Emily Fang

He had already spent years in prison on protest charges when his national security trial began in 2023.

And while awaiting his verdict, his family says the 78-year-old's health has declined.

Lai's work funding and organizing pro-democracy demonstrations came late in life.

After arriving in Hong Kong as a refugee, he built a fortune in fast fashion, then started several successful media companies in Hong Kong and Taiwan before pivoting to politics.

China's RedNote app, or Xiaohongshu in Mandarin, was briefly popular in the U.S.

too when the U.S.

considered banning TikTok.

Now the app has been pulled for a year in Taiwan, where Red Note has about 3 million users.

Taiwanese authorities say Red Note has been implicated in at least 1,700 fraud cases so far.

But Beijing blasted Taiwan's decision to pull it, saying the ban, quote, tramples on free speech.

Democratic Taiwan, which China one day wants to control, had already banned TikTok plus Red Note and three other Chinese social media apps from being installed on government phones.

over national security concerns, but it had held off on general bans for ordinary users of Chinese apps because of free speech concerns.

Emily Fang, NPR News.

For the first time ever, China's trade surplus topped $1 trillion this year, meaning it exported that much more in goods than it bought from other countries.

This record-breaking milestone comes despite a year of double, sometimes triple-digit tariffs from the U.S.

So far, shipments from China to the U.S.

have dipped by about a fifth because of those customs levies.

Instead, China has turned to Europe and Southeast Asia to export.

China now sells more than twice what it buys from the European Union.

Overall, exports from China had dipped in October, but they rallied in November, leading to a trade surplus of more than $111 billion for that month alone.