Senior diplomat disappears
Liu Jianchao detained, clean energy bonanza, U.S.-China chips and trade truce, China Coast Guard ship rams Chinese Navy vessel, and more.
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News is still slow this week, with China’s senior leadership enjoying, or suffering, their annual beach retreat.
Liú Jiànchāo 刘建超, “a senior Chinese diplomat widely seen as a potential foreign minister, has been taken away by authorities for questioning, according to people familiar with the matter” reported the Wall Street Journal. Liu, 61, was detained some time after July 30 when he returned “from a work trip to Singapore, South Africa and Algeria,” according to sources cited by Reuters.
Liu is currently head of the Communist Party’s International Department, which oversees relations with foreign political parties and groups. He studied international relations at Oxford, and has spent most of his career at the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aside from 2015 to 2018, when he was appointed to lead the International Cooperation Agency of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the top anti-corruption job targeting officials and their families outside of China. As the NGO Safeguard Defenders pointed out, he may have been “caught by his own investigators.”
Context
In 2023, Beijing removed Foreign Minister Qín Gāng 秦刚 from his post, and replaced him with his predecessor, former Foreign Minister Wáng Yì 王毅. The most credible explanation for Qin’s defenestration is that he was found to be having an extramarital affair with a TV reporter, but the Chinese Communist Party never issued an explanation.
There are a number of theories about Liu’s disappearance on the Chinese-language internet, including that he was having an extramarital affair, that he has helped wealthy Chinese individuals to move their assets overseas, and that he has become a victim of political infighting.
Renewable energy and EVs
Nearly half of cars sold in China are electric
Sales of new-energy vehicles (mostly electric cars) in China between January and June 2025 rose 40% year-on-year to just under seven million units, or 44% of total car sales.
China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) predicts that the annual charging volume of the country’s electric vehicles is expected to be equivalent to the annual power generation of the Three Gorges Dam. Much of that electricity will be generated without fossil fuels: Renewable energy accounted for almost 40% of total power generation in the first half of 2025, according to the NEA.
The interminable trade war
Trump softens on chips and tariffs again
On August 11, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order once again extending a trade truce between the United States and China for another three months.
On the same day, Trump suggested he might allow Nvidia to sell a scaled-down version of the Blackwell, its next-generation advanced GPU chip, in China. This came after an unprecedented deal with Nvidia and its rival AMD to give the U.S. government 15% of revenue from sales of some advanced chips in China.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has asked tech companies to suspend purchases of Nvidia chips, according to The Information. This comes after last week’s summons from China’s Cyberspace Administration to Nvidia “requesting that the company explain the backdoor security risks associated with its H20 computing chips sold to China and submit relevant supporting documentation.”
Choppy waters
China Coast Guard ship rams Chinese Navy vessel
On August 10, the Philippines Coast Guard released video evidence showing a Chinese Navy vessel ramming into a China Coast Guard ship during a pursuit of a Filipino patrol craft in disputed South China Sea waters.
“Our thoughts are with the [China Coast Guard] personnel who may have been injured in this incident,” tweeted Commodore Jay Tarriela of the the Philippines Coast Guard.
A China Coast Guard spokesperson said it would “continue to carry out rights-protection law enforcement activities…and will resolutely safeguard China’s national territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests.”
All the other news that fits
On our radar
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