News

The Chinese government has once again used soft power and cultural manipulation to insert its political agenda into international spaces, this time at the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival (KIMFF). The screening of Chinese propaganda films that depict Tibet as “Xizang” is not cultural exchange; it is a strategic attempt to rewrite history and normalize occupation through media.

China’s economic machine, once a relentless engine of growth and industrial dominance, now sputters under the weight of its own contradictions. Behind the façade of official statistics lies a reality of stagnation, structural decay, and mounting fiscal stress that even Beijing’s iron control can no longer conceal. Though first-quarter GDP in 2025 posted a 5.4% increase, much of this figure was propped up by artificially accelerated exports aimed at dodging an onslaught of new U.S. tariffs, rather than reflecting genuine economic vitality. This desperate maneuvering points to deeper weaknesses: an overdependence on external demand, and a faltering capacity to generate internal growth.

On May 12, 2025, the People’s Republic of China released its first-ever White Paper on national security, a document that lays bare the regime’s priorities with chilling clarity. At its core, the White Paper is not about national security in the conventional sense. It is an open declaration that the survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the bedrock of China’s security. Political loyalty to Xi Jinping Thought is not only encouraged—it is demanded.

That grim possibility is now staring U.S. security agencies in the face after damning discoveries revealed that Chinese-manufactured power inverters—widely installed in American solar farms—contain hidden “kill switches” and covert cellular radios. These components, invisible in public documentation, may allow Beijing to remotely manipulate, disable, or even destroy critical sections of Western power infrastructure. And these devices aren’t rare. Chinese giants like Huawei, Sungrow, and Ginlong Solis dominate the inverter market, supplying over 200 gigawatts worth of tech to European countries alone in 2022. Their presence is deep, their reach long—and now, their intent increasingly suspect.

In a scathing indictment of Beijing’s ongoing ethnic engineering, Human Rights Watch has exposed a 25-year campaign of forced relocations in Tibet, uprooting over 930,000 rural Tibetans from their ancestral lands under the pretense of “poverty alleviation” and “ecological protection.” The report, titled “Educate the Masses to Change Their Minds,” published May 22, 2024, shreds the Chinese government’s façade of “voluntary development” and lays bare a state-directed policy of displacement, coercion, and cultural erasure.

In a development that has jolted the already tense South China Sea theater, Philippine security agencies have arrested a group of Chinese nationals for conducting unauthorized surveillance and mapping of sensitive military installations across Luzon. The incident, now under intense investigation, is the latest episode in Beijing’s expanding campaign of clandestine infiltration—this time, not on disputed reefs, but within the sovereign mainland of a neighboring democracy.

On 15 May, Hong Kong Watch hosted a panel discussion on transnational repression (TNR) against journalists in the House of Lords, in collaboration with International Human Rights Advisors (#IHR Advisors) and the International Bar Association Human Rights Institute (#IBAHRI).

MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal stated, “We firmly reject such attempts by China to rename places in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. Assigning invented names will not alter the fact that Arunachal Pradesh is, has been, and will always be an integral part of India.”

On April 22, a deadly terrorist attack shook the popular tourist destination of Pahalgam in Kashmir, killing 26 and injuring scores more. The strike, traced to Pakistan-backed militants from the Lashkar-e-Taiba offshoot "The Resistance Front," occurred just days before a Reuters report confirmed Apple’s aggressive expansion in India—charting a path to move 60+ million iPhone units annually out of Chinese assembly lines and into Indian factories.

Admiral Samuel Paparo, the newly appointed commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), has laid out the Pentagon’s evolving strategic blueprint to counter China’s growing influence across the Indo-Pacific region, in one of the most comprehensive briefings delivered by a top U.S. military official to date.