Day: November 23, 2025

More than two years after launching its economic security strategy and with the world swept up in economic warfare, the European Union still cannot decide what economic security means. Advertisement Despite this, under the strain of US tariffs and Chinese export controls, the bloc is preparing to unveil a new “economic security doctrine” in early December, which will provide bureaucrats with a dashboard of all the weapons at its disposal and the levers to pull – even as progress on its 2023 strategy appears to have stalled. “It came from…

China’s top defence university is piloting a scheme that allows PhD students to graduate with a product or design instead of a thesis in an effort to solve “bottleneck” engineering problems amid the tech race with the United States. Advertisement Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) – dubbed one of China’s “Seven Sons of National Defence” because of its contributions to defence research and technology – is exploring new approaches to fostering engineers. These include removing traditional academic papers as a mandatory degree requirement, according to a report by the China…

Nicholas Lardy is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, both Washington-based think tanks. He has studied the Chinese economy extensively, publishing several books on its growth and development since the late 1970s. His most recent, 2019’s The State Strikes Back, posits a rollback of Beijing’s economic reforms via renewed government intervention into the market. Advertisement This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here. The US has had…

The G20 summit in Johannesburg delivered major wins for African countries on debt, climate and critical minerals processing, but the progress was undercut by an unprecedented US boycott. Advertisement The United States will host the event next year when it takes over the rotating Group of 20 presidency. But when the summit ended on Sunday, there was no US leader present for the ceremonial handover. With the US a no-show, China and its allies drove the consensus on a Global South agenda that has dominated G20 summits since 2022. The…

The diplomatic crisis between Tokyo and Beijing is the result of a years-long fundamental shift to the right in Japan – and part of a “long-term struggle” that China must prepare for, according to analysts. Advertisement The assessment comes as relations between the two countries nosedive, prompted by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s suggestion earlier this month that a hypothetical conflict in the Taiwan Strait would trigger a military response from Tokyo. For Beijing, the comments ventured into a “core interest” and warranted economic retaliation and furious daily rebukes, including…

Chinese scientists have reduced the production time of dielectric energy storage capacitor components to just one second, enabling scalable, temperature-stable storage for hybrid electric vehicles, radar systems and high-power lasers. Advertisement Unlike other methods that can take from three minutes to an hour depending on the product quality, the team’s flash annealing technique heats and cools at a rate of 1,000 degrees Celsius per second, allowing for rapid synthesis of crystal films on a silicon wafer in a heartbeat. Dielectric capacitors are electronic components that store energy by polarising dielectric…

Politburo member Wang Yi has become the most senior Chinese official to wade into the war of words over the new Japanese prime minister’s comments on the Taiwan Strait, saying her remarks “crossed a red line”. Advertisement Wang, who is China’s foreign minister, said China must “resolutely respond” to the comments to safeguard the country’s sovereignty and defend its post-war achievements. “It is shocking that Japan’s current leader has publicly sent the wrong signal of attempting military intervention in the Taiwan issue, said things that shouldn’t have been said, and…