Today’s Essential Eight items:

1. Communist Party Member, People’s Leader Xi Jinping

2. New guidelines normalize crackdown on gangs and organized crime

3. Zhang Yiming to step down as ByteDance CEO

4. Carbon emissions surge

5. European Parliament votes overwhelmingly to freeze consideration of the CAI

6. Japan and Korea

7. Xinjiang

8. RIP Robin Munro

Note: I have been attending the virtual Ditchley China conference today so the newsletter is much shorter than usual. It has been very interesting, Chatham House rules unfortunately, though was happy to see several subscribers.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see many of you in tomorrow’s weekly open discussion.