Month: August 2025

The recent back-to-back meetings in Alaska and Washington offer a troubling portrait of today’s security order. Rather than demonstrating a collective search for peace, these spectacles highlight a drift towards unilateralism, great-power deals and a hollowing out of multilateral security frameworks. Advertisement The meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed how easily Europe’s security can be reshaped behind closed doors, while the hastily arranged gathering at the White House with Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders underscored Europe’s diminished…

China has called for greater counterterrorism cooperation with Afghanistan, including joint patrols along the narrow strip of land that forms their only shared border. Advertisement “China supports the prompt resumption of bilateral patrols in the Wakhan Corridor to maintain peace and stability in the border region,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said during a meeting with the Afghan acting minister of interior affairs, Sirajuddin Haqqani. The Wakhan Corridor is a narrow strip of mountainous Afghan territory that divides Tajikistan and Pakistan, including Pakistani-held parts of Kashmir, and includes a 74km (46-mile)…

China Communication Services, the country’s leading telecommunications infrastructure contractor, said a wave of artificial intelligence projects is now driving digital transformation in thousands of industries and providing a boost to the company’s three major business segments. Advertisement Beijing-based China Comservice, a subsidiary of China Telecom, made that assessment on Thursday as the firm reported its latest financial results, which showed growth in both revenue and net profit in the first six months of the year. The Hong Kong-listed company reported a 3.4 per cent year-on-year increase in revenue to 76.94…

China has released a breakdown of the subsidy settlements for new-energy vehicle (NEV) companies from 2016 to 2020, along with the allocation plan for 2021 to 2022, and the data helps illustrate how the industry landscape shifted during those years. Advertisement According to data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) earlier this month, over the seven years from 2016 to 2022, subsidies gradually moved from traditional state-owned enterprises to leading carmakers and emerging start-ups. A total of 1.65 billion yuan (US$230 million) in subsidies was disbursed…

China has rejected claims that it is a growing espionage threat to New Zealand, calling the suggestions in Wellington’s latest intelligence report “groundless” and “riddled with ideological bias”. Advertisement In the annual report released on Thursday, New Zealand said it was facing its toughest national security challenges, with increasing threats of foreign interference and espionage. It said Beijing was the “most active” player in this interference, an escalation from last year when it labelled China a “complex intelligence concern”. The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service also called out China’s United…

Chinese Premier Li Qiang has called for stronger policy support for the biotech industry, as part of efforts to bolster innovation in a sector that has witnessed a boom in recent years. Advertisement “The biopharmaceutical industry is both a strategic emerging sector and vital to public health,” he said during an inspection in Beijing on Wednesday, as reported by the state-run Xinhua News Agency. “Efforts should be made to strengthen original innovation, address core technological challenges and mobilise resources from the government and market to achieve breakthroughs quickly.” Li also…

Planting trees in some parts of the world could cause droughts, according to a Chinese-led study that suggested greening efforts should take regional conditions into account to be effective. Advertisement Through a complex multi-decade study of vegetation and soil moisture patterns combining several databases and models, the researchers found that nearly half of the world had experienced a pattern of “greening-drying.” This included parts of the United States, Central Asia, Central Africa, inland Europe, southern Australia and South America, where increasing vegetation cover resulted in a drop in soil moisture…