Beijing

A red alert for air pollution has been issued in the Chinese capital for the first time this year as choking smog is expected to cover the city and surrounding areas in north China during the next five days. The red alert, the highest in the color-coded warning system, will come into force at 08:00 p.m. local time on Friday. Private cars will be ordered off the road, with an odd-even number plate system in force, according to a notice posted on the official website of the Beijing municipal government.

In what some have seen as the first warning shot of retaliation against Trump's threats of protectionism and part of China's escalating trade war involving the auto industry, overnight China Daily reported quoting a senior state planning official that Beijing will soon slap a penalty on an "unnamed U.S. automaker for monopolistic behavior."

On Sunday morning, Trump reignited the diplomatic spat with China when during an interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday the President-elect said that his support for the "One China" policy which has underpinned U.S. behavior toward Taiwan since the 1970s,  will hinge on cutting a better deal on trade, in other words it will be a "barter chip" to extract future concessions from Beijing.

While the domestic US audience was focused on what Trump would say about the latest scandal of alleged Russian intervention in the US presidential elections, which as a reminder, he called "ridiculous" and suggested that democrats are behind the report, China was more curious by Trump's foreign policy thoughts, which may have sparked yet another diplomatic spat, because one week after Trump snubbed America's long-running "One China" policy, today the President-elect questioned whether the United States had to be bound by its long-standing position that Taiwan is part of "one China" and brus

While China has been busy de-escalating the recent diplomatic spat with president-elect Donald Trump, with Beijing going so far as to call Trump's ambassador to China, Terry Brandstad, an "old friend", in a less diplomatic-context it is busy pushing every bellicose, nationalist button it can find. In a Thursday editorial in Global Times, China said it should "significantly" increase military spending and produce more nuclear weapons as a response to US President-elect Donald Trump,