🌍 Albanese meets Xi

Hi there Intriguer. Spare a thought for folks in China’s Hunan province who have to climb a 120m vertical cliff to get to their local convenience store.

📢 PSA: Our quick team retreat means there’ll be no briefing this coming Friday, Monday or Tuesday, but we’ll be back in your inboxes from Wednesday the 15th!

Today’s briefing is a 5 min read:

• 🇦🇺 End of a long winter for China and Australia?

• 🇰🇷 South Korea bans short selling (again). 

• ➕ Plus: An unpopular system, how the papers are covering recent Israel/Palestine protests, and why people in India are tweeting about pollution.

1. 🇨🇳 China: Vice-Premier He Lifeng will travel to San Francisco this week to meet US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen ahead of a much anticipated Xi-Biden meeting. He Lifeng, who’s close to President Xi, is now China’s top economic and finance official.

2. 🇵🇱 Poland: Citing parliamentary practice, Poland's president has given current Prime Minister Morawiecki the first attempt at forming a new government. The PM’s nationalist party won the most seats at last month’s elections, but not enough to form government alone.

3. 🇨🇰 Cook Islands: The leaders of PNG, Vanuatu and Solomon Islands (plus New Zealand’s newly elected leader) are skipping this week's Pacific Islands summit for various reasons. Its theme is ‘Our Voices, Our Choices, Our Pacific Way: Promote, Partner, Prosper’. 

4. 🇺🇸 US: Secretary of State Blinken has made an unannounced visit to Iraq where he met Prime Minister Al-Sudani. The pair discussed the dangers of a widening Israel-Hamas war, and ongoing attacks by Iran-backed militias against US troops stationed in Iraq.

5. 🇬🇳 Guinea: Former Guinean dictator Moussa Dadis Camara was recaptured after an apparent jailbreak over the weekend. Camara’s lawyer insists the former army chief was kidnapped.

🇦🇺 Australia | Geopolitics

Australia-China ties are finally defrosting

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last night (Monday). It was the first visit to China by an Australian leader in seven years.

Australia-China ties have been on a rollercoaster this past decade. Australia secured a coveted free trade agreement with China in 2015 after President Xi became China’s first leader to address Australia’s parliament.

But things then started to go sour as Australia became wary of a more assertive China, while China increasingly bristled at Australia’s responses.

When Canberra then called for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in 2020, Beijing cut off high-level contact and imposed a range of tariffs.

So why are things thawing now?

On the Australian side, a new government took office last year and set out to ‘stabilise’ ties via a change in tone more than substance, cheered on by businesses feeling the brunt of China’s trade restrictions.

And an increasingly isolated China saw this as a chance to dial things back, refocus on its domestic challenges, notch up a good news story with the West, and minimise secondary, oxygen-sucking quarrels.

So back to the present – what did last night’s meeting achieve? The two leaders joked about whether pandas or Tasmanian devils are cuter, but didn’t make any major announcements.

After a rollercoaster decade, the meeting itself was the message.

Intrigue's take: This defrosting has been constructive for both leaders looking to demonstrate they can manage a tricky relationship without looking weak. That could also help other world leaders still thinking through how best to manage a bigger, bolder China.

But of course, the real test for the Australia-China relationship will come when the two countries next disagree.

So, seen from another perspective, this defrosting was a low-cost way for China to rebuild economic leverage over Australia in case it one day needs to influence Canberra’s positions on core Chinese interests (like Taiwan).

Also worth noting: 

• Here’s how Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong summarised her country’s current China approach: “When I say we seek to stabilise the relationship, I use that phrase quite deliberately. I don’t use the word normalise, I don’t use the word reset because the reality is neither country is going back to where we were 15 years ago.”

🎧 Intrigue Outloud

Need to catch Intrigue on the go? Check out today’s Intrigue Outloud podcast to hear why Anthony Albanese’s visit to China was an historic one.

📰 How newspapers covered…

Israel/Palestine protests around the world

Today’s newsletter is supported by: Millennium Space Systems, A Boeing Company

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🇰🇷 South Korea | Geo-economics

South Korea clamps down on short selling

South Korean regulators imposed on Sunday (5 November) a temporary ban on short selling until June.  

Short selling is a common practice in which an investor bets against the value of a given asset. In most cases, an investor:

• 🏛️ Borrows shares from a stock broker

• 💵 Immediately resells them

• 📉 Waits until the share price drops, and then

• 🤑 Buys the shares back, returns them to the broker, and pockets the difference (or swallows the loss).

But bigger investors were using an illegal practice in Korea called ‘naked short selling’ to short sell shares without first borrowing them.

And legal or otherwise, regulators say this was all contributing to market volatility and harming everyday (‘retail’) investors. 

Intrigue’s take: Score one for the little guys. South Korea’s benchmark share index rose yesterday (Monday) more than 5% on news of the ban.

But by (again) intervening like this, South Korea risks undercutting its own efforts to boost its appeal as a lucrative, developed market. 

Also worth noting: 

• South Korea previously imposed a partial, 14-month short selling ban during the early days of the pandemic. 

➕ Extra Intrigue

Here’s what folks around the world have been tweeting lately

• 🇿🇦 #Gaza was trending in South Africa after Pretoria recalled its diplomats from Israel in protest.

• 🇰🇪 Kenyans were tweeting about “Hellen Obiri,” the legendary Kenyan distance runner who won the New York City Marathon on Sunday. 

• 🇮🇳 And folks in India were debating #DelhiAirQuality after the capital announced a partial and temporary ban on private vehicle use. 

🗳️ Poll time!

🗺️ Map of the day

Level of Metric Adoption

It’s often said the US, Liberia, and Myanmar are the only three countries still formally using the imperial system (i.e., inches, feet, pounds, gallons, etc). But as the above map suggests, things are sometimes a tad more nuanced.

Yesterday’s poll: How worried are you about AI taking your job?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😋 Not at all scared (41%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🙄 A little concerned (26%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😣 Pretty concerned (13%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 😱 Very scared (3%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🥰 I'm looking forward to it, actually (14%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ ✍️ Other (write in!) (3%)

Your two cents:

• 😋 M.J.H: “I work implementing innovation and automation technology. It will be a while before it can actually build itself.”

• 🙄 C.M: “I’m not afraid of AI being better than a human. I’m afraid it will be half as good as a human at 80% less expensive and the budget conscious managers will say “Hey, mediocrity sounds good to me."

• ✍️ C: “I'm retired. If AI can figure out what I do, it's welcome to it.”

• 🥰 S.S: “Too much of my job is mind numbingly repetitive. Better AI would allow me to do more creative things.”