What does it mean to be Taiwanese?
Decades later, only 3% of people in Taiwan consider themselves primarily Chinese. But plenty of people don't think of themselves as being fully Taiwanese, either. That ambiguity is being exploited by China's Communist Party, which insists the island is part of China, and has threatened to take it by force. Without a concrete sense of what it means to be Taiwanese, how will people resist?
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Reuters
an hour ago
- Reuters
China cautions tech firms over Nvidia H20 AI chip purchases, sources say
Aug 12 (Reuters) - Chinese authorities have summoned domestic companies including major internet firms Tencent ( opens new tab and ByteDance over their purchases of Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab H20 chips, asking them to explain their reasons and expressed concerns over information risks, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and other agencies also held meetings with Baidu ( opens new tab and smaller Chinese tech firms in recent weeks, said one of the two people and a third source. The Chinese officials asked companies why they needed to buy Nvidia chips when they could purchase from domestic suppliers, the sources. Authorities also expressed concerns that materials Nvidia has asked companies to submit for U.S. government review could contain sensitive information including client data, one of the sources said. However, the people, who declined to be identified because the meetings were not public, said the companies have not been ordered to stop buying H20 chips. Nvidia said on Tuesday the H20 chip was "not a military product or for government infrastructure". "China has ample supply of domestic chips to meet its needs. It won't and never has relied on American chips for government operations, just like the U.S. government would not rely on chips from China," the statement said. Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent and the CAC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Earlier on Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported that Chinese authorities have urged domestic companies to avoid using Nvidia's H20 chips, particularly for government-related purposes. Several companies were issued official notices discouraging the use of the H20, a less-advanced chip, mainly for any government or national security-related work by state enterprises or private companies, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. In a separate report, The Information reported that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent had been ordered by the CAC in the past two weeks to suspend Nvidia chip purchases altogether, citing data security concerns. The CAC directive was communicated at a meeting the regulator held with over a dozen Chinese tech firms, shortly after the Trump administration reversed the export curbs on H20 chips, according to the Information report. Reuters could not immediately confirm the reports and Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment. Top contract chipmaker SMIC ( opens new tab rose 5% on Tuesday on expectations of rising demand for locally-produced chips. But even without an outright ban, the concerns expressed by Chinese authorities could threaten Nvidia's recently restored access to the Chinese market as Chinese companies look to keep in step with regulators. Nvidia designed the H20 specifically for China after U.S. export restrictions on its more advanced AI chips took effect in late 2023. The H20 had since been the most sophisticated AI chip Nvidia was allowed to sell in China. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities effectively banned its sale to China, but reversed the decision in July following an agreement between Nvidia and the Trump administration. Last month, China's cyberspace regulator summoned Nvidia representatives, asking the company to explain whether the H20 posed backdoor security risks that could affect Chinese user data and privacy. State-controlled media have intensified criticism of Nvidia in recent days. Yuyuan Tantian, affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, published an article on WeChat over the weekend claiming H20 chips pose security risks and lack technological advancement and environmental friendliness. The scrutiny threatens a significant revenue stream for Nvidia, which generated $17 billion from China sales in its fiscal year ended January 26 - or 13% of total revenue. China has accelerated work on domestic AI chip alternatives, with companies, such as Huawei ( developing processors that rival the H20's performance, and Beijing urging the technology sector to become more self-sufficient. However, U.S. sanctions on advanced chipmaking equipment, including lithography machines essential for chip production, have constrained domestic manufacturers' ability to boost production. On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump suggested that he might allow Nvidia to sell a scaled-down version of its advanced Blackwell chip in China, despite deep-seated fears in Washington that Beijing could harness U.S. AI capabilities to supercharge its military. China's foreign ministry said on Tuesday it hoped the U.S. would act to maintain the stability and smooth operation of the global chip supply chain. The Trump administration last week confirmed an unprecedented deal with Nvidia and AMD (AMD.O), opens new tab, which agreed to give the U.S. government 15% of revenue from sales of some advanced chips in China. China's renewed guidance on avoiding chips also affects AI accelerators from AMD, Bloomberg also reported. It was not clear, however, whether any notices from Chinese authorities specifically mentioned AMD's MI308 chip. AMD did not respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
