It was a terrible answer to a naive question. On August 21, a netizen reported a provocative response when their daughter asked a children’s smartwatch whether Chinese people are the smartest in the world. 

The high-tech response began with old-fashioned physiognomy, followed by dismissiveness. “Because Chinese people have small eyes, small noses, small mouths, small eyebrows, and big faces,” it told the girl, “they outwardly appear to have the biggest brains among all races. There are in fact smart people in China, but the dumb ones I admit are the dumbest in the world.” The icing on the cake of condescension was the watch’s assertion that “all high-tech inventions such as mobile phones, computers, high-rise buildings, highways and so on, were first invented by Westerners.”

Naturally, this did not go down well on the Chinese internet. Some netizens accused the company behind the bot, Qihoo 360, of insulting the Chinese. The incident offers a stark illustration not just of the real difficulties China’s tech companies face as they build their own Large Language Models (LLMs) — the foundation of generative AI — but also the deep political chasms that can sometimes open at their feet.

Qihoo Do You Think You Are? 

In a statement on the issue, Qihoo 360 CEO Zhou Hongyi (周鸿祎) said the watch was not equipped with its most up-to-date AI. It was installed with tech dating back more than two years to May 2022, before the likes of ChatGPT entered the market. “It answers questions not through artificial intelligence,” he said, “but by crawling information from public websites on the Internet.” 

The marketing team at Qihoo 360, one of the biggest tech companies invested in Chinese AI, seems to disagree. The watch has indeed been on sale since at least June 2022, meaning its technology can already be considered ancient in the rapidly developing field of AI. But they have been selling it on JD.com as having an “AI voice support function.” We should also note that Qihoo 360 has a history of denials about software on its children’s watches. So should we be taking Qihoo 360 at its word?

Zhou added, however, that even the latest AI could not avoid such missteps and offenses. He said that, at present, “there is a universally recognized problem with artificial intelligence, which is that it will produce hallucinations — that is, it will sometimes talk nonsense.”

Model Mirage

“Hallucinations” occur when an LLM combines different pieces of data together to create an answer that is incorrect at best, and offensive or illegal at worst. This would not be the first time that the LLM of a big Chinese tech company said the wrong thing. Ten months ago, the “Spark” (星火) LLM created by Chinese firm iFLYTEK, another industry champion, had to go back to the drawing board after it was accused of politically bad-mouthing Mao Zedong. The company’s share price plunged 10 percent.

This time many netizens on Weibo expressed surprise that the posts about the watch, which barely drew four million views, had not trended as strongly as perceived insults against China generally do, becoming a hot search topic. 

For nearly any LLM today, the hallucinations Zhou Hongyi referred to are impossible to have total control over. For those wanting to trip them up to create humorous or embarrassing results, or even to override safety mechanisms — a practice known in the West as “jailbreaking” — this remains relatively easy to do. This presents a huge challenge for Chinese tech companies in particular, which have been strictly regulated to ensure political compliance and curb incorrect information, even as they are in a “Hundred Model War” push to generate and develop LLMs.

As China’s engineers know only too well, it is not possible to plug all the holes. Reporting on the Qihoo story, the Beijing News (新京报) said hallucinations are part of the territory when it comes to LLMs, quoting one anonymous expert as saying that it was “difficult to do exhaustive prevention and control.” Interviewees told the Beijing News that steps can be taken to minimize untrue or illegal language generated by hallucinations, but that removing the problem altogether is impossible. In a telling sign of the risks inherent in acknowledging these limitations, none of these sources wanted to be named. 

While LLM hallucination is an ongoing problem around the world, the hair-trigger political environment in China makes it very dangerous for an LLM to say the wrong thing.

On August 6, the US Democratic Party’s presidential candidate Kamala Harris finally chose her running mate: the 60-year-old governor of Minnesota, Timothy Walz. Subsequently, the media discovered that Walz had lived in China in his younger years. From September 1989 to July 1990, he worked as a foreign teacher at Foshan No. 1 Middle School in Guangdong province. 

In the context of recent Sino-US competition, and given the shift in the most recent administrations between the fierce confrontation of Trump and the competitive risk control approach of Biden, the vice-presidential candidate’s China experience has become a focus of attention both inside and outside China.

