Breitbart reports: "U.S. Homeland Security Blacklists 43 Chinese Firms for Slavery." From the lede:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has added 43 more companies to the “entity list” under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), directing customs agents to presume that all goods from the listed companies are tainted by slave labor from Uyghurs and other oppressed minorities in China.
China Uncensored's latest video returns to the topic of China's demographic collapse evidenced by the dramatic decline in the number of pre-schools and kindergartens, as well as some discussion of failed efforts by the CCP to increase birth rates. His thinking on why the Chinese refuse to have more children tracks my thoughts on the general decline in fertility rates: children have become a luxury that most young people can't or won't pay for.
On the other end, China is seeing deaths outpace births. The Rhodium Group published a paper earlier this year that predicts that China's population will decline by more than 60 million people in the next decade--roughly the population of France. The report goes on to note that:
The headlines are bad, the regional breakdown is worse. The country’s most developed provinces are seeing falling populations, which will impact overall consumption and the future productivity of the labor force. The impact on household consumption is obvious, but the larger problem for Beijing may be the hit to social security funds. The fiscal subsidy to social security funds rose to a record 2.9 trillion yuan last year, or 10.1% of general budget spending, and appears set to rise in the future.
It also states:
The drop in China’s birth rate in the 2020s has been shocking, even in the context of continuous declines since 2018. The ratio of new births to total population reached only 0.563% last year, compared to 1.199% a decade ago in 2015. The total of 7.92 million new births for the full year was the lowest level since 7.57 million in 1939, when China’s population was closer to 400-500 million people.
Admittedly, the number of women of child-bearing age has declined by 13% over the past decade to 213.7 million, but new births more than halved over the same interval. This reflects changes in behavior and preferences, as policy is now pro-natalist and has been far less restrictive since 2016, when the one-child policy was formally abandoned.
Chinese citizens’ decisions to marry and have children later in life are the main reasons behind the collapse in new births. The average age of people married rose to 34 years old in 2024, from 32.4 in 2018. As a result, the number of marriages declined by 40% from 2018 levels to only 6.1 million in 2024 (Figure 2). The average age of women bearing children increased to 30.1 years old in 2024, from 28.4 in 2018. These trends correlate well with additional education and economic advancements in other countries, and these factors are likely having an effect in China as well.
Another more recent factor that may be depressing births is the change in employment conditions. Alongside weaker economic growth, more workers have shifted to the gig economy, which does not provide security nor stable incomes. Additional discussions of potential AI-related job losses may be contributing to popular insecurity and uncertainty, which feed back into the birth rate as well. Social phenomena such as “lying flat,” “letting it rot,” or other societal trends developing within China’s youth also may be contributing to reductions in stable relationships and willingness to have children.
It doesn't help that China is an atheistic country as there is a strong correlation between religiosity and birth rates. (See also, "China’s Population Decline – The Impact on Business, the Economy, and Labor Markets" from China-Briefing).
China faces its own pension crises as well because of fewer workers to support a growing population of retirees. The Diplomat goes over this in a Feb. 11, 2026, article entitled "As China Ages, a Pension Crisis Looms." A key point:
By 2040, roughly 402 million people in China are expected to be over the age of 60, more than a quarter of the population. By comparison, the total population of the United States is expected to reach around 379 million by that time. This shift marks a turning point for China, signaling the erosion of its long-standing advantage in abundant and affordable labor while presenting a formidable financial challenge in caring for an aging society.
These demographic pressures prompted China to begin a gradual adjustment of its statutory retirement age in 2025, the first such change in more than seven decades. The retirement age for men will gradually increase from 60 to 63 over a 15-year period while the retirement age for women will rise from 55 to 58, with adjustments varying by occupation. While delaying retirement may ease fiscal strain, it does little to alter the underlying demographic arithmetic driving the crisis.
VIDEO: "China's Population is Collapsing"
China Uncensored (7 min.)
Some recent news from China, including flooding that led to a dam breach; and poisonous snakes escaping from a breeding facility.
VIDEO: "The Floods Were Devastating. Then The Dams Broke."
China Uncensored (12 min.)
