On the surface, China-US relations look calm. In reality, both sides are locked in close combat.
Foreign Minister Wang Yi met US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on July 22. The meeting took place on the sidelines of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Manila.
According to Xinhua, Wang Yi told Rubio that this year marks a landmark year for China-US relations. He noted that the two heads of state held a historic summit in Beijing, which established a positioning of "constructive and stable" strategic relations between the two countries.
Wang also set out China's firm position on what he called a series of negative words and actions by the US side. He demanded that Washington respect China's core interests, abide by the one-China principle, effectively manage frictions and disagreements, and address China's legitimate concerns, so that this year of opportunity for bilateral relations can become reality. Xinhua described the meeting as pragmatic, positive, and constructive.
Wang Yi's phrase "recent series of negative words and actions by the US" deserves close attention. The fact that the meeting was ultimately summed up as "constructive" suggests Washington offered certain commitments behind closed doors.
Two recent moves from the US side stand out as negative. While Washington has delayed new arms sales to Taiwan, it has refused to commit to stopping them altogether. The other issue is tied to AI large language models. China's Moonshot AI recently released its new Kimi K3 model, and its capabilities have caught up with America's most advanced systems.
The breakthrough triggered intense attention and drew a wave of negative commentary from US officials.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insists that America remains ahead. He claims the US leads China in AI by roughly a year. His next goal is to push America's share of global computing capacity from the current 60 percent straight up to 80 percent.
Bessent then said on July 21 that Washington would rigorously scrutinize AI models developed overseas with open-source code, including products released by Chinese firms. Should any such model be found to have stolen the intellectual property of US companies, he said, the US government has the means to impose sanctions.
Bessent also said the US government may go a step further and assess whether American companies using Chinese AI models should be required to disclose this to their customers. He likened the issue to that of counterfeit goods, stressing that businesses cannot use products built on stolen intellectual property.
These remarks show that the Trump administration has been thrown off balance by China's new model. It is now scrambling for ways to suppress it. The scrutiny of China's AI sector, which had focused on export controls over advanced chips, may now widen to cover training data, the provenance of underlying technology, corporate disclosure obligations, and intellectual property disputes. Fresh risk added to the US-China AI rivalry.
It's fair to assume that Wang Yi's warning to Rubio went beyond demanding a full halt to US arms sales to Taiwan. The warning was also aimed squarely at Bessent's remarks, calling for an end to the smearing and suppression of Chinese AI models.
This can be summed up in two points.
First, faced with the shock of China's AI advances, the US wants to preserve its own technological lead while unjustly suppressing others at the same time. No amount of spin from Bessent can whitewash that kind of behavior.
Second, Bessent's accusation that Chinese models copied American ones is, in essence, a trumped-up charge. It is one the US can investigate, "convict," and sanction entirely on its own terms. Wang Yi's warning was, in effect, laying the unpleasant truth on the table in advance.
From Beijing's perspective, if Washington uses this as a pretext to escalate, China could immediately turn the tables. President Xi could simply decline to visit the US in September, and Trump, in turn, need not bother coming to Shenzhen in October. That would inevitably rattle the US economy and stock market, right before Trump has to explain himself to voters in November's midterm elections.
Bastille Commentary
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Two national security cases have recently wrapped up in quick succession.
On Thursday (10 September), two members of the "Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union" were sentenced to three years, and three years and two months in prison respectively. Both had pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit secession" under the Hong Kong National Security Law.
Then today (11 September), sentence was passed in the "incitement to subversion" case against the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (the Alliance). Albert Ho Chun-yan, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for five years and two months.
The two defendants who pleaded not guilty, Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, were jailed for seven years and seven years and three months respectively.
The judge made it clear in sentencing why the Alliance case fell into the "serious circumstances" category. The case did not involve violence or any concrete method put forward by the defendants for "ending one-party rule."
But society was in turmoil at the time of the offence.
The defendants' activities continued for a full 14 months after the National Security Law came into force. Those activities were citywide in scope and attracted widespread attention.
The defendants believed that what they advocated might be unlawful, yet persisted regardless. The offending was premeditated.
The trials and tribulations Hong Kong has weathered since the handover amount to one giant political experiment. Every kind of political proposition has been put to the test, and we have seen the results.
Had these cases arisen in the early days after the handover, the verdicts might have read very differently to some.
Two young men aged 25 to 27, jailed for more than three years over a "nation-building union" that looked doomed to fail, might have seemed like the court making a mountain out of a molehill.
The same goes for the Alliance. Had its standing committee members been prosecuted in those early days, some might have felt they were merely chanting slogans to promote democracy. Perfectly harmless, undeserving of arrest and imprisonment.
But after more than two decades of development, we can now see with total clarity what these incendiary political activities can achieve.
From the mass march against Article 23 legislation in 2003, to the illegal Occupy Central movement in 2014, to the all-out riots of 2019, unlawful activities escalated step by step until violent protests spun completely out of control.
The breaking point came on 11 November 2019 with the Ma On Shan incident, in which a man was set on fire. An utterly depraved manifestation of violent lawbreaking.
The perpetrators believed they held the truth in their hands. They doused an unarmed civilian in flammable liquid and set him alight, intending to burn him to death. His only fault was trying to stop rioters vandalizing the MTR station.
Political violence had reached a point of no return, spiraling beyond control.
At the core of the Alliance stood the so-called traditional pan-democrats. They claimed to be promoting democracy in Hong Kong and the country. Yet they turned a blind eye to the street violence they themselves had incited, at times even tacitly condoning it.
One need only look at what was exposed during the trial of Jimmy Lai to see this plainly.
Back then, Lai instructed the senior management of Apple Daily to uphold "no distinction between the peaceful and the valiant".
In other words, they were not to draw a line between themselves and the valiant faction advocating violent struggle. That alone showed that the movement's descent into violence had the backing of big bosses behind the scenes.
And behind these local opposition bosses stood the political forces of the United States and the West.
Take Lee Cheuk-yan, a central figure in the Alliance case.
The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), to which he belonged, relied for years on funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Beginning in 1994, the HKCTU applied every year for grants from the NED-affiliated American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The cumulative total came to HK$13 million.
Here was an organization directly funded by a foreign government, running labor and social movements in Hong Kong. Who could believe it thinks independently?
Piece the whole picture together and the through-line becomes complete. Beginning in the late 1980s, in the closing stages of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the CIA set out to overthrow the entire socialist camp led by the Soviet Union.
China's "June Fourth incident" also occurred against this backdrop.
While China and the United States had not yet fallen out completely, such activities proceeded in the shadows. After the rupture, and especially after Washington launched its trade war against China in 2018, the United States embarked on subversion against China without scruple.
These were not activities to promote the development of democracy in China. They were subversive operations aimed at toppling state power.
Consider this: the CIA today openly recruits spies targeting China. That tells you how grave the situation is.
With the Alliance case tried and sentenced, the legal boundary for such acts of subversion has now been clearly drawn. Do not imagine that chanting a few incendiary slogans or setting up some reactionary organizations is harmless. A single spark can start a prairie fire.
Drawing the legal red line is precisely about nipping these subversive activities in the bud.
Lo Wing-hung
