China News

The sudden removal of China’s two most senior generals is believed to be a stark warning underscoring President Xi Jinping’s zero-tolerance focus on Communist Party discipline and political purity ahead of two landmark events next year. Beijing announced on Saturday that Zhang Youxia, first-ranked vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and China’s top uniformed officer, was under investigation for serious disciplinary violations, as was Liu Zhenli, chief of the CMC’s Joint Staff...

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The PLA Navy hospital ship Silk Road Ark arrived at the Uruguayan port of Montevideo last Tuesday for a four-day technical stop. The port call, as reported by China’s state news agency Xinhua, marked the first visit by a Chinese naval vessel to Uruguay – which sits between South America’s two biggest economies, Brazil and Argentina. Analysts said the inaugural visit signalled that Beijing’s efforts to expand its military exchanges in the western hemisphere were unaffected by America’s military...

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Europe’s survival as an independent political power depends on its readiness to impose costs on the United States while reopening a sustained channel with China. The Arthashastra counsels that the enemy of one’s enemy is one’s friend. Europe has ignored this principle, absorbing repeated American bullying while refusing to leverage relations with China as a counterweight. The Greenland episode crystallises a reality enforced through trade threats, security conditionality and territorial...

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A joint Chinese-US research team says it has developed a new semiconductor manufacturing method that it says could “open up entirely new avenues” to develop high-performance light-emitting and integrated devices. The process would surpass conventional lithography machines, which are the main way today of making the semiconductors used in most electronics. When a lithography machine etches a chip circuit, the laser strikes the material vertically. If light goes sideways, it causes uncontrolled...

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More than a dozen Filipino crew members rescued from the South China Sea have been transferred from the Chinese coastguard to Philippine vessels close to where their ship went down. The China Coast Guard said the transfer of the 15 survivors and the remains of two deceased from the capsized cargo ship took place on Sunday afternoon at the request of Philippine search and rescue authorities. Four other crew members from the ship remain missing. The Chinese coastguard rescued the men on Friday...

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A new Chinese military special-ops drone has shown unprecedented accuracy in live-fire tests, hitting a human-sized target with every shot while using a standard infantry assault rifle. The drone fired 20 single rounds while hovering at a height of 10 metres (3.2 feet) and a distance of 100 metres from the human-sized target, a standard 50cm by 50cm (about 20 by 20 inches) chest board. The drone achieved a 100 per cent hit rate during flight trials, according to a peer-reviewed study published...

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China has recorded a five-year peak in the number of provincial governments raising minimum wages, official data showed, as Beijing pledges to “invest in people” to support economic growth over the course of its latest five-year plan. Twenty-seven of the mainland’s 31 provincial-level jurisdictions have increased monthly minimum wages over the past year, with half introducing double-digit rises – outpacing China’s 5 per cent gross domestic product growth rate in 2025 – according to the Post’s...

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Jensen Huang marked the coming Lunar New Year with Nvidia employees in Shanghai on Saturday, as the CEO of the world’s most valuable company made his first trip to China in 2026 amid uncertainties around its H200 graphics processing unit (GPU). Huang received a rock-star welcome when he joined Nvidia’s annual Lunar New Year celebration, according to two employees who asked not to be named as they were not authorised to speak to the media. Huang gave a speech and handed out tangerines that he...

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Singapore Exchange (SGX) Group is seeking to widen its cross-listing schemes with Shanghai and Shenzhen and explore partnerships with Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) and other exchanges, according to its CEO. “Connectivity, in my view, is the new architecture for capital markets,” said Loh Boon Chye in an exclusive interview with the Post during his visit to Shenzhen last week. “We look towards more connectivity, not just with China but with other like-minded exchanges.” Loh said if...

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After a months-long war of words between an online influencer and a restaurant chain owner, a Communist Party mouthpiece has taken the unusual step of direct intervention – underlining China desire to rein in internet celebrities and social media platforms. Since Sunday, People’s Daily has published four commentaries about the restaurant chain Xibei, which says it expects to lose 500 million yuan (US$71.8 million) following an influencer’s online complaints about pre-made dishes. “This is...

