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China’s top science academy is among three parties suing Missouri for roughly US$50 billion for alleged damage to reputation and economic losses from the US state’s legal action over the Covid-19 pandemic. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said on Tuesday that her office was notified last week of the civil lawsuit filed in the Wuhan Intermediate People’s Court. According to court documents, the case was brought by the municipal government of Wuhan, where Covid-19 was first detected,...

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1. PLA division overseeing Taiwan sees newcomers in charge The Chinese military’s Eastern Theatre Command, the division that oversees Taiwan and that has been hit hard in Beijing’s anti-graft campaign, appears to be presided over by two officers who joined the division only recently.
2. Senior US and Chinese defence officials continue ‘military-to-military’...

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The Fujian, mainland China’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier, has made its first transit of the Taiwan Strait since its commissioning, with Taipei keeping a close eye on its movements. Taiwan’s defence ministry said on Wednesday that while the carrier, Beijing’s third, passed through the waterway, it appeared to be heading back to a Shanghai shipyard for repairs. The ministry also released a surveillance photograph of the Fujian, reportedly captured by F-16 fighter jets, showing no...

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China’s newest transport aircraft has conducted its maiden flight, images circulating on social media suggested, as the People’s Liberation Army moves to update its tactical transport fleet. Photographs and videos circulating online on Tuesday showed a four-engine turboprop aircraft. The most detailed images showed it had six-blade propellers, a T-tail, a blended winglet configuration and possibly an aerial refuelling probe positioned above the cockpit – a structure found on the Airbus A400M. A...

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China’s market regulator has warned that internet platforms demanding merchants offer the “lowest price across the internet” may face antitrust action, as Beijing steps up efforts to curb malpractice. The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) explained some details of its draft – Antitrust Compliance Guidelines for Internet Platforms – at a press conference on Wednesday, according to Xinhua. The “lowest-price” requirement, where platforms bar merchants from selling cheaper elsewhere,...

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China is accelerating efforts to secure its copper supply chain, designating the metal as critical across strategic industries such as electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and defence amid rising geopolitical tensions. Provincial governments are leading the charge. On Monday, Jiangxi – already a hub for heavy rare earth mines – pledged in its 15th five-year plan to develop a world-leading hub for advanced copper-based new materials. That follows a similar move in Shandong, where provincial...

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McDonald’s China arm has raised prices on most menu items, igniting a social media backlash as consumers grapple with job uncertainty and stagnant wages. Patrons discovered this week that prices for burgers, snacks and combos rose by up to 1 yuan (US$0.14). While modest, the increase drew attention because the chain’s budget combo has long been dubbed the “poor man’s meal” by frugal young adults. Some quipped online that “McDonald’s prices are rising, but my salary isn’t”, or that the popular...

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The Chinese military’s Eastern Theatre Command, the division that oversees Taiwan and that has been hit hard in Beijing’s anti-graft campaign, appears to be presided over by two officers who joined the division only recently. According to an analyst, the appointments mean the division maintained continuity of operation despite corruption cases being found in its leadership. Air Force Lieutenant General Yang Zhibin, 62, and Lieutenant General Zhang Jichun, 57, stood alongside other senior...

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1. China desalination tech makes fresh water cheaper than tap water – plus hydrogen China has launched a revolutionary facility in the eastern province of Shandong that produces fresh water from seawater for just two yuan (US$0.28) per cubic metre, generating green hydrogen as a by-product in a breakthrough that...

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China’s top economic policy coordinator has urged the country to confront unavoidable challenges, while expressing confidence that investment and consumption growth will recover next year as efforts to boost domestic demand intensify. An unnamed official from the Office of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission said the current challenges were “issues arising in the course of development and transition”. “[They] cannot be avoided or sidestepped, but with effort they can be...

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Chinese scientists have turned allergy into a powerful weapon against cancer to deliver drugs and turbocharge the body’s own immune attack on cancer. The team loaded mast cells – which cause allergic symptoms when they encounter antigens such as seafood and pollen – with anticancer drugs to deliver them into tumours. The researchers said they were working on clinical applications, including exploring its potential combination with existing cancer immunotherapies. The scientists from Zhejiang...

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The Taiwanese government has sparked fresh controversy by refusing to enforce amendments passed by the opposition-controlled legislature about local government funding. The move risks deepening a political stand-off and has drawn criticism that the island’s leader William Lai Ching-te was “bypassing the legislature when you can’t win”. The dispute centres on revisions to a law about how the central government distributes revenue to local authorities. Observers said the clash had escalated well...

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Beijing’s fresh imperative to “invest in people” – first raised in a proposal for the 15th five-year plan and reaffirmed at an agenda-setting policy meeting last week – reflects a rethink in economic strategy designed to stimulate domestic demand and improve social welfare, analysts said. China’s leaders vowed to “fully tap” the domestic economy’s potential at the annual central economic work conference held last week, which laid out their economic policy priorities for 2026. A readout from the...

