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Soon after China put the electromagnetic catapults on its newest aircraft carrier to the test, US President Donald Trump has taken a swipe at the “stupid electric” technology – and called for a return to steam power. The advanced catapult launch system was originally developed by the United States to boost the performance of its aircraft carriers. But when he addressed US Navy sailors aboard the USS George Washington in Japan on Tuesday, Trump said he was serious about signing an executive order...

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Vice-Premier He Lifeng has vowed that China will continue to expand the “high-level opening up” of its financial sector and welcome more investment by foreign financial institutions and long-term capital. “China will unswervingly expand high-level opening up in the financial sector and accelerate the building of a modern financial powerhouse,” he said in a statement published on Tuesday. The Chinese vice-premier made the comments during a meeting with the National Financial Regulatory...

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A report by a Washington-based think tank has revealed a tense 15-hour stand-off last month between China’s coastguard and South Korean vessels in a contested area of the Yellow Sea. The confrontation took place in the disputed Provisional Measures Zone (PMZ) after a South Korean research vessel, the Onnuri, approached facilities that Beijing has claimed are used for aquaculture, according to a report posted on Monday to the website Beyond Parallel, operated under the Centre for Strategic and...

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More than half of Americans say the United States should cooperate and engage with China, according to a survey released on Tuesday, a sharp increase from the 40 per cent recorded in 2024. The results released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs also found that a majority of Americans are against higher tariffs on Chinese imports. “Americans’ views of China are beginning to improve after several years of sharp declines,” said Craig Kafura, the council’s director of public opinion and US...

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Hundreds of American families who’ve waited over five years to embrace their adoptive children from China are clinging to hope that a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will finally bring their families together. Their optimism grew after the White House, for the first time, told the Post on Monday that the “America first” president is aware of their plight. This came weeks after US State Department officials suggested they look elsewhere after Beijing...

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Few areas of China reflect the country’s decades-long economic transformation more vividly than its cities. Rapid development has turned villages into dense urban landscapes and already sizeable metro areas into some of the world’s largest population centres. As the rate of urbanisation slows and the country transitions into a new economic era, we explore how select Chinese cities are navigating the change. Read the rest of our series here. There is hardly a city in China like Datong, where...

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The administration of US President Donald Trump on Tuesday tightened the rules on the importation, marketing and sales of new Chinese telecoms gear in the United States, a move set to haunt bilateral relations ahead of the summit of the top leaders later this week. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to block new approvals for devices with parts from companies on its “Covered List“ and also to allow it to bar previously approved equipment in certain cases. It means that devices...

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As Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping attempt to stabilise US-China trade relations on Thursday, a major problem unlikely to go away, no matter what the outcome, is the disjointed signalling and mixed messaging coming out of Washington, undercutting trust and confidence that any deal will even be implemented, say analysts and former officials. While governments worldwide face coordination problems, experts say the Trump administration is particularly prone to this. Also adding to concerns...

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Earlier this month, China National Nuclear Corporation quietly marked a groundbreaking achievement. It announced that Linglong One – which it has billed as the world’s first commercial land-based small modular reactor – had successfully completed its “cold functional test”. This is the first comprehensive assessment of a reactor, done before fuel loading, checking how the system functions under high pressure. Linglong One, which has been much cheaper to construct than the larger Hualong One...

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A new academic study tracking Chinese public opinion before and after the 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections suggests that the perception of the United States is related more to political changes and policy signals than to entrenched anti-American ideology. And the survey conducted after Donald Trump won the election in November 2024 but before he returned to the White House for his second presidential term and the subsequent trade war reveals a pivotal shift in Chinese public confidence...

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1. ‘Partnership, not pressure’, US soybean farmers urge Trump before Xi talks Increasingly desperate US farmers, including many who voted for US President Donald Trump, are urging him to adopt a conciliatory approach rather than a confrontational one if a lasting soy deal can be reached when he meets Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.
2. China sees Europe...

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China’s geopolitical rivalry with the West is expanding into new frontiers – including the polar regions, outer space, cyberspace and the deep sea – as Beijing unveils a flurry of scientific milestones and state-driven ambitions that analysts say are challenging traditional Western dominance across these critical domains. On Monday, China announced that its independently designed and built polar research vessel – the world’s first manned deep-sea-operations depot ship with icebreaking...

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Growing numbers of Taiwanese are unwilling to give their lives to defend the island, according to a new opinion poll. In a recent survey by My Formosa, respondents were asked if people should be prepared to pay any price – including death – to protect Taiwan’s status and prevent reunification with the Chinese mainland. The poll found that 52.2 per cent of those questioned were unwilling to do so – an 8.4-point rise compared with a similar survey carried out two years ago – while 40.8 per cent...

