July 19 – July 25
Highlights: Reactions across East Asia are muted to the Trump administration’s latest new tariffs; China adds fourteen European entities to an export control list in retaliation for the European Union sanctioning fourteen Chinese mainland and Hong Kong enterprises; the former leader of Hong Kong’s disbanded Democratic Party flees to the UK; Japan’s Diet authorizes the prime minister to designate a “backup” capital to handle major government functions in the event of a natural disaster striking Tokyo; the Seoul High Court acquits a woman who had been convicted of murder for terminating her pregnancy at thirty-six weeks; Taiwan’s legislature approves savings accounts for children into which the government will make annual deposits in an effort to boost the birthrate.
Regional
Reactions in East Asia were muted to the Trump administration’s July 23, 2026 announcement of a new set of permanent tariffs billed as combating forced labor in supply chains. The new levies imposed on sixty economies replace a 150-day global tariff that President Trump imposed in February after the US Supreme Court struck down his April 2025 “liberation day” tariffs as exceeding presidential powers. Among East Asian and South Asian countries, a 10 percent rate will apply to Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A 12.5 percent rate will apply to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The low-key reaction from the region reflects expectations that the new tariffs will have little practical effect. Japanese Trade Minister Akazawa Ryosei said the new tariffs were “regrettable” but that Washington had confirmed Japan would not face any additional tariffs beyond those agreed bilaterally last year. Taiwan Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun said that because Taiwan has already committed to ban imports of products made with forced labor, additional duties will only apply when needed to bring covered products to a total tariff rate of 10 percent. China’s Foreign Ministry mildly criticized “all forms of unilateral tariffs” as China and the US focus on preparing for President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington on Sept. 24, 2026.
China
The Commerce Minister added fourteen European entities to an export control list in retaliation for the European Union sanctioning fourteen Chinese mainland and Hong Kong enterprises as part of its latest round of sanctions against Russia. The European companies affected include Czech vehicle manufacturer Tatra Trucks, Italian electric motor maker Lafert SpA, German manufacturer Sindlhauser Materials GmbH and French drone manufacturer Cavok UAS. Chinese companies will not be allowed to sell them products that have both civilian and military uses.
Reuters reported that the United States and China will hold intergovernmental talks on artificial intelligence in September. The talks would be the first official US-China dialogue on AI under President Donald Trump. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to establish the dialogue at their May summit. Each government is concerned that the other's increasingly powerful AI models could strengthen military capabilities and enable cyberattacks. The US delegation will be led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who recently said it is unacceptable that watermarks of US large language models are appearing on Chinese AI models.
The Ministry of Public Security said police handed over to their American counterparts a man accused of fatally shooting his wife and sexually assaulting a minor in the United States more than two decades ago. The US issued a warrant for the man in 2004 and Interpol issued a red notice for him. The MPS said the repatriation was “another achievement in bilateral law enforcement cooperation.”
Hong Kong
A District Court sentenced a mentally impaired 23-year-old man to twenty-eight months in prison for making posts on social media platforms and putting up A4-sized posters in public places to promote the tiny Taiwan-based Revive the Republic of China Freedom Party. Chan Ho-hin acknowledged the actions, but his lawyers pleaded for leniency on the grounds that the defendant has a mild intellectual disability and that he was merely “parroting” the information he saw online. Judge Stanley Chan said that the court must not treat national security risks lightly and convicted Chan of inciting subversion.
A judge in West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court convicted an 18-year-old man of sedition after he scrawled “seditious words” in a commercial building bathroom on three occasions. Leung Kai-lok was accused of writing “Bomb Li Ka-chiu to death” in Chinese (referring to Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee), as well as the Chinese characters for “Gwong Si,”an abbreviation of the 2019 protest slogan, “Liberate Hong Kong, the Revolution of Our Times.” A policeman had been staked out in the bathroom when one of the messages was written in July 2025.
The Judiciary Department said that High Court Judge Wilson Chan will be reprimanded for copying large sections of a party’s submissions into his judgment in a case. The department said in a statement that excessive copying causes doubts about whether the judge independently analyzed the matter. It is the third time that Chan has been accused of heavy copying from party submissions. Each time, the Court of Appeal has ordered a retrial. Chan has been a judge since 2013.
The former leader of the now-disbanded Democratic Party, Wu Chi-wai, traveled to the UK to join family members less than a month after being released from prison in Hong Kong. Wu spent four years and five months in prison after being convicted of conspiracy to commit subversion for participating in an unofficial election primary. Hong Kong media outlets reported that Wu was detained for ten hours after arriving at Heathrow Airport because of an “administrative issue” but was subsequently granted entry.
Japan
Lawmakers narrowly approved a bill that allows the prime minister to designate a “backup” capital that would handle major government functions in the event of a natural disaster striking Tokyo. The vote followed weeks of push-back from opposition parties that viewed the legislation as tailored to advance the cause of reorganizing the city of Osaka into a metropolis like Tokyo, merging its city and prefecture governments. Osaka is a stronghold of the Japan Innovation Party (JIP), the junior partner of the Liberal Democratic Party. The final version that was approved does not designate a specific city.
In the final day of an extended legislative session, the Diet also amended the national referendum law to relax rules for vote counting and selecting poll watchers in remote locations when holding national referendums on amending the Constitution. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi wants to amend the 1947 Constitution for the first time by inserting formal recognition of the existence and role of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. Constitutional amendments require the support of two-thirds of lawmakers in the upper house plus majority support in a public referendum.
