July 12 – July 18

Highlights: Twenty-nine countries establish a Chinese-led artificial intelligence cooperation organization in Shanghai; Hong Kong national security police raid two independent bookstores and arrest five booksellers on suspicion of selling seditious books; Japan's Diet enacts election-misinformation measures requiring labels on AI-generated images, as well as a controversial law that punishes publicly damaging or defacing the national flag; South Korea’s National Assembly wrestles with sweeping changes to its Criminal Procedure Act, including a controversial proposal to strip prosecutors of all investigatory powers; Taiwan's opposition-controlled legislature moves to put referendum proposals about restoring nuclear power and legalizing euthanasia on the November ballot.

China

Representatives of twenty-nine countries signed an agreement in Shanghai establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (世界人工智能合作组织), which China says will promote international cooperation and global governance in artificial intelligence. Founding members include Russia, Belarus, Serbia, Cuba, Brazil, and Venezuela, along with ten African and twelve Asian countries. The China-proposed body will be headquartered in Shanghai. China proposed the body at last year's World Artificial Intelligence Conference. No country had formally announced membership until now.

New rules for artificial intelligence services that simulate human personalities and form emotional bonds with users took effect July 15. The Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services (人工智能拟人化互动服务管理暂行办法), issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four other agencies following four deaths reportedly linked to such apps, bar providers from fostering emotional dependence, generating content that promotes self-harm, and manipulating users' emotions. Providers must tell users they are talking to an AI, prompt breaks after two hours, and hand the conversation to a human if a user expresses an intent to self-harm.

The Shanghai High People's Court dismissed Shanghai Xiaoi Robot Technology's (上海智臻智能网络科技股份有限公司) RMB 5.1 billion (US$700 million) suit alleging that Apple's Siri voice assistant infringed Xiaoi's now-expired 2004 patent for a “chatbot system.” The court found Siri lacks two claimed features: communication through an instant messaging or SMS platform, and a “filter” that routes formatted commands and natural language to separate servers. In a companion action, the same panel declared newer iPhone models also non-infringing.

The Beijing Intellectual Property Court heard Louis Vuitton Malletier's administrative lawsuit against the China National Intellectual Property Administration over the agency's refusal to invalidate trademarks applied for by a Guangdong garment trader. The state-run Beijing Daily reported that the marks resemble LV’s four-petal flower monogram.

Earlier in July, the Suzhou Intermediate People's Court ordered the milk tea chain Molly Tea to stop using its own four-petal flower logo and pay Louis Vuitton RMB 10.3 million (US$1.5 million) for trademark infringement. Many Chinese social media users defended the logo as evoking baoxianghua (宝相花), a traditional peony-and-lotus pattern. Molly Tea said it will appeal.

The Communist Party expelled Ma Xingrui (马兴瑞), a member of its twenty-four-member Politburo and former party secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, for taking massive bribes and fostering corruption within his family. His case now goes to prosecutors. Ma is the third member of the current Politburo to be removed, after He Weidong and Zhang Youxia.

The party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection announced it is investigating Cai Fuchao (蔡赴朝), who enforced censorship across publishing, film, and online content as China's top media regulator before retiring in 2018. He is the fortieth centrally administered official investigated this year.
Prosecutors indicted Han Zhanwu, a former deputy head of the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, on charges of accepting an “especially huge” amount of bribes. He is the seventh senior official of the lucrative state monopoly to face corruption charges since 2019.
Prosecutors also indicted Wu Lan (乌兰), a former deputy party secretary of Hunan Province, on charges of accepting bribes over nearly twenty-two years in Inner Mongolia and Hunan.

Reuters reported that China is holding Youlin Chen, a Chinese-born American seismologist arrested at the Beijing airport in November 2024, on espionage charges. His wife said officials have interrogated him more than a hundred times about his published, US-funded research on the seismic signatures of North Korean nuclear tests. In March, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated Chen as “wrongfully detained,” reportedly the only American held in China with that status. China's Foreign Ministry said there is “no so-called wrongful detention.”

Beijing asked Thailand to extradite Bai Zhaodong, a Chinese journalist held at a Bangkok immigration center since January, on suspicion of extortion and bribery. Bai fled China in 2023 after his reporting exposed official corruption, according to Reporters Without Borders and the Spain-based group Safeguard Defenders. The groups say Bai faces persecution and torture if returned.

The National Financial Regulatory Administration proposed cybersecurity rules that would make bank and insurer boards, along with their Communist Party committees, primarily responsible for severe network outages and data breaches. For the most serious incidents, including multi-province outages lasting three hours or more, institutions would have to notify users and report to regulators every two hours. The draft is open for public comment until August 10.

Chinese universities are responding to a recent call by Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping to severely punish academic misconduct. Renmin University of China revoked the master's degree of Jiang Fangzhou (蒋方舟), a well-known writer, after finding that her thesis plagiarized a Taiwanese scholar's paper. Separately, Northwest University dismissed Associate Professor Jia Qianqian (贾浅浅), daughter of the novelist Jia Pingwa (贾平凹), for plagiarism in nine of her sixteen papers; Shaanxi Normal University revoked her master's degree.

