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Historians may mark January 20, 2026, as a landmark moment. That day, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, during his speech at Davos, declared the terminal decay of the US-led international order and charted a principled, pragmatic path for middle powers caught in the crossfire of great power rivalry. The significance lies in the fact that this bold critique came from Canada – a nation deeply intertwined with the United States through an alliance, as well as proximity and economic ties. US...

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Pirelli’s Chinese shareholder Sinochem said on Monday it had put forward a “structured solution” ‌to end a governance dispute with the tyre maker’s ‍Italian investor Camfin. The announcement was made as the Italian government assesses options to limit Sinochem’s influence over Pirelli, or even turn it into a passive shareholder, in ⁠a bid to ease the tyre maker’s US expansion. Beijing-controlled Sinochem is Pirelli’s largest shareholder with a 34.1 per cent stake while Camfin, the vehicle of...

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Monday downplayed US President Donald Trump’s latest tariff threat against Canada, saying the comments should be viewed with an eye towards a coming trade deal review. Asked about Trump’s threat to impose 100 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports should Ottawa finalise a new trade deal with China, Carney told reporters that the North American free trade deal is up for review this year and “the president is a strong negotiator”. “I think some of these...

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China is expected to finish construction on the landmark Pinglu Canal before the end of this year, taking just four years to complete the 72.7 billion yuan (US$10.4 billion) project to boost trade links with the country’s top export destination: Southeast Asia. The mega-project will provide China’s landlocked southwestern provinces with direct access to global shipping lanes, making it faster and cheaper to transport goods between the Chinese interior and neighbouring countries. The 134km (83...

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As AI video generation has evolved from a curiosity to a productivity tool embraced by serious creators, the Kling platform developed by China’s Kuaishou has landed firmly in the top tier alongside Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora. Kling has rapidly grown into a meaningful new business line for the company – long a runner-up to TikTok owner ByteDance in China’s short video arena – since its launch in June 2024, reaching about 12 million monthly active users and annual recurring revenue of roughly...

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The old rules said you had to choose: stealth or speed. The US picked stealth. Russia went fast. China is trying to throw away the rule book. Chinese researchers unveiled a development in aircraft design last month that could propel the nation’s next-generation stealth bombers into supersonic flight, ending the trade-off between speed and stealth that has troubled the American and Russian air forces for decades. Since the 1930s, scientists have been studying a type of aircraft called the flying...

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Taiwan has set up a top-tier firepower coordination hub in partnership with the US to sharpen asymmetric strike integration as military pressure from Beijing intensifies. The new Joint Firepower Coordination Centre – the highest-level facility of its kind in Taiwan – is designed to coordinate long-range precision strike planning and intelligence-sharing across the island’s military services. This comes as Taipei ramps up coordination between its US-made weapons systems and locally developed...

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With domestic margins shrinking and global trade risks rising, China’s commerce authorities are unveiling a state-backed business resource aimed at helping companies navigate and accelerate their global expansions. A national-level service platform will serve as a centralised full-service hub addressing companies’ common needs, including policy consultation, business services, country-specific information, resource matching and risk management, according to Wang Ya, an official heading the...

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Winston Churchill wrote his four-volume masterpiece, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, at the very moment a new era of world history was taking shape: victory over the Nazis, the birth of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions. All signalled continuity of Anglo-Saxon leadership in world affairs, the baton passing fairly peacefully from Britain to America. But 80 years on from the end of the second world war, the world is reconfiguring itself once more. And what it means for...

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China’s foreign ministry has urged its citizens to avoid travelling to Japan ahead of Lunar New Year as the ongoing row over Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments about Taiwan rumbles on. A statement issued on Monday said: “With the Lunar New Year approaching, the foreign ministry and the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urge citizens to avoid travelling to Japan and advise those already there to stay alert to crime and disaster warnings. “In recent weeks, public security in Japan has deteriorated,...

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China’s new dry dock near the South China Sea could help Beijing avoid having an aircraft carrier “gap” in the disputed waterway and pave the way for military outreach to the Indian Ocean, analysts said. According to a report by American geospatial intelligence company AllSource Analysis, satellite imagery on January 21 shows the first use of a new dry dock at Yulin Naval Base in the southern Chinese province of Hainan for the likely maintenance of Chinese Navy aircraft carriers. The report said...

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President Xi Jinping has stressed the need to advance indigenous technology – particularly artificial intelligence (AI) – in his first formal meeting of the year with ministers and provincial officials, as the world’s second-largest economy pushes innovation-led growth. His message was clear: Beijing would redouble efforts to break development bottlenecks through a “whole-of-nation” approach – a year after start-ups like DeepSeek stunned the world and shone a spotlight on China’s tech...

