China: Weekly Summary (December 29 - January 04, 2026)

I’ll jump right in. This week’s set of posts around China felt like walking through a busy train station. Same tracks, different trains pulling up at the same time. Some trains were loud and military. Some smelled of oil and rockets. Some were full of code and policy memos. I would describe them as a messy, crowded picture of a country using all the tools it has — military moves, money, tech, and big corporate push — to reshape its place in the world.

The Taiwan drumbeat: drills, blockades, and the new normal

If you read one theme across the week it’s the choreography around Taiwan. There’s a steady drumbeat. It isn’t a single thunderclap. It’s constant. China staged enormous drills — live fire, encirclement — and the language used by reporters and analysts kept circling the same point: normalization.

Sam Cooper (/a/samcooper@thebureau.news) describes a large live-fire encirclement with 89 aircraft and 28 ships. It reads like a show of force meant to mark red lines. Then David Cenciotti (/a/davidcenciotti@theaviationist.com) covers “Justice Mission 2025,” a broader exercise with blockades and multi-branch coordination. These are not practice runs for parade routes. They are operational demonstrations that test logistics, command, and what a blockade might look like in practice.

Angelica Oung (/a/angelica_oung@taipology.substack.com) takes a few steps back and leans on history. She argues that events like Nancy Pelosi’s visit in 2022 changed the operational environment, pushing China to make these drills routine. To me, it feels like a neighbor who used to slam a door now rearranging furniture loudly at night — you notice it more, you adapt, and at some point you stop thinking it will ever stop.

The posts aren’t shy about the implications. Authors point out how drills normalize pressure and create friction for Taiwan’s military: surprise becomes harder to spot, and routine drills become part of a new baseline. That baseline matters. If you live with sirens every day, your tolerance changes. If a navy practices blockades until they look normal, the political cost of ignoring them rises.

Zev Shalev (/a/zev_shalev@narativ.org) ties these actions into a messy global diplomacy scene. His roundup pairs China’s military displays with high-stakes diplomatic theater elsewhere — a reminder that Beijing’s moves don’t exist in a vacuum. The drills are a message to Washington and Taipei, sure, but they also operate inside a wider geopolitical scramble that includes other hotspots.

Reading these pieces together, I’d say the consensus is simple: China is pushing to make coercive tactics ordinary. People disagree about whether that equals immediate invasion risk. But nearly everyone agrees the pressure is deliberate and long-term.

Militarization of shipping and the grey-zone playbook

A scene that kept catching my eye was the photograph of a container ship that looked like it carried more than steel boxes. Naked Capitalism (/a/naked_capitalism) ran a piece on commercial vessels fitted with military hardware — radar, vertical launch systems, more. That’s a different kind of creeping militarization. It’s less dramatic than aircraft flying over an island, but it’s sneakier.

I would describe this as mixing grocery carts with armor plates. You don’t expect your food truck to have a hidden cannon, but now imagine that trucks on the highway might. It raises practical questions: What does insurance look like? How do ports react? How do insurers, shipping companies, and rival navies adjust rules of engagement? It’s like when a kid keeps bringing a multi-tool to school; people don’t immediately know whether to be impressed or alarmed.

This theme connects to the exercises around Taiwan. If naval blockades are practiced and some merchant hulls can suddenly become threats, the whole idea of peacetime commercial traffic gets fuzzier. It’s a grey-zone play: signals are sent below the threshold of declared war. A lot of authors point this out because it reshapes maritime security and global trade in ways that are easy to miss if you only watch headline warfare.

Diplomacy, Venezuela, and the resource scramble

A set of posts shifted the conversation to Latin America and raw resources. Zev Shalev’s piece on Mar-a-Lago diplomacy reads like a geopolitical soap opera: Trump hosting Netanyahu, Zelenskyy making deals, and China conducting drills around Taiwan. It’s an odd collage. But beneath the theater is a clearer theme: resources and influence.

Philoinvestor (/a/philoinvestor) writes a provocative piece titled “Venezuela is Taiwan.” The point — blunt and maybe a touch dramatic — is that the U.S. sees resource-rich places as stakes in the same game it plays over Taiwan. Lithium, oil, and critical minerals are strategic. Homo Ludditus (/a/homo_ludditus@ludditus.com) highlights the lithium triangle too, and a U.S. general spelling out why those mines matter for national security.