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As the number of people living alone in China skyrockets, a wave of products and services is emerging to address the safety, social and mental health needs of the country’s solo-living population, analysts said. The issue was thrust into the public spotlight earlier this month, when a check-in app called Are You Dead? – or Sileme in Chinese – briefly surged to the top of paid app charts in mainland China and several other markets, revealing the scale of China’s vast and rapidly expanding solo...

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The opposition push to impeach Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te has entered a new phase after he refused to appear at related legislative hearings. The no-show has further deepened partisan strife and is likely to complicate governance ahead of year-end local government elections, observers warn, although most of them agree that the impeachment motion is unlikely to clear Taiwan’s high constitutional threshold. The impeachment motion – an unprecedented move against a sitting leader of...

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Mainland China’s and Hong Kong’s birth rates fell to record lows last year, despite extensive government incentives to encourage larger families. In Hong Kong, registered births fell 14 per cent to a historic low of 31,714 in 2025. Notably, the increase in births in 2024 may have been due to the auspicious Year of the Dragon. It is believed that babies born in the dragon year will grow up to be smart and successful. This is likely to have affected the timing of births as seen in Hong Kong during...

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When a film about an investigation into a phone scam in Cambodia debuted at the Busan International Film Festival in 2018, it was not the cast or the plot that drew attention in China. Instead, the focus was on the film’s executive producer, Chen Zhi – a billionaire Chinese businessman who has himself been accused of running a sprawling online scam network in Cambodia. In The Prey – touted as Cambodia’s “first million-dollar action movie” – an undercover Interpol operative ends up in jail. But...

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In the US State Department’s catalogue of priorities for the next five years, Taiwan rates exactly zero mentions. The department’s Agency Strategic Plan does list peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific as a goal but its top focus after national security is the western hemisphere. The plan sets out the direction of US foreign policy and foreign assistance between 2026 and 2030 and in doing so, sidesteps the island entirely. It is a contrast to the White House’s National Security Strategy (NSS)...

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China has cancelled almost all of its rocket launches at the country’s busiest space port after two failures at other sites and signs of a long-awaited lift-off for a lunar supercarrier. The Xiaoxiang Morning Herald reported on Friday that nearly all the rocket launches scheduled next month for the Wenchang space centre in the southern province of Hainan had been cancelled. “Only the test flight for a new type of rocket on February 11 [remains],” the Changsha-based newspaper quoted a space port...

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Finland’s prime minister begins a four-day visit to China at the head of a large business delegation on Sunday, seen as the latest move by a European country to forge closer ties with Beijing amid coercive US policies under President Donald Trump. According to analysts, Petteri Orpo’s trip also highlights Beijing’s efforts to strengthen ties with individual European Union member states as a way to soften broader EU scrutiny over China’s alleged overcapacity driving a huge trade...

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Thailand, a US treaty ally, has been adding to its arsenal of Chinese-made weapons with deals for ships, tanks and other high-value hardware. Analysts put the trend down to pragmatic considerations. The Royal Thai Army has finalised a deal to buy an additional batch of Chinese-made VN-1 armoured vehicles for 1 billion baht (US$32 million). This is expected to add around 20 new units to its existing fleet of more than 100 VN-1s, according to local media reports. The contract was signed on January...

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Some weighty themes were addressed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, from the apparent return of the Monroe Doctrine and US “manifest destiny” in geopolitics, to a replay of the 19th-century “Great Game” among competing nations elsewhere. But one critical issue that did not receive sufficient attention was the prospect of a global financial system crisis undermining such monumental assumptions. These annual gatherings of the supposedly great and good, from national leaders to business barons...

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The United States will use strength – not confrontation – to deter China in the Indo-Pacific, the Defence Department said, laying out its national strategy to protect the “homeland”. The US would also push allies to pay more for their defence, it said on Saturday in the 34-page document outlining the country’s security environment and approaches for the next four years. According to the strategy, the goal after protecting the “homeland and hemisphere” is to deter China “from being able to...

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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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