Day: June 28, 2025

Advertisement According to one China watcher, Beijing may be a “long-term beneficiary” of the American retreat from stable leadership, as Washington’s strikes on Iran have revealed it to be an uncertain and unpredictable global power. More significantly, the conflict has revealed Washington’s reluctance to engage in a prolonged war, offering the Chinese leadership clues on how the Trump administration might approach other flashpoints, including Taiwan. The US carried out air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend in an operation Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth called a “resounding success” that obliterated…

China’s halt on rare earth exports will fuel efforts to build alternative production capacity overseas despite technical and financial challenges, according to REalloys, an American firm that is involved in the industry. Advertisement But the buildout would be costly and protracted due to technical challenges and could require subsidies and tariffs to stave off competition from Chinese products, which have dominated the global market for nearly three decades, analysts said. “China has done a remarkable job at putting these supply chains for critical metals together,” said REalloys CEO David Argyle…

China still lags behind the US in artificial intelligence (AI) chips, but the country is rapidly catching up in algorithms amid an intense technological race between the world’s two largest economies, according to renowned computer scientist Harry Shum Heung-yeung. Advertisement AI competition encompassed three key aspects: chips, algorithms, and applications – and the US was “clearly” still “far ahead” in chip technology, said Shum, council chairman at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, at an economic summit hosted by the University of Hong Kong Business School on Friday.…

Over the past month, one of the biggest hit streaming shows globally has been a fictional drama about a young man who plots revenge after his family is murdered. Advertisement The made-in-China historical fantasy is the latest major production to showcase the growing international influence of one of the country’s fastest growing cultural exports – storytelling. In the week after its May 18 debut, Legend of Zang Hai topped multiple overseas rankings in 15 regions, including the No 1 spot on Disney+ in Taiwan for seven days, while becoming the…

Iran may look to China for weapons support amid conflicts with the US and Israel, but Beijing will remain cautious, considering strained economic ties with Tehran and its broader interest in balancing ties with Israel and other Western-aligned states in the region, according to a veteran Chinese expert on the Middle East. Advertisement In an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post, Pan Guang, a Chinese scholar of Jewish and Middle East studies, said the conflict between Iran and Israel was unlikely to spiral into a broader war, but…

Chinese-American mathematician Yitang Zhang has left the United States to join Sun Yat-sen University in southern China as a full-time professor. Advertisement The 70-year-old number theorist has been appointed to the university’s newly established Institute of Advanced Study Hong Kong and will live and work in the Greater Bay Area, the university announced at a ceremony on Friday afternoon. While the university did not give further details about his appointment, it noted that Zhang had relocated to China with his family. Zhang spent a decade as a mathematics professor at…

Israel’s sweeping intelligence operations against Iran have jolted Taiwan’s security community, raising concerns that Beijing could adopt similar tactics to cripple the island’s leadership or critical infrastructure. Advertisement As assassinations and sabotage rattle Tehran, analysts in Taipei warn that Beijing’s infiltration of Taiwan is no longer a purely political threat, and it might be laying the groundwork for high-stakes covert warfare. In recent months, Taiwan has seen a surge in espionage cases implicating not only retired and active-duty military personnel, but also aides to senior government officials and lawmakers from…

A county in southwestern China is bracing for another deluge just days after record floods killed at least six people. Advertisement Authorities in Rongjiang county in Guizhou province ordered the evacuation of half a dozen areas on Saturday as heavy rain was again forecast for the region. “Exceptionally large floods” began sweeping through the county on Tuesday, setting new benchmarks for both rainfall and water levels, state broadcaster CCTV reported on Thursday without saying what those levels were. The water inundated low-lying areas and inflicted severe damage on some infrastructure,…

Yajiang-1, a cutting-edge computing centre perched in the cradle of Tibetan civilisation along the Yarlung Tsangpo River, is up and running as part of China’s plan to transform the so-called roof of the world into a strategic frontier for sustainable supercomputing. Advertisement The facility, the first major hub of the “Eastern Data, Western Computing” project on the Tibetan Plateau, takes advantage of the region’s extreme environment to make massive artificial intelligence (AI) training tasks – amounting to millions of processing hours a year – radically more energy efficient. China plans…