Month: November 2025

China will not seek a nuclear arms race and opposes the United States’ deployment of offensive missiles in Asia, according to Beijing’s latest white paper on nuclear policy. The paper – titled “China’s Arms Control, Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in the New Era” – updates the previous 2005 version of the document. In the white paper released on Thursday, Beijing said it had consistently kept its nuclear forces at the minimum level required for national security. Beijing has long underscored… South China Morning Post

Both China and the European Union have signalled that a dispute over semiconductor maker Nexperia should be resolved at the corporate level, according to China’s Ministry of Commerce, as affected countries continue to seek a solution to supply-chain disruptions. The push for a corporate resolution came after two separate video conferences that Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao had on Wednesday – with German Economy Minister Katherina Reiche and European Commissioner for Trade Maros Sefcovic. “Both sides agree that … Nexperia Netherlands and Nexperia China should promptly engage in constructive communication…

In nuclear war, the long-held assumption of mutual assured destruction no longer exists. Welcome to the age of permanent strategic instability, where superpowers mix fast and accurate nuclear and non-nuclear missiles in the same arsenal. The risk of war is greater than many realise. The scale of catastrophe is also significant. A potential nuclear winter is estimated to amount to billions of deaths from starvation after years of global crop failures. Such risks and consequences are disastrously underestimated. Nuclear powers have long sought the ability to fight and win a…

However, that demand appears unlikely to be met in the short term, and one diplomatic analyst warned that the pressure tactics should aim to avoid a nationalist backlash within Japan and win support for Beijing’s stance. Advertisement “Based on current official statements, Beijing’s pressure is likely to continue until Takaichi explicitly retracts her remarks, or the Japanese government formally articulates its ‘consistent position’ on the Taiwan issue,” said Xu Weijun, an assistant research professor with the Institute of Public Policy at the South China University of Technology. Earlier this month,…

Beijing has warned against foreign interference in its internal affairs following reports that US President Donald Trump privately pressed Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to dial back her rhetoric on Taiwan. During a call on Tuesday, the US leader urged Takaichi not to provoke China, according to a Wall Street Journal report that cited government officials. While reportedly briefed on Takaichi’s domestic political constraints, Trump asked her to “temper” her tone, but stopped short of echoing Beijing’s demand for a full retraction. Advertisement Tokyo rejected the claims and denied that…

In the eighth instalment of his exclusive series for the South China Morning Post, American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek explores the big world manifestation of small world quantum mechanics. Read his previous articles here. The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2025 was awarded to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit”. The trio collaborated on a series of groundbreaking experiments during 1984 and 1985. The phrase “quantum leap” is often used, in common…