China News

During the past decade, Chinese think tanks have had the best of two worlds – having the backing of the government while having some room to move outside it. Encouraged by the country’s leadership to promote China’s soft power, the sector has grown in influence as retired officials have come on board, bringing expertise, connections and some freedom. Not unlike their Western counterparts, these institutes have come to play major roles in Track 2 diplomacy and policy recommendations. But two...

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A spy thriller backed by a Chinese intelligence agency has become one of the biggest box office hits of the Lunar New Year. Scare Out, directed by Zhang Yimou, who is best known internationally for films such as Raise the Red Lantern and House of Flying Daggers, was produced under the direct supervision of the Ministry of State Security, which said the film was based on real-life cases. The film features a tense game of cat and mouse as counter-espionage agents track down a researcher who leaked...

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I travelled to Zurich, Switzerland, last month to attend the Asia Leaders Series, a forum designed to foster candid exchange between Europe and Asia, offering policymakers, economists and business leaders a trusted setting to engage seriously with global challenges. The event took place on the eve of the World Economic Forum meeting. I was asked to moderate a session on a topic that was hardly novel: US-China rivalry. I approached the event with modest expectations. Strategic competition between...

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China’s envoy to the United Nations, Fu Cong, has warned that any military involvement by Japan in the Taiwan issue would amount to aggression against Beijing, which would “retaliate resolutely”. Fu told a UN meeting on Wednesday that Tokyo had publicly tied the question of the island’s defence to what it called an existential crisis and that Japan was “attempting to intervene militarily in the Taiwan issue under the guise of collective self-defence”. But those were “fallacies” that betrayed...

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China will not seek reciprocity in its latest trade agreement with South Africa, its ambassador said, as Beijing prepares to roll out an expanded zero-tariff policy for African nations from May 1. The deal means South African goods can enter the Chinese market tax-free without any requirement for Pretoria to reciprocate by lowering its own import duties on products from China. “In this process, China will fully accommodate South Africa’s interests and will not seek reciprocity,” Chinese...

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Chinese scientists have used artificial intelligence to make progress on a more than 300-year-old maths problem that has implications for large-scale data storage and advanced telecommunications. Using an AI system called PackingStar, the researchers made record-breaking advances on the “kissing number” problem, surpassing the limits of human geometric intuition and standard computing. The work done by the team was like a “romance” between machines and humans exploring science together, they...

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Chinese deals in Kenya often move from signing to construction in less than a year, according to the head of the African country’s investment agency, with most of the agreements signed during Kenyan President William Ruto’s visit to Beijing in 2025 well under way. John Mwendwa, CEO of the Kenya Investment Authority (InvestKenya), noted that in contrast, projects funded by the West typically took longer due to stricter environmental, social and governance standards and complex regulatory...

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A surge in South Korean visitors wanting to play golf in Guangzhou, fuelled by China’s visa-free travel policy and the city’s warm climate, is keeping Quan Yulan busier than ever at the travel agency where she has worked for 12 years. Compared with 2023, when international travel began recovering after the coronavirus pandemic, Korean bookings surged by more than 300 per cent last year, said Quan, who is of Korean descent, adding that the Guangzhou-based agency expected even stronger growth this...

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I remember when I was four or five years old, my great-grandmother would get busy days ahead of Lunar New Year. She would clean the house, pickle vegetables in an enormous jar and start pre-cooking dishes for the New Year’s Eve family meal. One star of the night, called “lion’s head”, is steamed minced pork meat balls that take days to make. My great-grandmother would go to the market ahead of time and pick out pork belly that was the right balance of lean and fat meat, carefully chopping the...

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The world’s “most difficult” railway project is taking shape in rugged southwestern China. The line connecting Dali and border town Ruili in Yunnan province is the first to cut through the Hengduan Mountains, traversing some of the world’s most complex geological and topographical terrains. Running along the country’s southwestern frontier for about 330km (205 miles), the railway is expected to boost China’s links with Southeast Asia. The line is being built in two sections: Dali to Baoshan, and...

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The White House declined on Wednesday to comment on reports that US President Donald Trump is weighing whether to cancel or delay a US$11 billion arms package to Taiwan, as he seeks to keep an expected April summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on track amid pressure from Beijing. “I don’t have any announcement or updates to share,” said White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. On Monday, Trump told journalists he had discussed the potential sales with Xi. “I’ve talked to him about it. We had...

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With the unveiling of the long-range hypersonic CJ-1000 missiles, China has surpassed the United States in the critical race to field practical scramjet propulsion systems, according to a mainland military magazine. Alongside the ship-launched YJ-19, the CJ-1000 road-mobile cruise missile was one of two hypersonic missiles powered by advanced air-breathing scramjet engines on show during the Victory Day military parade in Beijing in September last year. They are the world’s only two operational...