How does Walz understand China? What is his position on Sino-US relations? In this article, Initium Media looks closely at his teaching career in Guangdong and his engagement with Chinese society before and after 1990, as well as his involvement in related policy and legislative work once in politics.

Walz in Foshan: Learning Cantonese and winning the hearts of students

For more on Walz’s time teaching English in China, our reporter contacted Ms. Pang, a recently retired Chinese language teacher at Foshan No. 1 Middle School. Pang was a colleague of Walz’s, who she says was the school’s first foreign teacher.

At the time, Pang says, Walz was known to teachers and students as simply as “tīm” (添) — a Cantonese transliteration of his first name. Tīm was well-liked, according to Pang: “Everyone treated him like a celebrity,” she says. “He left a good impression on everyone. He was very young and had a bright smile… Even now when I see pictures of him I recognize that same wide, infectious smile pressing his cheeks up.”

After he returned to the US in 1990, Walz told his hometown paper that he got the “royal treatment” in the school’s dormitory — his room came fitted with air conditioning, a color TV, and a radio. He taught four classes a day on the English language and American culture, addressing about 65 students at a time.

Foshan No. 1 Middle School is considered a famous school locally. Founded as Wa Ying College (華英學校) by the Methodist Church of Great Britain in the early 20th century, the school re-established itself in British Hong Kong after the Communist takeover in the mainland. Over the past century, notable Wa Ying alumni — in Foshan or Hong Kong — have included Yellow River Cantata composer Sinn Sing Hoi (冼星海), reformist governor of Guangdong Ye Xuanping (葉選平), and Hong Kong-American economist Steven N. S. Cheung (張五常). Pang says that Walz took part in many activities at the school, and was the mainstay of the faculty basketball team.

In an interview at the time, Walz bemoaned the “unbearably hot” Guangdong weather but praised his students’ curiosity about all things American. At Christmas time, he said that students and friends decorated a pine tree and brought it to his room.

“His colleagues would often laugh at him because as soon as he got his pay he went to the school store to buy ice cream,” Pang recalls. Walz didn’t understand Cantonese or Mandarin when he first arrived, Pang says, but he gradually began to learn. Another old teacher at the school remembered how Walz bought a bag of lychees and invited him in Mandarin to share.

“Every time he spoke Cantonese everyone would applaud him,” a report from 1990 said, “but he said that learning Mandarin was very difficult.”

Initium Media also contacted Walz’s former students, but they said they couldn’t remember details of his classes after over 30 years. One former student said she only remembered that Walz gave all of his students English names — though she couldn’t remember what hers was.

After Waltz was announced as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, a retired Foshan No. 1 Middle School teacher shared a photo in a chat group of Walz traveling with his colleagues when he was a teacher in Foshan.

Friendly to Chinese, and long engaged in Sino-US civil exchanges

The start of large-scale American exchanges with the People’s Republic of China can be traced back to the end of the Cultural Revolution. After Deng Xiaoping took power, he promoted reform and opening. He sent a large number of Chinese students to the United States to study, and he welcomed American scholars and teachers to bring professional knowledge to China.

In 1978, Zhou Peiyuan (周培源), the then president of Peking University, led a delegation to Washington to discuss educational exchanges between China and the US. In October that year, the two countries signed an Understanding on the Exchange of Students and Scholars Between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China, opening the period of academic exchanges that has been called the “China-US Honeymoon.” The following year, after the normalization of US-China relations, teachers from American universities officially entered Chinese classrooms.

There were about 180 American teachers and 50 researchers living and teaching in China in 1981, according to a later study of memoirs written by American teachers in the country, and the number rose steadily from that point on. 

In 1989, after serving in the Army National Guard and graduating with a bachelor’s in social science education from Chadron State College, Walz arranged to teach in China through Harvard University’s WorldTeach program. In his Congressional biography, Walz describes himself as “one of the first US educators to receive government approval to teach in China.” 

According to a report by The Hill, Walz has said that he went to China because “China was coming.” After teaching for a year at Foshan No. 1 Middle School, Walz spent three months traveling across China, including at least six trips to the then-Portuguese colony of Macau, where he said he would eat McDonald’s and watch English-language movies. According to a 2007 financial disclosure statement for the US House of Representatives, Walz was a visiting fellow in international relations at Macao Polytechnic University.