BBC News (via Yahoo) reports that Chinese fishing trawlers are devastating fishing grounds near the coast of Sierra Leone in an official exclusion zone; and, according to the fishermen, even cutting the nets and line used by the native fishers. More generally, the article explains:
West Africa remains the global epicentre for illegal fishing. An estimated 40% of the world's unlicensed catch can be traced to its waters, according to a 2024 global report.
The study estimated that this costs West African nations a combined $10bn in lost revenues, and risks the food security of millions of people. Commentators say that the situation has not improved in the subsequent two years.
Thomas Turay, president of Sierra Leone's Fishermen's Union, says that the average catches for his members are down some 40% in recent years. And he's in no doubt where the blame lies.
"The illegal fishing is too much," he says. "The sea belongs to us, but for the foreign trawlers, they come at night and violate the seven-mile exclusion zone, they come right into the shore here."
And according to the fishermen, the overwhelming majority of the illegal fishing is done by Chinese vessels (as if that should surprise anyone).
An interesting piece from Rod Martin (h/t Instapundit) which asks "Is Scott Bessent Working to Crash the Yuan?" Bessent is the current Treasury Secretary. But back in the day, Martin relates, Bessent was part of the team at Soros Fund Management that “broke the Bank of England.” So he knows how to crash a country's currency. Martin hypothesizes that Trump wanted Bessent to head up the Treasury Department because of his experience in exploiting weaknesses in currencies, and wanted to apply that against China.
Martin explains:
Speculators do not destroy sound currencies by magic. They attack when governments defend lies. They see the contradiction before politicians admit it, before central bankers explain it away, before the press corps discovers it three years too late and pretends it was obvious all along. Britain broke. The pound fell. The Bank of England lost.
[snip]
China is not Britain in 1992. The analogy is not exact, nor does it need to be. Britain was defending a currency arrangement markets no longer believed. China is defending something far bigger: the fiction that an overbuilt, overleveraged, export-addicted dictatorship with too little domestic consumption and evaporating foreign direct investment can keep growing forever while its own people are trapped behind financial walls and its customers are shutting their doors.
That fiction is embodied, crystallized in the yuan.
The yuan is not a normal currency. It is not the dollar. It’s not even the euro. It is a managed instrument of Communist Party control. A real reserve currency requires trust. It requires convertibility. It requires deep and open capital markets. It requires the rule of law. It requires confidence that the government will not trap your savings the moment they become politically inconvenient.
As Martin continues, Trumps tariffs go the heart of the matter because it forces China to defend one of its lies at the expense of revealing the contradiction on other points.
Trump isn’t just raising costs. He is forcing choices. He’s making China decide which lie it wants to defend first: the lie that its export machine can survive without unrestricted access to the American consumer, the lie that its domestic economy is healthy, the lie that the yuan is trusted, or the lie that Communist capital controls are compatible with global financial leadership.
This video from China Uncensored is in response to all the people that say they don't care or are unconcerned about China's power and influence because, in their minds, it doesn't impact their lives. They are wrong.
VIDEO: "I don't care anymore..."
China Uncensored (10 min.)
VIDEO: "China's Rampaging Murders Just Peaked! Out of Control"
serpentza (25 min.)
From the New York Post: "Democrat Eileen Wang agreed with prosecutors that she worked with the People’s Republic of China to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to the city council in Arcadia — a city in the San Gabriel Valley within LA County — in November 2022." I'm sure that she is just one of many.
Apparently one of those "revenge against society" attacks: "Beijing 'covered up passenger plane suicide crash that killed all 132 on board': Data showed pilots wrestled over controls after engines were switched off"--Daily Mail. The aircraft in question was China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 which crashed into mountains in Guangxi province in March 2022 killing all 132 people on board.
The Boeing 737 had been cruising between Kunming and Guangzhou when both engines were manually shut down, the autopilot was disengaged, and the aircraft was forced into a steep nosedive, according to the US findings.
Data extracted from the flight recorders showed a terrifying struggle inside the cockpit, with two pilots fighting over the controls as the jet plunged towards the ground.
