Month: April 2026

A hotel operator’s planned entry into Xiongan New Area southwest of Beijing highlights a tentative but growing alignment between Hong Kong’s private sector and the state-backed development project, as leaders renew efforts to accelerate the zone’s transformation into a hi-tech growth hub. Hong Kong-based Langham Hospitality Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of Great Eagle Holdings, said on Thursday that it had signed a management agreement with China Xiongan Group Public Service Management to open two hotels in Xiongan, located in Hebei province about 100km (62 miles) from Beijing. The hotel…

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for China and Cambodia to “stand in closer solidarity, now more than ever” in the first-ever 2+2 strategic dialogue aimed at deepening mutual political and security ties. Speaking during a meeting in Phnom Penh, Wang also urged the two sides to further strengthen political and security cooperation to “firmly hold the reins of development and security in their own hands”. The meeting on Wednesday was the first under the 2+2 mechanism with Cambodia involving defence and foreign ministers, proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping…

For years, Nasa funded a dream called SpiderFab – a spider-like robot that would crawl through orbit, weaving solar power stations and giant antennas from spools of carbon fibre – creating structures too large for any rocket to carry whole. Although SpiderFab never ended up in space, scientists from the Shenyang Institute of Automation in northern China say they have built the key technologies to reach a similar goal. The team first made the building blocks from a carbon-fibre composite, shaping it into long, hollow tubes using heat and pressure.…

The number of Chinese tourists deciding to travel during the five-day Labour Day holiday at the start of next month could rival or exceed last year’s headcount despite higher global fuel prices, analysts said, adding travellers were likely to prefer shorter trips to save on transport costs. Domestic flight bookings were up about 8 per cent year on year and domestic package-tour reservations were about 10 per cent higher ahead of the break, even after fuel prices shot up because of the war in Iran, according to a survey by…

South China Morning Post

Alibaba Group Holding has struck its first external partnership for its flagship consumer artificial intelligence app, linking it with China Eastern Airlines in a move that pushes its agentic capabilities beyond the company’s own ecosystem and into real-world services. The company said the fresh collaboration allowed users of the Qwen app to manage the full flight booking process – from search and ticket purchase to seat selection and check-in – within a single natural-language chat interface. It also acted as a proactive intelligent companion, anticipating user needs and suggesting options,…

Shortly after the doors opened each day at the ongoing Canton Fair, every corner of the robotics and drone halls quickly filled to capacity, while the new energy pavilion remained densely packed with overseas buyers. Foreign buyers moved slowly between booths, live streaming their encounters with new tech products to social media, queuing to try out the latest devices and in some cases, purchasing samples on the spot at the event, which started last Wednesday. Advertisement The scenes reflect a broader shift for China’s largest trade exhibition, where the nation’s…

China has reported a staggering amount of domestic artificial intelligence power, pointing to what some experts say could be a “dark pool” of compute thousands of times larger than its public reports suggest. According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), China has achieved 1,882 exaflops – short for exa floating-point operations per second – which translates to 1,882 quintillion, or billion billion, calculations per second. The figure is more than 6,000 times higher than the country’s computing power as reflected in the Top500 list, one of the…

All eyes are on the Strait of Hormuz as the world waits for a new round of US-Iran peace deal talks to ease the global energy crisis, while the extended ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump remains up in the air. These are the main takeaways from what happened overnight. Peace talks? It remains unclear when the two sides will return to the negotiating table. Advertisement Trump on Wednesday said there was “no time frame” for when the war on Iran might come to an end. During an interview…