Day: December 23, 2025

President Xi Jinping has instructed central state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to serve as the bedrock of national development, urging them to drive industrial upgrading and secure critical technologies in the next phase of China’s growth. “Central SOEs must fully recognise the responsibilities and missions they shoulder and better serve the overall priorities of the party and the state,” he stressed in remarks conveyed to a meeting of central SOE leaders in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday, though he did not attend in person, Xinhua reported on Tuesday. The mandate comes as…

The late Emperor Hirohito of Japan should be held accountable under international law for the crimes of Unit 731, according to Chinese scholars who say the wartime ruler authorised the infamous programme but was shielded from prosecution by US policy after World War II. The secret Japanese military unit in northeastern China, which was responsible for human experimentation, biological warfare and at least tens of thousands of civilian deaths, had been created by imperial order in 1936, said Zhou Donghua, a contemporary history professor at Hangzhou Normal University. Before Japan’s…

That underscored a sluggish state of affairs at Mao Geping, about two months after opening its first overseas location in the city, and the broader challenges faced by Chinese beauty – dubbed C-beauty – brands seeking to expand sales outside the mainland. The cosmetics firm was named after founder Mao Geping, China’s most famous make-up artist, who was behind numerous mainland films, television programmes and reality shows. Advertisement “Mao Geping is finally here in Hong Kong,” trumpeted the firm’s account on the Chinese social media platform RedNote, which only had…

Washington is not pursuing a forceful strategy towards China but Beijing’s “historic” military build-up is making the US increasingly vulnerable, the Pentagon said in its annual report to Congress on military developments related to China. “We do not seek to strangle, dominate, or humiliate China … We seek only to deny the ability of any country in the Indo-Pacific to dominate us or our allies,” the 100-page report released on Tuesday said. “China’s historic military build-up has made the US homeland increasingly vulnerable” it added, citing Beijing’s growing arsenal of…

China should establish an “original” knowledge system regarding the history of its border regions to mitigate security risks from “hostile forces in the West”, according to a senior scholar at a prominent state-run think tank. Fan Enshi of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) also warned about the threat of “de-Sinicisation” in US-led historical perspectives, calling for a shift from “fragmented research” towards systematic domestic theories that could better project Chinese influence internationally. “The world today is undergoing great changes unseen in a century, with hostile forces in the…

China accused the United States at the United Nations on Tuesday of violating international law and destabilising the Caribbean region, as Washington defended its seizure of Venezuelan oil tankers and vowed to intensify pressure on President Nicolas Maduro’s government. Speaking at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council requested by Venezuela and backed by China and Russia, Beijing said US actions carried out under the banner of counter-narcotics enforcement amounted to unilateral coercion and a direct challenge to the principles of sovereignty and freedom of navigation. “The US actions…

In its push to secure supplies of critical minerals, the Donald Trump administration has increasingly looked abroad to reduce vulnerabilities in supply chains that underpin many of the world’s most advanced technologies. From China to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Ukraine, key strands of US foreign policy in recent months have centred on access to these materials – a group of roughly 60 minerals that the US Geological Survey considers vital to national and economic security, including rare earths that have become a focal point of Washington’s trade war…

All eyes are on how Beijing’s “Chinese dream” of eventual Taiwan reunification will unfold at a time when the leader of the United States – Taipei’s top international backer – appears less likely to intervene in case of a cross-strait conflict. In the second of a three-part series, Amber Wang looks at the challenges facing the new Kuomintang leader. Read the first part here. There have been seven chairs of the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s main opposition party, since President Xi Jinping took the top job in Beijing in 2012. But few…

That may sound like diplomatic low-hanging fruit, since it would be hard to find a reasonable person willing to argue that we should hand control over nuclear weapons to AI. But with the Chinese government, there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit, especially on weighty security matters. The Chinese are inherently sceptical of US risk reduction proposals. Russia had opposed similar language in multilateral bodies. Because bilateral talks with the US on AI and nuclear security would open daylight between Russia and China, progress on this front was not…