Angelica Oung’s follow-up on the extraction of Nicolás Maduro — she calls it “To Catch a President” — pushes us into the messy middle of operations and optics. She questions the motives and the choreography. Was it a clean intelligence triumph, or part performance, part squeeze on supply chains and influence? The answers matter because the more operations look like theater, the more they redraw local politics and perceptions of sovereignty.

To me, it feels like watching two kids argue over the last slice of pizza while a third one quietly points to the pantry. The loud fight draws attention, but the real game might be what happens in the pantry — who gets the cheese and the crust.

This group of posts links China to these resource contests implicitly and explicitly. China doesn’t just show up with military hardware; it shows up with investment, loans, and political ties. Some authors — notably Naked Capitalism — view China’s role in the global South with skepticism, saying overinvestment and exploitative deals have real costs. That chorus complicates the simple “China is rising” story with questions about who actually benefits.

AI, science, and money: researchers, Z.ai, and the e-CNY twist

There’s a second track of posts that focuses on tech. Jeffrey Ding (/a/jeffrey_ding@chinai.substack.com) runs a gentle piece — reflections from Chinese researchers on AI in science. Practical, small, human. Doubao, Gemini, science simulations, language translation. Researchers say AI saves time on mundane tasks and helps with modeling complex systems. Their tone is curious. They’re not starry-eyed, but they’re not panicked either. It’s practical adoption.

Then there’s the noise around money and markets. Alex Wilhelm (/a/alex_wilhelm@cautiousoptimism.news) flagged Z.ai’s IPO plans — a $560M raise and a $6.5B valuation headline. If you squint, the Z.ai news and the researchers’ notes form two halves of a coin: the state and private sectors pushing AI for both practical science and massive profit bets. Funding is aggressive. Competition with the U.S. is baked into the story. I’d say the posture is ambitious and a little desperate in places. Big valuations mean big expectations.

And then a wild card: the e-CNY. The Tech blog (/a/tech_blog@grigio.org) writes in Italian about the digital yuan becoming interest-bearing starting Jan 1, 2026. That’s the first central bank digital currency (CBDC) to add interest. That’s a policy lever as much as a product change. It’s meant to nudge adoption. But the posts also voice the obvious worry: privacy and state control. If your digital wallet is a ledger a bank can touch, adding interest is a carrot but also a long leash.

I would describe this scene as a set of experiments. One experiment is: how far can you push tech and money to get adoption? Another is: how do you balance control with convenience? Chinese researchers like the tools; investors want returns; the state wants control and systemic stability. Those goals don’t always line up.

Space: launches, reusable rockets, and the new arms race for orbit

Space stories were everywhere. Jack C. (/a/jackc@china-in-space.com) wrote twice this week. One post tallied 2025 as a big year for China in space: 93 launches, reusable tech, Shenzhou-20, Tianwen-2, and big satellite constellations. The other noted test completions for three reusable rockets — Astronstone, iSpace, Galactic Energy — with flights planned for 2026.

Robert Zimmerman (/a/robert_zimmerman@behindtheblack.com) frames the broader picture: the real space race of 2025 is SpaceX versus China. It’s not just governments now; private companies matter a lot. The scale of launch cadence is noteworthy. Spaceflight is becoming industrialized in a way that looks like a factory line for satellites and hardware.

Analysts and bloggers point to two big shifts. One, China’s space sector is rapidly commercializing. Private firms are taking risks and moving fast. Two, reusability is becoming mainstream. That changes costs and cadence. If rockets can be reused like airliners, access to orbit changes from a prize to a routine service.

To me, it feels like two rival bakeries racing to bake the most pies. One has mastered a conveyor belt, the other keeps refining recipes. Meanwhile, customers (states, telcos, scientists) queue for slices.

China and Africa: investment, deindustrialization, and the inconvenient truths

Naked Capitalism returned with a critique: China’s overinvestment in Africa has helped drive deindustrialization in some places. This is an uncomfortable counterpoint to narratives of development via Chinese capital.

The post digs into how Chinese projects and U.S. tariffs interact to hollow out local manufacturing. It points to exploitation, environmental harm, and broken promises about local industrial upgrading. It’s a story that complicates the idea that Chinese money is always a net good for developing nations.

