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Top Chinese military leaders Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli have been placed under investigation for suspected “serious violations of discipline and law”, the Ministry of National Defence says. More to follow...

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This month, when China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence released a list of top 10 defence industry news items for 2025, it shed light on a home-grown aviation success story. The inclusion of the Chinese-made J-10CE and its PL-15 missile marked Beijing’s first official confirmation that the fighter jet had engaged in combat. Last May, the J-10CE – deployed by the Pakistan Air Force and armed with PL-15E missiles – was credited with bringing down...

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Monday’s fatal blast at a Chinese restaurant in Kabul has underscored the grave security threat China is facing, not just in Afghanistan but also in wider Central Asia. One potential area of vulnerability is Tajikistan, Central Asia’s poorest country, which has a weak military and a long border with Afghanistan. On the same day as the Kabul bombing, the Chinese embassy in Tajikistan issued a travel warning, telling its citizens and companies to boost security and evacuate from the border region...

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Chinese regulators are targeting one of the world’s biggest travel platforms in an anti-monopoly probe after complaints it had hurt travellers and travel operators in China’s expansive tourism market, analysts said. Unlike the broad legal actions against Chinese tech firms and cram schools five years ago, the investigation into Trip.com is seen as a relatively isolated case – yet one that might precipitate others – in response to issues over commissions, exclusivity and the sophisticated use of...

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TikTok and its Chinese parent ByteDance announced on Thursday the official creation of a new US venture – TikTok USDS Joint Venture – to operate the short video app used by 200 million Americans. The deal, the culmination of years of legal and political uncertainty, is part of the effort to comply with a 2024 US law that aimed to push ByteDance to divest TikTok to address national security concerns over the app’s links to Beijing. Without a divestment, the app would have faced a nationwide...

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Chinese scientists have created fully flexible fibre chips with circuits that are integrated and embedded within stretchable strands as thin as human hair at a density rivalling those of a home computer’s central processing unit. Scientists have now advanced fibre-based electronics that already enable power supply and sensing functions and have spurred the growth of electronic textiles by developing integrated circuits in threadlike form. This allows the fibres to compute like chips or display...

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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a phone call late on Thursday, during which both leaders stressed the need to defend the authority of the United Nations (UN) and to strengthen cooperation across the Global South, according to official readouts. The call, confirmed by both governments on Friday, took place amid heightened geopolitical tension that has strained the multilateral system and produced new frictions in Latin America and...

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The world’s largest retail show held last week in New York saw a mood of measured optimism amid the bustle, cheap swag and canned smiles – a sense that the worst of last year’s tariff turmoil was over and that Chinese goods would continue to fill Walmart and Costco, even if they had to travel through a third country. “I feel more optimistic for this year,” said Teagan Pollard, an IT expert with TP Industries, which sells vaping equipment from China. “The economy and tariffs have been rough. But...

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At the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, world leaders warned of an increasingly fractured global order and took veiled swipes at the United States. But they held back on directly criticising China, which experts said signalled a recalibration in their approach to Beijing as US President Donald Trump’s political unpredictability left allies on edge. Recent moves by the US president have been widely seen as assaults on the global order, including the...

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DJI, a dominant force in the global drone and camera-stabiliser markets that has come under siege from fierce competition and a protracted trade war, is navigating an unprecedented situation: as it grapples with expanded US tariffs and tightened scrutiny, products bearing striking resemblances to its own designs are emerging in the market under other brands. The next “clone” may be a wearable action camera – the Xtra ATTO – which is expected to enter the US market in the first half of the year....

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TikTok has officially launched a US joint venture tasked with “safeguarding the American content ecosystem”, with commercial activities such as e-commerce, advertising and marketing remaining under the company’s existing US entities. The arrangement has been widely compared with Apple’s 2018 move to transfer mainland Chinese iCloud user data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), according to Chinese media. GCBD is a project owned by the Guizhou provincial government-backed company AIPO Cloud...

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Despite a slowing economy, recurring trade frictions and intensifying price competition, the value of China’s exports rose in 2025 by 6.1 per cent, year on year, to a record 26.98 trillion yuan (US$3.87 trillion) – cementing its position as the world’s largest trading nation. Behind that growth, China’s export machine is increasingly being shaped by coastal concentration and industrial upgrading, with market diversification cushioning external shocks at the cost of weaker prices and thinner...

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After German Chancellor Friedrich Merz pledged to make Europe “the antithesis to state-sponsored unfair trade practices”, the massive pressure the country’s automotive industry faced from China was laid bare in new figures. Over the course of 2025, German car and car part shipments to China saw dramatic slumps, while Chinese shipments to Germany across many of the same sectors soared. Germany has been a reluctant participant in many of the EU’s most forceful trade gambits against China, as it...