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Brazil has imposed anti-dumping duties on a broad range of Chinese steel products and hypodermic needles following two investigations that found the imports were being sold at unfairly low prices, harming domestic producers. Approved by the government’s foreign trade committee and signed by Vice-President Geraldo Alckmin in his capacity as trade chief, the measures apply for up to five years and target cold-rolled steel, coated flat steel and medical needles shipped from China. Cold-rolled steel...

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US President Donald Trump’s administration announced on Wednesday that it would rescind a rule rewarding electric vehicle production – eliminating the so-called “fuel content factor” – the latest in a series of actions that roll back federal support for EVs that analysts say could leave the US further behind in a global race increasingly shifting in China’s favour. The move comes as the US struggles to compete with China’s rapid growth in the EV sector globally, marking another setback for...

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Beijing has quietly tightened restrictions on officials with family members overseas in the past year as part of a sweeping anti-corruption drive, according to sources. Three people familiar with the situation said inspections had been carried out since early last year within government bodies and state-owned enterprises to scrutinise the overseas connections of top officials and executives. In the past, such inspections have sought to identify “naked officials” – those whose spouses and...

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A Lunar New Year post from the Chinese coastguard on Wednesday provided a rare glimpse at how aerial drones have become essential to daily training and operations near a hotly contested South China Sea reef. The social media post was meant to show officers on the coastguard vessel Wanshan, or China Coast Guard 3301, guarding the disputed Scarborough Shoal, known as Huangyan Island in China, during the Lunar New Year holiday. But the details of their daily training revealed how aerial drones and...

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China is gearing up to harness the extended Lunar New Year holiday to attract more spending by international tourists, as the country looks to shake off a recent economic slowdown and pivot towards consumption-driven growth. In a rare joint initiative by nine central government departments, Beijing announced plans earlier this month to turn the holiday – which this year began on Sunday and runs through February 23 – into a “consumption feast that links regions and engages everyone”. The move...

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Twelve people were killed in an explosion at a firework shop in Hubei in central China on Wednesday, just days after eight people died in a similar incident in a nearby province. The accident happened just before 2.30pm on the second day of Lunar New Year in Zhengji township in the city of Xiangyang, state news agency Xinhua reported. The report added that the subsequent fire spread across the premises and was put out within an hour. An investigation into the cause is under way. The explosion...

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Years before China’s DeepSeek stunned the world with its powerful open-source AI model, Chinese tech geeks began experimenting with the openness ethos through a collaboratively written open-source novel, still going strong after nearly two decades. With millions of words spanning nearly 3,000 chapters, The Morning Star of Linggao has been crowd-written by thousands of contributors – mostly tech geeks, engineers, military enthusiasts and STEM professionals – who insert themselves as characters in...

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A former president of Iceland has rejected US President Donald Trump’s claim that nearby Greenland was surrounded by Chinese and Russian vessels, saying it was “not supported by facts”. In an interview on the sidelines of last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, who was Iceland’s president from 1996 to 2016, said there were “no Russian and Chinese ships in the waters of Greenland”. Trump said last month that the US “needed Greenland” – a Danish territory – “from the...

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A surge in drug research in China has driven the cost of a laboratory monkey to about 140,000 yuan (US$20,260), a sum that exceeds the country’s average annual wage. Official government procurement records showed that prices had doubled in the last five years for such monkeys, which are widely used in the preclinical stage to check whether a drug is safe and how it is absorbed, broken down and cleared by the body. Analysts said the soaring cost was underpinned by a flood of drug-licensing deals...

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The decline in the number of Chinese visitors to Japan accelerated in January, fuelling the first monthly drop since Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, offering the clearest sign yet of economic fallout from tensions between the countries. Arrivals from China shrank 61 per cent in January from a year earlier, compared with a 45 per cent decline in December, the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) said on Wednesday, citing a shift in the timing of the Lunar New Year holiday and warnings...

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Owning a white vehicle in China may mean lower car insurance premiums because it is less likely to get in an accident, according to an executive from SunCar Technology Group, which uses artificial intelligence from ByteDance to personalise services. “This is what we found based on our massive data,” said SunCar chief strategy officer Breaux Walker in an interview with the South China Morning Post. Other factors also affect premiums, including car usage, commuting routes and driving habits....

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Two Chinese diplomatic missions in Southeast Asia have issued warnings urging citizens to stay away from gambling following two deaths allegedly linked to financial losses. The Chinese consulate in Da Nang, Vietnam said in a statement on Monday that cross-border gambling was a criminal offence in China and citizens found to be involved would be “held legally accountable in accordance with the law”. It also warned that consular protection could not be provided to a Chinese citizen under threat...

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China and South Korea have had a turbulent relationship over the past few years as they compete across a range of hi-tech industries. But the two countries now appear to be bonding over a shared challenge: their rapidly ageing societies. The issue has featured on the agenda of several meetings between President Xi Jinping and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in recent months, with the leaders pledging to work together to deal with the economic changes being wrought by their nations’ low...

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