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China’s Spring Festival has emerged as a high-stakes arena for artificial intelligence and robotics companies, with tech giants Tencent Holdings and Baidu committing a combined 1.5 billion yuan (US$215 million) to their digital red packet campaigns. Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent announced on Sunday that its AI chatbot app Yuanbao would give away 1 billion yuan in hong bao – the traditional red envelopes containing cash gifts. Users could win up to 10,000 yuan through lucky draws...

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China placed its most senior military officer and another top general under investigation for suspected “serious” disciplinary violations, extending a corruption push that has hollowed out the leadership of the nation’s military. Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli are “suspected of serious violations of discipline and law”, the defence ministry said in a short announcement on Saturday. Both generals sit on the Central Military Commission (CMC), China’s top military body, with Zhang, 75, only ranking...

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Chinese state media have warned the Communist Party to be vigilant against officials who “do nothing but wait for a power transition” – a clear reference to next year’s national party congress. The China Organisation and Personnel News, affiliated with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, published a commentary on Friday titled “Preventing Officials from Sitting Around and Doing Nothing but Waiting for a Power Transition”. It cited a communique issued after the fifth plenary...

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Young consumers’ spending on anime, comics, games and pop toys, alongside growing wellness expenditures by senior consumers, will continue to shape China’s consumption landscape this year, according to HSBC Holdings. Against this backdrop, the coming nine-day Spring Festival holiday was set to benefit the food, hotel and tourism sectors, HSBC said in a trend report, adding that this tailwind would propel first-quarter growth in the food sector, particularly for snack food and dairy...

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Chinese lending to Africa dropped by nearly half to US$2.1 billion in 2024 compared with the previous year, according to a new report. The fall, from US$3.9 billion in 2023, was part of a decade-long trend. Lending had been on an upwards trajectory since 2006 and peaked between 2012 and 2018 – a period that saw the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative when lending passed the US$10 billion mark each year. At its height, in 2016, Beijing lent US$28.8 billion, but the total has not passed the...

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Gold surged to an all-time high of US$5,000 an ounce on Monday, with analysts forecasting further gains as the precious metal is increasingly viewed as a strategic hedge amid heightened geopolitical risks linked to the current US administration’s foreign policy shifts and a growing push for de-dollarisation. “We see the recent move as justifiable, given the rise in geopolitical risks and [the] macro environment,” said Alexandra Symeonidi, a senior corporate credit and sustainability analyst with...

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A rail system that accelerates heavy objects faster than the speed of sound using pure electromagnetic force has been operating in the eastern Chinese city of Jinan for more than two years. But one of the biggest mysteries remains: how does it stay in control? The sonic boom the system generates at ground level could blind or wreck traditional sensors, while the slightest miscalculation due to missing data could mean disaster at supersonic speeds. The system, known as the electromagnetic sledge,...

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President Jose Jeri of Peru has vowed not to resign despite rising pressure over a widening scandal involving undisclosed meetings with Chinese businessmen, as opposition lawmakers say the affair has damaged public trust and senior officials insist no illegal acts took place. The controversy, known in Peruvian media as “Chifagate”, a reference to Chinese-Peruvian cuisine, centres on late-night encounters at a Chinese restaurant and a wholesale shop in Lima. The meetings were not recorded on the...

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New share listings by Chinese technology firms in Hong Kong have delivered above-average returns on their debuts so far in 2026, as investors faced with a challenging macro environment bet on Beijing’s push for technology self-reliance. Graphics processing unit (GPU) maker Shanghai Biren Technology, semiconductor maker OmniVision Integrated Circuit Group and three others rose by an average of 30 per cent on their debuts, beating the 24 per cent return of the 11 total initial public offerings...

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China’s leading planemaker is poised for a moderate ramping up of production and deliveries of its C919 narrowbody jet this year, aiming for 28 units or more, with two having already rolled off the production line just three weeks into the new year, according to sources and an industry analyst. While setbacks forced Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) to cut back on its delivery targets last year, a manager briefed on the state-owned giant’s plans said it expected supply chain...

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The United States will impose 100 per cent tariffs on Canadian imports should Ottawa finalise a new trade deal with China, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday, amplifying a similar threat from US President Donald Trump a day earlier. “We can’t let Canada become an opening that the Chinese pour their cheap goods into the US,” Bessent said on ABC’s This Week. During a visit to Beijing on January 16, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a thaw in bilateral relations with China,...

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Jeffrey Ding is an assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. He is the author of Technology and the Rise of Great Powers, an award-winning book exploring the impact of technology on geopolitical competition, as well as the founder of the ChinAI newsletter, which tracks developments in China’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry. In this interview, Ding explains why “diffusion”, not innovation, will determine whether China or the US will prevail in the AI race,...

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As China prepares its digital yuan for wider domestic and cross-border use, the global debate has turned again to a familiar question: is Beijing trying to challenge the US dollar’s dominance? But this misses the more consequential point. The significance of China’s digital currency push lies not in substitution, but in the transformation of the infrastructure that underpins international payments. Over the past few years, the e-CNY has evolved into one of the world’s most advanced central bank...

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