The NTSB said: ‘It was found that while cruising at 29,000ft, the fuel switches on both engines moved from the run position to the cut-off position. Engine speeds decreased after the fuel switch movement.’
Graphs released by the American agency showed opposing movements on the pilot's control yokes, indicating one crew member was attempting to recover the aircraft while another continued forcing it into a dive.
Video captured from the ground showed the plane plunging almost vertically from the sky.
No distress call was made by the crew, and no emergency transponder code was transmitted before the impact.
The article also reports:
Three pilots were on the flight deck at the time of the crash - Captain Yang Hongda, 32, first officer Zhang Zhengping, 59, and trainee second officer Ni Gongtao, 27.
Speculation in China has focused heavily on Zhang, one of the airline's senior pilots, who had reportedly recently lost his captain's rank.
John Wilder's latest piece is "China’s Unrestricted Economic War on America." He notes that in 1999, two PLA colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, wrote a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare describing how to take down the U.S. without open warfare. And they have been following it since. He explains:
The idea was simple: use every possible tool to erode the enemy’s strength while pretending you’re just a friendly neighbor.
How many of those boxes have they checked?
And this doesn't even include China buying up U.S. farms and ranches, buying up land abutting U.S. military bases, and flying drones over sensitive locations.
I know that a lot of readers probably disagree with the war against Iran, but it is important to understand that Iran is just a pretext. If it were just about Iran and its nuclear arsenal, the Democrat leadership--at the least the ones that matter--would be all for it. But the real target of the war is China.
Zineb Riboua, in an article penned for The Free Press, explained at the beginning of March:
Operation Epic Fury, this weekend’s joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, has been widely described as an extraordinary assault on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. That is true, but it misses a critical dimension. For years, Beijing has spent billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China’s regional architecture.
In other words: This is all about China.
She continues:
Iran’s value to China also extends to proxy warfare. When Iran’s Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in late 2023, the consequences rippled across the global economy. Container traffic through the Red Sea fell by 90 percent within three months. Goods worth roughly $1 trillion were disrupted in the first seven months. The rerouting of ships around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope added nearly two weeks and about $1 million in fuel costs to every voyage, driving freight rates between Asia and Europe.
The U.S. bore the heaviest burden of response. Carrier strike groups were deployed, air campaigns were sustained for months, and precision munitions costing between $1 million and $4 million per interceptor were expended at a rate that, by mid-2025, had consumed roughly a quarter of America’s high-end missile interceptor inventory. Last week, it was reported that Tehran was close to finalizing a deal for Chinese-made supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, capable of threatening American carriers now massing in the Persian Gulf. Earlier, Chinese suppliers shipped over 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a key missile propellant ingredient, to an Iranian port, enough to rebuild a substantial portion of the ballistic missile stockpile that Israel spent 12 days destroying. Why would Beijing do this? And what does that mean for the United States? Answering those questions requires looking beyond Iran and toward the broader global contest in which Iran plays a role.
Start with oil, because oil is where the entire relationship begins. China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports at steep discounts. The shipments travel on a ghost fleet of tankers that switch off their transponders and relabel their cargo as Malaysian or Indonesian to circumvent American sanctions. Since 2021, the cumulative value of these purchases has exceeded $140 billion. This makes China the main reason the Islamic Republic has not gone bankrupt.
The arrangement works beautifully for Beijing. It gets cheap oil for its industrial base, saving billions annually compared to market-rate suppliers. And in exchange, China acquires influence over a nation of 90 million people sitting astride the world’s most consequential energy corridor.
Meanwhile, Tehran, increasingly cut off from every other major economy, has nowhere else to turn. When Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei received Chinese president Xi Jinping in Iran in 2016, he praised the 25-year strategic partnership as “totally correct and endowed with wisdom,” adding pointedly that “Western governments have never been able to win the Iranian nation’s trust.” Khamenei was not merely flattering a guest. He was describing a structural reality: Iran’s economy now runs on Chinese money, and both capitals know it.
In 2021, the 25-Year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership committed China to invest an estimated $400 billion across Iran’s energy, banking, telecommunications, and infrastructure sectors, formalizing a relationship that was already underway. The deeper this integration runs, the less leverage anyone else has over Tehran, and the more leverage Beijing accumulates.
