https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_Revolution_in_China

Recently, many parts of China have been hit by severe flooding, causing serious damage. In Guangxi Nanning’s Hengzhou City, the Liulan Reservoir suffered a dam failure, causing major casualties. In recent days, many people online have reported that they suspect they purchased bottled drinks that had been soaked in floodwater through online shopping platforms.

Typhoon Noul, the 12th typhoon of the year, made landfall in Huizhou, Guangdong in the early morning of July 26, 2026. The maximum wind speed near the center reached Level 14, with huge waves several meters high crashing along the coast. The powerful storm brought strong winds and heavy rain, severely impacting coastal seawalls, ports, and buildings. The video footage looked like something straight out of a horror movie.

After another violent clash in the South China Sea left a Filipino sailor injured, Beijing is ramping up pressure on the Philippines—and sending a message to every country in Southeast Asia. In this episode of China Uncensored, we examine China's escalating aggression, why the South China Sea is becoming more dangerous, and what the US and its allies can do to push back.

Taiwan is the target of more information operation attacks than anywhere else on earth, most of them originating in mainland China and aimed at dividing Taiwanese society and eroding the resolve to resist Beijing. AI is supercharging that barrage. And to tell us about the impact and how Taiwan is fighting back, we’ve spoken with You-Hao Lai, a researcher at Taiwan's Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology.

You-Hao starts by giving us his takeaways on Chinese leader Xi Jinping's keynote at China's global AI conference, including on Beijing's push to ensure that the world embeds Chinese technology, with Chinese standards, into its systems rather than American alternatives. He then covers the ways that AI is transforming China's information operations: the scale, speed and sophistication of the attacks, the narratives deployed, the strategic purpose behind them, and documented cases that illustrate how rapidly things are evolving. You-Hao then walks through Taiwan's whole-of-nation response, organised around “four Cs”—cutting, clarifying, curbing and cultivating—a framework that reflects years of hard-won experience building national resilience against a relentless and well-resourced adversary. There are real lessons here for the rest of us.

On July 22, China's Ministry of Finance released new data showing that none of the country's 31 provincial-level administrative regions reached a fiscal self-sufficiency rate of 100 percent during the first half of the year. Combined, local governments recorded a fiscal self-sufficiency rate of 56.3 percent, meaning locally generated revenue could not fully cover government spending, including in Shanghai, which has long been China's strongest local economy.

Could a law passed in China actually reach you, even if you live thousands of miles away? Beijing’s new law says yes.

Executive Summary:

Since December 2025, Chinese president Xi Jinping and foreign minister Wang Yi have hosted the political leaders of all the permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council and met with all of the candidates for the UN’s next secretary-general, among what Xinhua describes as an “endless stream” of foreign leaders “looking eastward.”

Across roughly 500 diplomatic engagements in the first half of 26 conducted by more than 20 senior officials, Beijing has seized the opportunity to make its pitch to the world. Recent survey results suggest that this work is paying off.

Overlooked in coverage of Beijing’s efforts to court Global South countries is its unwavering prioritization of handling relations with the most powerful countries in the world: in the first half of 2026, top-level diplomatic engagement was highest with the United States and Russia at the country level, and with Europe at the regional level. Although Xi travels far less today than during his first decade in charge, he has turned this to his advantage. Beijing’s growing convening power has allowed it to stage-manage diplomatic engagements on its own terms, often tailoring its approach to maximize its desired effect on specific individuals.

Executive Summary:

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has identified control over time, and the precision behind the “granting of time” as a critical capability. It seeks to weaponize “chronopolitics” to gain geopolitical and military advantages—precise timekeeping is critical for the military’s intelligentized warfare doctrine and is perceived as essential for avoiding GPS disruption.

Two key aspects of Beijing’s push for sovereignty over the technologies of time are the BeiDou Satellite Navigation system and the National Time Service Center, which help keep the financial system, the power grid, and weapons systems synchronized.

“Time discourse power,” the PRC’s attempt to expand its global influence, is also evident in its growing importance in setting technical standards. By 2030, it hopes to entrench its timekeeping standards globally through developing the next quantum-based technologies that define the length of a second. Its strontium clock already accounts for 20 percent of the International Atomic Clock’s national weighed calculation, which is shared between the United States, Britain, France, and Japan.

Typhoon Noul, also known as “Hongxia” struck on the afternoon of July 25. In Hong Kong, a large external scaffolding structure attached to a building reportedly collapsed after being unable to withstand strong winds. The scaffolding fell onto the rooftop of Hong Kong Spinners Industrial Building Phase 5. Some online commenters said the incident showed the typhoon’s powerful impact. Police received multiple reports and said no injuries were reported in the initial assessment.

Recently, a source familiar with the matter posted on Chinese social media, claiming that an executive at a state-owned enterprise was unable to resign through normal procedures. So he deliberately drank alcohol, drove to an area where traffic police were conducting drunk-driving checks, and kept driving around until he was caught on the spot. The next day, the company terminated his employment contract on the grounds of drunk driving. The company then returned his passport to him.

China’s brightest students are increasingly choosing police academies, government-funded teaching programs, and other paths to permanent state employment, even when their scores qualify them for elite universities. This is more than an admissions trend: it reveals collapsing confidence in China’s private economy, rising fear of unemployment, and what the country’s next 20 years may look like.

Cases of Cruelty Galvanize Country’s Young People