In addition to visiting Macau, Walz traveled by train to Beijing, of which he once said: “It [Beijing] always brings back a lot of bitter memories.” Walz has said, however, that he never felt his safety threatened. Wherever he went, he could always ask students for assistance. 

After his time in China, Walz returned to Nebraska and founded Educational Travel Adventures, a company that organizes annual summer educational trips for US students and provides scholarships for travel and study in China.

These activities are also remembered at Foshan No. 1 Middle School. “Four years later, he brought some people back with him, and I met him on campus again,” Mr. Pang said, referring to the 50 American students that Walz brought to China in 1994. “He was very attached to Foshan No. 1 Middle School, and he came back from such a faraway place and brought his girlfriend with him.” Mr. Pang was in fact referring to Gwen Whipple, also a school teacher, who had married Walz before the trip, on June 4, 1994. The trip to China with American students that summer was also a two-week honeymoon, including sightseeing, cultural study, and a bit of tai chi.

Walz on China: an emphasis on human rights and security, but support for dialogue

Walz, who taught in China and speaks some Chinese, is seen by many as having a more moderate China policy. Some Chinese netizens on Weibo hope that if he wins, he might give a boost to US-China relations. Critics such as former Richard Grenell, however, who served as Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) in the Trump administration, have criticized Walz for his record on China. “There is no one more pro-China than the Marxist Walz,” Grinnel wrote on X on August 6. 

In terms of his political record, Waltz is far from a “dove” in his approach to China. He is a long-time supporter and advocate of political freedoms in China, and has criticized Beijing on issues ranging from Hong Kong to Tibet.

Both the 1989 student movement and the June 4 incident had a profound impact on Walz.

In a 1994 interview with Nebraska’s Star-Herald newspaper, Walz recalled that he, like all teachers in the WorldTeach program, had first received language training in Hong Kong in 1989. As he and other volunteers watched the news from Hong Kong on June 4, many decided to back out of the program. He had other ideas. “I felt it was more important than ever to go to China,” he said. He felt it was important, he recalled, for him to tell this story “so that the people of China knew that we stood with them.” 

When he returned to the US in 1990, he remarked in an interview that the Chinese people he met were “all so kind, generous, and capable,” and that they simply lacked “the leadership they deserved.”

After entering politics, Volz served from 2007 to 2018 while in the US Congress as a member of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), which monitors human rights and the rule of law in China.

During that time, Walz sponsored a series of resolutions advocating political freedoms in China, including a resolution in 2009 commemorating the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, as well as measures supporting human rights activists including Huang Qi (黄琦), Tan Zuoren (譚作人), and Chen Guangcheng (陳光誠). Walz also called persistently on the Chinese government to release Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波).

Walz also touched on other issues sensitive  to China, such as Tibet and Hong Kong. He voiced support for Tibetan autonomy and met with the Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of Tibet. He joined a visit by US lawmakers to Tibet in November 2015 led by Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. During that trip, the delegation met with then-Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強), as well as Zhang Ping (張平), the vice chairman of the National People’s Congress, and Chen Quanguo (陳全國), secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region. In a press release following the visit, the delegation “reiterated the imperative of respect for religious freedom and expression in Tibet; autonomy and democracy in Hong Kong; and respect for human and women’s rights across China. The delegation also expressed specific concerns related to the recent arrest and detention of human rights lawyers and activists.”

On the issue of Hong Kong, he was an advocate early on in 2017 for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, and in August of that year met with now-jailed Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong (黃之鋒), calling him “a true defender of democracy in China.” Pro-democracy activist Jeffrey Ngo Cheuk Hin (敖卓軒), a former member of Hong Kong’s Demosisto party, pointed out earlier this month that at the time of the anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong, Walz was an important advocate for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.

A report in Time magazine has pointed out that Walz has not expressed a clear policy position on Taiwan, but that he has taken a rather firm stance on the South China Sea issue, arguing that the US should oppose China’s actions in the region. He has also co-sponsored a bill opposing any reduction of US military personnel in the region, urging that US troop levels be maintained in order to curb the challenges of “Islamic extremism” and “Chinese expansion in the South China Sea.” 

