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China has made strengthening export control rules and safeguarding supply-chain resilience top priorities this year, as officials move to secure the nation’s economic interests amid rising geopolitical friction. The Ministry of Commerce said it would enhance legal frameworks and risk prevention and tighten the “safety net for opening up” as one of eight core work areas, according to a statement released on Sunday after its annual work conference in Beijing. China has increasingly used export...

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China has voiced opposition to the use of force in the Middle East as US President Donald Trump threatened to strike Iran over escalating protests there. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning on Monday said Beijing hoped Iran’s government and its people would overcome “current difficulties” and uphold stability in the country. “We always oppose interference in other countries’ internal affairs,” she said at a press conference, responding to a question about Trump’s threats to attack...

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Human migration is as old as history and as current as today’s headlines of law enforcement operations and tragedy. Amid the encounters, the question remains: how do strangers become a single people? Today, more than 90 per cent of China’s population identifies as Han Chinese, despite centuries of migration and upheaval. Historians once credited this unity to strong rulers, uniform writing and Confucius. But archaeologists in China are finding the answer in the bowl rather than the sword or pen....

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Authorities in Mogadishu had cleared the roads for a historic visit, yet on Friday Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi travelled to Tanzania instead of his planned visit to Somalia. It would have been the first high-level Chinese mission to Mogadishu in four decades. The last-minute decision not to include the capital on Wang’s itinerary came as Somalia seeks shows of diplomatic support after Israel recognised the breakaway region of Somaliland last month. A source at the presidential palace told...

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China has vowed to deepen cooperation in new energy and green minerals with the nations in the Global South, saying the move is in line with their industrial goals and a step towards further advancing Beijing’s economic opening-up, according to the latest front-page commentary in the Communist Party’s official newspaper. “Amid profound changes in the global environment, [China’s commitment to further opening up] underscores our confidence and responsibility in upholding openness and win-win...

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Alibaba Cloud’s flagship Qwen family of artificial intelligence models surpassed 700 million downloads as of January on the developer platform Hugging Face, which made it the world’s most widely used open-source AI system. According to research published on Friday by consultancy AIBase, citing data from Hugging Face, estimated Qwen downloads as of December alone exceeded the combined total of the next eight most popular models on the platform globally, including those from Meta Platforms and...

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Reported discussions between Riyadh and Islamabad over a potential deal involving fighter jets co-developed by China and Pakistan could be a “big win” for Beijing’s arms exports to the Gulf region, analysts said. However, doubts remained over whether such an agreement would actually proceed on the grounds that the JF-17 was in such marked contrast to Saudi Arabia’s Western-centric air force. A Reuters report on Thursday that cited two Pakistani sources said Islamabad and Riyadh were in talks for...

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Chinese researchers have released the world’s first software for lunar timekeeping, a tool designed to support precise navigation and landings as a new global race to the moon gathers pace. Clocks tick faster on the moon than on Earth due to weaker gravity – by about 56 millionths of a second per day. The effect, predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is tiny but accumulates over time, making Earth time increasingly unreliable for lunar operations. To address this, a team...

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China’s artificial intelligence efforts are unlikely to catch up with the United States in the near term despite making significant headway in recent years, according to the country’s leading AI researchers. The comments at a major industry conference in Beijing on Saturday underscored the gap between the two countries in semiconductor chips and chipmaking equipment, key resources for building out the infrastructure needed for developing cutting-edge AI models. Lin Junyang, technical lead of...

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With domestic profits narrowing and production capacity expanding, China’s firms are continuing to widen their overseas footprints in search of new, more lucrative markets. In this series, we examine China Inc.’s next phase of “going global” and the complex, challenging international environment its companies have chosen to enter. Chinese national Steve Xie has been doing business overseas for years. His latest venture, a new warehouse in Egypt, will supply electric vehicles and auto parts to...

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In today’s chaotic world, we can sum up the shift in the global economy and geopolitics with a single number: 1 trillion. The year 2024 will be remembered as the first time in history that a national government’s interest payments on its debt exceeded US$1 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. Despite US President Donald Trump’s pledge to cut federal spending and his aggressive global trade war, the United States is now adding US$1 trillion in national debt every...

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Mainland China’s retail and retail property sectors have suffered another blow amid a fresh wave of store closures by foreign and Hong Kong brands. “The series of closures come as a combined result of their outdated business models and profound changes in the macroeconomic environment,” said Wang Tianshi, an analyst at Shanghai-based LeadLeo Research Institute. “Compared with emerging mainland retailers, Hong Kong and foreign brands often remain under a ‘selling on the mainland’ phase, rather...

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Zheng Yongnian is a leading Chinese political scientist and government adviser, with a focus on the country’s transformation and foreign relations. In his third interview for the Open Questions series, Zheng discusses the “Donroe Doctrine” and its implications for the existing world order – and an emerging one. For other interviews in the series, click here. On Venezuela, you have noted that the US pivot to Latin America could reshape the regional order and that Donald Trump’s warnings to other...

