Month: April 2025

Officials from China’s economic powerhouses should keep a close eye on external challenges as the country maps out its grand development plans for the next five years, according to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Advertisement In Shanghai on Wednesday for discussions on shaping the next national five-year plan, Xi told officials from Shanghai, Inner Mongolia and the provinces of Guangdong, Gansu, Sichuan, Zhejiang and Hubei that they had to adapt to international changes to optimise the country’s economic framework. “During the planning period, it is essential to take a forward-looking approach…

With soaring tariffs bringing trade between the world’s two largest economies to an effective standstill, many restaurant owners on both sides of the Pacific are grappling with disruptions to their food supply chains. Advertisement In China, the first to feel the pain were high-end restaurants with American steak and Boston lobsters on their menus. Kurt Wang, a chef at one such restaurant in Beijing, said 30 per cent of its beef was normally imported from the United States. “Beef is the only ingredient that we sourced from the US,” Wang…

China may have only a “limited” role to play amid the escalating India-Pakistan stand-off, as it faces the challenge of balancing itself between the two South Asian neighbours, according to Chinese experts. Advertisement Still, they expect Beijing to help avoid a full-blown confrontation on its doorstep and to safeguard its overseas interests in the region. Relations between New Delhi and Islamabad dramatically soured after a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir last Tuesday that killed 26 people, most of them tourists. The tit-for-tat reprisals that followed once again moved the nuclear-armed…

Chinese start-up DeepSeek quietly open-sourced a new specialist artificial intelligence (AI) model on Wednesday, just a day after Alibaba unveiled the third generation of its Qwen family, as competition heats up in the race to advance generative AI capabilities. Advertisement Hangzhou-based DeepSeek uploaded its latest open-source Prover-V2 model to Hugging Face, the world’s largest open-source AI community, without making any announcements on its official social media channels. This comes amid growing anticipation for its new R2 reasoning model, which is expected to launch soon. DeepSeek’s Prover series consists of domain-specific…

An obscure committee in Geneva became the latest battleground in the global trade war on Tuesday as Chinese diplomats clashed with counterparts from the United States, Europe, Japan and others over claims of Beijing’s industrial overcapacities and Washington’s swingeing tariffs. Advertisement Tensions threatened to boil over at the World Trade Organization’s Committee on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures as a US-led group of members attacked China for its alleged subsidies and industrial overflows. In heated responses, Beijing turned the tables on those countries’ own trade policies, lashing out at US President…

China must stimulate consumption to offset the potential loss of the US market. To have a lasting impact, stimulus measures must aim to boost the birth rate, given that in societies like China, consumption is driven by raising children. Advertisement There are costs and benefits to raising children that extend to society as a whole. Faced with an inverted population pyramid, the Chinese government, which has control over so many parameters, is in a unique position to shift the economic value of raising children to their parents. The trade war…

China’s Tiandu-1 satellite has taken part in a laser ranging experiment in Earth-moon space under strong daylight conditions, which the satellite’s developer says is the first test of its kind. Advertisement China’s Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) ran a laser ranging experiment on April 26-27 from the Earth to the Tiandu-1 experimental satellite, which has been orbiting the moon since its launch in March last year, according to state broadcaster CCTV. Satellite laser ranging measures the distance to orbiting satellites, which involves a laser at an observatory sending pulses of…