Koreas
The South Korean National Assembly voted 173-0 to extend the special counsel investigation into former President Yoon Suk Yeol and former first lady Kim Keon Hee until late August. The Constitutional Court removed Yoon from office in April 2025 over his December 2024 declaration of martial law. The couple also faces corruption allegations. The extension required National Assembly approval because the special counsel had already used the two one-month extensions allowed by law. The opposition People Power Party, Yoon's former party, says the ruling Democratic Party is using the investigation to pursue revenge against political opponents.
Senior officials of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and main opposition People Power Party (PPP) agreed to act quickly on legislation authorizing a special counsel to look into ballot shortages during the June 3 local elections. The two parties also agreed on procedures for selecting the special counsel.
A joint police-prosecutors investigation team visited the offices of the National Election Commission (NEC) in Gyeonggi Province to search for evidence that officials falsified voter turnout figures for the June 3 local elections to conceal their own errors. The investigators also searched NEC regional offices in three Seoul districts where hundreds of voters were kept waiting after polling stations ran out of ballot papers. Thousands of people have held street protests for weeks demanding an election rerun.
The Seoul High Court acquitted a woman who had been convicted of murder for terminating her pregnancy at thirty-six weeks. Prosecutors said the baby was born alive at a hospital through a Caesarean section and placed in a freezer until it died; hospital staff then falsified the records to make it look like the baby was stillborn. The High Court said the mother may not have known the baby was born alive. It upheld the convictions of two doctors but reduced their sentences. Since the Constitutional Court removed an abortion ban in 2019, the legislature has failed to put any law in place regulating when or how abortions may be carried out, creating uncertainty about what is allowed.
The Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office indicted Korean American Morse Tan on criminal defamation charges over false claims targeting President Lee Jae Myung. Tan, a professor at Liberty University who served as the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice during the first Trump administration, is accused of telling a Washington, DC press conference last year that Lee was involved in a gang rape and murder of a girl when he was a juvenile and was sent to a juvenile detention center. After Tan came to Korea in May to monitor its June 3 local elections, the Ministry of Justice barred him from leaving the country while police investigated his earlier statements.
Taiwan
The legislature passed a law establishing savings accounts for children into which the government will make annual deposits of NT$60,000 (US$1,854) until they reach age eighteen. The goal is to encourage couples to have more children. Each child will have a Growth Allowance Account and a Future Account. Funds in a Growth Allowance Account can be withdrawn by the child’s legal representative at any time, but funds in a Future Account cannot be withdrawn before the account holder turns eighteen, with some exceptions.
Nationalist or Kuomintang Party (KMT) legislators proposed slashing NT$295.74 million (US$9.13 million) from the budget of the Control Yuan, one of Taiwan’s five branches of government, effectively freezing its audit and anti-corruption work. The legislators were responding to the administration’s nomination of what they called overtly pro-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidates to be Control Yuan commissioners. The six-year terms of the body’s twenty-nine commissioners all expire on July 31 and there has been concern that the KMT will refuse to approve their nominated successors. However, Presidential Office Secretary-General Pan Men-an (潘孟安) later said that he and the nominees met with Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), a senior KMT leader, and Han pledged to facilitate cross-party negotiations to confirm new commissioners.
The Supreme Administrative Court rejected an effort by the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee (CIPAS) to collect NT$3.2 billion (US$99.1 million) from the Kuomintang Party (KMT) for land that CIPAS determined had been acquired illegally during Taiwan’s authoritarian era. The land was part of a plot that once extended to more than 90,000 square meters (22.2 acres) in Taipei's Wenshan District. Portions have been sold over the years.
The Legislative Yuan amended the Telecommunications Management Act (電信管理法) to exempt satellite network operators from the foreign ownership limits imposed on telecommunications companies. Local media reported that the change is intended to ease the entry of Starlink, a US satellite internet service seen as an emergency backup for Taiwan's vulnerable undersea cables.
The legislature also passed amendments to the Sand and Gravel Excavation Act (土石採取法) making non-permitted excavation for profit punishable by up to five years in prison and fines of up to NT$500 million (US$15.5 million), or by life imprisonment when it causes a death. The amendments respond to the discovery of a mining operation in 2025 that dug a six-hectare, fifteen-meter-deep pit in a water source conservation area and filled it with toxic waste.
Responding to a tainted cooking oil scandal, the Executive Yuan (Taiwan's Cabinet) proposed imposing fines of up to NT$30 million (US$929,771) on large food manufacturers who fail to notify authorities of product anomalies within 24 hours of discovery. The proposal, which requires amending the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法), also would mandate more frequent self-inspections by food businesses. The proposal is a response to the recent scandal involving a Taichung oil producer who waited nearly three weeks to report that a batch of its soybean cooking oil contained unsafe amounts of benzopyrene, a carcinogen. By then, large amounts of the oil had entered the food chain.
The Supreme Court upheld the conviction and eight-year prison sentence given to a mainland-born woman for developing two immigrant marriage advocacy organizations in Taiwan under the substantive direction and control of the Chinese Communist Party. The Mainland Affairs Council said Zhou Manzhi (周滿芝) will be stripped of the Taiwanese citizenship she obtained through marriage in 2004.
The Supreme Court also upheld a two-year, eight-month prison sentence for former independent legislative candidate Ma Chih-wei (馬治薇) for accepting funding from China during her 2024 campaign for a legislative seat in Taoyuan. In return, prosecutors said Ma gave them business cards of national security personnel and other information.
The National Communications Commission announced that nationwide air raid drills on August 10 and 13 will for the first time simulate a communications disruption, slowing mobile data service for thirty minutes in fourteen northern and central cities and counties. An official said the exercise is meant to familiarize agencies and the public with using backup communications, including voice calls and text messages, during a large-scale disaster or cyberattack.