China’s Cyberspace Administration, the national internet regulator, announced a campaign last month against influencers who “create a ‘wealth-flaunting’ persona, deliberately showcasing a luxurious life built on money, in order to attract followers and traffic.”

One influencer, Wang Hongquan, known for flaunting his luxurious lifestyle online had his account on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok banned.

Searches returned an error message saying it had been blocked “due to violations of Douyin’s community guidelines.”

The Douyin accounts of other online influencers who posted similar content, such as Bo Gongzi (Young Wealthy Lord Bai), with 2.9 million followers, and Baoyu Jiajie (Abalone Sister), with 2.3 million followers, were also blocked.

China is currently experiencing an economic slowdown that has reportedly hit the middle class especially hard.

“When most people are unhappy with their own lives, they see all this online content that’s so disconnected from reality — seeing all these people who seem so happy and wealthy, it creates a pretty warped psychology,” Lyla Lai, a former beauty influencer who had over a million followers on Douyin, said in a voice message.

Lai, who left Douyin amid criticism from other users over her sales tactics and lifestyle, said there were “concerns about young people today seeing too much of this stuff and not focusing on their studies anymore, getting caught up in this excessive, greedy materialism.”

“In the long run, that’s definitely not good for development, so this cleanup is really necessary,” said Lai, who now lives in Australia.

“But at the root of it, we also need to see the economy being able to develop more, so people can have a greater sense of fulfillment and happiness in their lives, rather than just seeking psychological comfort through the internet.”

According to Bloomberg, India’s population stands at 1.4286 billion as against China’s 1.4257 billion people, according to mid-2023 estimates by the UN’s World Population dashboard.

China’s figures do not include Hong Kong and Macau, Special Administrative Regions of China, and Taiwan, as shown by data.

This is the first time that India has topped the UN list of most populous countries since it started collecting population data in 1950.

China is facing a looming demographic decline as birth rates plunge and its workforce ages.

It follows similar moves in the United States and Britain, which have taken measures to stop government departments installing Chinese-made cameras at sensitive sites.

Both countries have expressed fears that Chinese companies could be forced to share intelligence collected by the cameras with Beijing’s security services.

At least 913 Chinese-made cameras have been installed across more than 250 Australian government buildings, according to official figures compiled by opposition politician James Paterson.

This includes offices and facilities belonging to the departments of defence, foreign affairs and finance, as well as the attorney-general’s department.

Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles said officials would hunt down and remove all Chinese-made security cameras within its buildings.

“It’s a significant thing that’s been brought to our attention and we’re going to fix it,” he told national broadcaster ABC.

“It’s important that we go through this exercise and make sure that our facilities are completely secure.”

The government-funded national War Memorial — a sprawling 14-hectare (35 acres) complex in the capital Canberra — also confirmed it would remove a small number of Chinese-made cameras through an “abundance of caution”.

Other government agencies declined to comment, or referred back to Marles’ statements.

Paterson, a vocal critic of the Chinese government, had said Australian government buildings were “riddled” with “spyware”, and that every Chinese-made camera should be urgently ripped out.

The cameras were made by companies Hikvision and Dahua, which have been blacklisted in the United States for allegedly helping the Chinese government carry out a “campaign of repression”.

According to the US Department of Commerce, Hikvision and Dahua have been implicated in the “high-technology surveillance” of the Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region.

The US banned the importation of surveillance equipment made by the two companies in November last year because it posed “an unacceptable risk to national security”.

In Britain, a group of 67 MPs and lords called for the government to ban Hikvision and Dahua in July last year, following reports their equipment had been used to track Uyghurs.

It was a Hikvision CCTV camera that caught former health secretary Matt Hancock kissing an aide in violation of Covid rules in June 2021, leading to his resignation.

Hikvision said it was “categorically false” to paint the company as “a threat to national security”.

“No respected technical institution or assessment has come to this conclusion,” the company told AFP in a statement.

“Our products are compliant with all applicable Australian laws and regulations and are subject to strict security requirements.”

Australia in 2018 was one of the first countries in the world to block Chinese telco Huawei from its 5G cellphone network.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who made the decision, said it would help Australia “defend our own sovereignty”.

Similar Huawei bans are now in place in the US, Britain and Canada — which along with New Zealand and Australia form the secretive Five Eyes spying alliance.

