Month: August 2026

The United States’ organ transplant system has been plunged into a crisis of public trust after federal health authorities decertified a major organ procurement organisation (OPO) over allegations that organs were harvested from donors who may still have been alive. The scandal has sent shock waves through Chinese communities and validated growing fears among Chinese students and parents. On August 5, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the immediate decertification of the Network for Hope, the nation’s 16th-largest OPO, which coordinated organ donations for nearly 7…

China’s embassy in Wellington has rejected New Zealand’s latest security assessment as the product of “foreign interference” and a “Cold War mentality”, as tension grows in a relationship already strained by geopolitical and security concerns. The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service’s annual threat report identified China as the only country conducting espionage “at scale”. In the Thursday report, the agency’s Director General Andrew Hampton described the current threat environment as “the most challenging of recent times” and warned “the frequency of espionage activities [is expected] to increase over the next…

Credited as a co-engineer of one of the greatest economic reforms in human history, former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji died on August 12, 2026, at the age of 97. We have put together seven stories from the South China Morning Post’s coverage of Zhu’s death. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. Zhu Rongji, China’s chief engineer of economic reform, dies aged 97 Zhu Rongji was premier of China from 1998 to 2003. Photo: Robert Ng 2. Zhu Rongji: leading China’s transformation through…

00:00 00:00 1.00x South China Morning Post

For generations, working with ancient Chinese texts has been a painstaking task. Specialists would spend years deciphering unfamiliar characters, copying manuscripts by hand, adding punctuation to texts written without it, comparing different editions and tracing references scattered across thousands of years of records. But artificial intelligence is now changing that process, not only by helping to preserve fragile manuscripts but also by transforming how ancient texts are recovered, studied and shared. As China accelerates its efforts to digitise a vast collection of ancient works, universities, technology companies and volunteers are…

In a post on Wednesday, “Zhejiang Propaganda” – a social media account affiliated with the Zhejiang provincial publicity department – warned about the rise of the “pseudo-historical school” online. The school promotes conspiracy theories that deny Western history and claim key achievements of Western civilisation actually originated in China. “[The] pseudo-historical school of thought has become a negative ideological trend that spreads through the internet and fractures social cognition,” the post cautioned. “Such claims appear to promote national confidence, but in reality they reflect ignorance of exchanges between civilisations. In…

Three Latin American governments that moved against Chinese commercial interests over the past year were named in a White House report on Thursday, which accused Chinese exporters of routing goods through third countries to evade US tariffs. Mexico, Panama and Colombia now join Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic among more than 40 countries the report says carry elevated risk of illegal transshipment, the practice of moving goods through an intermediate country so they enter the US under a different origin and a lower duty. Previously,…

For generations, China’s brightest science and technology minds followed a well-worn path: board a Westbound flight and claim a seat at a globally renowned university. That once-reliable trajectory has fractured. Escalating US-China tech competition and tightening immigration policies across the “big four” study destinations – Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States – have redrawn the map for global student mobility. As Western nations impose ever-stricter access controls and security protocols on their laboratories, a less conspicuous but significant shift is gathering momentum. A growing number of China’s…