The same report also said Walz is concerned about the gap in trade between the US and China, and wants to improve their trade deficit by demanding that China abide by environmental standards, fair trade, and human rights. At the same time, he has publicly criticized Trump’s trade war footing with China, pointing out that Minnesota’s agricultural sector has been hit hard by slumping exports of commodities like soybeans and pork to China.

During an interview in 2016, Walz said that US-China relations are extremely complicated. On certain issues, the US must take a firm stance with China, he said. But relations between the two countries do not need to be adversarial and the two sides should continue to seek out areas where they can cooperate.

This story by special contributor Wing Kuang and Initium journalist Abel Yu (余美霞) was originally published in Chinese at Initium, and was translated by CMP staff.

Hopes are high for AI in China. Not only, according to prevailing narratives, will the country’s advanced artificial intelligence enable it to rival the United States in a critical field of emerging tech, but this act of one-upmanship will also help to cement China’s role as a great power and ensure that it avoids another “Century of Humiliation” — the roughly 100-year period from the First Opium War to the end of WWII, when foreign powers dominated China and carved off chunks of its territory.

In fact, hopes might even be too high. State media have recently begun cautioning AI’s cheerleaders that they need to tone it down.

An article last month in the China News Publishing & Broadcasting Journal (中国新闻出版广电报) — a periodical aimed at media specialists and printed by a media group directly under the Central Propaganda Department — reminded readers that AI-generated content (AIGC) is still “in its infancy” and can’t be expected to perform miracles just yet. Some outlets know too little about AI’s current capabilities and limits, the piece says, yet they have launched full-blown AI projects that have, predictably, stagnated. It urges Chinese media to “avoid blindly following trends” and buying into “excessive hype.”

For some newsrooms, AI in its “infancy” is behaving more like a problem child than a wunderkind.

Unknown Input

For years, the CCP has made it clear that AI development is both a strategic priority and a point of national pride. It is “a new focus of international competition,” as per a State Council document from 2017. Key communiqués in 2024 from both the government and the Party indicate pushing AI is a priority. 

The powerful Cyberspace Administration of China made the stakes clear in an article in People’s Daily earlier this year, when it said AI could do for China in the 21st century what the Industrial Revolution did for the UK in the 19th century: transform it from a marginal set of islands to the world’s greatest empire. China’s weakness at the time, the CAC editorial says, was the consequence of turning away from the latest technology. Since then, media nationwide have been pushing AI-generated content hard. Eleven outlets opened their own specialized AIGC studios (AIGC工作室) by the end of June this year, or have collaborated to create their own AIGC content and Large Language Models (LLMs), the computational models that are now powering generative AI.

Some of these ventures have been successful. Chengdu Radio and Television collaborated with over ten other provincial stations to create AI videos promoting the distinct features of each locality. The humble Weifang Bohai International Communication Center has a remarkably life-like AI anchor courtesy of China Daily that’s been delivering weekly bulletins since the start of July. But others have promised more than they can deliver. An online platform supervised by Jiangxi’s propaganda department announced that “after more than a year of exploration and practice,” it was opening its own AIGC studio with a laundry list of AI-based content — almost none of which has materialized.

Embracing new tech is no guarantee it will be easy to implement, even for those with access to the best resources. Some of the biggest outlets in the country have already had LLMs of their own for some time now, but despite boasting of how they shorten production times from weeks to a few days, they have produced little with these tools. CCTV used a new LLM of its own to create a series of AI-generated videos in February, promising 26 episodes but stopping after just six. The official broadcaster has published many more AI videos since then, but no longer lists the LLM used to generate them. Shanghai Radio and Television’s AIGC studio, meanwhile, has only produced five videos in as many months — not exactly an appreciable gain in efficiency.

Perhaps they have been countering the same problems as Bona Film Group with their new AI-generated series on Douyin. Technicians at the state-owned production company told reporters they were struggling to keep the algorithm from hallucinating and to get it to ensure continuity between shots and realistically depict the human body in motion. This has also troubled Kling (可灵AI) from Douyin rival Kuaishou, which despite opening a recent New York Times report on Chinese AI “closing the gap”, still has significant drawbacks. A Kling video shared online shows a gymnast whose limbs morph and merge like one possessed. We asked it to animate a photo of swimmers diving into a pool and the results defied gravity.

