China's new priorities for cities
Xi gossip, urban policies, GDP ⬆︎, lecherous Red Grandpa, biotech, Australian PM in China, European and American tensions, Chinese diplomacy in India and Middle East, Taiwanese decoupling.
This is The China Week, a succinct roundup and analysis of what happened in the People’s Republic in the last seven days. Please take out a paying subscription for full newsletters, access to the archive, and to receive special content, such as our brief guide to the best specialized sources of China news.
Those who talk don’t know, those who don’t know talk
Don’t waste your time on Xi rumors
Before this week’s news, a note on recent rumors about Xi Jinping losing power:
The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), arguing that the burden of proof is on people who assert the existence of God, wrote:
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.
He goes on to suggest that it not the teapot sceptics but the people who believe in the celestial teapot who need to prove that it exists.
In the 1990s and 2000s, I often thought of this argument when earnest China-watchers would talk breathlessly about Chinese Communist Party officials who were behind-the-scenes “reformers” who would at some point reveal themselves and turn China into a liberal democracy.
The many recent rumors about Xi Jinping losing power are similar. They are based on nothing except gossip and guesses. There are perhaps fewer than 50 people who know what is really going on at the very top of the Chinese Communist Party, and none of those people are talking to journalists, and if they did they would not tell the truth. Don’t waste your time entertaining such idle speculation.
—Jeremy Goldkorn
Urban development
City policies to focus on quality of life
In 2011, China became a majority urban country, with more than 50% of the population living in cities. In 2017, China launched a rural revitalization strategy, aiming to reduce both rural poverty and pressures on cities from mass migration from the countryside, marking a change from decades of policies that encouraged urbanization.
Now the government’s focus seems to be on accelerating a trend that was already forming: making cities more pleasant rather than bigger. On July 15, Xi Jinping and most of China’s most senior leaders attended a meeting of the Central Urban Work Conference. The main message: China’s “urbanization is shifting from a period of rapid growth to a period of stable development,” meaning that bigger is no longer better; the focus is now on improving quality of life and making cities “desirable to live in,” and “beautiful.”
Statistics and lies
GDP growth surprisingly good
China’s gross domestic product (GDP) increased 5.2% in the second quarter of 2025 from the same period a year earlier, which several media reports called “better than expected.”
But not all is rosy. “China's producer deflation deepened to its worst level in almost two years in June as the economy grappled with uncertainty over a global trade war and subdued demand at home,” according to Reuters, while the New York Times worries about how much longer China can “keep propping up its consumers with subsidies” and other downward forces.
Pharma dharma
China will rule biotech
“Chinese biotech's advance has been as ferocious as the nation's breakthrough efforts in AI and EVs, eclipsing the EU and catching up to the U.S.,” according to Bloomberg. “Chinese biotech shares are surging this year on growing optimism over innovative cancer treatments being licensed to western pharmaceutical companies,” reported the Financial Times. “China's biotech is quietly eating Big Pharma's lunch,” says Yahoo.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs of up to 200% on pharmaceuticals imported into the U.S., and American regulatory moves may “stand in the way of innovative Chinese-developed drugs reaching American patients,” reported healthcare industry website Stat. This is happening as the Trump government is willingly ceding its lead in science investment and basic research.
Internet culture
Red Grandpa’s obscene videos
Police in the city of Nanjing announced the arrest of a suspect for distributing obscene materials. The story that has emerged is that a 38-year-old man surnamed Jiāo 焦, using the alias “Ah Hóng” 阿红 has been cross-dressing and posing as a woman on social media platforms, offering “free sexual services” to men. He secretly filmed the encounters and then sold the videos over the internet.
Initial reports about him suggested that he was in his 60s, and called him Red Grandpa or Red Old Man 红老头. Weibo Doom Scroll has translated some of the social media discussion about the affair (One, Two), including a comment that asserts “There’s no such thing as a straight man. They just haven’t met the right grandpa.”
Other internet news from China:
Man arrested in Ukraine had been selling missile fragment souvenirs on Chinese second-hand app / Fred Gao
Acting Crazy—AI's most important use case for Chinese youth / China AI Newsletter
4:30 A.M. at a day labour market in China, a drink to start a day’s toil / The East is Read
Down under
‘China–Australia relationship has turned around’
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The China Week to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.