Day: January 11, 2026

Chinese researchers have released the world’s first software for lunar timekeeping, a tool designed to support precise navigation and landings as a new global race to the moon gathers pace. Clocks tick faster on the moon than on Earth due to weaker gravity – by about 56 millionths of a second per day. The effect, predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is tiny but accumulates over time, making Earth time increasingly unreliable for lunar operations. To address this, a team from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing built…

China’s artificial intelligence efforts are unlikely to catch up with the United States in the near term despite making significant headway in recent years, according to the country’s leading AI researchers. The comments at a major industry conference in Beijing on Saturday underscored the gap between the two countries in semiconductor chips and chipmaking equipment, key resources for building out the infrastructure needed for developing cutting-edge AI models. Lin Junyang, technical lead of Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen team, said there was a less than 20 per cent chance – already…

With domestic profits narrowing and production capacity expanding, China’s firms are continuing to widen their overseas footprints in search of new, more lucrative markets. In this series, we examine China Inc.’s next phase of “going global” and the complex, challenging international environment its companies have chosen to enter. Chinese national Steve Xie has been doing business overseas for years. His latest venture, a new warehouse in Egypt, will supply electric vehicles and auto parts to the African and Middle Eastern markets. But these days, Xie has noticed other Chinese entrepreneurs…

In today’s chaotic world, we can sum up the shift in the global economy and geopolitics with a single number: 1 trillion. The year 2024 will be remembered as the first time in history that a national government’s interest payments on its debt exceeded US$1 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. Despite US President Donald Trump’s pledge to cut federal spending and his aggressive global trade war, the United States is now adding US$1 trillion in national debt every 71 days – up from…

Zheng Yongnian is a leading Chinese political scientist and government adviser, with a focus on the country’s transformation and foreign relations. In his third interview for the Open Questions series, Zheng discusses the “Donroe Doctrine” and its implications for the existing world order – and an emerging one. For other interviews in the series, click here. On Venezuela, you have noted that the US pivot to Latin America could reshape the regional order and that Donald Trump’s warnings to other countries could lead to profound structural changes. How do you…

The extreme precision of the US in its Venezuelan operation shows why nations must be able to execute a complex special surgical strike, according to analysts who said China had long pursued the capability but had yet to master it. In a complex joint endeavour integrating its air force, navy, intelligence agencies and space and cyber units, the US military’s elite Delta Force special mission unit completed its precision raid in Caracas – from infiltration to exfiltration – in less than three hours, abducting Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his…

Chinese firms have signalled plans to launch more than 200,000 internet satellites, filing submissions with a UN agency just as Beijing accused Elon Musk’s SpaceX of crowding shared orbital resources. A dozen or so submissions from various Chinese satellite players were filed with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the end of last month. The biggest projects – CTC-1 and CTC-2 – were for 96,714 satellites each and filed by the newly established Institute of Radio Spectrum Utilisation and Technological Innovation. 01:11 SpaceX launches another test flight of its mega…