Joseph Belbruno Blog

 Anatoly Motkin is the president of StrategEast Center for a New Economy. Last year, police raided more than 20 locations across Europe and sealed two offices inside the European Parliament. The target was Huawei, a Chinese company suspected of using soccer tickets, luxury trips and cash to buy support from legislators just as the European Union was debating whether to limit the use of its technology in 5G networks. The incident was a window into the lengths to which China is willing to go to protect its control of digital infrastructure worldwide. In the West, security risks associated with Chinese technology, including back doors, espionage and data exposure, have dominated policy debates. But a more insidious dimension has largely been overlooked. These telecommunications contracts with Chinese firms are, in practice, the first step toward making a country a technological satellite of Beijing. I call it the Silicon Curtain. Though the Iron Curtain was a geographic boundary that ...

  China Cooks the Carbon Emissions Books Beijing redefines a key metric to make itself look greener. By A coal-powered Power Station in China   greg baker/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Unlike the West’s green radicals, China isn’t willing to sacrifice its economy to meet its climate pledges. But Beijing isn’t above cooking its carbon books to gull Western activists into thinking it is. Opinion: Potomac Watch At United Nations climate conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and Paris in 2015, Beijing vowed sizeable reductions in the amount of carbon China emits per dollar of gross domestic product, or carbon intensity. Subsequent national planning documents reiterated this goal. Beijing’s statistics have since suggested it would fall far from delivering on this climate promise. And last September the head of China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment admitted  that “controlling carbon emission intensity is challenging.” Yet suddenly in March China reported that it had achie...

  Newsletter The World China Exports Surveillance The country has spent decades perfecting a surveillance state at home. Now it’s promoting its ideology of state control, and the technology to enforce it, abroad. By  Katrin Bennhold I’m the host of The World. May 31, 2026 Updated  6:18 p.m. ET You’re reading The World newsletter.   Your daily guide to understanding what’s happening — and why it matters. Hosted by Katrin Bennhold, for readers around the world. When I first read about how China tracks its citizens with surveillance cameras and also ranks them according to a set of political and social criteria set by the Communist Party, it was impossible not to think of “1984” and Big Brother. Since then, China has become the world’s superpower of surveillance, much of it augmented by artificial intelligence. It’s Mao-era policing on steroids. And as my colleagues David Pierson and Berry Wang write, that model of policing is now being exported to authoritarian st...