When Wang Hanzheng, a Chinese student at the Royal College of Art, attended a graduate show in a warehouse on Brick Lane in east London in July, he found the space crowded, unimaginative and unfit for presenting art. It was with this in mind that at 11pm one night earlier this month Wang and a team of 22 others painted a Chinese political slogan in bold red characters along a nearby wall stretching nearly 100 metres. The artwork – which spelled out the Chinese government’s “socialist core values”, including the…
Month: August 2023
China’s Bank of Communications to ‘initiate’ a mortgage rate cut, hewing to the push to make first homes more affordable and lift housing slump
China’s state-owned banks are poised to cut their mortgage rates, answering the government’s call to make housing more affordable and stimulate consumption as the world’s second largest economy slows, a move that analysts say would only have a limited impact. Bank of Communications has scheduled a meeting at 3pm today to “initiate the project to adjust the existing mortgage rates on personal home loans,” according to a notice obtained by the Post. The bank’s investor relations officers said they are not authorised “to disclose information to the public” regarding the…
Vietnam’s ‘Onion Bae’ activist loses appeal against 5½ year sentence
A court in Vietnam on Wednesday upheld the five and a half year prison sentence for activist Bui Tuan Lam, known as “Onion Bae,” his wife Le Than Lam told Radio Free Asia. On May 25, Bui was convicted of propaganda under Article 117 of the country’s Penal Code, after being found guilty of criticizing the government online. Le told RFA Vietnamese she was not allowed to attend Wednesday’s three-hour hearing at the Higher People’s Court in Danang. but his lawyer Le Dinh Viet was permitted to represent him there.…
China’s Country Garden Sells Stock to Pay Debts
The embattled Chinese homebuilder Country Garden said on Wednesday it planned to raise $34 million by issuing new shares, its latest effort to get a handle on its debt problems and contain a deepening property crisis that is weighing on China’s economy. In a filing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Country Garden said it planned to issue 350.6 million shares of the company at 77 Hong Kong cents apiece next Wednesday. The proceeds will not go to the company. Instead, they will go to a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based…
India Protests Chinese Map Claiming Disputed Territories
India said on Tuesday that it had lodged a “strong protest” with China a day after Beijing released the 2023 edition of its standard map showing Aksai Chin — an area of Kashmir mostly controlled by China — and the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh within Chinese territory. The map was released Monday on the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources standard map service website, just days after the two nations agreed to work to ease tensions at their disputed border. The map also includes Taiwan and the South China…
New neutrino research may help answer the question of our existence
Receive free Science updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Science news every morning. The writer is a science commentator Trying to spot neutrinos is a bit like trying to catch moonbeams. The subatomic particles permeate the universe but, being near-massless and electrically neutral, they rarely interact with anything. In the seconds it takes you to read this sentence, trillions of these so-called ghost particles will have zipped through your body. Neutrinos are a new frontier in the quest to stress-test the Standard Model,…
Xiaomi profit doubles in second quarter amid strong premium smartphone sales as market slump nears bottom
Xiaomi Corp reported better-than-expected profit after cost-cutting efforts and a focus on more expensive mobile devices helped buoy margins and offset a moribund smartphone market. Net income more than doubled to 3.67 billion yuan (US$503 million) in the three months ended June, versus the average estimate of 3.16 billion yuan. Revenue slid a less-than-projected 4 per cent to 67.4 billion yuan, narrowing declines from previous quarters when the smartphone market slump was at its worst. Xiaomi reasserts goal to challenge Apple’s iPhone at launch of new products Beijing-based Xiaomi has…
Tech war: China exploring ways to make its own AI memory chips despite US sanctions, sources say
China is exploring ways to produce its own high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the next-generation of memory chips tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) processors, as it pushes ahead with a semiconductor self-sufficiency drive amid US sanctions, industry sources said. While it will be an uphill battle to catch up with global leaders like SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology given the impact of Washington’s sanctions, the Chinese government has determined that the country must become self-sufficient in HBMs even though it may take years, they added. Industry sources, who are familiar…
China’s corruption crackdown rips through healthcare sector
In late July, doctors at a Shanghai hospital were called into work at 6.30am for an urgent meeting, expecting to be faced with a healthcare emergency. Instead, they were met by management, telling them the hospital would in September be placed under investigation by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Chinese Communist party’s internal watchdog. While the hospital remained open, “we are focused on reporting each other to the authorities and conducting self-inspection; the CCDI will probably send an inspection team to our hospital next month to decide who…
Chinese envoy arrives in oil route hub Bandar Abbas as Beijing and Tehran strengthen ties
China’s new envoy to Bandar Abbas in southern Iran has assumed office in the latest sign of strengthened ties between Beijing and Tehran as the two face tensions with the West. Xu Wei, the newly appointed consul general, landed in Bandar Abbas on Sunday and was greeted by Iranian officials and Chinese diplomats at the airport, the Chinese embassy in Tehran said on Monday. Xu, who served as counsellor and deputy head of the Chinese embassy in Iran from 2016 to 2017, said he looked forward to “working with all…