Month: March 2026

China’s flagship airline resumed direct flight services to Pyongyang on Monday, a symbolic and logistical development that marks warming bilateral ties and comes just weeks after passenger train services were restored for the first time in six years. The Air China flight arrived at Pyongyang Sunan International Airport on Monday morning, where the Chinese ambassador to North Korea, Wang Yajun, and other embassy diplomats welcomed passengers at the airport, according to Xinhua. The Boeing 737 operated by the national carrier departed from Beijing Capital International Airport about 8am and arrived…

To European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the ribbon of rail snaking from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia across Angola to the Atlantic port of Lobito is “more than just infrastructure”. The Lobito Corridor rail upgrade is a flagship project of the EU’s €300 billion (US$346 billion) infrastructure drive, Global Gateway, launched to great fanfare in 2021 as a rival to Beijing’s own Belt and Road Initiative. It is also pivotal to the EU’s efforts to wean itself off China’s chokehold on the global supply of…

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek suffered a prolonged outage overnight that extended into early Monday morning, disrupting service for hundreds of millions of users, according to a company notice and user feedback. The Hangzhou-based AI lab’s namesake chatbot website and app were offline from Sunday evening, with the company continuing to investigate while issuing fixes from between 1am and 9am on Monday, according to service maintenance records the company published online. The service appeared to be restored by 9.13am, according to a trial use by the South China Morning Post.…

Beijing has imposed sanctions on Japanese lawmaker Keiji Furuya for allegedly “colluding with the Taiwan independence forces”. “Japanese House of Representatives member Keiji Furuya, despite strong opposition from China, has repeatedly made provocative visits to Taiwan and colluded with ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces, seriously violating the one-China principle,” China’s foreign affairs ministry said in a statement on Monday. During his visit to Taipei on March 17, Furuya, a lawmaker with Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, met Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te. Advertisement According to Taiwan Today, an online publication owned…

Cheng Li-wun, chairwoman of Taiwan’s opposition party Kuomintang (KMT), will lead a delegation to mainland China next month at the invitation of Beijing, her first visit since assuming the position in November. Song Tao, head of Beijing’s Taiwan Work Office, said on Monday that the Communist Party Central Committee and Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, would welcome her visit to Jiangsu province, Shanghai and Beijing from April 7 to 12, to “promote the peaceful development of relations between the Communist Party and Kuomintang as well…

Chinese researchers say they have built an 11-satellite network for a jam-resistant, high-accuracy optical navigation system, designed to provide positioning where GPS is unavailable or disrupted, from self-driving cars and drones to deep-space missions. Optical navigation has also been used in the ongoing US-Israeli war with Iran, helping drones developed by companies such as Asio Technologies and General Atomics operate in environments where GPS signals are jammed. While positioning systems such as GPS and BeiDou rely on satellites that beam radio waves, Tsinghua University’s new network uses coded light signals…

China’s art market is showing tentative signs of recovery despite economic pressures, according to UBS, which cited rising participation from the next generation of wealthy families. “We have been seeing a rebound, with more trips for auctions and purchases [in China],” said Amy Lo Choi-wan, chairman of UBS Global Wealth Management Asia and CEO of UBS Hong Kong, in an interview with the South China Morning Post. “So I am optimistic.” Despite a prolonged property downturn and weak consumption, China’s art market eked out a marginal increase of more than…

Maritime tensions between China and the Philippines are likely to persist despite Manila’s call for energy cooperation, Chinese observers said after revived diplomatic talks on the weekend. Senior diplomats from the two countries met in the Chinese city of Quanzhou on Friday and Saturday for two rounds of talks, covering a range of issues from oil and gas cooperation in the South China Sea to renewable energy and coastguard communication. The foreign ministry consultations were held for the first time in three years while the Bilateral Consultation Mechanism on the…