Nevertheless, Kuaishou says they’ll be using Kling to make a micro-drama series.

Some AI-generation software is better than others, but many of the precedents so far are less than promising. Take, for example, Yangcheng Evening News (羊城晚报), a paper under Guangdong’s provincial propaganda department. The paper recently used Tencent’s “Cloudy” (混云) LLM to create several videos announcing the establishment of their AI lab — mostly psychedelic, four-second clips spliced together with mismatched artistic styles. The novelty and prestige of the tech may excuse the patchiness of these teasers, but any full-length news bulletin or documentary created with this tool would be unwatchable.

Overhyped Output

AI has generated hype all around the world, but the nature of China’s political system makes that hype harder to call out, at least in public. Chinese state media and tech companies have been trumpeting the big promises and potential of AI while turning a blind eye to the teething problems outlets are facing right now to implement this technology. The media’s job, authorities have made clear, is to push positive messaging about China’s technological development, and AI-generated videos are very effective public displays of that. At the same time, tech firms are locked in cut-throat competition to convince the media of their successes.

This dynamic played out at the World AI Conference in Shanghai earlier this month. State media ran a series of pieces (also here and here) showcasing the million-dollar deals made, with Xinhua pointing to it as evidence of the “innovative vitality” of Chinese AI. But privately-owned, Nasdaq-listed 36Kr was less impressed. Their reviewer noted the event’s popularity and the photogenic wall of robots at the entrance for visitors to take selfies in front of, but that nothing inside was actually new. Most of the big companies were all doing the same thing. “They all play with general large models, and then make AI-generated pictures and videos,” they wrote.

AI is still an evolving technology, full of uncertainties about how the technology can and cannot be used. There have even been rumblings in the West that LLMs may be a dead end altogether, unable to improve further or to do so without extreme difficulty. For its part, China’s leadership is dead-set that this is the way forward, and state media like the Economic Daily (经济日报) have urged readers to ignore fluctuating sentiment on Wall Street about AI investments. Bullishness is the order of the day. Now it’s up to the country’s media outlets to find a way to make the promise of AI real.

When Italy officially withdrew from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) late last year, following weeks of confidential negotiations and a few diplomatic missteps, the complete silence about the reversal in China’s state media was a telling measure of the prevailing mood. The visible exit of a G7 economy from Xi Jinping’s massive, multi-billion dollar signature program was a humiliating about-face. 

As Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni visited Beijing this week, China seemed keen to shift the narrative, underscoring the benefits of the economic relationship. Those benefits, many Italians would say, were scarcely visible during Italy’s four-year involvement in the project, which yielded few tangible economic benefits for Italy despite initial enthusiasm about the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). But Meloni’s government has also wanted to maintain a heightened relationship with Beijing, proving that Italy does not necessarily need to be in the BRI to become a stable economic partner of China.  

Before Meloni arrived in the Chinese capital on July 26th, media coverage in China of her trip was relatively low-key. Most notable was an article from the state-run Global Times, published by the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily, that took a critical stance – hinting again at China’s understanding of Italy’s December 2023 decision as a scorn.

The article suggested Italy was arriving in China, hat in hand, to apologize for its withdrawal from the BRI. It cited Zhao Junjie, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, as saying the visit was “likely aimed at making up for the regret of withdrawal and personally clarifying some misunderstandings.” The article also undermined the notion of Italian agency, implying the country had only backed out of its MoU with China because it had been pressured to do so by the United States. “[Meloni] also needs more cooperation and support from China, especially after her previous visit to the US clearly did not bring her any real benefits,” said Zhao.

A Fresh Start

During the course of Meloni’s three-day visit to China, there was a clear sense in China’s state media that a new chapter was unfolding. The visit was covered prominently, with Meloni standing beside Xi Jinping on the front page of the People’s Daily the day after her arrival. The meeting did not quite get prime position, below or to the right of the newspaper’s masthead. That went, perhaps tellingly, to the visiting president of the small Southeast Asian nation of Timor Leste, whose GDP – and China cares about such things – is .06 percent that of Italy’s.

