Month: April 2026

China has cleared the way for a landmark visit by the Dutch trade minister – signalled by Beijing’s quiet removal of long-held sanctions on the official – at a time when their bilateral relations need some attention, according to people familiar with the matter. Beijing has agreed to host Sjoerd Sjoerdsma for a visit and has removed him from the sanction list, a source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “No date is fixed yet [between Beijing and The Hague] … only that…

China has vowed to take a holistic approach in responding to external shocks and safeguarding the country’s energy security, as fallout from the US-Israel war on Iran continues to spread across the global economy. After a meeting of the country’s Politburo – a major decision-making body of the ruling Communist Party led by President Xi Jinping – that ended on Tuesday, the country’s top leadership pledged to push forward with new water, power and computing infrastructure projects, while accelerating the launch of major projects that are ready to break ground.…

German biochemist and Nobel laureate Hartmut Michel has taken up a full-time position as a professor at Jilin University in Changchun, northeastern China, according to the university. The 77-year-old – who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for revealing how photosynthesis works at the molecular level – will join the university’s First Hospital as “a flagship hire under its talent recruitment strategy”, the university said in a statement last week. It said Michel told the university’s Communist Party chief Tian Hui during a meeting on April 21 that the…

The Pentagon is considering outsourcing warship design and building to South Korea and Japan with a proposed US$1.85 billion feasibility study into the project, according to US media reports. The study – included in the 2027 budget – will look at the feasibility of adopting or co-producing advanced hulls such as Japan’s Mogami-class and South Korea’s Daegu-class frigates to supplement the US Navy’s overstretched production lines, USNI News reported on Friday. If the plan goes ahead it will be the first time the US has bought a major surface combatant…

China’s population is projected to fall by about 60 million over the next decade, threatening economic activity in wealthier coastal provinces and putting growing pressure on the public pension system, according to recent analyst reports. Research firm Rhodium Group estimated that the world’s second-most populous country, after India, could lose the equivalent of nearly France’s entire population over the coming 10 years. In a nation of 1.41 billion people, a decline of this scale would weigh on labour productivity, consumption and social security, including in richer coastal provinces that have…

The United States has “no defence against hypersonic weapons or cruise missiles”, a senior Pentagon official told Congress on Monday, as US President Donald Trump’s US$185 billion Golden Dome missile shield faces continued scepticism. “The Golden Dome will strengthen deterrence by denying adversaries the ability to achieve their objectives through coercion or aggression,” Marc Berkowitz, the assistant secretary of defence for missile defence and deterrence policy, told a Senate hearing on Monday. Trump, a Republican president known for his fixation on outsize military programmes, proposed last year that the US…

The coming summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Donald Trump offers a window to stabilise bilateral ties through trade deals, but former diplomats and business figures have urged the leaders to move beyond commerce during their talks. At a forum held by the Centre for China and Globalisation (CCG) in Beijing on Sunday, analysts and former officials called on the leaders to address issues such as healthcare, climate change, technological decoupling and AI governance. One former diplomat also warned of a “malpractice-like” lack of summit preparation…

“Balikatan 2026” is meant to reassure allies and deter adversaries. But the military exercise hosted by the Philippines also reveals a harsher truth: the Indo-Pacific is drifting into a security logic in which deterrence no longer contains risk but multiplies it. Every move taken in the name of stability now invites a countermove. Every display of resolve is answered by another. The result is not equilibrium, but a trap. That is why diplomacy has to return to the centre of regional strategy before military signalling becomes the region’s default language.…