We Don't Have to Trade With China

Nope:

China has restored railway freight traffic with North Korea that had been suspended over pandemic concerns, its foreign ministry said Monday.

Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said the connection across the Yalu River between China’s Dandong and Sinuiju in North Korea had been restored after “friendly consultation between the two sides.”

Zhao said normal trade would be maintained while pandemic controls stay in place, but gave no other details.

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A B.C. senator has resigned his longstanding membership in a pro-Beijing group, the University of British Columbia China Council. Senator Yuen Pau Woo as a Council member once complained of the “sour attitudes many Canadians have about Beijing.”

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 I wouldn't go that far:

"The United States and Taiwan should lay plans for a targeted scorched-earth strategy that would render Taiwan not just unattractive if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain," they write in the U.S. Army War College's most-downloaded paper of 2021. "This could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the most important chipmaker in the world and China's most important supplier."

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Oh, I'm sure:

China will not use its strength to "bully" its smaller neighbours including the Philippines, its foreign minister said on Monday, as he highlighted the importance of settling disputes in the South China Sea peacefully.

"Stressing only one side's claims and imposing one's own will on the other is not a proper way for neighbours to treat each other and it goes against the oriental philosophy of how people should get along with each other," Wang Yi, the Chinese government's top diplomat, told a virtual forum organised by China's embassy in Manila and a local advocacy group.

His remarks come less than two months after the Philippines condemned China's blocking of a military resupply ship in the South China Sea, which prompted a warning from treaty ally the United States that an attack on Philippine vessels would invoke its mutual defence commitments.