Author: Media Library

The People’s Liberation Army’s anti-corruption investigations into top general Zhang Youxia and others will eliminate a watered down combat capability and give new momentum to the military’s development, according to a commentary by its mouthpiece the PLA Daily. “The resolute investigation and punishment of corrupt officials such as Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli removes obstacles and stumbling blocks that hinder the development of our cause,” it said in a front-page editorial on Monday. “It eliminates the watered down parts of combat capability building and inspires the spirit of hard work…

China’s frontier artificial intelligence labs are ending the lunar year on a high note, racing to release a series of new AI models in the last few weeks of the Year of the Snake as the country gears up to celebrate the start of the Year of the Horse. Beijing-based Zhipu AI and Shanghai-quartered MiniMax, which just made their stock exchange debuts in Hong Kong, would be the next to update their flagship AI systems with across-the-board enhancements, according to sources familiar with their release plans. Zhipu AI, known as…

Chinese scientists have developed a hydrogel cooling coating for solar panels to boost power output by 13 per cent compared to conventional photovoltaic systems. The transparent layer can reduce the temperature of “hotspots” – overheated areas on solar cells caused by defects, shading from leaves, bird droppings or dirt – by 16 degrees Celsius, or nearly 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Hotspots are a common cause of solar panel failure and fire risk. “On a global scale, our developed cooling strategy can offset around 50 per cent of power generation loss caused…

Twenty years ago, technologies developed by Liang Jie at Microsoft were incorporated into products like the Windows Media Video Player and Blu-ray discs used by millions worldwide. A decade on, while a professor in Canada, Liang ventured into entrepreneurship, developing an intelligent sensor system for elderly care to address global population ageing. Today, he brings his top-tier expertise in image and video compression back to China. Advertisement According to the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo (EIT), he joined the university in January as a chair professor at its School of…

Interest in de-dollarisation has spiked in Chinese academic and policy circles, as Beijing grows increasingly wary of the United States’ potential to weaponise its currency. The surge has been most visible in the volume of research. A search by the South China Morning Post on China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), one of the country’s largest academic research databases, showed the number of papers on the subject more than doubled from 2023 to 2025 compared with the preceding three years. De-dollarisation gained further traction as global economic uncertainty intensified following the…

Lawrence J. Lau is a Hong Kong economist specialising in economic development and East Asian economies. He was a professor of economics at Stanford University before serving as vice-chancellor and president of the Chinese University of Hong Kong until 2010. Lau has held the Ralph and Claire Landau Professor of Economics chair at the university since 2007. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here. What is your take on China’s drive to build a high-quality production force? How much has…