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With nearly one month before Hainan, China’s southern island province, launches a separate customs regime, President Xi Jinping has urged officials to ensure the process goes smoothly so the region can spearhead the country’s opening up. “The strategic goal of building the Hainan Free Trade Port is to establish it as a significant gateway leading China’s opening up in the new era,” Xi said on Thursday in Sanya, a city in southern Hainan, during his tour of the tropical island. “This is an...

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China recorded a year-on-year uptick of 8.5 per cent in marriage registrations over the first three quarters of 2025, a rare piece of positive demographic news as the country’s population continues to shrink and rise in average age. The increase suggests that a host of recently introduced pro-marriage policies are starting to pay off, but experts cautioned the number of marriages would still decline over the long term as the pool of younger adults dwindles. A total of 5.15 million couples...

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With Beijing signalling a restart of Nexperia’s chip exports to safeguard the global semiconductor industry, uncertainties continue to swirl around the resumption of deliveries from China, said a major German automobile supplier amid plans to reduce its production and slash working hours at individual locations. “Our task force is working intensively to secure our chip supply. The situation remains very tense across the industry,” a spokesman with German car-part supplier ZF Friedrichshafen told...

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The quest to understand the “God particle” may have just hit a wall in China. An ambitious multibillion-dollar plan to build the world’s largest particle collider – a machine that could have placed the country at the pinnacle of global basic research and scientific talent – may be abandoned, according to its lead scientist. The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), designed to smash electrons and their antimatter counterparts to study Higgs bosons with unprecedented precision, was not put...

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During a whirlwind visit last month to Kuala Lumpur, US President Donald Trump oversaw a peace accord between Thailand and Cambodia and secured trade and critical minerals agreements with those two countries as well as with Malaysia and Vietnam. At the same time, US and Chinese negotiators met in the Malaysian capital, addressing trade disputes to pave the way for Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Busan last week. The talks yielded progress on tariffs and rare earth exports. For...

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China’s Mars orbiter Tianwen-1 has captured a rare snapshot of a mysterious interstellar visitor that has ignited debate among scientists about its origins. The object – designated 3I/Atlas – is only the third ever detected entering our solar system, and new images, released on Thursday by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), offer a closer look at the presumed comet. Tianwen-1 snapped the pictures from about 30 million km (18.6 million miles) away on October 3. The object, which was...

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China’s Ministry of Finance returned to the international bond market for the first time in a year on Wednesday, offering US$4 billion in sovereign notes and giving international investors a chance to register their opinion on the country’s economic outlook amid receding trade tensions. The issuance came just days after a truce in the long-simmering US-China trade dispute and followed Beijing’s unveiling of its 15th five-year plan for economic and social development. The offering of US...

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that China “is going to win” the race to develop next-generation artificial intelligence, urging Washington to speed up its efforts. The head of the world’s first company to reach US$5 trillion in market value told The Financial Times that Beijing’s energy subsidies were boosting its drive to build cutting-edge semiconductors used to power AI technology developments. “China is going to win the AI race,” the British newspaper cited him as saying on Wednesday at an...

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Beijing has criticised a cross-party group of New Zealand lawmakers for attending a reception held by Taiwan’s de facto embassy, saying they had violated the one-China principle. Last week, the Chinese ambassador Wang Xiaolong wrote to a number of parliamentarians who had attended the October 24 event at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office to mark the foundation of the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name. Wang warned them that their attendance breached New Zealand’s foreign policy and...

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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has urged major greenhouse gas emitters to make stronger commitments in a meeting with Chinese Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang ahead of this year’s Cop30 climate talks. Beijing has been trying to maintain a prominent role in global efforts to fight climate change. A source familiar with the discussions said the talks had been “brief and cordial”, with the Brazilian president using the occasion to thank Beijing for its diplomatic support over hosting the...

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China’s university boom has helped boost US postgraduate education and local economies in college towns, according to a new study. The country’s massive higher education expansion – which lifted annual undergraduate enrolment in China from about 1 million in 1999 to 9.6 million by 2020 – resulted in waves of students going abroad and produced measurable effects inside US universities, according to a team at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit based in Cambridge,...

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Chinese self-driving technology firm WeRide, fresh off raising HK$2.39 billion (US$307 million) in a Hong Kong share sale, plans to rev up commercialisation of autonomous taxis and expand into markets like the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Japan. Tony Han, founder and CEO of the Guangzhou-based company, said WeRide would deploy 10,000 robotaxis worldwide over the next few years, adding that its fleet could eventually grow to hundreds of thousands in line with the ultimate goal of “supplying...

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China’s key trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, has called on the US to create “a favourable atmosphere” for agricultural cooperation between the two countries. “We hope the US will work together with China, with a focus on the broader picture, to create a favourable atmosphere for practical cooperation in areas such as agriculture,” Li told a visiting US agricultural trade delegation in Beijing on Tuesday, according to a statement published by the Ministry of Commerce on Wednesday. Li said there...