The Foreign Ministry warned of possible retaliation after the US Department of Homeland Security said it will drastically shorten visas for foreign journalists in the US to 240 days and cut those for Chinese journalists to only ninety days. The new US rules, which also affect foreign students and exchange visitors, will end a longstanding system that allows foreign journalists to work in the United States as long as they meet eligibility requirements. The number of American journalists in China and vice versa has dropped sharply since 2020 as a byproduct of worsening relations. China has already restricted many US journalists to ninety-day visa terms.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Wu Shaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer with a pending asylum application, after a traffic stop in Pennsylvania. Wu defended anti-corruption activists and practitioners of the banned Falun Gong movement before fleeing to the United States in 2019. The Department of Homeland Security said Wu overstayed his visa by six years. He is scheduled to appear in immigration court on July 27.

Hong Kong

National security police raided two independent bookstores, Have a Nice Stay and Greenfield Book Store, and arrested five booksellers on suspicion of committing acts with seditious intention, an offense under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (維護國家安全條例) punishable by up to seven years in prison. Police said the five displayed and sold publications that could stir up hatred against the government, the judiciary, and law enforcement. Police later released all five on bail. The South China Morning Post reported that the books under investigation include writings by the late opposition lawmaker Shiu Ka-chun and a 2025 memoir by former Democratic Party chair Emily Lau Wai-hing. It was the third police operation against independent booksellers this year.

Have a Nice Stay had just announced plans to close, saying that it was losing money and that unclear official “red lines” made it impossible to know which books may legally be sold.
Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung said the government will not publish a list of banned books because sellers could evade it by changing titles. He said booksellers must ensure the books they sell do not endanger national security.

The Legislative Council approved legislation that places part of a rebuilt border crossing between Shenzhen and Hong Kong under Hong Kong’s jurisdiction. The government said travelers will complete both Hong Kong and mainland border checks at a single stop in about five minutes, compared with thirty now. The government gazetted the Huanggang Port Hong Kong Port Area Bill (皇崗口岸港方口岸區條例草案) on July 14, 2026, and lawmakers approved it three days later. The National People's Congress Standing Committee had authorized the arrangement in June.

The independent committee investigating last November’s deadly fire in seven high-rise apartment buildings at Wang Fuk Court concluded its public hearing after taking testimony from more than seventy witnesses over four months. The committee’s counsel, Victor Dawes, submitted a 627-page written report summarizing the findings, which included an indictment of the failure by multiple government departments to oversee the work of companies that were repairing the building facades when the fire broke out. The government has charged seven people and two companies with manslaughter, conspiracy to defraud, and other charges.

The District Court sentenced former law student Alice Tong, 27, to two years and ten months in prison for rioting during the 2019 anti-government protests. Judge Edmond Lee acquitted Tong of the same charge in 2021. However, the Department of Justice appealed, and the Court of Appeal overturned the acquittal and ordered Lee to retry the case. Lee convicted her in June.

Wang Zhenmin, a former legal affairs chief at Beijing's liaison office in Hong Kong and former dean of Tsinghua University Law School, said the city's national security laws must be constantly improved to close loopholes. He said the laws “are the world's mildest, respect the rule of law the most, and protect human rights and freedoms the most” of any national security legislation.

Japan

The Diet enacted a historic revision to the law that defines who belongs to the imperial family, allowing adoption of distant male relatives to father future heirs and allowing princesses to keep their royal status after they marry commoners - but not to take the throne themselves. Polls show that 60 to 90 percent of Japanese support having a female emperor, and many would like to see 24-year-old Princess Aiko succeed her father, Emperor Naruhito. However, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, a conservative, organized closed-door discussions of the draft with all the parties in the Diet before formally submitting it to the legislature for speedy approval.

The Diet also enacted a controversial law that punishes publicly damaging or defacing the national flag, including livestreaming treatment of the flag in ways that would offend the feelings of others. Violators would face up to two years in prison or a maximum fine of 200,000 yen (about $1,230). Two legal scholars testified before an upper house committee before the law’s passage that it is unconstitutionally vague and threatens free speech. Motohiro Hashimoto of Chuo University said criminalizing damage to the state's symbol “means prohibiting the most powerful form of criticism against the state.”

The Diet enacted revisions to the Public Offices Election Law and the Information Distribution Platform Law to combat false information about elections on social media. Among other things, the revisions require labels on images and videos created with AI and require platform operators to counter election misinformation. Most of the revisions take effect on March 1, 2027, in time for local elections expected in April.

The Diet enacted a bill that brings crypto assets under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Law, the statute governing securities. Until now, crypto assets have been treated in Japan only as a means of payment, but they are increasingly being traded as investments. The revision raises the maximum prison term for operating an unregistered crypto trading business to ten years from three and bars insider trading.