Daily Mirror
3 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
MIKEY SMITH: 10 unhinged Donald Trump moments - and why his crime stats are even more dodgy
Trump rolled out a statistic that is so outrageously dishonest it's unbelievable - and nobody has spotted it until now Donald Trump's last night announced plans to take over the police in Washington DC, and send in troops to fight crime. It was one of the most provocatively authoritarian moves by a US President since the post-911 era. Or at least since the Covid Pandemic. And it was all based on fudged figures. We'll go through some of those fudges and some of the immediate fallout. Meanwhile, Trump had a pop at Zelensky and made people translate TACO into Chinese. Oh, and Liz Truss is back, and more desperate than ever to seem relevant in the US. Here's everything that happened in Trump world in the last 24 hours that you need to know about. 1. Send in the Clowns. No, hang on - Troops. Send in the TROOPS. Donald Trump last night announced plans to "federalise" the Washington DC Police Department and deploy the National Guard, and maybe other members of the military, on the streets of the capital, to tackle a "crime emergency" and "rising violence" in the capital. Except that there is neither a crime emergency nor rising violence in the capital. There are two measures of violent crime in DC. One is by the Metropolitan Police department - which for some reason doesn't include aggravated offences or felony assaults, the other is by the FBI, which does - and which counts crimes differently. (MPDC is incident based - so one reported crime is one entry. The FBI pulls from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which can mean an incident with multiple crimes can be recorded as just one crime.) The MPD's figures put violent crime down 26% year on year since 2024, building on the previous year which saw a 35% reduction year on year since 2023. That's a 30 year low. Even the FBI's method of counting shows a 10% reduction year on year 2023-2024 across all violent crimes. 2. Let's talk about Bogota Then Trump held up a bunch of graphs on paper that show DC's murder rate plotted against other capital cities from around the world. And on that graph, DC's 2024 murder rate (27.54 per 100,000) is shown as dramatically higher than other capital cities - including some surprising ones like Bogota, the capital of Colombia (15.1 per 100k) and Mexico City (10 per 100k). Note: The actual figure for Bogota is 15.2, according to the "Bogotá, Cómo Vamos" quality-of-life report. But we'll let that slide. For comparison, the national US murder rate is around 5 per 100k, the equivalent for Colombia is 25.4 per 100k, and for Mexico it's 24.9 per 100k. So why does Washington DC have such a dramatically higher murder rate than places like Bogota and Mexico City - and why is it so much higher than the US national average? Well, as with many things, it depends on how - and who - you count. Washington DC's murder rate is counted from the city of Washington DC only. The city itself is relatively small - with about 700,000 people. And the suburbs around it that make up the DC Metro area all have their own police forces, who publish their own crime stats. Bogota's numbers are for the whole metro area - 8m+ people - most of them living in areas where not a lot of murders happen. Same for Mexico City's figure, which is based on an area covering 22 million people. In 2024 there were more than 1,200 murders in Bogota - while there were just 187 in Washington DC. The murder rate in DC is higher because it only counts the inner city, where murders are more likely to happen. If you run the MPDC's numbers for DC, plus the suburbs of Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, and Prince George's County - you get to a murder rate of 7.72 per 100,000. That's still a shade higher than the national average, but much lower than Trump's scaremongering would have you believe. And much lower than both Bogota and Mexico City. Here's what the graph should look like. 3. Don't take my word for it... CNN helpfully clipped together a bunch of people noting crime was down in DC. Including Kash Patel, literally during Trump's press conference. 4. DC's mayor kinda shrugs Mayor Muriel Bowser just doesn't have the kind of fight that we saw from local officials when Trump sent the troops to LA. In fairness, there's not a lot she can do. The law Trump is using is kind of legit. He's only supposed to use it to federalise the police for 48 hours at a time, up to a maximum of 30 days. But he's allowed to do it. She said Trump's action was "unsettling and unprecedented." But she also kinda suggested that if people were worried about him being able to do it, they shoulda made DC a state like they've been asking for for decades... 5. This is just the warm up... Trump hinted that DC wasn't the only city he had his eye on for a provocative, authoritarian takeover. Mentioning New York, Baltimore and Oakland as being "so far gone", he said: "this will go further. We'll starting very strongly with DC." If you think this isn't a dry run, you're dramatically underreacating. Or, as Tim Walz put it: 6. Alaska is Russia now Many people learned for the first time this week that for a handful of people in Russia, Alaska is contested territory. The great bear sold the state to the US in 1867, but people still joke about it being theirs really. Which is why it's pretty funny that Putin got Trump to agree to meet him there, because he can joke that it's home soil. Anyway, Trump made that joke even funnier last night by saying he was "going to Russia" to meet Putin. If Biden had done 7. It's what I do Trump reckons he'll know whether a "deal" can be made to end the war in Ukraine within "the first two minutes" of meeting Putin. Asked how he'll know that, he replied that that's just what he does. 8. He had another pop at Zelensky Trump had another pop at Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he was "a little bothered" by Ukraine's leader saying over the weekend that he needed constitutional approval to cede to Russia the territory that it captured in its unprovoked invasion. 