China

"The process of dividing the world into opposing blocs is accelerating and it is now splitting into several large regions", Russian political scientist, Dmitry Drobnitsky, claims.

China's premier has sounded an unusually stark warning about the world's second-largest economy, saying it must return to normal as the country's zero-Covid strategy bites into growth.    

China is the last major economy welded to a policy of mass testing and rapid lockdowns to eliminate virus clusters, but the strict curbs have battered businesses.    

China's export growth tumbled in April as global demand weakened, adding to pressure on the world's second-largest economy after Shanghai and other industrial cities were shut down to fight virus outbreaks.

President Xi Jinping has offered state backing for tech, infrastructure and jobs to revive China's economy, but analysts warn growth will continue to wilt until Beijing drops its rigid virus controls.    

Two and a half years since the coronavirus first emerged in Wuhan, China is the last major economy still closed off to the world, despite its relatively low death toll.    

China's exports rose 15.7 percent over a year ago in March while imports were flat amid disruptions due to coronavirus outbreaks as the ruling Communist Party enforces a "zero-COVID" strategy to isolate every case.

Ljubljana – The newspaper Večer comments on the Beijing Olympic Games in Monday’s commentary entitled Chinese Games, saying that they brought the country the necessary infrastructure to become a skiing nation and Covid restrictions worked. Even environmentally, the country has set high standards. But politics remains a problem, the paper says.

China has not adopted the rules of the World Trade Organization even after 20 years' membership, the United States said yesterday, adding that the world's second-biggest economy had "retained and expanded" its statist approach to the detriment of businesses and workers globally.

The US have stepped up exercises in the region as China presses its territorial claims over the South China Sea with Beijing also ramping up pressure on Taiwan

The United States announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, a rebuke of China's human rights record that stops short of preventing U.S. athletes from competing.

China will stop funding coal projects overseas, President Xi Jinping announced on Sept. 21, all but ending the flow of public aid for the dirty energy contributing to the climate crisis.