China: Beijing’s backflip over sugar apples signals a much bigger project

What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox. Sugar apples are sweet, covered in a green Jurassic skin and ooze a creamy pulp. Across Asia, they are used in milk teas and jellies, ice-creams and yoghurts. They are a bit cloying for my taste. And until Tuesday, it seems the Chinese Communist Party had problems with them, too. In September 2021, it blocked one of Taiwan’s largest agricultural exports over alleged biosafety and pest fears (claims that would be familiar to Australia’s lobster farmers and timber producers). The period was marked by Taiwan’s pursuit of free trade deals, a pledge by officials in Washington, London and Canberra to work more closely with Taipei, and a sharp increase in military threats from Beijing to Taiwan’s air defence zone. In other words, cross-strait relations were getting worse and Beijing protested by blocking the ...