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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Meta Platforms is preparing to have to unwind its acquisition of the artificial-intelligence startup Manus after China banned the transaction on national-security grounds Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.Meta bought Manus, a China-linked, Singapore-based startup that specializes in building AI agents, in December for $2.5 billion, and quickly moved to integrate the new technology into its systems. Any attempt to undo the acquisition would mean disentangling the two.In another complication, Manus’s investors, which include California-based venture-capital firm Benchmark, have already received their returns, people with knowledge of the matter said.Meta garners significant revenues from Chinese advertisers who target consumers outside China, despite Facebook and other Meta apps being blocked in the country.Several former Manus investors in Asia, including Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund, have planned to cooperate if Meta goes ahead to unwind the deal, some of the people said.Beijing has handed the two companies a preliminary deadline of several weeks to unwind the deal and fully restore Manus’s Chinese assets to their original state, some of the people said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Xi Jinping had just finished a lunch of herbed-ricotta ravioli at a secluded estate outside San Francisco in 2023 when his security agents sprang into action.Their mission: ensuring no trace of the Chinese leader’s DNA fell into foreign hands. The agents—measuring about 6-foot-3, dressed in identical dark suits—were observed grabbing Xi’s utensils and plate and spraying them with an unidentified liquid.Welcome to the unseen theater of great-power diplomacy, where a meeting of the two most powerful leaders on earth can hinge on the slightest missed protocol, an unexpected miscue or even a bit of saliva left on a fork.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Wu Jingliang, a human resources manager in Beijing, got a raise at the beginning of the year, and the first financial move her family made was to increase their monthly savings rate.“I don’t dare spend, because I have a child. The child will need schooling later, and then there’s marriage or buying a home—we definitely need to save up a sum of money for him,” she told Barron’s in a phone interview.Conversations with other Chinese consumers revealed similar caution, all relating to feelings of financial insecurity.Beijing keeps rolling out consumption stimulus, and Chinese consumers keep responding with less enthusiasm than policymakers hoped.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.KUANTAN, Malaysia—The Pentagon’s push to get its hands on the rarest of the rare-earth elements leads all the way to this small port city in Malaysia.Here, Lynas Rare Earths, an Australian company, has begun pumping out heavy rare earths, the elusive kind that China dominates.“No one had made a separated heavy rare earth outside of China in 20 years,” said Amanda Lacaze, Lynas’s chief executive. The company’s chief operating officer, Pol Le Roux, said it had actually been 30 years.When China cut off exports of heavy rare-earth elements during trade tensions last year, automobile factories in the U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Defence profligacy is a prerogative of rich, powerful nations. In 1983, the US embarked on its Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars after a science-fiction film. Its bizarre cost-benefit equation led to it being binned within a decade.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.WASHINGTON—The U.S. has burned through so many munitions in Iran that some administration officials increasingly assess that America couldn’t fully execute contingency plans to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion if it occurred in the near term, U.S. officials said.The U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Chinese artificial-intelligence startup DeepSeek is tapping external investors for the first time since it became a household name, looking to raise funds for research and development, people familiar with the matter said.In recent weeks, DeepSeek has held talks with potential investors, including Chinese technology giants Alibaba and Tencent, seeking to raise at least $300 million, the people said. The funds will be denominated in Chinese yuan, they said.Beijing-based venture-capital firm Shunwei Capital—backed by Lei Jun, founder of Chinese consumer-electronics maker Xiaomi—has also held talks with the AI startup, some of the people said.Preliminary discussions value the Chinese AI heavyweight at between $10 billion and $30 billion, the people said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Japan has decided to ease restrictions on its sale of weapons to other countries, although this would be limited to the 17 with which it has defence tie-ups. As India is part of the four-nation Quad—with Japan, the US and Australia as other members—Tokyo’s move opens up a possibility worth close consideration by New Delhi. We could diversify our set of high-tech arms suppliers to include a non-hegemonic power with which we have had good relations for eight decades.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.BEIJING—For decades, China has broadcast a simple message to its people: America is a chaotic and dangerous place.For just as long, that message largely failed to resonate, as millions of Chinese people looked across the Pacific and saw a proverbial “shining city upon a hill.” Many of China’s best and brightest saw the U.S. as a land of boundless opportunity underpinned by robust rule of law.Today, America’s allure is fading.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.A combustible mix of policymaker FOMO, industry self-interest and parental anxiety about the future of work is fuelling Asia’s push to introduce AI into classrooms at ever younger ages. The result risks turning a generation of developing minds into guinea pigs, while gains flow not to students, but to tech companies.You don’t have to be a Luddite to see the problem: AI’s inherent promise is convenience, while learning requires effort. Those aims are fundamentally at odds.