Meanwhile, Chinese-flagged ships sailed through with less interference. Beijing contributed no vessels to the multinational protection force and issued no condemnation of the attacks. In fact, Chinese satellite companies were providing the Houthis with intelligence to enable their targeting of commercial vessels.
The logic here is simple. Every dollar the United States spends defending Red Sea shipping lanes is a dollar unavailable for submarine production, Pacific bases, or Taiwan contingency planning. Every carrier group stationed in the Gulf of Aden is a carrier group absent from the Western Pacific. Iran’s proxies, armed with Iranian weapons and supported by Iranian intelligence, function as a mechanism of American strategic attrition, and the costs fall entirely on Washington while Beijing accumulates strategic gains.
Real Clear Defense similarly noted in mid-March that the war is really about China, explaining:
Iran is a theater, but it does not hold the final stage. The real battlefield lies within the larger contest between the United States and China over the architecture of the international order.
Seen through that lens, American military pressure on Iran—and earlier actions against Venezuela—assume wider significance. These moves do not merely punish hostile regimes. They strike at elements of the geopolitical framework Beijing has spent decades constructing.
China’s rise has depended not only on domestic economic growth but also on the steady expansion of influence abroad. Beijing has cultivated relationships with states willing to trade with China, align diplomatically with China, or simply welcome a world less dominated by Washington.
Iran occupies a crucial place in that system.
The oil that sustains Tehran’s economy has long flowed eastward to China, often at discounted prices. Countries now under American pressure have supplied nearly 17 percent of China’s imported oil, providing Beijing with a quiet but significant buffer against Western leverage.
To remove Iran from that equation—or even threaten doing so—is to reach directly into China’s long-term energy planning and development strategy.
Iran's importance to China is reflected in the assistance China has given Iran. The Strategist reports:
Several reports in recent weeks have revealed the extent of China’s active support for Iran. The Financial Times
reported on 15 April that China had given Iran a commercial
reconnaissance satellite, providing Tehran with precise targeting
information to hit US military facilities in the Middle East. A Chinese
company, Earth Eye Co, reportedly built and launched the TEE-01B
satellite and provided in-orbit delivery to Iran. Another Chinese
company, Emposat, also supplied Iran with satellite data and control
services. These must have helped Iran target US bases in the war.
Other
reports point to a Chinese geospatial AI and software company,
MizarVision, which published satellite imagery with tagging data on
several US military facilities prior to and even during the war.
On
12 April, CNN reported that China was providing Iran with new
air-defence systems in the coming weeks. These were shoulder-fired
anti-aircraft missiles, CNN said. These are relatively short-range
systems, but they still represent a serious danger to both helicopters
and low-flying combat aircraft. The US-built Stinger is a good example,
and its earlier version was credited with playing a major role in
defeating Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. CNN’s sources
said that China was shipping the weapons through third countries to hide
their origin. China has denied the report.
A 3 April Telegraph
report revealed that China was providing Iran with chemicals for fuel
for ballistic missiles. The report added that four sanctioned vessels
were at Iranian ports, with one more ship waiting offshore. They’d come
from China’s Zhuhai Gaolan port and were transporting sodium
perchlorate, a precursor material for solid-fuel rocket propellant. The
quantity is reported to be enough for hundreds of ballistic missiles.
The five ships reportedly belong to the Iran Shipping Line Group, which
is under sanctions by the US, Britain and the European Union.
So how long should we expect the war to continue? That's hard to say, but one data point has to do with China's strategic oil reserve. Prior to the war breaking out, "China surged oil imports in January and February alone by 16 percent, with Russia exporting around 300,000 additional barrels per day to China," and "China’s combined strategic and commercial reserves now stand at 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion barrels, covering roughly four months of imports." That means that the U.S. blockade may need to go on for more than four months to be effective. But even that may be in doubt, as China expects to benefit from the UAE leaving OPEC.