'I mean, he's got approval to go into a war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap?' Trump added. "Because there'll be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody.' Zelensky has consistently dismissed the idea of "giving their land to the occupier." 9. What's Chinese for taco? Trump extended his trade truce with China for another 90 days. Again. He posted on Truth Social that he signed the executive order for the extension, and that "all other elements of the Agreement will remain the same." Beijing at the same time also announced the extension of the tariff pause, according to the Ministry of Commerce. The previous deadline was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. Had that happened the U.S. could have ratcheted up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30%, and Beijing could have responded by raising retaliatory levies on U.S. exports to China. 10 Liz Truss has done an interview with (another) far right US podcast provocateur Liz Truss sat down for a chat with the supremely awful Ben Shapiro in Hungary a few weeks ago. And today, Shapiro has finally got round to editing and releasing this meeting of minds. During the chat she managed to slag off the NHS, Isembard Kingdom Brunel, Shakespeare, Peter Pan, Jerusalem, Mary Poppins, Elgar, Pink Floyd, The Clash, James Bond and the Queen. All in once sentence. "The views expressed in the Olympic ceremony are not those of the average Briton," she said, lured into it by Shapiro having a dig at the NHS' prominence in the event. Truss went on: "The problem is we have an elite that hates Britain, and they have done for some time. And that is the history of Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer. They want to help the human rights of anybody who doesn't live in Britain but they're very reticent to defend our own interests." There you go then. If you liked the opening ceremony, you hate Britain, says Liz Truss. Oh hang on, what did Liz say about the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony back in 2013? "Last summer's Olympics opening ceremony seamlessly combined Isambard Kingdom Brunel and William Shakespeare, Tim Berners-Lee and Mary Poppins." Right. But there's no quotes from her since then where she properly gets behind the vibe of 2012, are there? Like, nothing where she says we need to harness the spirit of it? Right you are, Liz.
Reuters
6 hours ago
- Reuters
China slaps temporary duties on Canadian canola
BEIJING/SINGAPORE, Aug 12 (Reuters) - China on Tuesday announced preliminary anti-dumping duties on Canadian canola imports, a fresh escalation in the year-long trade dispute that began with Ottawa's imposition of tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports last August. The provisional rate will be set at 75.8%, effective from Thursday, the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement. ICE November canola futures fell 4% to a three-month low after the announcement. China, the world's largest importer of canola - also known as rapeseed - sources nearly all of its supplies of the product from Canada. The steep duties would likely all but end imports if they are maintained. "This is huge. Who will pay a 75% deposit to bring Canadian canola to China? It is like telling Canada that we don't need your canola, thank you very much," said one Singapore-based oilseed trader. China's Ministry of Commerce said on Tuesday an anti-dumping probe launched in September 2024 had found Canada's agricultural sector and particularly the canola industry had benefited from "substantial" government subsidies and preferential policies. China has until September, when the investigation formally ends, to make a final decision on the duties, though it has the option of extending that deadline by six months. A final ruling could result in a different rate, or overturn Tuesday's decision. The decision marks a shift from the conciliatory tone struck in June when China's Premier Li Qiang said there were no deep-seated conflicts of interest between the countries during a phone call with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. "This move... will put additional pressure on Canada's government to sort through trade frictions with China," said Trivium China agriculture analyst Even Rogers Pay. The Canadian embassy in Beijing did not respond to Reuters' request for comment. Separately, China also launched an anti-dumping investigation into Canadian pea starch and imposed provisional duties on imports of halogenated butyl rubber, according to ministry statements. Replacing millions of tons of Canadian canola is likely to be difficult at short notice, say analysts. China primarily uses imported canola to make animal feed for its aquaculture sector. A separate duty on Canadian canola meal imports in March has already put these supplies at risk. The move provides an opportunity for Australia, which looks set to regain access to the Chinese market with a few test cargoes this year after a years-long freeze in the trade, Pay said. Australia, the second-largest canola exporter, has been shut out of the Chinese market since 2020 due mainly to Chinese rules to stop the spread of fungal plant disease. However, even if Australian imports increase, "fully replacing Canadian canola will be very difficult unless import demand drops sharply," said Donatas Jankauskas, an analyst with commodity data firm CM Navigator. ($1 = 1.3789 Canadian dollars)
