We are raiding the Guardian long read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.
This week, from 2022: As the world faces the worst debt crisis in decades, the need for a global lender of last resort is clearer than ever. But many nations view the IMF as overbearing, or even neocolonial – and are now looking elsewhere for help
By Jamie Martin. Read by Kelly Burke

The former chief executive of Nexperia, a Dutch chipmaker, said Dutch officials had known for years that the company’s Chinese owner sought to move its technology to China.

The torn pieces of paper by Gao Zhen, a renowned artist jailed in China, show family portraits, memories of New York and expressions of faith. To his wife, they are love letters.

The White House is aggressively seeking to weaken and dominate the United States’ traditional allies. European leaders must learn to fight back.
Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz have become adept at scrambling to deal with the latest bad news from Washington. Their with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Downing Street on Monday was so hastily arranged that Mr Macron needed to be back in Paris by late afternoon to meet Croatia’s prime minister, while Mr Merz was due on for an...

Commerce department finalising deal to allow H200 chips to be sold to China as strict Biden-era restrictions relaxed
Donald Trump has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, marking a win for the chip maker and its CEO, Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country.
Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns.

Bing Liu’s film is an unflinching portrait of an undocumented Uyghur immigrant and a traumatised US veteran whose fragile connection is strained by their pasts
Chinese-American film-maker Bing Liu made an impression with the about people from his home town in Illinois; now he pivots to features with this sad and sombre study of romance and life choices among those on the margins of US society, adapted from the prize-winning novel of the same name by Atticus Lish.
The scene is the no-...

A gripping film captures the fraught contests, lonely outposts and human toll of the Philippines’ struggle to assert sovereignty against China
Director Baby Ruth Villarama and her crew board an assortment of maritime vessels to record the ongoing strife and its consequences between the Philippines and China over control of what has recently been named the West Philippine Sea (WPS), formerly part of the South China Sea. This area, which is seen by just about everyone (apart from the Peopleâ€...

There's this weird guilt trip many people seem to have when they order orange chicken or crab rangoons. " True enough. Walk into a restaurant in Beijing or Shanghai and you won't find General Tso's ...

Booming Chinese exports have driven trade surplus past $1tn but also reveal the extent of country’s reliance on foreign markets
A boom in exports that has pushed China’s trade surplus past $1tn for the first time reveals the extent to which its economy is still overwhelmingly reliant on foreign markets – and the difficulty figures like Donald Trump will have in trying to rebalance global trade.
Data released on Monday shows that in the first 11 months of this year, China’s trade...

Chinese exports are flooding the developing world, and the social consequences are bound to be profound.