I fully expect things to get spicy this summer as China begins to feel the bite of sanctions. First, China's Leftist tools will be working overtime to protest and disrupt life in the U.S. and prepare for cheating in the fall elections. Second, we should see China step up its modes of attack outline in Unrestricted Warfare. In that regard, it is notable that a synthetic opioid, cyclorphine, has started showing up on American streets.
They're called "Revenge Against Society attacks." Typically they are carried out with vehicles, although knives are popular as well. And some of them--including one where the killer used a front-loader--have impressive body counts.
VIDEO: "China's 2026 Murder Season Just Kicked off"
serpentza (12 min.)
From "US-Indonesia sign key defence pact, Washington eyes Strait of Malacca":
The US and Indonesia signed a Major Defence Cooperation Partnership Monday, after multiple media reports over the weekend indicated that Jakarta has granted blanket overflight access for American military aircraft. Such access would give the US greater ability to keep an eye on the Strait of Malacca, another global chokepoint for trade.
The agreement is perhaps not as significant as this article makes it appear, since it is mostly one encouraging cooperation through joint exercises and training. The overflight access is currently being negotiated, but if approved, would probably be more significant, allowing the U.S. to better monitor shipping through the Malacca strait--particularly traffic to and from China.
For some background on the significance of the Malacca Strait to China, here are a few articles:
Pam Bondi has reportedly been fired by Trump as the U.S. Attorney General. Trump has been unhappy with her handling of the Epstein files, but the final straw was her allegedly tipping off U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) that the FBI was poised to release a cache of documents concerning Swalwell's links to a Chinese spy, Christine "Fang Fang" Fang. The Daily Mail notes: "It is unclear why Bondi would have intervened, but it is believed that Bondi and Swalwell have a friendly relationship." In any event, it may have given Swallwell time to lawyer up and for his attorney to threaten legal action against the FBI should it release the documents.
Interestingly, Wikipedia notes (footnotes omitted):
In December 2020, Swalwell was named in an Axios story about suspected Chinese spy Fang Fang, known as Christine Fang, who, since at least 2012, had been cultivating contacts with California politicians who the Chinese government believed had promising futures in politics. Axios reported that Fang participated in fundraising for Swalwell's 2014 congressional election bid, met Swalwell at events, and helped place an intern inside his congressional office. ...
The implication is that Swalwell might have been one of those politicians that China believed had a promising future in politics.
From Just The News: "US intel hid Chinese 2020 election meddling from Trump because they opposed his policies, memo says." From the article:
Analysts inside the U.S. intelligence community sought to conceal evidence of Chinese influence efforts from President Donald Trump during the 2020 election, with analysts saying they didn’t want their intel used by “that vulgarian in the Oval Office” to pursue policies toward China they personally disagreed with.
The revelation is found within a January 2021 report written by — and never before reported upon comments by — analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf, who conducted a review of the spy community’s handling of Russian versus Chinese meddling efforts during the 2020 election. Among his conclusions was that intelligence analysts downplayed China’s actions because they had disdain for the “vulgarian” Trump and did not want to support the policies and priorities of the Trump administration toward China with which they “personally disagree.”
In other words, no matter their excuses, they were acting (or failing to act) in order to preserve Chinese influence over U.S. elections, placing them into the category of domestic enemies. The article continues:
This is not the only piece of evidence pointing to Chinese government election influence efforts in the 2020 election. Although much about China’s activities in 2020 remains classified, Just the News conducted a thorough review of publicly-available intelligence assessments, federal indictments, foreign government warnings, and cybersecurity firm analyses.
There is credible evidence that Chinese government-linked cyber hackers and Chinese social media troll farms took aim at the U.S. presidential election in 2020 and sought to undercut Trump during his run against now-former President Biden. There are also indicators that Chinese intelligence and law enforcement agencies — China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and its Ministry of Public Security (MPS) — also played a role in 2020.
Xi Jinping has purged more of his senior military leadership. Some of the rumors and speculation is that high ranking leaders were selling Chinese military secrets to the U.S. or that there was an attempted coup. I wonder if it had to do with the poor performance of Chinese military systems in Venezuela.
VIDEO: "Xi Jinping Has Gone Full Stalin"
China Uncensored (6 min.)
