Morning Notes: China-Taiwan conflict in the news again

China will strengthen anti-trust regulatory powers to push forward healthy, sustainable development of internet platforms, state CCTV television quoted President Xi Jinping as saying at a regular top-level economic meeting on Monday.

The Chinese government wants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to sell some of its media assets, including the South China Morning Post, because of growing concerns about the technology giant’s influence over public opinion in the country, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Beijing expressed misgivings about Alibaba’s media holdings during several meetings dating to last year, said the person, asking not to be identified because the discussions are private. Government officials are particularly upset about the company’s influence over social media in China and its role in an online scandal, involving one of its executives.

When President Joe Biden’s national security team prepares to meet their Chinese counterparts at a high-stakes summit in Alaska on Thursday, one of the most urgent issues they must tackle is Beijing’s growing threat to Taipei.

“If we were to all of a sudden militarize the engagement, if we were to do a lot more to push back on China, if [Taiwan’s] government declares independence — those are all bellwether events that could significantly alter the facts or the assumptions that we have about a military crisis,” said the first senior defense official.

The Biden administration has told China that normalising relations with Australia is a precondition to Washington taking any substantial step towards improving relations with Beijing, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.

In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, the U.S. president’s Indo-Pacific coordinator, Kurt Campbell, said China’s “economic coercion” of Australia had been raised in every meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials and “will be underscored in interactions in Anchorage later this week”.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will meet with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi and State Councillor Wang Yi on March 18 in Alaska, the first high-level in-person contact between the two countries under the Biden administration.

Britain wants to expand its influence among democratic nations in the Indo-Pacific region while preserving strong ties with the United States, a document laying out the country’s post-Brexit foreign policy priorities will say on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson wants to be at the forefront of a reinvigorated, rules-based international order based on cooperation and free trade.

Calling the Indo Pacific “increasingly the geopolitical centre of the world”, the government highlighted a British aircraft carrier deployment to the region and announced a previously postponed visit to India will go ahead in April.

German coronavirus infections are again spreading exponentially, up 20% in the last week, an expert at the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases said on Tuesday.

“We are exactly on the flank of the third wave. That can no longer be disputed. And at this point we have eased the restrictions and that is speeding up the exponential growth,”

The EMA has said that as of March 10, a total of 30 cases of blood clotting had been reported among close to 5 million people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot in the European Economic Area, which links 30 European countries.

Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, said the decisions by France, Germany and others looked baffling.

“The data we have suggests that numbers of adverse events related to blood clots are the same (and possibly, in fact lower) in vaccinated groups compared to unvaccinated populations,” he said, adding that halting a vaccination programme had consequences.

“This results in delays in protecting people, and the potential for increased vaccine hesitancy, as a result of people who have seen the headlines and understandably become concerned. There are no signs yet of any data that really justify these decisions.”

 #FooledbyRandomness

More than 100 Million Americans got vaccinated. In that age group about 3-4K die every day.

The odds of nobody dying since taking the vaccine is close to 0. Same with chicken soup or mastika ice cream

I've had it with conspiracy theorists.— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) March 16, 2021 

As of February 2021, 6.9% of Indeed job postings cited remote work as an option, compared with 2.9% in January 2020. The term was increasingly used for jobs in higher-paying industries such as technology, finance and law.

Suga told a government meeting that measures would include payments of 50,000 yen to single-parent and low income households as well as aid for work training and food banks