Australia’s centre-left government has been trying to repair its relationship with China since coming to power in May last year.

China slapped hefty tariffs on key Australian exports in 2020 at the height of a bitter dispute with the former conservative government.

According to the academy, the number of instances of the coronavirus in the country has increased.

Prof. Oladapo Ashiru, the president of the Academy of Medicine Specialties of Nigeria, made this call in a statement on Thursday, stating that Nigeria needed to take action right away.

Ashiru said, “Nigeria should immediately tighten her borders with strict restrictions on flights coming from China through Qatar, Ethiopian, South Africa and other airlines. 

“We cannot afford the spillover from the current increase in COVID-19 from the country. Hence reinstate all the control measures for incoming flights from the eastern routes.

“Travellers from China must show a recent  negative COVID-19 test 48 here before landing.”

Also, a report on Reuters on December 28, 2022, said Chinese hospitals and funeral homes were under intense pressure on Wednesday as a surging COVID-19 wave drained resources, while the scale of the outbreak and doubts over official data prompted some countries to enact new travel rules on Chinese visitors.

The vaccine, created by Tianjin-based CanSino Biologics, needs to be inhaled and it is expected to quickly become a favourite among a number of people who are not comfortable with needles and syringes.

According to a statement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Sunday, the vaccine called CanSino’s Ad5-nCoV has received approval from the China’s National Medical Products Administration. The news produced an instant movement in the market as the share prices of the company went up by around 14.5 per cent.

Following the announcement, company shares surged 14 per cent on Monday morning before closing 7.1 per cent higher than their opening value.

The needle-free vaccine – which can be stored and administered more easily than intramuscular jabs – will be given through a nebuliser, the company said.

“The approval will have a positive impact on the company’s performance if the vaccine is subsequently purchased and used by relevant government agencies,” the statement added.

The company did not offer details on when the adenovirus-vectored vaccine will be made available for public use.

There is no publicly available verified or peer-reviewed data on the efficacy of the new vaccine.

The Boeing 737 plane crashed in the rural countryside near Wuzhou city, Guangxi region and “caused a mountain fire”, CCTV said, citing the provincial emergency management bureau.

The report added that rescue teams were dispatched to the scene.

CCTV said a “China Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 plane carrying 133 people has crashed in Teng county, Wuzhou, Guangxi, and caused a mountain fire”.

Local media reported that China Eastern flight MU5735 had not arrived at its scheduled destination in Guangzhou after it took off from the city of Kunming shortly after 1:00 pm (0500 GMT) Monday, citing airport staff.

There was no immediate response from China Eastern when contacted by AFP.

The southern city took the measures on Sunday as authorities battled an Omicron flare-up in factories and neighbourhoods linked to nearby Hong Kong, which is recording scores of daily deaths as the virus runs rampant.

Shenzhen is one of ten areas nationwide to issue some level of stay-at-home order.

Health officials have warned tighter measures could be on their way, as concerns mount over the resilience of China’s “zero-Covid” approach in the face of the highly-transmissible Omicron variant.

Authorities reported 2,300 new virus cases nationwide on Monday and almost 3,400 a day earlier, the highest daily figure in two years.

“There have been many small-scale clusters in urban villages and factories,” Shenzhen city official Huang Qiang said at a Monday briefing.

“This suggests a high risk of community spread, and further precautions are still needed.

Photos shared with AFP by a Shenzhen resident showed entrances to a housing compound blocked by large plastic barriers, as residents swapped jokes on social media about their rush to grab laptops from offices before the lockdown.

Tech stocks tumbled on the Hong Kong exchange in early trading Monday, as concerns over the impact of the virus spread in Shenzhen — a hub for iPhone maker Foxconn, as well as Huawei and Tencent — spooked investors.

In Shanghai, China’s largest city, residential areas and offices in some neighbourhoods remained sealed off on Monday, as city authorities try to avoid a full lockdown.

The city reported around 170 new virus cases on Monday, enough to seed anxiety among businesses over the economic pain ahead.

A restauranteur with four outlets in different parts of the city, said he has to wade through a morass of hyper-local restrictions, giving an indication of how ordinary life in China is still spun on its head by a pandemic that has eased across much of the world

“Different districts adopt different policies,” he told AFP, requesting anonymity.

“I want to close one and keep the rest open, and see how it goes later. What else can I do except for tough it out?

Other outbreak epicentres have been less lucky.