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In the 10th year since founding Pony.ai in the US, James Peng has completed the autonomous-driving company’s second share listing, with its debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Thursday coming less than a year after it started trading on the Nasdaq. “Because our home base is in China, I think listing in Hong Kong will definitely help us in terms of branding, in terms of the proximity to our home base,” Peng said in an interview. Based in Guangzhou and incorporated in the Cayman Islands,...

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China’s start-up developers of artificial intelligence applications significantly lag behind their US counterparts in global recurring revenue, making overseas expansion the default strategy for these mainland firms, according to a new report. As of August, only four of the world’s top 100 AI apps from private companies by annual recurring revenue (ARR) were Chinese, according to a report jointly released last week by domestic research firm Unique Research and San Francisco-based consultancy...

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With US President Donald Trump’s unabashed claim of ending eight wars in eight months hogging the limelight, China’s handling of both intrusions along its border with Myanmar and the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute has gone relatively unnoticed. In stark contrast to America’s dramatic and forceful brokering of peace deals, Beijing has adopted a calibrated and generally reactive response to Myanmar’s border intrusions and supports Asean taking the lead on the Cambodia-Thailand border dispute...

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A senior Chinese general has called for the military to be prepared to “live a tight life” and cut costs on multiple fronts in an elaboration of the 15th five-year plan. The remarks by Qiu Yang, deputy director of the General Office of the Central Military Commission, were made in an article published last week and included in a supplementary reader for the Communist Party’s policy recommendations on the five-year plan covering 2026-2030. The recommendations were issued following the closing of...

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Chinese ultra-fast fashion giant Shein is seeking dialogue with French authorities after Paris suspended the platform in a shock move on Wednesday. “Shein takes note of the government’s announcement today,” a spokesperson for the group told the Post. “We are committed to working with the French authorities to address any concerns swiftly, as we have always done, and we are seeking dialogue with the authorities and government bodies on this issue.” Earlier on Wednesday, the French government...

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In a packed marble courtroom, the US Supreme Court on Wednesday opened what could be the most consequential trade ruling in a generation, grilling President Donald Trump’s administration over whether a 48-year-old emergency law effectively gave the White House virtually unlimited power over trade. At stake: US$90 billion already paid by American importers, trade deals with partners across the globe, billions more to come, and the delicate balance of power between Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol...

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China has unveiled critical details of a revolutionary cargo ship under development: a nuclear-powered vessel that can carry 14,000 standard shipping containers. But what makes this ship truly groundbreaking is that it will be powered by a thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR) with a thermal output of 200 megawatts – matching the power level of the S6W pressurised water reactor used in the US Navy’s most advanced Seawolf-class nuclear attack submarines. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors...

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The Canton Fair, considered a barometer of China’s foreign trade and manufacturing outlook for the next six to nine months, has concluded in Guangzhou as dramatically as it began. Three weeks ago, the exhibition hall was shrouded in gloom. Just days before China’s largest and oldest trade exhibition opened on October 15, US President Donald Trump had threatened to impose an additional 100 per cent tariff on Chinese goods. The announcement sent shock waves through the fair, plunging exporters...

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Amid the growing presence of Chinese firms in Brazil, Brazilian businesses are expressing hope of being able to further expand into China’s market, while also calling for enhanced bilateral efforts to overcome challenges such as logistical bottlenecks. “China can and should be Brazil’s largest export market for every product category,” said Christian Gogola, director of Brazilian beverage company Legendaria. “But for now, more Chinese companies are entering Brazil than Brazilian firms doing...

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1. Nexperia fallout: chip spat reignites EU debate over Chinese investments The saga of Netherlands-based and Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia, caught up in broader geopolitical tensions between the United States and China, is rekindling a debate about foreign investment in Europe and is likely to lead to further scrutiny by EU countries on future Chinese...

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China’s military has insisted electronic jamming was not responsible for two recent US military air accidents in the South China Sea, suggesting instead that the American armed forces were to blame for their misfortunes. On Monday, state broadcaster CCTV aired a report that denied that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had caused a fighter and helicopter launched from the USS Nimitz to crash in the South China Sea last month. On October 26 an MH-60R Seahawk helicopter and an F/A-18F Super...

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A swift resolution of the Sino-Dutch row over the control of Chinese-owned, Netherlands-based chipmaker Nexperia is not likely, according to analysts, which means semiconductor supplies for the global car industry remain uncertain. That assessment comes a day after China’s Ministry of Commerce accused The Hague of “going its own way, without taking concrete steps to resolve the issue”, even as the mainland regulator considered exempting some Nexperia orders from an export ban that it imposed...

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