Month: August 2026

China’s most senior general Zhang Shengmin has invoked the late former president Jiang Zemin’s response to the collapse of the Soviet Union and first Gulf war in an article emphasising the importance of party unity and military reform in the face of external threats. In the article, published by party mouthpiece People’s Daily on Tuesday, Zhang highlighted the existential threats China faced in the late 20th century and how Jiang steered the People’s Liberation Army through the turmoil that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe in 1989.…

The People’s Liberation Army used a drone to deliver cases of cash and gold bars in a field during a “wartime financial support” drill apparently simulating a Taiwan operation, according to a state media report. A multi-rotor drone was used to drop the camouflage cases at designated locations during the exercise conducted by the PLA Eastern Theatre Command, national newspaper Defence Times said last week. The report prompted heated discussion online and has since been deleted. A multi-rotor drone was used to deliver the cases to soldiers in a field.…

South China Morning Post

Chinese President Xi Jinping led the party elite in paying a final tribute to former premier Zhu Rongji, who was cremated on Tuesday as national flags flew at half mast across the country and beyond. He served as premier from 1998 to 2003 and is regarded as the chief engineer of the country’s economic reform, having played a pivotal role in transitioning China towards a market-based economy and steering its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). That paved the way for China’s unprecedented growth and its rise as the…

South China Morning Post

After US President Donald Trump’s landmark visit to China in May, President Xi Jinping will pay a state visit to Washington in September. The South China Morning Post reports on the preparations and examines the issues at stake in the bilateral relations. Updated: 18 Aug, 2026 South China Morning Post

A top naval software expert, whose work helped warships to process battlefield information and support combat decisions, has vanished from the Chinese Academy of Engineering’s online membership list. Zhao Xiaozhe, 63, a vice-admiral in the PLA Navy, once headed the Central Military Commission’s top science and technology body, helping to shape research priorities across China’s armed forces. He is the latest prominent defence expert to disappear from the academy’s website, following reporting in… South China Morning Post

China’s state media has called for English-language terms related to artificial intelligence (AI) to be dropped in favour of standardised Chinese equivalents in a push to boost the country’s “discourse power”. As AI technologies have rapidly spread in China, English terms have entered common speech in the country, such as “agent” and “LLM” for large language model, a commentary published by the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily noted earlier this month. The article argued that reliance on foreign terminology would lead to “cognitive dependency” and ultimately undermine the country’s voice…