2026 Issue 20

As Beijing aggressively pursues its industrial and mercantilist trade policies, the harms to other economies are becoming more apparent.  Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal describes these dynamics in his piece about the PRC’s “Industrial Policy of Everything.”  The New York Times observes that Europe is edging closer to a trade war with the PRC even as Berlin and Madrid seek to forge closer economic relations with Beijing. 

Brad Setser expands on this in a piece about “weaponized interdependence” for the Council on Foreign Relations and François Godement analyzes how even Beijing’s partners are losing confidence in the PRC.

The German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reports on an advanced PRC surveillance system that focuses on foreigners in China in ways that surpass anything seen before and a group of researchers share their findings in the journal Nature on their examination of the CCP’s influence over Large Language Models to amplify the Party’s propaganda.