China News

We have selected seven of the most interesting and important news stories covering US-China relations from the past few weeks. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing.

1. Trump sells tariffs as farmers’ win in Iowa, but many aren’t buying it In January, US President Donald Trump said farmers were “going to be the biggest beneficiary” of his tariff policy, even if it was “going to take a little while to kick in”. But many remained anxious that they could once...

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Donald Trump’s repeated threats against Greenland and rising tensions with Iran may have been a factor in the latest round of talks between China and Russia, according to Chinese observers. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Sergei Shoigu, the head of the Russian Security Council, met in Beijing on Sunday. According to the Chinese foreign ministry, Wang warned of the danger of the world lapsing into the “law of the jungle”. “China and Russia should maintain close communication on major issues...

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China has tightened tax incentives and raised preferential rates in several sectors as part of a broader push to generate more government funds, after experiencing a sharp drop in fiscal revenues amid an economic slowdown and persistent deflationary pressure. The Ministry of Finance and State Taxation Administration released a slew of detailed provisions for the country’s new value-added tax (VAT) law over the weekend, which included raising the rate applied to telecommunication services from 6...

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The shortest wavelength of a laser beam generated from a crystal has been realised in a laboratory at the Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to a new paper. At 158.9 nanometres (nm), it leads to all-solid-state lasers with the highest output energy recorded. The all-solid-state solution offers a desktop-scale size, lower cost, easier maintenance and performance equal to room-sized laser systems, such as those based on gas plasma and...

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We have selected seven of the most interesting and important news stories covering global relations from the past few weeks. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing.

1. Trump’s freewheeling Davos speech stirs unease among global audience There was moderate relief after US President Donald Trump walked back his threat to take Greenland by force at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January – but also concern among critics and lawmakers that his...

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Artificial intelligence (AI) may look automated, but it runs on human labour. Behind every chatbot and image generator are thousands of people labelling images, tagging text, moderating content and training systems to understand language and culture. This invisible workforce has quietly become a critical layer of the global AI economy. India has emerged as a major hub for this work. Its large English-speaking workforce and long history in information technology outsourcing have made it a go-to...

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China is looking to escalate measures against cybercriminals operating inside and outside its borders by banning convicted citizens from leaving the country, even after they have completed their sentence. The draft Cybercrime Prevention and Control Law bill comes as China doubles down on working with Southeast Asian countries to crack down on cross-border online fraud. The bill, which aims to impose an exit ban on Chinese found guilty of cross-border online crimes for up to three years after...

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Taiwan’s main opposition party reaffirmed its view of mainland China as “family” as the vice-chair of the Kuomintang (KMT) left for talks with counterparts in Beijing on Monday. The trip by KMT vice-chairman Hsiao Hsu-tsen has drawn fierce criticism from Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and reignited debate over the island’s cross-strait strategy. Leading a 40-member delegation to a think tank forum with the Communist Party of China, Hsiao said the visit was aimed at creating a...

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Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Xpeng Motors showcased its humanoid robot in front of hundreds of onlookers at a mall in the southern metropolis of Shenzhen over the weekend, but a backwards flop became headlines, reflecting the bumpy journey ahead for such machines. After completing a smooth catwalk to the centre of the audience on Saturday, Iron, the 178cm robot said to walk with humanlike grace, lost its balance and fell backwards when standing still on the stage, according to multiple...

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President Xi Jinping has called for China’s yuan to become a global reserve currency, underscoring ambitions to carve out a greater role for it in world finance. The country needed a “powerful currency” that could be “widely used in international trade, investment and foreign exchange markets, and attain reserve currency status”, Xi said in a commentary published on Saturday in Qiushi, the Communist Party’s ideology journal. The comments were first made in a 2024 speech to officials. Xi spoke of...

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China secured the most new shipbuilding orders globally in 2025 despite a slight dip in market share, showing enduring market dominance amid industry turbulence sparked by US threats targeting the Chinese maritime sector, official data showed. Chinese shipyards secured 107.8 million deadweight tonnage (DWT) in new orders in 2025 – a 4.6 per cent year-on-year decline – accounting for 69 per cent of the global market, down from a 74.1 per cent share in 2024, according to data released on Sunday by...

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Alibaba Group Holding has joined rivals including Tencent Holdings and Baidu in rolling out Spring Festival red-packet giveaways to drive mass-market adoption of its artificial intelligence, committing 3 billion yuan (US$432 million) to spur spending across its ecosystem as it seeks to extend its edge in foundational models to consumer-facing products. The Hangzhou-based e-commerce and AI giant said on Monday that its AI app Qwen would anchor a Spring Festival campaign across its flagship...

