Day: August 18, 2026

A Chinese national, described by the US Justice Department as a “prolific” money launderer, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Tuesday and ordered to pay US$25 million for his role in a Chinese money laundering outfit with ties to Mexican drug gangs. The agency said Jianfei Lu, aged 31, was involved in laundering more than US$92 million in illicit funds in a two-year period, collecting the money from US-based drug traffickers and depositing it into shell company bank accounts using both real and fake identities. “Chinese money laundering…

The South China Sea’s contested islands could be transformed into autonomous, robotic fortresses, according to a defence proposal by the Chinese coastguard. The plan, which was detailed in a Chinese-language journal supervised by the state-run China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, envisions a maritime landscape defended by a coordinated swarm of machines instead of soldiers. The proposal comes as Beijing seeks to neutralise the growing threat of low-cost drone swarms – the asymmetric weapon that has reshaped naval combat as traditional, human-led defences are increasingly vulnerable to uncrewed aerial and surface fleets.…

A new film telling the story of the Iraq war through Chinese eyes marks the latest in a series of soft power initiatives designed to get Beijing’s message across to the wider world. Although Once Upon a Time in the Middle East does not explicitly state the name of the country in question, it is set in the 2000s and features an invasion by American troops. The film’s central character, a Chinese chef named Xu Fu who is working off his debts at the time the war starts, turns his…

In a global first, leading Chinese commercial rocket company LandSpace has recovered a stainless-steel booster after an orbital launch, marking a major step in the country’s efforts to develop lower-cost, reusable rockets. Previous reusable boosters deployed in such launches have been made from aluminium alloys, which can be more expensive to develop due to higher design and raw material costs. China is also the first country to succeed in orbital launch recovery down distinct technological pathways, pulling off a dual-track strategy that even the United States – which pioneered reusable…

As China deepens the commercialisation of its vast troves of data, the United States needs to develop its own national data strategy that treats data as an economic asset to better position itself to prevail in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics, a key US congressional advisory body has said. In a report published on Tuesday, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) warned that the US risks ceding global leadership in setting global data standards to China, which would give Chinese firms an advantage over their…

Several top US Democratic lawmakers chided US President Donald Trump on Tuesday for easing sanctions recently on Chinese and Hong Kong officials who, they said, were “complicit in Beijing’s dismantling of Hong Kong’s autonomy”. “We write to express serious concern,” the four-page letter said. “It raises serious questions about the durability of US policy towards Hong Kong that we believe warrant a direct response from the administration.” On July 14, the US allowed its designation of Hong Kong as an area worthy of “national emergency” concern to lapse, although a…

Midwestern Americans watching television this summer may have been surprised to see China and bacon appearing together in political advertisements. “The corrupt Save Our Bacon scam in the farm bill – it’s a giveaway to Chinese corporations,” one advertisement declared over images of the Chinese flag and Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Whose side is your senator on? America or China?” Viewers might assume the advertisement was promoting yet another Republican-led effort to counter Beijing. The reality is far more complicated. Behind the aggressive campaign against the Save Our Bacon Act…