"China’s population falls again as births drop to lowest rate since 1949 communist revolution," reports the Associated Press. Population figures earlier this week show that the population declined by 3 million people last year, and "the birth rate in 2025 — 5.63 per 1,000 people — is the lowest on record since 1949, the year that Mao Zedong’s Communists overthrew the Nationalists and began running China. Figures before that, under the previous Nationalist government, were not available." In other words, birth rates are the lowest ever recorded. The article adds:
Like many other countries in Asia, China has faced a declining fertility rate, or the average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime. While the government does not regularly publish a fertility rate, last saying it was 1.3 in 2020, experts have estimated it is now around 1. Both figures are far below the 2.1 rate that would maintain the size of China’s population.
The actual population figures may actually be much worse than officially reported, however, as the video below explains:
VIDEO: "China’s Real Population: A Question No One Is Allowed to Answer"
Lei's Real Talk (14 min.)
From the War Zone: "China’s Mysterious Submarine-Ship Hybrid Breaks Cover". The craft it a trimaran with a long and large central hull, and two smaller hulls near the back of the craft which resemble nacelles on a science fiction spacecraft. It is believed to be a submarine-ship hybrid, capable of either partial or fully submerged travel, because it has design features of both submarines and surface vessels. "The overall design, as well as features like the depth marks on the sail and elsewhere on the hull, point to it being a hybrid submersible/surface craft, which would offer the benefits of stealth when submerged and relatively efficient travel while surfaced."
In terms of its purpose, one of the most persistent theories is that it’s an arsenal ship.
For some years now, there have been rumors that China is developing a vessel of this kind. The idea would be to have an uncrewed, hard-to-detect vessel that could emerge to launch its missiles (land attack and/or anti-ship) before disappearing below the waves.
From the Daily Mail: "Inside China's bioweapons plot that transformed Michigan's 'Big House' into ground zero of covert warfare." The article reports that on November 5, federal agents charged three Chinese nationals - Xu Bai, 28, Fengfan Zhang, 27, and Zhiyong Zhang, 30 - with conspiring to smuggle genetically modified biological materials related to round worms into the US while working at a University of Michigan (U-M) Shawn Xu research lab. Zhang was also charged with making false statements to federal agents about the shipments.
These cases follow the June arrest of Chengxuan Han, a PhD student from Wuhan who pleaded no contest to smuggling charges before being deported and barred from returning to the US.
Han had sent the modified worm samples from China before joining the lab in Ann Arbor herself.
[snip]
In the same month Han was arrested, federal prosecutors charged a Chinese couple - Zunyong Liu and Yunqing Jian - with trying to smuggle a dangerous crop fungus into the US, which could potentially devastate American fields and poison livestock.
Federal authorities also claim that the more than 600 research and teaching labs at U-M have repeatedly been hijacked by Chinese students and researchers for illicit activities. And beyond the shenanigans at the research labs, the article mentions that "[i]n 2023, five Chinese U-M students were charged after a midnight visit to Camp Grayling, a military training installation in northern Michigan," adding that "Federal agents say they deleted photos, lied about why they were there and tried to cover their tracks. They had all graduated and left the US before charges were filed in October 2024." Finally, the article relates:
Since 2020, U-M has received $375 million in foreign funding, including tens of millions from Chinese entities.
The university struck major partnerships with:
In 2017, U-M even launched its official name in Chinese characters.
And until 2019, it hosted a Confucius Institute, widely seen as a soft-power arm of Beijing.
In other words, the University of Michigan has become a hot spot of spying, bio-terror, and has been assisting China in making better ballistic missiles.
More: "Chinese scientist who smuggled dangerous ‘vomitoxin’ fungus into US deported"--New York Post.
From Yahoo!: "A Chinese Astronaut Heard A Sound In Space That Hasn't Been Explained In Two Decades." An excerpt:
It was October 2003 and a historical moment for China. The country launched its first manned spacecraft carrying astronaut Yang Liwei, and his flight was scheduled to be 21 hours long. During his flight, however, he heard a knocking sound. He described the sound like a wooden mallet hitting a metal surface. The sound occurred on and off. He could not identify the source of it, though reported that it sounded like something was knocking on the outside of the ship.