The Diet revised the Criminal Procedure Code to reduce the ability of prosecutors to block retrials of suspected wrongful convictions through endless appeals. The law now allows courts to order prosecutors to submit evidence in their possession and prohibits the prosecution from appealing a court’s order to start a retrial unless there are “sufficient grounds” to appeal, which grounds must be disclosed. However, defense counsel are unhappy with a provision that penalizes them or their clients if they share evidence with third parties, including the media.

In a case that illustrates how hard it has been to obtain retrials, an investigation by the Nagoya High Public Prosecutors Office found that at least five prosecutors withheld evidence that could have exonerated a man who was wrongly convicted of the 1986 murder of a junior high school girl in Fukui Prefecture. Shoji Maekawa, 61, had already served his seven-year sentence when a court acquitted him in a retrial last year. The prosecution blocked his petition for a retrial in 2011.

The Kyoto District Court rejected a lawsuit by more than 3,400 plaintiffs seeking to suspend the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at Kansai Electric Power's Oi nuclear plant in Fukui Prefecture. The plaintiffs argued that regulators underestimated risks to the plant's foundations and that evacuation plans fail to account for traffic congestion. They first sued the utility and the central government in 2012, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Koreas

Faced with criticism from civil society groups and the judiciary as well as the political opposition, the ruling Democratic Party began considering carve-outs to its plan to strip the country’s powerful prosecutors of all criminal investigatory powers. Critics said that if prosecutors could not conduct even supplementary investigations when police failed to resolve a case, crime victims would have no recourse. At issue are proposed sweeping changes to the Criminal Procedure Act, intended as the culmination of a years-long process to rein in too-powerful prosecutors. The National Assembly voted in March 2026 to replace the prosecution service with two separate agencies to handle serious crimes investigations and prosecution.

The Seoul Central District Court sentenced former President Yoon Suk Yeol to two years in prison for violating the Political Funds Act by accepting free opinion polling during his 2022 presidential campaign. The court found that a political broker gave Yoon fourteen free surveys worth about 28 million won (US$18,600), and sentenced the broker to eighteen months in prison. Yoon plans to appeal. He is also appealing a life sentence, imposed in February, for insurrection over his 2024 declaration of martial law.

Courts separately acquitted Yoon's wife, Kim Keon Hee, of a related charge involving the same polls. The Supreme Court is reviewing her case.

President Lee Jae Myung said South Korea should lower the age below which minors cannot be criminally punished, and ordered further public consultation. A government-citizen deliberation process found most participants favored a one-year reduction, from the current cutoff age of 14 to 13, for serious and repeat offenses. Minors below the threshold age now face at most two years in a juvenile detention facility.

The Ministry of Economy and Finance announced plans for a National Asset Basic Act that would bring virtual assets under state asset management for the first time. The current State Property Act does not recognize newer forms of property such as intellectual property or cryptocurrency obtained through seizure. The government must still draft the bill and win National Assembly approval.

An appellate panel of the Uijeongbu District Court acquitted a North Korean defector charged under the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act with helping other defectors send money to family members in North Korea through unauthorized channels. The defendant's lawyer said the court found no evidence that he was operating a foreign exchange business for profit. Because direct legal transfers to North Korea are effectively unavailable, defectors commonly rely on brokers with bank accounts in South Korea and China. It was the second such acquittal by a South Korean court since November 2025.

The Gwangju District Prosecutors' Office summarily indicted a man on charges of violating the National Technical Qualification Act by using AI-powered glasses to cheat on a fire-safety engineering certification exam. A summary indictment seeks a fine without a full trial. Local media reported that it was the first legal action in South Korea involving the devices.

Taiwan

The Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) and the Taiwan People's Party (TPP), which together control the legislature, took steps to put referendum questions about restoring nuclear power and legalizing euthanasia on the November ballot. Taiwan shut its last operating nuclear reactor in May 2025. A final legislative vote on the proposals is expected in late August.

The two parties have already advanced four other referendum proposals for the same ballot: caning for major crimes, death sentences without unanimous approval by a three-judge court panel, absentee voting, and earmarking traffic fines for road safety. The death sentence measure counters a 2024 Constitutional Court ruling that required unanimity.

Taiwan suffered two diplomatic setbacks during the week.

Papua New Guinea announced that it was closing Taiwan’s trade office in its capital in an effort to deepen trust with Beijing. Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs protested the move. Taiwan opened the office in 1990 under a trade agreement despite having no diplomatic relations with the country.

Lithuania’s new prime minister, Mindaugas Sinkevicius, said on his first day in office that he hopes to restore normal diplomatic and trade relations with China. China downgraded the relationship in 2021 after Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a representative office in Vilnius under the name "Taiwan" rather than “Taipei.” Sinkevicius said he believes relations with China can be restored without a change in Taiwan’s representation, but China’s Global Times newspaper said Lithuania needs to take concrete steps.

The small Taiwan People’s Party sent a low-key delegation to mainland China for the first time since the party was founded in 2019. The group of three party staffers and five youth division members did not include party Chair Huang Kuo-chang or any current or former lawmakers. They spent four days in Shanghai visiting economic infrastructure projects, historical sites, technology firms, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The delegation leader, Lee Wei-hwa, said they aimed to build goodwill while supporting Taiwan’s autonomy.