Month: August 2026

China adds an 800-passenger jet with ‘flying wing’ body to its big aircraft plan

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A Chinese research team has unveiled an aerodynamic model for a massive flying-wing passenger aircraft that could carry more than 800 people, marking a bold new entry in the country’s large aircraft programme. Unlike conventional aircraft that have separate fuselage, wings and tail, a flying wing merges most of the structure into a single broad lifting body. The proposed design is 85 metres (280 feet) wide and 43 metres long, with a wingspan roughly 1.6 times that of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, which also uses a flying-wing layout. By…

After Hormuz, China looks to the promise – and peril – of the Arctic’s ‘ice silk road’

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When Marco Rubio suggested that the world should look to new shipping lanes to bypass the logjammed strait of Hormuz, it’s unlikely he had the Arctic’s northern sea route in mind. And yet in recent months the promise of this 5,500km channel – cleaved through frozen seas by nuclear-powered icebreakers and illuminated by a sun that never dips below the Arctic horizon – has grown. Japan, Korea and India have all expressed interest in sending cargoes through the northern sea route (NSR), but it’s China that has established the first…

Nirupama Rao and Lin Minwang on the great India-China face-off

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Welcome to Open Dialogue, a series from the South China Morning Post where we bring together leading voices to discuss the stories and subjects occupying international headlines. In this edition, we invited a leading Chinese scholar of South Asian affairs and a former Indian foreign secretary and ambassador to China to reflect on the deep fault lines in India-China relations. They debate whether the biggest barrier is history or politics, clash over the border, Pakistan and India’s ties with the United States, and examine whether Beijing and New Delhi can…

A fake website and a deluge of CVs: the Australian firm embroiled in an FBI probe into alleged Chinese espionage

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When the first emails arrived, they were easily dismissed as spam. But as strangers continued to boast about their defence and security credentials, they became impossible to ignore. From mid-2025, a small Australian consultancy firm called Horizzen started receiving emails and strange calls from people applying for vague jobs in the United States. It would have been an ambitious global expansion for the Brisbane-based firm, which only had a few domestic clients. Except, it wasn’t hiring. Without its knowledge, a fake consultancy firm impersonating Horizzen had been launched online. It…

How a ‘rough’ and ‘crude’ Chinese cartoon ox went from box office zero to hero

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A raw, handcrafted Chinese animation has become an unlikely box-office sensation despite being widely panned by critics and social media users. Niu Lai, or The Arrival of the Ox, has been criticised for its “rough” and “broken” style and a plot that many viewers found hard to follow. The popularity of the two American films has already seen the release of some high-profile Chinese films – including Three Kingdoms: The Beginning, a historical drama set in the third century – being delayed or cancelled. Niu Lai’s plot, which revolves around…

Communist Party of China invokes Jiang’s legacy in call to rally round Xi’s leadership

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A leading Communist Party research group has invoked the legacy of China’s former leader Jiang Zemin in a call to rally round President Xi Jinping. The article by the Institute of Party History and Literature, published on Sunday in the party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily, formed part of the commemorations of the centenary of Jiang’s birth and highlighted the importance of supporting the leadership in the face of economic or geopolitical difficulties. “Under the party’s third-generation leadership with Comrade Jiang Zemin at its core, China calmly responded to a set of…