had an opportunity to do a sharp China about the tomato industry and the impact of China, we'd go in a heartbeat. Talk about a national champion, the tomato and Italy. Yeah, I mean, for all the focus on like sexy technology, like chips and solar panels or EVs,

There are also, just in the course of prepping for this show, there are minor stories about more traditional industries that are also being affected by PRC exports. So if anybody would like to read more about the tomato angst in Italy, consult the show notes for the FT article. So...

Anyways, to keep things moving and on a more serious note, we will move to what are the biggest stories in China domestically over the past week. I'll read a headline from The Wall Street Journal. Mass attacks in China prompt censorship.

and a clampdown on mourning. And they write, as China confronts a rare series of violent attacks, authorities have been scrambling to restrict information and suppress public expression of solidarity, a sign of Beijing's growing concerns that these incidents could threaten social stability. On Tuesday, a car rammed into a crowd of students and parents in front of a primary school in southern China, injuring several people, according to police and state media reports.

The driver, a 39-year-old man, was arrested and the police are continuing to investigate the case. None of the injuries were life-threatening, the police said. This was the third similar mass casualty incident in roughly a week. Last week, a car plowed into a crowd at a sports stadium in southern China's Zhuhai, killing 35 and injuring dozens more. On

On Saturday, eight people were killed and 17 wounded in a knife attack at a college in Yijing, eastern China. In many other countries, news of such incidents would quickly overtake the news cycle and social media. In China, reports on them have been relatively brief, often largely sticking to what official statements said or just pasting a screenshot of police statements.

Videos that appear to be taken at incident scenes were often quickly taken down from social media. Local authorities have been closely monitoring acts of mourning by the public.

And then you also highlighted a story from The Straight Times, which noted that a week after the attack in Zhuhai last week, the victims and their families remain nameless and faceless to the public. The latest example of a well-rehearsed Chinese playbook for security incidents where the authorities seek to control what can be discussed, ensuring that any dissatisfaction with the party and government does not brew.

Bill, this is three heartbreaking incidents in the span of a week here. Are there tools beyond censorship that the government can deploy to try to prevent these tragedies? Obviously, no one was killed at the school, but the video of that attack that I saw, if it was an attack, was.

The video was pretty chilly. You could just see dozens of six-year-olds running away with their backpacks on. It was awful. I mean, these are all...

Part of the problem is when these kinds of attacks happen, they get censored pretty quickly. You get very brief statements from the local police about what happened. You don't really know what the motive is. Like the attack in Zhuhai where this guy drove around this track where there were groups of people who were exercising after work in these walking exercise, but in a regimented way with these people.

like in clubs and officially they said that he was upset over a divorce settlement. One of the stories going around was actually he was, his ex-wife was, he was, he was going after her because she was in one of these groups because she had effectively taken like 10 million RMB from him and given it to her kids from a previous marriage. We don't know. We don't know what the motives are. You know, we don't know like the, like the,

Like the incident today at this school, and I think it was in Cheongdeo, Hunan, was... We don't know if it was an accident or it was intentional. Obviously, the stabbing over the weekend was at a vocational school, and it was a former student who had clearly... He and his family had paid a lot of money to go to the school, but he still wasn't able to get a good job. And so I think he was... Basically, this was its end, and this was... There was a manifesto going around saying,

that allegedly by him, but not confirmed, that said one of the things he was trying to make a point so that it would improve the labor law because he had no recourse. And I think what's interesting, there's the playbook of how they memory hold these events where very quickly it gets censored. You can't talk about it. You can't go make any physical expressions of mourning. The people bring flowers, the flowers get

taken away. But there's also, you know, since the Juhai attack, there's been the Ministry of Public Security had an expanded party committee meeting to talk about effectively how to better, how to improve social stability and deal and prevent these kinds of mass incidents. You've had other parts of the legal system. Like today, there was a meeting from the

the party committee of the top prosecutor, the Supreme people's curatorate, also talking about the similar themes. And what ultimately is going to come out of this though, is a lot more preemptive interventions where they're going, they're going to go out and they're going to identify people who may be considered at risk in terms of

possibly in financial straits or having some sort of a civil dispute or going through a divorce, who may be more likely to go commit some sort of a... One of the phrases is basically to get revenge on society. So they're going to preemptively go out and talk to these people and they're going to do that through the various...

grassroots measures that the party has set up over the years and then has dramatically reinforced in the Xi era, where you have your neighborhood committees, you have this new central social work department that was set up after the 20th Party Congress. You have this reinvigoration of this concept of the Feng Chao experience, where it's basically mass work to deal with addressing contradictions in

without arresting people. Last week, they also talked about some models like the Chaoyang Masses, which is effectively individuals in Beijing, started in Beijing Chaoyang District, where it's effectively a network of informants and people who sit on the streets. Sometimes they're retirees. So I think you're going to end up seeing a lot more of...

kind of not just technical surveillance, but actually more sort of human intervention and human surveillance to the extent the system can do that. Because these kind of events, they can very quickly erode people's confidence in the party and in the system. And that's what they're worried about. They're worried about a broader impact on stability and a broader impact on

confidence in the system. I mean, you can definitely see a pretty clear line to a couple more incidents like this and fomenting popular discontent and lack of faith in the government to be able to control these incidents. Right. And, you know, that doesn't mean it's going to suddenly be like mass protests, but it's just like this becomes very corrosive very quick

Sure. And very... I mean, they're horrifying incidents. Yeah. No, they're terrible. They're tragedies, right? I mean, that's the thing. So one thing, one book of people... I'm sure you've read reviews, but I would recommend it is...

Peming Xin, a professor, he has a good book. It's called The Sentinel State that came out earlier this year. It's on surveillance and the survival of dictatorship in China. And a lot of the stuff he talks about in here about how the party has rebuilt a lot of the grassroots mechanisms around surveillance and social monitoring, social control. I think they're going to step all that stuff up to deal with these issues.

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