An image on the 3 April cover of The Economist shows an angry US President Donald Trump shouting on one side, with China’s President Xi Jinping calmly smiling on the other. “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake,” says the headline.A revealing picture in the White House’s archives shows US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai shaking hands in Beijing on 9 July 1971, when Kissinger made his secret dash for a détente with China. The press was told that Kissinger was unwell and resting in Pakistan.

The turmoil of the last year-and-a half— tariff wars and physical wars (Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine), the abduction of a head of state and assassination of another, territorial ambitions and tattered alliances—has led to claims that the Pax Americana of stable global institutions managing commerce and conflict has ended. If that is true, what comes next? This uncertainty has fostered many forecasts of the future of global politics by policy pundits.Consider the analysis of Hal Brands, a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the American Enterprise Institute.

Can the U.S. pivot from a military deterrent to a more integrated strategy? Write to me at [email protected]. Include your full name and location, and I might publish your response in a coming issue (if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).This is an edition of the WSJ China newsletter, a weekly dispatch of exclusive insights on the contest between the U.S.

As the U.S. and China move from a battle over economic principles to managing the status quo, who is winning? Write to me at [email protected].

China is just managing to keep retail deflation at bay. Official data for February released on Monday showed that its consumer price index rose 1.3% from a year earlier. In January, it had recorded a rise of just 0.2%.

Those who view President Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran as a blow to China should think again. Beijing will manage any potential leadership change in Tehran as long as the oil keeps flowing, a summit with Trump and President Xi Jinping stays on track, and Washington handles Taiwan—China’s most sensitive red line—with care. Xi’s strategy is closer to the ancient Chinese phrase that notes the benefit of sitting on the mountain and watching the tigers fight: conserve strength while others exhaust themselves, and intervene only if core interests are directly threatened.Beijing doesn’t think of alliances the way the US does.

A recent report by the Haut-Commissariat à la Stratégie et au Plan that urged the EU to consider either steep tariffs on Chinese imports or a deliberate weakening of the euro against the renminbi has triggered reactions well beyond Paris and Brussels. What began as a domestic French strategic recommendation has evolved into a wider debate about Europe’s economic direction and its role in an increasingly fragmented global trading system.The proposal, suggesting tariffs of up to 30% or a 20–30% euro depreciation, reflects mounting anxiety over Europe’s widening trade imbalance with China and its erosion of industrial competitiveness.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Iran has sought for years to build closer military ties with China and Russia, but its powerful friends are proving reluctant to step forward as the regime faces the most acute U.S. threat to its survival in decades.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is not in retreat, although many have been predicting its untimely demise for some time. Far from shrinking, President Xi Jinping’s signature lending plan is adapting, and in doing so becoming harder to counter. It’s shifting from financing megaprojects to becoming a long-term development partner, particularly for fast-growing economies in the Global South.

India opened its space sector to private players at a time of covid paralysis. Since then, some progress has indeed been made. Poised for a breathtaking leap into space, however, might be China.In the last week of December, Beijing notified the UN’s International Telecom Union of its plan to put over 200,000 satellites in orbit within a decade.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. MILAN—For an entire decade, the Olympics couldn’t stop getting it wrong. The Games were held in the middle of autocracies, the middle of pandemics and the middle of nowhere.