This piece matters because it pushes back on simplified geopolitics. China is not a tidy model of export-led development that always helps partners climb the manufacturing ladder. Sometimes it creates dependencies and winners and losers in local economies.

That said, other posts point to Chinese investment as transformative in other contexts — especially infrastructure and connectivity. The tension is real: investment can build roads and satellite networks while also undercutting local firms. The authors arguing these points often are not on the same page, and that disagreement is the point. It’s messy.

Recurring motifs, points of agreement, and where people trip over each other

Read across these posts and a few clear motifs pop up.

• Dual-use is everywhere: rockets, merchant ships, AI, satellites. Civilian tools get adapted for strategic aims. That’s not news, but it’s more visible now. The posts show specific cases that make the trend feel immediate.

• Normalization of coercion: multiple writers describe how repeated drills make pressure look ordinary. Authors differ on the timeline and the endgame, but they agree on the tactic: make the abnormal feel normal.

• Competition across domains: not just military, but economy, money (e-CNY), tech, and space. China’s state and private actors are pushing in parallel. That creates friction with other powers and confusion for observers.

• Uneasy global partnerships: in places like Africa and Latin America, Chinese money has winners and losers. Some posts celebrate infrastructure wins. Others catalog ecological and economic costs. That split shows how complex China’s global footprint is.

Where writers disagree: on intent, scale, and the right policy response. Some voices emphasize the near-term risk of conflict; others say the bigger worry is economic entanglement and soft power influence. Some want stronger deterrence from the U.S. and allies. Others want careful diplomacy and investment in partner countries to counter dependency.

A mild repetition here: nearly every writer returns to the same idea — China is not a single thing. It is a tangle of firms, state projects, engineers, generals, banks, and regional allies. Saying "China does X" is often shorthand for many different actors doing different things for different reasons. I’d say that is worth repeating because it keeps getting lost in headlines.

Small, useful takeaways if you want to dig deeper

• If you care about Taiwan, read the drill reporting first. The operational details matter. Check Sam Cooper (/a/samcooper@thebureau.news) and David Cenciotti (/a/davidcenciotti@theaviationist.com) to see what was tested and practiced.

• If you worry about the future of sea lanes, the militarized-ship piece from Naked Capitalism (/a/naked_capitalism) is a good start. It’s a subtle but game-changing issue.

• For tech watchers, the China AI reflections by Jeffrey Ding (/a/jeffreyding@chinai.substack.com) are grounded and practical. For business and investors, Alex Wilhelm (/a/alexwilhelm@cautiousoptimism.news) on Z.ai gives a window into market bets.

• If you want the human theater angle — geopolitics over cocktails and shouting — Zev Shalev (/a/zev_shalev@narativ.org) mixes diplomacy and spectacle in a way that shows how distant crises collide.

• Space fans should follow Jack C. (/a/jackc@china-in-space.com) and Robert Zimmerman (/a/robert_zimmerman@behindtheblack.com). One maps Chinese progress; the other frames it against SpaceX and a global launch cadence.

• For critical takes on China in the global South, Naked Capitalism (/a/naked_capitalism) again is blunt on overinvestment and consequences.

A few parting, slightly messy thoughts

Reading these posts felt a bit like watching an orchestra where different sections play competing tunes. The brass is loud (military drills). The strings hum in the background (AI and space tech). The percussion is the markets and money flows (Z.ai IPO, e-CNY interest). Sometimes the conductor is clear. Sometimes no one’s sure who’s leading.

I would describe the week as a picture of a state and a set of private actors sprinting in different directions but toward similar goals: more control, more capacity, more leverage. To me, it feels like a country trying to run several marathons at once, and choosing its pace depending on the race. Some races (space, AI) are overt and competitive. Others (shipping militarization, currency policy) are quieter and more about shaping the rules.

There are real stories worth following. The military drills make the stakes concrete. The merchant-ship militarization story shifts how we think about peacetime trade. The e-CNY change could alter how money works at scale if people actually use it. The space launches are a visible sign of long-term industrial investment. The debates about Africa and Latin America remind us that influence is often local and complicated.

If you like reading the people who stitched these threads together, click through the links to their posts. You’ll find photos, maps, numbers, and sharper takes. My sense is that next week will carry these same currents forward — maybe louder in one channel, quieter in another. But the patterns are set: China is testing both hard and soft edges of power.

Read the posts if you want the receipts. They’re worth the scroll.