Day: February 24, 2026

US President Donald Trump delivered his first official State of Union address of his second term on Tuesday night, defending his policies and touting his administration’s biggest achievements since his return to the White House. In the longest speech of its kind, Trump spoke of a “golden age of America”, saying “America is respected again, perhaps like never before”. The American leader is grappling with a series of challenges, including rising economic woes, mounting foreign policy tensions and sharp political divisions before the midterm elections. Advertisement Throughout the near-two-hour address,…

Just hours apart on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, two congressional hearings laid bare the United States’ calibrated yet deeply sceptical approach to China, with senior officials stressing the pursuit of stable ties without trust and highlighting alleged Chinese efforts to steal or circumvent US technology restrictions. The officials’ appearances before Congress reflected bipartisan concern and underscored persistent tensions over trade and advanced technologies such as semiconductors, ahead of US President Donald Trump’s planned April summit in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In a House Foreign Affairs Committee session on…

A team of Chinese scientists has unveiled the world’s smallest and most energy-efficient transistor in a breakthrough poised to anchor the next generation of high-performance AI hardware. The researchers achieved the feat in ferroelectric transistors (FeFETs), which function similarly to neurons in the human brain as they integrate memory and processing in a single unit, thereby reducing the time lost in data transfer. In conventional semiconductor chips, data storage and computation occur in separate areas, creating efficiency bottlenecks for communication “across the wall”. Advertisement According to Qiu Chenguang of Peking…

The European Union’s trade chief Maros Sefcovic has railed against the bloc’s glacial trade defences, warning that years-long probes and rigid rules will not protect the bloc from China’s increasingly fierce export machine. Speaking in the European Parliament on Tuesday, Sefcovic lashed out at Beijing’s “unsustainable” trade surplus and called for an urgent overhaul of world trading rules to account for “overcapacities”, “unfair trade policies” and “state subsidies”. He confirmed, meanwhile, that the commission was “monitoring very closely the increase of plug-in hybrid Chinese vehicles” to the EU. Advertisement “Last…

When Wilson Chan Fung-cheung joined Hong Kong’s banking industry as a foreign-exchange trader more than four decades ago, his work involved US dollars, UK pounds, Japanese yen and various European and Asian currencies – but not Chinese yuan. “Back then, there was no yuan trading at all as, in fact, the internationalisation of the yuan only started in 2009,” recalled Chan, who has worked for various Chinese banks. Beijing’s decision that year to promote its currency for wider use in trade, investment and other fundraising activities was a game-changer for…

Kyiv’s top envoy to Beijing has called on China to play its “important” and “critical” role to help end the war in Ukraine, which is now stretching into a fifth year. “We are working with all international partners to bring a sustainable and lasting peace, and we believe that our host country, China, is uniquely positioned to play an important and in many ways critical role in this process,” Olexander Nechytaylo, Ukrainian ambassador to China, told foreign diplomats in the Chinese capital on Tuesday. “So my message here today: let’s…

China has vowed to refine its energy strategy and ramp up major engineering projects over the next five years, placing energy security at the heart of its new development blueprint. The National Energy Administration announced on Monday that it would introduce a new development framework this year, together with a series of sector-specific plans, as Beijing enters its latest five-year plan period. “The internal and external environment for building China’s new energy system is undergoing profound and complex changes,” said Ren Yuzhi, head of the administration’s planning department, in a…