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“We do not need to chase [after other countries], we are the road,” said President Xi Jinping after inaugurating a major scientific project in Sanya, Hainan province, in 2018. Xi urged scientists to push the boundaries of technological development. Xi’s bold statement not only reflected his boundless confidence in China’s scientific community but also the wisdom of the “Made in China 2025” national economic strategy, which has produced nothing less than a technological renaissance. Thanks to a...

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Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged Japan’s new administration to take a constructive “first step” in engaging with Beijing and to properly address sensitive issues such as Taiwan and wartime history. Wang made the remarks during a phone call with his Japanese counterpart Toshimitsu Motegi on Tuesday – the first high-level diplomatic engagement between Beijing and Tokyo since Sanae Takaichi became Japan’s first female prime minister a week ago. Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping,...

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In a dramatic speech in Berlin on Saturday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen painted a dystopian picture of today’s world as she reiterated her calls for an independent Europe. “Europe is facing up to another seismic change in the way the global economy works. We may be approaching a shift in the international order – one increasingly defined by power, whether economic, technological or military,” she said. Declaring a new “era of geoeconomics”, von der Leyen described unnamed...

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China and a bloc of 11 Southeast Asian countries signed an upgrade to their free-trade agreement on Tuesday, expanding its terms to cover product quality, environmental protection and help for small businesses, in a sought-after strengthening of multilateral economic ties for Beijing amid its ongoing trade war with the US. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), a group with a combined population of 680 million and a total gross domestic product of US$3.8 trillion in 2023, signed the...

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Mainland Chinese police have formally initiated an investigation into Taiwanese legislator Puma Shen, marking Beijing’s latest move targeting individuals it deems to be “diehard Taiwan separatists”. On Tuesday, the Chongqing Municipal Public Security Bureau in southwestern China issued a police bulletin on social media, stating Shen had “engaged in criminal activities aimed at splitting the nation by initiating and establishing the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist organisation ‘Kuma...

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Beijing has officially announced the Politburo’s proposal for the nation’s 15th five-year plan, including language that signals strategic support for the private sector and an acceleration of China’s transformation into a financial power, easing market concerns about their positions in the economy over the next five years. These messages were not mentioned in the communique published last week at the end of the fourth plenum of the Communist Party. “The state should implement the Private Economy...

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Insta360, the Chinese rival of GoPro, recorded a 90 per cent jump in third-quarter revenue from a year earlier, as China’s leading maker of 360-degree and action cameras prepares to square off against drone giant DJI by the end of 2025. Shenzhen-based Insta360 said its revenue in the September quarter grew 92.64 per cent to 2.94 billion yuan (US$413 million), according to the company’s filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange on Monday. Net income for the period shrank 15.9 per cent to 271.9...

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Deep-sea animals in the Pacific Ring of Fire off Japan are rapidly growing and adapting, scientists observed in crewed submersible dives. Creatures in the deep, dark ocean have evolved diverse strategies to survive, adapting to varying depths and nutrient availability. The team from the University of Western Australia (UWA) and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology published their findings gleaned from studies in the Ring of Fire – a Pacific belt that contains hundreds of active and...

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The Chinese planning season is in full swing. Ahead of the formal release of the 15th five-year plan (running from 2026 to 2030) next March, early signs coming out of the just-completed fourth plenum of the Communist Party suggest that it will be more of the same: a focus on continuing China’s extraordinary industrial and technological ascendancy, driven by what President Xi Jinping has called “new productive forces”. That would be a mistake in the following sense: China’s techno-industrial...

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In the 1987 American action film RoboCop, protagonist Alex Murphy is a police officer in a dystopian 21st-century Detroit when he is mortally wounded and rebuilt by cybernetic enhancements so that he can keep fighting crime. Nearly 40 years on, a Chinese policeman and a team of doctors at Jilin University have turned what once seemed a highly futuristic treatment into an encouraging new reality. Recently, state broadcaster CCTV reported that the Second Hospital of Jilin University earlier this...

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Shenzhen-based robotics company Dobot has unveiled a lifelike robotic recreation of Sinosauropteryx – a small, feathered dinosaur that lived around 130 million years ago – in its latest push to broaden commercial applications of robotics beyond humanoid forms. The company said in a statement on Monday that the machine, powered by multimodal interaction, environmental perception and motion-control technologies, could “walk, breathe, emit low murmurs and interact intelligently with its...

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China’s “institutional strength” will help the country tackle “major tests” over the course of the next five-year plan, analysts and state media have said. The country’s latest development plan, which is due to start next year and run until 2030, comes at a time when Beijing is facing increasing obstacles to its long-term ambitions both at home and abroad – particularly its intense rivalry with the United States. China’s first five-year plan was introduced in 1953. The country has since...

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