Day: August 16, 2025

Chinese aerospace engineers are revisiting a decades-old, largely abandoned aviation concept – the oblique rotating wing – and transforming it into a potential cornerstone of future warfare: an unstaffed hypersonic mother ship capable of flying at five times the speed of sound and unleashing a swarm of drones behind enemy lines. Advertisement Drawing inspiration from Nasa’s quirky AD-1 experimental aircraft of the 1970s – a small jet-driven plane with a “scissor wing” that pivoted diagonally across the fuselage – researchers in China have reimagined the oblique wing as the key…

A number of Chinese cross-border exporters expect the Trump administration’s erratic trade policy to continue testing their stamina and resilience, days after the tariff truce between Beijing and Washington was extended for another 90 days. Advertisement Those concerns were raised on the sidelines at Friday’s opening of the semi-annual China Cross-Border E-Commerce Trade Fair in Guangzhou, capital of southern Guangdong province, which concludes on Sunday. Amazon.com trainer Sandy Zhu, for example, suggested that newcomers to the platform, which caters to 20 overseas markets, sell to the US because traffic was…

Advertisement China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations – two key players in the Global South – account for a quarter of the world’s population and a fifth of global gross domestic product, contributing to over 30 per cent of global economic growth. In July, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi announced that both sides would submit the “3.0 version” of the China-Asean Free Trade Agreement for approval in October. This signals a push to future-proof Asia’s trade flows amid renewed US protectionism and intensifying global competition. With negotiations over,…

China has been urged to speed up the development of solar power in space to gain a stronger footing in the new energy sector and the space race. Advertisement Ge Changchun, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, called in an article for a top-down strategy to speed up efforts to develop the technology and narrow the gap with the United States in sectors such as materials and precision control. Space solar power facilities are designed to be built and operated in orbit, where they convert solar energy directly…

The highly anticipated US-Russia presidential summit in Alaska had raised hopes for progress on ending the Ukraine war, but instead left more questions than answers. Advertisement Still, observers viewed Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic return to US soil – his first in a decade – as a symbolic win for Moscow. The nearly three-hour talks, which both Putin and Donald Trump described as “productive”, signalled a potential thaw in the fraught US-Russia relationship despite concluding without a ceasefire agreement, they said. Meanwhile, as China offered a cautious endorsement of the summit, Chinese…

European leaders have vowed to turn the screws on Moscow after a high-stakes US-Russia summit in Alaska failed to result in a ceasefire in Ukraine. Advertisement After a flurry of post-summit calls on Saturday, a coalition of Ukraine allies rallied around Kyiv, insisting that Russia could not veto its future membership of Nato or the European Union. Nor could there be limitations on “Ukraine’s armed forces or on its cooperation with third countries” as part of any peace agreement, read a statement quickly agreed between leaders of prominent European nations…

China is equipping Burkina Faso’s military and positioning itself for greater influence in the Sahel, filling a vacuum left by the collapse of security partnerships with Western nations, especially the United States and France. Advertisement The move is part of a broader modernisation plan that the Burkinabe government, headed by junta leader Ibrahim Traoré, announced in late 2023 amid growing insecurity waged by jihadist militants, mostly affiliated with al-Qaeda and Islamic State. After a complex diplomatic history that saw relations first established in 1973 and then severed in 1994, China…

Foreign Minister Wang Yi will visit India for the first time in three years to discuss the latest round of border talks, the Chinese foreign ministry has confirmed. Advertisement During the trip from August 18 to 20, the top Chinese diplomat will serve as the “special representative of the China-India boundary question” in the 24th round of border talks “at the invitation of the Indian side”, according to a Saturday statement from the ministry. This series of negotiations aims to address long-standing border disputes, which have seen a temporary de-escalation…