Year: 2025

Consuming a diet with a moderate amount of lard can decrease both fat accumulation and inflammation in body fat, according to a new study by Chinese scientists. “These findings challenge the conventional view of animal fats and demonstrate that consuming lard at the recommended level (with dietary fat providing 25 per cent of energy) can confer metabolic benefits by regulating adipose tissue homeostasis,” the team wrote. Scientists from Hunan Agricultural University, the University of South China and the Changsha Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau published their findings in the peer-reviewed…

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…