Day: September 8, 2025

Pioneering Chinese-American mathematician Zhongwei Shen has left the United States to take up a chair professorship at Westlake University in Hangzhou. Advertisement He joined Westlake’s School of Science in July to continue decades of research on partial differential equations and harmonic analysis – mathematical fields that form the backbone of modelling the natural world, according to the university website. Shen, who was admitted to Peking University as a maths major at just 14, has spent 40 years in the US, including nearly three decades at the University of Kentucky, where…

Rahdar Hussain Afridi, a Pakistani national studying for a PhD in robotics at Peking University, had been worried about whether he could stay on after graduating in January. Advertisement He hopes to secure a job in China, but the recruitment process can take a while and his student visa, which might expire soon after graduation, does not come with a work permit. China’s newly introduced “young talent” K visa for STEM professionals has brought him “great relief”. “I am really happy to hear about this visa,” said Afridi, 29. “I…

On September 3, I watched the live broadcast of China’s military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the victory in World War II. The perfectly aligned formations, the roaring fighter jets, the cutting-edge unmanned combat systems – the spectacle spoke for itself. Advertisement Scanning international media, I found commentary interpreting the parade as a show of force by China and Russia against the United States, or warning about the Taiwan Strait and wider region. On Weibo, Chinese sentiment was summed up by a netizen who remarked: “Only when the motherland…

To get Southeast Asia’s coveted durians more quickly into the hands of Chinese consumers, a port operator in the relatively far-flung market of northeastern China is building a transit centre to handle seaborne imports of the pungent, spiky and often pricey fruit. Advertisement Liaoning Port Group, part of which operates the major sea terminal in Dalian, kicked off construction of the Dalian Northeast Asia Fruit Transit Centre in late August, a group representative said this month. That project will complement a new shipping service that the port group calls its…

Advertisement In 2006, he founded the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) – a non-profit environmental research organisation based in Beijing. At the time, data collected by his organisation showed around 28 per cent of monitored water sources nationwide were severely polluted and rendered unusable, leaving nearly 300 million people without sufficient clean drinking water, causing disease outbreaks in some regions. But significant improvements have been seen in water quality over the years, with more than 90 per cent of water at national control sections now being graded as…

Members of the Brics nations logged into a virtual summit on Monday, convened by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, intending to take a defiant stand against US President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war. Advertisement Instead, the quickly assembled outing became an exercise in caution, as the bloc’s heavyweights, Brazil and India, sought to steer clear of further enraging the “America-first” leader. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a founding Brics leader, skipped the meeting, sending Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in his place in a signal of a careful balancing…

For over a decade, the name Kim Jong-un has been synonymous with an isolated, economically struggling pariah state. Despite possessing nuclear weapons, North Korea has long been dismissed by the international community as a minor player on the world stage. That perception has now fundamentally changed. Advertisement As Kim stood alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping at China’s Victory Day parade last Wednesday and then had one-on-one summits with both, it signalled far more than diplomatic theatre. It marked a seismic shift in North Korea’s global…