Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Beijing, China, on February 4, 2022 when Putin arrived for the opening of the Winter Olympic Games and talks with his Chinese counterpart. Photo: Kremlin Pool Photo via AP South China Morning Post
The Australian government is bracing for China to step up its push to expand influence in the Pacific, with a senior figure privately conceding Canberra has a lot of work to do to regain lost trust and strengthen regional unity. Despite initial relief at a decision by Pacific island countries to defer a sweeping 10-country security and economic pact proposed by China, the Australian government now believes this may be only a temporary reprieve. “Things aren’t going back to the way they were,” said a senior Australian government figure who…
Question: what do men and Excel have in common? Answer: they’re always automatically turning things into dates when they’re not. To younger people – that is, anyone under the age of 20 – Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, a tool as essential to accountants as saws are to carpenters, is the contemporary equivalent of mom jeans, handwritten thank-you notes and cravats: stuff that oldies care about. How come, then, that the hashtag #excel has had 3.4bn views on a certain social media platform and that one Excel expert on that platform has…
China has reported no new Covid-19 infections in Shanghai for the first time since March, as the country’s latest outbreak subsides after months of lockdowns and other restrictions. China is the last major economy committed to a zero-Covid strategy, stamping out all infections with a combination of targeted lockdowns, mass testing and long quarantine periods. The economic hub of Shanghai was forced into a months-long lockdown during a Covid surge this spring driven by the fast-spreading Omicron variant. Beijing also shuttered schools and offices for weeks over a separate outbreak.…
Rescue workers saved a woman who was trapped by rushing flood waters in Yingde, Guangdong Province in China. The woman was pulled to safety and seemed unharmed. Flooding in southern China during the summer months is common, but water levels in some areas have reached a 50 year high. This video has no sound BBC
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, will visit Hong Kong for the 25th anniversary of the city’s handover to mainland China, the state news agency Xinhua reported on Saturday. The trip will be Xi’s first known visit outside mainland China since January 2020 after the Covid-19 outbreak. He will also attend the inaugural ceremony of the sixth-term government of Hong Kong, Xinhua said. John Lee will become the city’s new leader on 1 July, replacing Carrie Lam, who oversaw some of the territory’s most tumultuous times with anti-government protests and Covid.…
If water is the source of life, fertiliser is the source of scaleable food production. The increasing cost of fertiliser is one of the largest contributors to a “cost-price” squeeze affecting the farmers of major agricultural products in Australia and globally. The cost of food is increasing in step with the cost of producing that food and, in the past quarter in Australia, we have seen food inflation increase by 2.8% – the fourth-highest quarter since the turn of the century. The price of wheat, the main staple for much…
Advertisement The announcement from Beijing recently about signing an order with trial outlines on military operations other than war (MOOTW) has triggered foreboding in some quarters that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may be taking a leaf out of the Russian military playbook, inspired by Moscow’s so-called “special military operations” in reference to its invasion of Ukraine. More ominously, some see the new order as a precursor to an impending Taiwan crisis. Coming so soon after the Chinese defense minister, General Wei Fenghe, had vowed at the Shangri-La Dialogue…
Advertisement In early June, when the local authorities of Shanghai lifted its three-month-long lockdown, the central government soon announced its own approach toward the zero COVID-19 goal: conducting mass PCR testing nationwide, alongside some economic stimulus. In practice, this policy requests every resident to take PCR tests regularly and frequently in exchange for relatively moderate measures in dealing with a local outbreak. However, the skeptics point out that based on China’s political system of fragmented authoritarianism, such a gigantic health project would be untenable. Local governments, facing economic strain, usually cope…
The spot rate for sending a 40-foot container from Asia to the West Coast of the United States, that includes the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, further dropped by 3 per cent to US$8,934 this week, according to the Freightos Baltic Index. Photo: AP South China Morning Post