Day: July 16, 2025

The United States’ decision to ease export restrictions on certain advanced chips – part of a broader package of trade agreements with China – is seen by experts as an early sign that high-level negotiations have steered bilateral relations in the right direction. Advertisement Washington’s move to resume license application reviews for Nvidia’s H20 AI and Advanced Micro Devices’s MI308 AI chips comes ahead of talks between senior officials from both nations in the coming weeks, despite a protracted strategic stand-off over tech and export controls. Zhuang Bo, global macro…

High on the Tibetan Plateau, China has completed a cutting-edge telescope designed to detect ripples in spacetime from the dawn of the universe with the help of the United States – strengthening a global effort to probe how everything began. Advertisement The Ali Cosmic Microwave Background Polarisation Telescope (AliCPT), perched at 5,250 metres (17,220 ft) in Tibet’s remote Ali prefecture, was finished this month after eight years of construction involving 16 institutions worldwide, including Stanford University, according to state broadcaster CCTV. Led by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP)…

Catch up on some of SCMP’s biggest China stories of the day. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. US and China are ‘creeping’ towards a trade deal, former ambassador Burns says Washington and Beijing are on a “creeping path towards some kind of a deal”, former US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns said on Tuesday, while offering some rare support for US President Donald Trump’s tariff strategy towards China. 2. China’s foreign minister urges SCO to work for more ‘equal and orderly’…

Beijing has pledged to punish those who enforce Taiwan’s residency restrictions for mainland Chinese spouses, with Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily slamming Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te’s recent remarks about “removing impurities” on the island. Advertisement On Wednesday, Chen Binhua, a spokesman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, described the island’s tightened residency rules as “a typical case of illegal abuse of power” and accused Taiwanese authorities of “discriminatory treatment and deliberate suppression that expose the nature of separatists”. Chen said Taiwanese authorities were “deliberately targeting mainland spouses who have lived…

China appears to be positioning Africa as a testing ground for internationalisation of the yuan as it seeks to expand the currency’s global use and break the dominance of the US dollar. Advertisement During a recent meeting in Cairo, the central banks of China and Egypt signed a series of agreements to promote the use of the yuan in trade and investment. These deals – lauded by People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng as a key step in advancing economic ties – were signed last week during Chinese Premier…