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Mannings, one of Hong Kong’s largest health and beauty chains, will cease all retail operations in mainland China, both online and offline, as it adjusts its strategy in the highly competitive market. In a letter to its members, Mannings China said “its physical stores on the mainland will close permanently after January 15, 2026”. Its online sales channels will wind down even earlier. Mannings’ official mini mall on Tencent Holdings’ WeChat will stop service at midnight on December 28, 2025,...

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MetaX Integrated Circuits soared on its trading debut in Shanghai, as investors piled into the second producer of graphics processing units (GPUs) to go public this month amid optimism about China’s push for self-sufficiency in semiconductors and artificial intelligence. The shares of the Shanghai-based company began trading at 700 yuan on Wednesday on the technology-heavy Star Market, surging 569 per cent from their offer price of 104.66 yuan. That made the five-year-old company the fourth-best...

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A top scientist has sharply criticised China’s increasingly resource-driven research culture, warning that a reliance on vast accumulated funding, manpower and data for scientific output is inefficient and actively undermines genuine innovation. Zhang Hong, a senior cell biologist at the Institute of Biophysics in Beijing and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, condemned what he called “a vicious cycle” in how life sciences research was increasingly done in China. Projects were inflated...

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Senior US and Chinese defence officials met in Washington this week in the latest sign of renewed military-to-military communication as the two countries seek to stabilise ties. Alvaro Smith, a deputy assistant secretary of defence for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the Pentagon, met with China’s Major General Ye Jiang, Deputy Director of the Central Military Commission Office for International Military Cooperation, for the 19th annual US-China Defence Policy Coordination Talks from December 15...

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Mainland China’s 17 million Alzheimer’s patients can, for the first time, pay less out of pocket for a costly drug touted as “historic” and “the beginning of the end” for the memory-robbing disease after Beijing launched a commercial insurance innovative drug list in an effort to make medicines more accessible and affordable. Leqembi, developed by Japan’s Eisai and costing a mainland Chinese patient about US$28,400 a year, could see its price cut by half after it was added to the inaugural...

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It has been a turbulent year for the fraught US-China relationship. In the second story in this new series, we look back at the events of 2025, examining how the trade war tested policymakers and firms, forcing a rethink in business, strategy and supply chains. In April, when US President Donald Trump upended global trade by announcing “reciprocal tariffs” on almost all the country’s trading partners, officials in eastern China’s Ningbo – a national export hub – went on a wartime footing. Across...

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1. ‘Testing the waters’? US reported to have seized Chinese cargo bound for Iran The reported US seizure of a ship allegedly carrying Chinese-made dual-use components to Iran might signal Washington was “testing the waters” on reviving an old tactic to pressure Beijing’s ties with its adversaries, but such moves risked breaching international law, analysts...

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Chile’s election of an ultraconservative leader has created another vocal ally for US President Donald Trump in a lithium-rich region where China has emerged as the dominant economic partner, positioning the South American country at the centre of an intensifying superpower rivalry. In what was probably Chile’s sharpest rightward shift since the end of its military dictatorship in 1990, José Antonio Kast, a right-wing former lawmaker who campaigned on Trump-style hardline positions on crime and...

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China has accused Japan of attempting to “mislead the public and hope that somehow the issue would resolve itself” after its foreign minister selectively quoted its position on Taiwan from a joint communique that was the foundation of establishing their diplomatic ties in 1972. During a parliamentary session on Monday, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi repeated Tokyo’s position on Taiwan as stated in the document that established and normalised ties with Beijing, although he did not read out...

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Mainland Chinese media are calling for the demolition of a wartime monument in Japan, resurfacing a long-standing point of bilateral tension, as Beijing and Tokyo are locked in a diplomatic row over Taiwan. Yuyuantantian, a social media account run by mainland state broadcaster CCTV, said on Saturday that Japan seized more than 370 stones from the countries it invaded during the second world war – most from China – and used them to build Hakko Ichiu Tower, which the account described as “a tower...

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Beijing has greenlit Biren Technology’s initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, as more Chinese artificial intelligence chip designers rush to go public amid heightened investor interest in these stocks. Biren, which designs high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), received regulatory approval to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange, according to a China Securities Regulatory Commission filing on Monday. This was expected to put the company on track to become the first GPU...

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Chinese artificial intelligence chip designer MetaX Integrated Circuits will make its trading debut in Shanghai on Wednesday, according to a filing late on Monday, more than a week after industry peer Moore Threads Technology’s stellar listing on the city’s Star Market. Founded in Shanghai in September 2020 by former engineers at Advanced Micro Devices, MetaX priced its initial public offering at 104.66 yuan per share, which was expected to raise 4.2 billion yuan (US$596 million) from the sale...

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