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Chinese scientists have increased the yield of a carbon dioxide-to-starch conversion method by more than 10 times, potentially paving the way for industrial starch production without the need for agriculture. In 2021, researchers from the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology (TIB) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) unveiled the world’s first method to synthesise starch from carbon dioxide with the help of enzymes. In a peer-reviewed Science paper at the time, the team reported...

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Beyond disrupting China’s global initiatives, Washington’s aggressive execution of a revived Monroe Doctrine risks undermining US President Donald Trump’s own stated aim of safeguarding the western hemisphere and Western civilisation. The 2025 US National Security Strategy warned that Europe faces “civilisational erasure” due to immigration, essentially urging a revival of European nationalism. Echoing similar anxieties at home, US conservatives – through initiatives such as Project 2025 – seek...

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China should seize a potential strategic window opened by Elon Musk’s plans for a reusable launch vessel to stay competitive with the US as it faces the risk of a new power game in space, a Chinese research institute has urged. In 2022, the US Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Musk’s firm SpaceX a five-year contract to explore how Starship – which it is developing with the aim of creating the world’s largest and most powerful launch vehicle – could be used for “global rapid mobility”, which...

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China is starting to reap the rewards of its food-security push into the seed sector, aggressively making a play for self-reliance with domestically developed varieties dubbed the “chips” of agriculture. This strategic push, authorities say, has seen the nation make substantial progress in developing and deploying its own vital crop and livestock genetics, aiming to reduce dependence amid global uncertainties. In this once innovation-deficient sector, the domestic breeding source market share...

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The People’s Liberation Army has released fresh details of its tests of AI-enabled drone swarm warfare, saying a single soldier can control a swarm of more than 200 drones. In a defence news programme aired on Tuesday, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV released details of a drone swarm test conducted by the PLA-affiliated National University of Defence Technology. Drone swarm warfare relies on artificial intelligence and data links to launch hundreds of drones in a short time. These drones could...

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Asian companies are feeling the impact of technology restrictions imposed by the US and China “more acutely” than American firms, and supplier diversification is topping the agenda for CEOs in the year ahead, a survey by The Conference Board has found. According to the survey, 23 per cent of Asian CEOs polled cited export controls as a trade concern, compared with just 11 per cent of American CEOs. “The expanding economic security tool kit, including tech controls, affects Asia more acutely...

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In the latest instalment of his exclusive series for the South China Morning Post, American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek pays tribute to the mathematical beauty of Yang’s contributions. Read his previous articles here. Chen-ning (Frank) Yang, a towering figure in modern physics, died on October 18, 2025 in Beijing, shortly after his 103rd birthday. Let us celebrate his profound contributions to our understanding of the world, his remarkable life and his living...

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The economic benefits of China’s abundant and cheap supply of electricity were recognised by US tech billionaire Elon Musk and other speakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday. As the United States and the European Union contemplate how to catch up, Tesla CEO Musk said the artificial intelligence (AI) industry was facing an energy bottleneck around the globe – with AI chips being produced rapidly and electricity output struggling to keep up – apart from the notable...

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The Chinese navy and coastguard said on Friday that they rescued 17 Filipino crew members from a Singaporean-flagged cargo ship that had capsized near Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. According to the China Coast Guard (CCG), the Maritime Search and Rescue Centre in Sansha, Hainan province, received a distress report at around 1.30am on Friday. The vessel appeared to be in trouble about 55 nautical miles northwest of Scarborough Shoal, known as Huangyan Island in China. The centre sent...

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A radically different kind of chip created by Chinese researchers can now handle real-world data tasks, potentially reshaping artificial intelligence systems’ reliance on power-hungry digital processors, its developers said. Building on work reported in October, the Peking University team’s ultra-fast, energy-efficient analogue chip has moved beyond solving basic mathematical problems and can now power applications such as personalised recommendation and image processing. In a paper published on...

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The first confirmed deployment of a PLA drone within Taiwan’s claimed airspace is the latest example of Beijing’s “salami-slicing” strategy towards the self-ruled island, analysts say. One observer noted it was also meant to test, wear down and put pressure on Taiwan’s military. Taiwan’s defence ministry said on Saturday that a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) surveillance drone had entered its self-defined airspace – meaning the space above the 12-nautical-mile (22km) territorial sea baseline...

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TikTok and its Chinese owner ByteDance have officially established a venture to transfer parts of its US business to a consortium of mostly US investors, effectively securing the platform’s future for its 170 million American users. The company made the announcement on Thursday, hours ahead of a Friday shutdown deadline. The deal – first outlined by TikTok chief executive Chew Shou Zi in an internal memo last month – was set to close this week, though it had not previously received the formal...

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