South China Morning Post
Trump ally visits China, DeepSeek releases V4, EV earnings
Month: April 2026
In lead-up to Trump’s Beijing visit, China announces 2 pandas are headed to US zoo
The China Wildlife Conservation Association said on Friday that male panda Ping Ping and female Fu Shuang would travel to the US under a 10-year conservation agreement signed with Zoo Atlanta last year. Chinese state media, including the Global Times, framed the announcement as extending the “panda bond” between the Chinese and American people and advancing biodiversity cooperation. 09:52 How do China’s panda loans work and how has panda diplomacy evolved? How do China’s panda loans work and how has panda diplomacy evolved? Zoo Atlanta announced the news on Thursday,…
‘Big shout-out’ to China’s environmental leadership from UN agency head
The United Nations very much relied on China for its environmental protection role, including its major funding for biodiversity conservation in the Global South, the organisation’s environment chief said on Thursday. Speaking on the sidelines of the Regional Ecological Summit in Kazakhstan, Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said that “China has always been an active player in multilateralism”. Andersen said that within UNEP, they “very much rely on China, together with the other 192 [member states], to play a steady role”. Advertisement “China has been…
America offers US$4 million bounty for arrest of Chinese money launderer
The United States is offering a reward of up to US$4 million for information leading to the arrest of a Chinese national who fled the US after being convicted of money laundering. The bounty on fugitive Daren Li, 43, was announced by the State Department on Thursday through its Transnational Organised Crime Rewards Programme. In February, Li was convicted and sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison by the US Court for the Central District of California. Advertisement He had pleaded guilty in November 2024 to conspiring to launder…
War and Sanctions Accelerate China’s Currency Push
Neat rows of Chinese currency bills sit behind glass at the center of the national security gallery inside Hong Kong’s Museum of History, along with model fighter jets, attack helicopters and vials of rare-earth metals. Set with instruments of war and trade, the display underscores a central idea: The internationalization of its currency, the renminbi, is considered a pillar of China’s national security. Despite its rise as an economic superpower, China remains reliant on a global financial system anchored by the dollar. Turning the renminbi into a globally accepted currency…
DeepSeek releases next-gen AI model with ‘world-leading’ cost efficiency
DeepSeek has finally released its much-anticipated next-generation foundational artificial intelligence model, the open-source V4, which it said was competitive with leading US closed-source models from the likes of OpenAI and Google DeepMind. DeepSeek released two versions of the model on Friday, with the V4-pro model boasting 1.6 trillion parameters, making it the Hangzhou start-up’s biggest ever model by that metric, while the smaller V4-flash model has 284 billion parameters. Both models have a context window of 1 million tokens, a critical feature that determines the amount of information an AI…
Could thousands of US ‘hellscape’ drone boats mess with PLA plans for Taiwan?
Taiwanese analysts have broadly welcomed a new US Navy plan to deploy thousands of uncrewed surface vessels across the Indo-Pacific by 2030, saying it could complicate Beijing’s military planning and strengthen deterrence. But they also warned that unless Taipei pressed ahead with its own stalled drone fleet ambitions, the approach might offer Taiwan only limited direct benefit, given Washington’s production, logistics and surveillance challenges. The assessments follow remarks this week by Captain Garrett Miller, who said the US Navy expected to field more than 30 medium uncrewed surface vessels in…
ChiNext, Shenzhen’s Nasdaq, emerges as investor darling as start-up indexes smash records
An overhaul of listing and trading rules has driven a 16-year-old board for start-ups on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange to an all-time high, and traders believe the listed companies’ above-average earnings growth and exposure to renewable energy will extend the record-setting run. The ChiNext 50 Index of the board’s 50 biggest stocks and the ChiNext Composite Index both broke highs set in 2015 this week, outpacing other equity gauges of yuan-denominated stocks, which have yet to fully recoup their losses since the beginning of the Middle East conflict. Buying sentiment…
Iran War Has Drained U.S. Supplies of Critical, Costly Weapons
Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year. The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories…
Trump Reposts Anti-Immigrant Tirade Calling China and India ‘Hellhole’ Places
President Trump provoked a broad backlash this week when he posted a transcript from a right-wing podcast in which the host referred to China and India as “hellhole” places and said recent immigrants from those countries had not “integrated” into America as “European Americans” had. The transcript, which Mr. Trump posted on his Truth Social account on Wednesday night, came from a recent episode of “The Savage Nation,” hosted by Michael Savage, a popular conservative talk radio host. Mr. Trump also posted the original video clip of Mr. Savage’s podcast.…