Month: September 2025

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. China announces date for key party meeting to discuss next 5-year plan The Communist Party of China will hold its annual conclave between October 20 and 23 in Beijing to discuss the next five-year plan, a blueprint that will set out the country’s economic, political and social goals as it grapples with the United States. 2. China, North Korea FMs signal firm ties and…

Just hours before US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to settle the tumult surrounding TikTok, Beijing launched a sudden salvo in its ongoing trade war with Washington. Advertisement It not only marked the latest example of bilateral tensions flaring up during Trump’s second presidential term, analysts say it also reflected a pattern in the tit-for-tat tactics that Beijing has employed, with carefully planned reactive measures aimed at maximum leverage. But even as waters remain muddied, the general expectation appears to be that bilateral talks will continue. Analysts attribute…

A Chinese court sentenced 16 people linked to a notorious Myanmar-based telecoms fraud group to death on Monday for crimes including fraud, drug trafficking and prostitution. Advertisement According to state broadcaster CCTV, prosecutors in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang found that since 2015 the Ming family crime gang had used its influence in Myanmar’s Kokang region to set up a number of “parks” and collude with financial backers to carry out criminal activities. Those activities – encompassing telecoms fraud, gambling operations, drug trafficking and organised prostitution – involved more…

The Rohingya people have endured one of the world’s most protracted, yet least visible, humanitarian crises. Nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in what were supposed to be temporary camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. They still have little prospect of returning to Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Advertisement But at a recent conference in Dhaka, the Rohingya people were, for the first time, given a voice. Their message was clear: they do not want more aid. They need to go home. China is well placed to help make that happen. For years,…

The sudden death of a promising young Princeton University Chinese researcher and innovator in the field of AI-powered electronics has shocked academic and online communities in the United States and China. Advertisement Twenty-eight-year-old Li Haoran was found dead in his home in West Windsor, New Jersey, on Thursday, according to the university. Li’s death was confirmed in a statement by the university’s administration on Friday, but further details were not immediately available. Li was an exceptional talent in the field of power electronics and machine learning and had recently completed…

Authorities in Henan province, central China, have approved the merger of 82 small rural financial institutions into a single regional lender, in an effort to contain systemic risks in a region once at the centre of a major banking scandal. Advertisement Approved by the Henan office of the National Financial Regulatory Administration (NFRA), the consolidation will see Henan Rural Commercial Bank absorb institutions across nine cities including Kaifeng, Pingdingshan and Anyang, according to an official social media post by the bank on Sunday. The bank will assume all assets, liabilities,…

An all-superconducting magnet built by Chinese scientists has generated a world-record steady magnetic field of 35.1 tesla, about 700,000 times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field. Advertisement The development could have implications for anything that requires highly powerful magnets, like aerospace electromagnetic propulsion, power transmission, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear fusion and superconducting magnetic levitation, or maglev. The fully superconducting magnet developed by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Plasma Physics operated stably for 30 minutes before being safely demagnetised. “This validated the reliability of the technical…

Hunan has become the latest Chinese province to tighten controls on non-tax revenue growth through a revision of local regulation, as Beijing intensifies efforts to revive market sentiment and private investor confidence. Advertisement The regulation changes, set to take effect on November 1, explicitly mandate that local-level governments fully remit proceeds from the disposal of confiscated goods – along with any interest they generate – to the state treasury, in a sign of how such non-tax revenue is now under stricter oversight by the central government. Additionally, the controls forbid…