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The extreme precision of the US in its Venezuelan operation shows why nations must be able to execute a complex special surgical strike, according to analysts who said China had long pursued the capability but had yet to master it. In a complex joint endeavour integrating its air force, navy, intelligence agencies and space and cyber units, the US military’s elite Delta Force special mission unit completed its precision raid in Caracas – from infiltration to exfiltration – in less than three...

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Chinese firms have signalled plans to launch more than 200,000 internet satellites, filing submissions with a UN agency just as Beijing accused Elon Musk’s SpaceX of crowding shared orbital resources. A dozen or so submissions from various Chinese satellite players were filed with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the end of last month. The biggest projects – CTC-1 and CTC-2 – were for 96,714 satellites each and filed by the newly established Institute of Radio Spectrum...

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Chinese authorities have again stressed that hiking on the deadly Aotai Line in northwestern China is illegal after three more people died on what Chinese media has described as the country’s “most dangerous hiking route”. “It is strictly forbidden to conduct unauthorised hiking traverses and similar activities [on the Aotai trail],” the General Administration of Sport’s mountaineering management centre said in a notice on Friday. “Recently, five individuals undertook an unauthorised crossing of...

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China pledged to deepen cooperation and exchanges with Tanzania on Friday as its top diplomat toured the region, promising that Beijing would “always stand together” with Africa. Wang Yi also called on Tanzania to work with China to uphold international law and multilateralism, in what one observer said would be the Chinese foreign minister’s key message to Africa amid Washington’s apparent retreat from the rules-based international system. Wang will wrap up his six-day tour of the continent on...

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China is set to supercharge the advanced J-20 stealth fighter with avionics upgrades on its radar, engines and AI integration to cement the fifth-generation jet’s pivotal position in aerial warfare, a military analyst told state media. The Mighty Dragon, China’s answer to the American F-22 “Raptor”, was also effectively operating alongside the country’s stealth attack drone and early warning aircraft, military commentator Zhang Xuefeng told state broadcaster CCTV in a programme released on...

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China’s vast outbound travel market is set for further growth in 2026, boosted by the spread of visa-free policies for Chinese nationals and a stronger yuan. But visits to Japan could plummet by nearly 50 per cent amid a political dispute between Beijing and Tokyo, according to analysts and industry insiders. Mainland Chinese travellers are expected to take about 165 million to 175 million cross-border trips in 2026, up from an estimated 155 million last year, the travel marketing and technology...

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European immunologist Andrew Macpherson has officially taken up a full-time position at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei in the central province of Anhui. The move, confirmed by USTC’s school of biomedical sciences on January 2, is a boost to China’s growing reputation as a global hub for cutting-edge biomedical research. Macpherson, widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities in gastrointestinal mucosal immunity, joins USTC from Switzerland, where he was...

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Last weekend’s US raid on Venezuela has shone a spotlight on the wider strategic concerns in play in South America, including the US-China rivalry in countries such as Peru. The country is a key hub for mineral exports to Asian markets, but it has tried to maintain a balance between Beijing and Washington. China had funded a strategically important port on Peru’s Pacific coast, but it had remained “broadly aligned” with US interests, analysts said. Washington also regards it as part of its...

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China has pulled off a daring underground feat, using a multimillion-dollar tunnel boring machine (TBM) to recover its stranded twin beneath the country’s largest river. The rendezvous between the TBMs was achieved with just 2mm (0.078 inch) of vertical error and no horizontal deviation under the Yangtze’s riverbed, setting a benchmark for precision in deep underground engineering, according to state media on Wednesday. The feat saved a megaproject that might otherwise have been scrapped. In...

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Last weekend, following the US military operation in Venezuela abducting its leader, Nicolas Maduro, Brazil’s president denounced the attack as a “flagrant violation of international law” and having “crossed an unacceptable line”. “These acts represent a grave affront to Venezuela’s sovereignty and yet another extremely dangerous precedent for the entire international community,” Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on social media. Lula, who said attacking countries was “the first step towards a...

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The global artificial intelligence (AI) race remains one of the most hotly contested spheres of international competition. Few would bet today on an eventual winner, but current trends point to three possible scenarios that we should consider. In the first scenario, the AI world is dominated by the US and China. While the US still has the technological edge, China is closing in fast and vies with the US for leadership on many of the key dimensions of AI prowess. According to Stanford...

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Taiwan’s latest military crash involving an upgraded F-16 fighter jet has sparked fresh scrutiny of the readiness of the island’s ageing arsenal amid the sustained high-tempo demands of cross-strait tensions. The episode on Tuesday has sharpened debate over whether upgrades and new armament purchases can realistically keep pace with increasing wear, maintenance constraints and the rapid modernisation of mainland China’s forces, according to lawmakers and analysts. The incident involved an F-16V...

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