Andrea Ferrario

Retail sales are not growing as much as Beijing would like. Employees currently work an average of 48.2 hours a week, but without a significant increase in income. So, during the recent public holidays, a call not to use days off for shopping went viral on Weibo before being censored.

President Lee Jae-myung wants to provide all of South Korea's 51 million people with free, unlimited access to an AI assistant powered by domestic models. The initiative aligns with the state-business collaboration model that has underpinned the country’s development, but it has to contend with the massive costs of the necessary infrastructure.

Grappling with collapsing real estate revenues, local governments are delaying payments to businesses, which is reverberating along the supply chain to small suppliers. Beijing is trying to contain the problem but, without new resources, there is a risk of simply shifting losses from one entity to another.

More than the deposits themselves, the expertise acquired in mining institutes has ensured China's control over a large share of global production, a disadvantage the West will need years to overcome. To counter the lucrative wages offered by US companies, Beijing is pre-emptively withholding passports from qualified personnel.

Beijing has confirmed that the Chinese president will attend the BRICS summit on 12-13 September. This is his first visit to India in seven years, marking a thaw facilitated by Trump's slights against India. However, following the 2020 conflict in Ladakh, a border agreement remains elusive, and competition persists.

The scaling back of joint military exercises with South Korea was intended to reopen direct dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang. But the North denies any contact and is raising the ‘price’ for a return to negotiations. These developments are placing President Lee Jae-myung in an increasingly difficult position.

The fifth plenum of the Central Committee, set for October, will not focus on the new Five-Year Plan but on the party's "rigorous" internal governance. Meanwhile, the anti-corruption drive is also affecting the military leadership at a time when the economy is slowing. For Xi Jinping, cohesion remains the top priority ahead of the 2027 congress.

After the real estate crisis drained local finances, Beijing is focusing on private wealth to finance the race for artificial intelligence and semiconductors. But new taxes, controls, and steered investments are increasing the risk of passing the cost of this industrial strategy on to households.

Despite more high-level meetings with Xi and improved economic relations, Kim Yong-un's regime is cracking down on Chinese films and TV series and is careful with its official statements. Meanwhile, North Korean workers returning from China report being treated like beggars.

Beijing controls 80 per cent of this material used for its hardness and strength, from drill tips and light bulb filaments to ammunition and anti-missile systems. In addition to putting exports on hold, it has been scouring US scrap heaps. Meanwhile, the West is stuck in litigation.

Once classified by the Communist Party as “spiritual pollution”, this genre now generates billions of yuan in revenue and has become part of the state's cultural promotion strategy, within a clear geopolitical vision. "The Wandering Earth" and "The Three-Body Problem" are the most striking examples of Netflix phenomena. But in the background, tensions have also emerged between artistic forms and the new computing power deployed by propaganda.

Data on the performance in the first quarter of 2026 confirm the difficulties of China’s southern coastal province, which was the laboratory of the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping but is now suffering from the downsizing of Hong Kong and the crisis of the manufacturing sector. Jiangsu and Zhejiang are currently leading the country, with Hangzhou emerging as China's artificial intelligence hub. Meanwhile, differences between the various parts of the country are growing.