Jilin province in the country’s northeast recorded over 1,000 new cases for the second day in a row.

At least five cities in the province have been locked down since the beginning of March, including the major industrial base of Changchun, whose nine million residents were confined at home Friday.

While the caseload is low in global terms, it is deeply alarming in China where authorities have been unrelenting in squashing clusters since early 2020.

In recent days, at least 26 officials in three provinces have been dismissed due to their poor handling of local outbreaks, state media reported

China has so far managed to control sporadic domestic outbreaks through a combination of snap lockdowns, mass testing and travel restrictions but the latest outbreak is testing the limits of its playbook.

Top medical expert Zhang Wenhong said Monday that China cannot relax its zero-Covid policy just yet despite the low fatality rate of Omicron.

“It is very important for China to continue to adopt the strategy of community Covid-zero in the near future,” Zhang wrote on social media. “But this does not mean that we will permanently adopt the strategy of lockdown and full testing.

Some 1.45 trillion yuan ($230 billion) has been set aside for national defence, according to a government budget report.

The increase is slightly higher than the 6.8 per cent rise last year and broadly in line with the general pace of growth in recent years.

It exceeds Beijing’s annual GDP growth target of 5.5 per cent announced separately by Premier Li Keqiang on Saturday.

During a speech opening the annual session of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, Li said Beijing would “enhance military training and combat readiness, stay firm and flexible in carrying out military struggle, and safeguard China’s sovereignty, security and development interests”.

Beijing has poured billions of dollars into defence modernisation in recent years as it aims to transform its huge military into a world-class force rivalling that of the United States and other Western powers. Li made no reference to those tensions other than a standard warning against any “separatist activities” in Taiwan and “foreign interference” in the self-ruled island’s status.

Beijing’s military budget is still far lower than Washington’s, which has over $700 billion earmarked for defence spending for 2022.

But many overseas military analysts believe actual spending is significantly higher than the publicly announced budget

“The People’s Liberation Army is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party and the party leadership needs to secure the continued support from the military leadership,” said James Char, an expert on the Chinese military at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

“One of the ways to do this is by demonstrating that the needs of the PLA are being prioritised.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping last month called on the military to conduct “combat-oriented tests” and increase the capacity for “intelligent, information-based warfare.”

Over the past year, China has conducted two flight tests of hypersonic ballistic missiles.

Military tensions have dramatically increased over the past year between China and rivals including the US and India as Beijing has overseen an island-building spree in the South China Sea, clashes on the Himalayan border and sabre-rattles over Taiwan.

The selected achievements include the Tianwen-1 Mars probe’s successful landing on Mars, the successful launch of China’s space station core module Tianhe, Shenzhou-12 and Shenzhou-13 manned spaceships’ successful launch and docking with the core module.

According to the list issued by the High Tech Research and Development Center of the ministry, these were the 10 domestic scientific advances. Other advances include the starch synthesis from carbon dioxide, lunar evolution revealed by lunar samples brought back by the Chang’e-5 mission, mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 evading antiviral drugs, and the world’s largest fast radio bursts sample detected by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope.

The scalable production of high-performing fiber lithium-ion batteries, quantum walks on a programmable two-dimensional 62-qubit superconducting processor, self-powered soft robot swimming in the Mariana Trench, and the causes of bird migration routes and key genes of long-distance migration are also on the list.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Beijing ahead of Friday’s 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony. Both countries have now released a statement with China supporting Russia’s demands of a halt in NATO expansion while Russia supports China’s claim to control over Taiwan.

Russia and China said they “oppose further enlargement of NATO” and called the organization to “abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches” in a joint statement released Friday, February 4.

“Friendship between the two States has no limits [and that] there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation,” says the statement, which puts in writing the deepening of diplomatic ties between the two major powers, amid military tensions at the Ukrainian border where Russia has amassed 100,000 troops.

The statement does not mention Ukraine (or the European Union), but makes clear references to the current crisis.

“Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions, intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose colour revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas,” the document reads.

In the statement, the U.S. is criticized for the AUKUS alliance in the Indo-Pacific region.

The sides … remain highly vigilant about the negative impact of the United States’ Indo-Pacific strategy on peace and stability in the region,” the statement reads.

Moscow also reiterated its opposition to “any forms of independence of Taiwan.” China considers the self-ruling island to be part of its territory.