This is The China Week, an all-killer-no-filler analysis of what happened in the People’s Republic from August 5 to 12, 2025. Please take out a paying subscription for full newsletters and access to the archive, and forward it to anyone who might find it useful.

News is still slow this week, with China’s senior leadership enjoying, or suffering, their annual beach retreat.

Liú Jiànchāo 刘建超, “a senior Chinese diplomat widely seen as a potential foreign minister, has been taken away by authorities for questioning, according to people familiar with the matter” reported the Wall Street Journal. Liu, 61, was detained some time after July 30 when he returned “from a work trip to Singapore, South Africa and Algeria,” according to sources cited by Reuters.

Liu is currently head of the Communist Party’s International Department, which oversees relations with foreign political parties and groups. He studied international relations at Oxford, and has spent most of his career at the the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aside from 2015 to 2018, when he was appointed to lead the International Cooperation Agency of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the top anti-corruption job targeting officials and their families outside of China. As the NGO Safeguard Defenders pointed out, he may have been “caught by his own investigators.”

Context

In 2023, Beijing removed Foreign Minister Qín Gāng 秦刚 from his post, and replaced him with his predecessor, former Foreign Minister Wáng Yì 王毅. The most credible explanation for Qin’s defenestration is that he was found to be having an extramarital affair with a TV reporter, but the Chinese Communist Party never issued an explanation.

There are a number of theories about Liu’s disappearance on the Chinese-language internet, including that he was having an extramarital affair, that he has helped wealthy Chinese individuals to move their assets overseas, and that he has become a victim of political infighting.

Renewable energy and EVs

Nearly half of cars sold in China are electric

Sales of new-energy vehicles (mostly electric cars) in China between January and June 2025 rose 40% year-on-year to just under seven million units, or 44% of total car sales.

China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) predicts that the annual charging volume of the country’s electric vehicles is expected to be equivalent to the annual power