Raimondo's China tour, Xi to skip G20 summit, and Japan-China clash over Fukushima water

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Welcome to another edition of What’s Happening in China, a weekly newsletter that curates the latest and most important news and developments from the country.

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PHOTO OF THE WEEK

Skaters in downtown Beijing. Despite the challenges, skateboarding in China continues to grow in popularity.

Travel firms urged to halt trips to Uyghur region over China rights abuses – The Guardian

Uyghur advocates have called on western tourism companies to stop selling package holidays that take visitors through Xinjiang, where human rights abuses by authorities have been called a genocide by some governments.

The request comes as China reopens to foreign visitors after the pandemic, and as its leader, Xi Jinping, calls for more tourism to the region.

A report by the US-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), released on Wednesday, said western tourism to the region risked supporting the normalisation of Chinese government policies that were “intended to destroy the Uyghur identity”.

China human rights abuses: Penny Wong slammed by Opposition over no Uyghur sanctions – The Sydney Morning Herald

The Coalition has accused Labor of inaction over China’s human rights abuses, questioning why the government has failed to introduce the sanctions and travel bans adopted by other jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, United States and European Union.

The criticisms were echoed by Human Rights Watch, which queried what message Australia was sending by not joining other comparable countries in taking action.

The opposition’s foreign affairs spokesman, Simon Birmingham, launched the attack on the anniversary of the finding made by the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, who said China’s forced detention and treatment of Uyghurs “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity”.

Interview: Luke de Pulford on U.K. Parliament's genocide resolution – Axios

“There’s no route to a court. So the U.K.’s policy is inoperable. You can’t say genocide determination is for a court when there’s no court that will ever hear the case.”

"There can’t be any deepening of the economic relationship between the U.K. and China while the U.K. Parliament suspects that a genocide is taking place," says de Pulford. "You can’t offer economic rewards for genocidal states."

POLITICS & SOCIETY

China Wants Its ‘Silver’ Haired Teachers to Get Back to Teaching – Sixth Tone

The National ‘Silver Age’ Teacher Action Plan, launched by the Ministry of Education and nine other departments, aims to recruit around 120,000 retired teachers in the next three years.

The plan emphasized the coordination of different government departments to motivate qualified retired teachers to return to the classroom, without specifying concrete measures for how to do so.

The plan comes as China’s population is aging rapidly. In a news briefing, a MOE spokesperson said that China’s population of people above 60 will exceed 300 million by 2025, with teacher retirements also peaking by then.

Chinese people are living two years longer thanks to 'war on pollution,' report says – CNN

The annual Air Quality Life Index report, produced by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, praised China’s “staggering success in combating pollution.”

Pollution levels globally have fallen slightly from 2013 to 2021 – which the report said was “entirely due to China’s progress.” Without China’s improvements, the world’s average pollution would have risen instead.

The improvement means the average Chinese citizen’s lifespan is now 2.2 years longer, the report said.

Chinese cities used to dominate global rankings of the world’s worst air quality; while some are still on those lists, in many cases they have been overtaken by cities in South Asia and the Middle East.

New Twitter scam in China: sextortion scammers – Rest of World

Since April, after X introduced a new blue-check policy allowing users to buy verified badges, the platform has seen hundreds of newly verified Chinese sextortion accounts, according to Robin Li, founder of online safety software PureTwitter. They prey on Chinese users, harassing the community’s most prominent voices — often political dissidents and influential opinion leaders. The scammer accounts have alienated many users who had turned to the platform as a crucial news source outside of the Great Firewall.

Shanghai Trials Sugary Beverage Alert System in Stores – Sixth Tone

Shanghai has started piloting a beverage health alert system as part of a countrywide initiative to combat health problems related to excessive sugar intake.

A recent study of 15.8 million Chinese adults found that 34.8% of the population are overweight, and 14.1% are obese, according to China’s BMI classification.

Over the past two weeks, 159 brick-and-mortar retailers in the city, including supermarkets and convenience stores, have begun displaying color-coded warning signs on their beverage shelves, Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper reported.

‘I want to see my parents. I’ll take any deal’: the Tiananmen Square leader desperate to return to China – The Spectator

I ask if it’s true that he has offered his silence in return for being allowed home. ‘It is. I want to see my parents,’ he says. ‘I’ll take any deal for that.’ But what about his ‘ultimate goal’ of democratising China? ‘It will be a dilemma,’ he says. ‘But if there’s a deal on the table, I just don’t think I have the right to refuse my parents’ right to see me.’ He doesn’t regret the students’ actions, but when I ask if he would do it again, knowing the price could be either death or exile, he says: ‘The answer is most definitely not.’