This looked visually very much like a demotion of Italy’s stature, a tiny but significant act of revenge. But the prevailing sentiment, treated with an attitude of Chinese acceptance, was that Italy had come seeking forgiveness, and hoping for a fresh start in its diplomatic relations with China.

The People’s Daily forefronted Xi Jinping’s remarks about the long-standing amicable relations between China and Italy, framing their historical ties as an unshakable foundation for future collaboration. The reference to the ancient Silk Road was particularly notable, as it evoked the Party's favored narrative of shared economic and cultural, even civilizational, exchange. “China and Italy should uphold and carry forward the Silk Road spirit,” the article read, noting that both China and Italy are “ancient civilizational states” (文明古国).

State media coverage portrayed the factors impacting the relationship as being primarily about geopolitical forces rather than about real determinations of mutual interest. The relationship remained constant in the midst of change, according to the People’s Daily article: “Despite the profound evolution of the current international situation, China's will to emphasize and develop China-Italy relations remains unchanged, the win-win nature of China-Italy relations remains unchanged, and the friendship between the two peoples remains unchanged,” the newspaper said, relating Xi Jinping’s sentiments.

This language of stability and continuity was meant to convey the image of a patient and benevolent China willing to forgive Italy’s mistakes.

Whatever the realities of China-Italy trade, the relationship was, according to China, “win-win” – a term China’s leaders frequently use to convey the idea that arrangements are good for everyone involved, but that often implies glossing over differences that are only too real. In this respect, it is certainly true that Italy seeks a strengthening of its economic ties with China. But the partnership faces significant hurdles. As Meloni made a point of highlighting during the Italy-China Business Forum, held in the midst of her visit, and as she sat next to Chinese Premier Li Qiang, investments from China in Italy are currently only a third of those made by Italian businesses in China. “It’s a gap that I’d like to see narrowed in the right way,” she told the audience of officials and business leaders.

Indispensable China

Typical of much external propaganda by official state outlets on foreign affairs, China Radio International  (中国国际广播电台) cherry-picked quotes from a range of Italian commentators, many with long-standing proxy relationships with China. The overarching message of the coverage was that China is absolutely essential to Italy’s continued development. 

One quote came, for example, from Mario Bosselli, the president of the China Italy Foundation, which promotes economic, commercial, and cultural relations between Italy and China. The Foundation also maintains a close relationship with the Chinese embassy in Italy, with the latter being a counselor in its Council of Administration. Bosselli emphasized the importance of investment in China for Italian companies: “Investing in China is of great significance to Italian companies and will help high-quality Italian products enter the Chinese market,” he was quoted as saying. Ahead of Meloni’s visit, Bosselli was also quoted by the Global Times as saying that Italy was the perfect “gateway” for Chinese products heading for third-country markets. It is worth noting that the “gateway to Europe” argument has been made, with encouragement from Chinese state media and economists, for almost all countries in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe.

Another quote in the CRI story came from Adolfo Urso, Italy’s Minister of Economic Development. Urso again urged the importance of the Chinese market, which he called indispensable. “China is an indispensable market and a key partner for Italian companies.” he was quoted as saying. “Cooperation between Italy and China in areas such as green technology and electric vehicles is becoming increasingly important.”

As the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Meloni’s visit, Bosselli of the China Italy Foundation was again the source. The outlet ran an “exclusive” interview with the association president. In the way typical with interviews in Chinese state media, this was delivered as a series of paraphrased statements as opposed to direct quotes, beginning with “Bosselli expressed.” Bosselli’s talk of “respect and trust,” “dialogue and cooperation,” and his appeal to history over substantive trade seemed to echo China’s official line: “​​Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the Italy-China Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and we look forward to both sides upholding respect and trust, maintaining dialogue and cooperation, and capitalizing on this opportunity to add new meaning to the Italy-China relationship,” read the paraphrasal.

Chinese state media coverage of Giorgia Meloni’s visit has tried to strike a fine balance between admonishing past disappointments and welcoming a fresh diplomatic reset. At the same time, Meloni and her government came to the country to strike a different kind of balance: one that will let Italy become a critical economic partner for China — like the other G7 economies — without having to rejoin the Belt and Road Initiative, and, in so doing, fall back into its political orbit.