The Wire China

We are excited to release this special edition of The Wire China. For more than a year, our staff writers, Katrina Northrop and Eliot C., have been working with Mike Forsythe at The New York Times to look into leaked documents from Xiao Jianhua’s Tomorrow Group. What they found was Xiao’s repeated and obscured entanglements with Jack Ma’s empire. In other words: China’s most celebrated billionaire and its most notorious billionaire were secretly involved on business deals worth at least $1 billion. To round out this special edition, the rest of our magazine this week is devoted to some of the questions or thoughts you may have after reading the investigation: a timeline from Aaron Mc Nicholas of Jack Ma’s whereabouts since his infamous 2020 speech; Andrew Peaple's interview with Victor Shih on the fallout from Xi Jinping’s tech sector crackdown; a great video about how the investigation was done as well as more background information on Xiao’s empire; and an op-ed from Graham Webster on China’s tech turnaround.

You’re no doubt aware of the increasingly hawkish rhetoric against China, but our cover story this week looks at the harder-to-document flip side: those in the West who are reluctant to publicly criticize #China and top Chinese companies because they perceive a high legal or political risk in doing so. Elsewhere, we have #infographics from Aaron Mc Nicholas on why China’s largest #lithium producers are hurting; two pieces from Katrina Northrop — an interview with Peter Hessler on China’s past and present and a reported piece on China’s role in the #gunpowder supply chain — and an op-ed from Diana Choyleva about why China’s contradictions remain unresolved after the Third Plenum.

Graham Webster, who leads the DigiChina Project at Stanford University, writes that Beijing’s crackdown on the #tech sector, followed by recent huge #investments in #AI and other areas, are part of a long pattern of shifts in the way the government has approached tech development.

Victor Shih is a professor of political science at the University of California San Diego, where he is also director of the 21st Century China Center. A well-known and prolific commentator on China’s political and financial scene, his most recent book, 'Coalitions of the Weak', describes how elite Chinese politics has worked since the late-Mao era until the present day. In this week’s Q&A with Andrew Peaple, he talks about how Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive upset the Party’s equilibrium and signs of splintering within the leader’s ruling faction.

For a man once often seen hobnobbing with presidents and other global leaders, the last few years have seen a comparative slide into obscurity for Jack Ma. This week’s #infographics by Aaron Mc Nicholas consolidate the main events and sightings in recent years of China’s most storied businessman.

Watch how reporters Michael Forsythe, Katrina Northrop and Eliot C. traced China’s most notorious businessman back to Jack Ma, and learn more about Xiao Jianhua and his conglomerate, The Tomorrow Group.

Discussions within U.S. #policy making circles take too little account of the devastating impact any conflict could have on the global chip industry, Paul S. Triolo argues.

Chinese humanoid #robots are working better and getting cheaper. But what are they good for? Rachel Cheung reports.

Andreas Fulda is an associate professor at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, where he specializes in EU-China relations, democratization studies, and citizen diplomacy. His new book, Germany and China: How Entanglement Undermines Freedom, Prosperity and Security, examines Germany’s dependence on #China and its costs. In this week’s Q&A with Rachel Cheung, he talks about the need for a paradigm shift in Germany’s foreign #policy and the difficulty of countering hybrid threats.

While Western investment in China slows, Germany’s Bertelsmann has an Asian fund that shows little sign of waning enthusiasm. This week’s #infographics by Aaron Mc Nicholas take a closer look at BAI Capital.