Adding to the mystery, this was not the last time the sound was heard. Astronauts on Shenzhou 6 in 2005 and Shenzhou 7 in 2008 also reported hearing the exact same sound and were equally unable to identify the cause. Though not exactly the same sound, during the Apollo 10 mission in 1969, astronauts reported hearing eerie whistling while they were on the dark side of the moon; the whistling was even recorded by the ship's systems. Most recently, the astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, famously trapped in space after the fiasco with their Boeing Starliner spacecraft, heard a strange pulsing noise from the ship.
In many of those cases, scientists could find a source for the strange sounds. The Boeing Starliner noise was explained as audio feedback from the Starliner and the International Space Station. The Apollo 10 noise was explained as radio interference between the lunar module and the command module. However, the knocking sounds heard on the three Shenzhou missions have still eluded explanation.
The main reason that sounds in space are alarming is because sound waves have to be able to bounce off of objects to create noise. National University of Singapore professor Goh Cher Hiang explained this to the BBC: "The travelling of sound travels requires a medium — be it air particles or water molecules or metal, solid atoms ... If it is knocking, there could be something physical 'hitting' the spacecraft carrying the astronaut."
Whatever it was, it probably had a bloody steel hook for a hand.
It's not "new" new because it was showcased on 2019, but the QBZ-191 and its improved ammunition, designated as DBP-191, is an attempt to modernize China's small arms, and its traditional layout with a long Picatinny rail along the top of the receiver and hand guard represents yet another country abandoning bullpup designs. The Firearm Blog relates:
The QBZ-191 family of weapon systems consists of three types of firearms: a short-barreled carbine called the QBZ-192, featuring a 266 mm (10.5-inch) barrel; a standard assault rifle designated as QBZ-191, which has a 368 mm (14.5-inch) barrel; and a designated marksman rifle (DMR) called QBU-191, equipped with a 550 mm heavy profile barrel. The DMR is designed for selective fire and serves as a dual-purpose squad support weapon, allowing designated shooters to provide limited suppression fire based on magazine capacity. Continuous use of full-auto fire could reduce the DMR's effectiveness over time.
The QBZ-191 weapon system employs a short-stroke gas system controlled by a three-position gas regulator. It features a rotating bolt with four large locking lugs and helical locking surfaces, like the locking mechanism on AK-type rifles. The bolt carrier is equipped with a cam-in locking mechanism and an anti-pre-engagement lever, which is visible on the top of the bolt carrier and engages with a steel trip on the receiver. Additionally, the system has an elongated cam track that allows the bolt to remain locked for a more extended period, ensuring that the pressure in the barrel decreases to safe levels before unlocking. The QBZ-191's stated rate of fire is high, at 750 rounds per minute.
I will interject to say that they picked a terrible rate of fire for automatic weapons: too fast for being able to adjust the aim as you fire, and too slow to get off a few rounds before the barrel climbs too high to be usable even at close distances. In any event, the article goes on to further describe the rifle and its features.
The secret sauce, so to speak, will be the new ammunition. Unfortunately, the article relates, "[t]he 5.8x42mm DBP-191 ammunition developed for this rifle lacks publicly available data regarding projectile weight or muzzle velocity. However, it appears to utilize brass cases rather than the previous generations' steel, copper-washed, or lacquer-coated ammunition." The article does discuss earlier type of 5.8x42mm ammo, though, which offered bullet weights of 64, 71, and 77 grains depending on the specific type.
A dedicated Armor Piercing load was developed for the 5.8x42mm and designated the DVC-12. In place of a hardened steel core is a tungsten penetrator with a lead ball filling in the air gap in the bullet tip. The projectile weighs 84.7 grains and has a muzzle velocity of 2,881 fps when fired from the GPMG and DMR. The DVC-12 load is claimed to offer a 58% increase in armor piercing performance at 800 meters compared to the steel penetrator equipped DBP-10, and a 37% increase at 1,000 meters. The DVC-12 AP 5.8x42mm cartridge has a black color coded bullet tip.
