Month: August 2026

Since Chinese container ships began plying the Northern Sea Route three years ago, the Arctic shipping lane has gained global importance. Houthi attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea later that year disrupted traffic through the Suez Canal – the fastest route between Europe and Asia – in what was the most serious conflict-driven disruption since the Arab-Israeli war nearly six decades earlier. The 5,600km (3,480-mile) Northern Sea Route spans Russia’s Arctic coast, from the Barents Sea to the Bering Strait. While it used to be impassable for most…

The iconic wrapper of White Rabbit, a six-decade-old Chinese milk confectionery, has recently gone viral in the West. Shared this month in a post on X, formerly Twitter, the retro packaging was hailed as an “absolute masterstroke of graphic design”. Its distinctive waxy paper – featuring a white rabbit against a red circle, with blue-and-white rabbit motifs lining both edges – has since racked up more than 6 million views and 260,000 likes. In the comments section, online users from around the world have shared custom creations such as tattoos,…

We have selected seven of the most interesting and important news stories covering US-China relations from the past few weeks. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. US-China ‘Board of Investment’ stalls before expected Trump-Xi meeting Photo: AP The US-China Board of Investment, one of the key outcomes of the May summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, is unlikely to be among the deliverables for their expected meeting next month in Washington, according to the head of a…

Taiwan has signed a deal with US defence start-up Vatn Systems to develop autonomous underwater vehicles and strengthen its asymmetric warfare capabilities amid growing military pressure from Beijing. Executed through the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) – Taiwan’s government-funded top weapons developer – the agreement marks the latest in a series of moves to expand the island’s unmanned underwater capabilities. Under the memorandum of understanding signed last week, NCSIST and Vatn will explore artificial intelligence-enabled command-and-control systems, deploy autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and establish supply-chain and maintenance…

Last month, two Chinese companies released artificial intelligence models most people outside the industry know little about: Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI and Qwen3.8-Max by Alibaba Group Holding (which owns the South China Morning Post). The markets reacted even before publicly auditable evidence about the performance claims – detailed benchmark table, model card and licence – was made fully available. In the weeks that followed, global chip stocks shed about US$3 trillion in market value. That reaction, rather than the models, is the story. Obviously, nobody was repricing Chinese engineering…

Chinese researchers have engineered a probiotic that could make diabetes care as simple as drinking a cup of yogurt or swallowing a capsule. The “smart” bacterium, designed to sense high blood sugar and automatically release a glucose-lowering hormone, performed on par with the blockbuster drug Ozempic in animal tests, according to a study published in Nature last week. The team at East China Normal University in Shanghai has already filed patents and is now scaling up production to meet pharmaceutical standards for the US and European markets. “If all goes…

Zheng Yongnian, dean of the school of public policy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen), made the case in his preface to The Rise of Atlas, a new book about the development of Huawei Technologies’ Atlas 950 SuperPoD computing system. The system, which Huawei showcased at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai last month, has been described as the industry’s largest AI supernode, a type of high-powered supercluster capable of linking more than 1,000 processors. Zheng argued that the main importance of such projects lay in…

South China Morning Post