Month: June 2025

Officials across China are avoiding dining out to “play safe”, as the country’s latest austerity drive spirals into an overbearing campaign of excessive control like many similar ones before it. Advertisement Several officials interviewed said that the lifestyle change, even if temporary, was largely prompted by the ever-shifting local austerity measures, which could be even more stringent than the regulations originating from the central state and party bodies. An official in southwestern Sichuan province surnamed Luo said his department head had announced a dine-out ban in early May, saying “eating…

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…