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Mainland investors faced difficult decisions as gold and silver prices extended their rout on Monday in domestic trading, with some rushing to buy the dip ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday and others retreating to the sidelines. Shanghai silver futures dropped 17 per cent to 24,832 yuan (US$3,572) per kilogram as of 2pm, while gold futures declined more than 15 per cent. The UBS SDIC Silver Futures Fund, a Shenzhen-listed open-ended fund that mainly tracks Shanghai silver futures prices for...

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The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (Comac) is revving up the design and testing phase of its widebody C929 airliner, marshalling its resources and mobilising its stakeholders to roll out the indigenous jet on schedule – or, potentially, ahead of earlier estimates. Specialists from the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) have proactively involved themselves in the C929’s development, the South China Morning Post has learned, with personnel from the national regulator assessing...

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The People’s Liberation Army’s anti-corruption investigations into top general Zhang Youxia and others will eliminate a watered down combat capability and give new momentum to the military’s development, according to a commentary by its mouthpiece the PLA Daily. “The resolute investigation and punishment of corrupt officials such as Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli removes obstacles and stumbling blocks that hinder the development of our cause,” it said in a front-page editorial on Monday. “It...

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China’s frontier artificial intelligence labs are ending the lunar year on a high note, racing to release a series of new AI models in the last few weeks of the Year of the Snake as the country gears up to celebrate the start of the Year of the Horse. Beijing-based Zhipu AI and Shanghai-quartered MiniMax, which just made their stock exchange debuts in Hong Kong, would be the next to update their flagship AI systems with across-the-board enhancements, according to sources familiar with their...

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Chinese scientists have developed a hydrogel cooling coating for solar panels to boost power output by 13 per cent compared to conventional photovoltaic systems. The transparent layer can reduce the temperature of “hotspots” – overheated areas on solar cells caused by defects, shading from leaves, bird droppings or dirt – by 16 degrees Celsius, or nearly 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Hotspots are a common cause of solar panel failure and fire risk. “On a global scale, our developed cooling strategy can...

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Twenty years ago, technologies developed by Liang Jie at Microsoft were incorporated into products like the Windows Media Video Player and Blu-ray discs used by millions worldwide. A decade on, while a professor in Canada, Liang ventured into entrepreneurship, developing an intelligent sensor system for elderly care to address global population ageing. Today, he brings his top-tier expertise in image and video compression back to China. According to the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo...

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Interest in de-dollarisation has spiked in Chinese academic and policy circles, as Beijing grows increasingly wary of the United States’ potential to weaponise its currency. The surge has been most visible in the volume of research. A search by the South China Morning Post on China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), one of the country’s largest academic research databases, showed the number of papers on the subject more than doubled from 2023 to 2025 compared with the preceding three...

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Lawrence J. Lau is a Hong Kong economist specialising in economic development and East Asian economies. He was a professor of economics at Stanford University before serving as vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong until 2010. Lau has held the Ralph and Claire Landau Professor of Economics chair at the university since 2007. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here. What is your take on China’s drive...

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As global trade fragments and tariffs return, economic power is increasingly defined not by financial scale alone, but by productive strength. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, leaders spoke openly about a harsher world order. Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng warned that trade wars have no winners. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for a new security architecture amid rising protectionism. French President Emmanuel Macron described a world becoming more...

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The following is an interview with George Galloway, former member of the British parliament and leader of the Workers’ Party of Britain, published by the Chinese newspaper Global Times on January 25, focused on the present position and prospects of Europe in geopolitics. Asked first about the reported ‘framework of a deal’ supposedly reached by … Continue reading The sun has risen in the east – George Galloway’s message to Europe

The post The sun has risen in the east – George Galloway’s message to Europe appeared first on Friends of Socialist China.

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The Pentagon has signalled a shift for US forces in South Korea, pushing them to expand their role beyond North Korea to help deter Beijing in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the region, according to experts. The analysis follows a visit to South Korea this week by Elbridge Colby, the US undersecretary of defence for policy and a key architect of the Pentagon’s National Defence Strategy. In his first trip outside the United States since taking office in April, Colby hinted at a possible...

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A publisher kindly offered me an opportunity to interview Eyck Freymann, a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, and to review his new book, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China. I think I must decline. I am sure he is a great scholar and thinker but I already have too many unread books on the shelves demanding my attention, a constant accusing presence reminding me what a slow and lazy reader I am. And Taiwan? I don’t think I want to waste time engaging with the indoctrinating...

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As dwindling domestic profits push more Chinese firms onto the global stage, industry titans – forerunners who know what such a shift entails – are offering crucial advice for navigating challenges abroad. “The most important thing is to become a local company,” said Zhu Lei, chief marketing officer for air conditioner giant Gree Electric Appliances, which was among the first Chinese companies to enter the Latin American market. The advice comes as Chinese firms are expected to ramp up their...

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