It’s not quite up there with Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver to get into character, but Michelle Yeoh reportedly spent two years learning the Rubik’s Cube to prepare for this Chinese drama in which she plays a real-life former maths teacher who became a champion in retirement. The true story is stretched and squeezed here, fictionalised to fit sports-movie formula; it ends up being so-so entertaining and funny in places, but disappointingly predictable. The biggest surprise is that cubing is so popular it has its own world championship. Still,…
Category: The Guardian
‘Super app’ aimed at UK students uses servers owned by Chinese firm on US blacklist
A new messaging and payment “super app” marketed at British students uses servers owned by a Chinese company that has been put on a US military blacklist for its alleged affiliation to the People’s Liberation Army. ZyMix, which is being pushed on university campuses as the UK’s first super app designed “for gen Z”, combining chat, payments and community features, has a contract with a German-based subsidiary of Tencent Holdings, a Chinese conglomerate in Shenzhen. Tencent Holdings was added in January 2026 to the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) list…
Stellantis and Renault back UK to get EU car industry protection
Stellantis and Renault have backed the UK car industry for inclusion in proposed rules to protect EU industry, but urged the British government to consider limiting imports of Chinese cars. Emanuele Cappellano, who leads Stellantis’s European brands including Fiat, Citroën, Opel and Vauxhall, and François Provost, the chief executive of France’s Renault, said the UK should effectively be counted as one of the EU’s 27 member states for the purposes of the proposed “Made in Europe” legislation. The new rules aim to ensure EU subsidies and government procurement benefits Europe’s…
EU deal with China limits imports of hybrid electric vehicles
The EU is to limit the number of hybrid electrical vehicles imported from China to 350,000 cars a year, the European Commission has confirmed. Imports have been soaring in the last two years with about 800,000 battery and plug-in hybrids likely to be sold this year. The EU expects that the quota, which will come into force in December, will halve China’s market share which now stands at 6% in a landmark four-year agreement made in Beijing last week. The annual limit on imports of hybrids will be taken under…
Volkswagen boss backs EU plan to bolster domestic European industry
The boss of Volkswagen has backed EU proposals to boost its domestic industry, arguing European carmakers need to be able to “compete under comparable conditions” with Chinese rivals. Oliver Blume said “Made in Europe” rules from the EU “must reward real value creation in Europe”, speaking in Paris before the motor show this week. The rules are aimed at countering the rapid rise of Chinese brands in Europe in the automotive sector and other important manufacturing industries. Lower-priced Chinese manufacturers have prompted a crisis in several industries. Volkswagen is among…
China agrees to ‘halve’ hybrid car exports to EU in landmark deal
The EU said it has reached a landmark deal with China to “halve” its sales of hybrid cars in the bloc amid fears surging sales could kill off parts of the European car industry. Trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič said the deal was the first of its kind and the result of “intense” negotiations with China since June to curb a trade deficit of €1.18bn (£1bn) a day, which has caused mounting tensions between the two economic powers. The deal “opens the prospect of cutting China’s export [of hybrids] by more…
Mao’s Last Dancer Li Cunxin on his long-awaited follow-up: ‘I don’t think my publisher expected it to take 14 years!’
Some people live such extraordinary lives that a single autobiography simply won’t suffice. Li Cunxin has now written two. The renowned ballet dancer and former artistic director of Queensland Ballet had hoped he was finished writing his story after the phenomenal international success of his 2003 memoir, Mao’s Last Dancer. But life had other plans. “Actually, I had signed a contract with Penguin Random House for a follow-up,” Cunxin says, from his home in Brisbane. “It was going to be about the lives of my brothers and friends in China,…
EU ‘pulling out all stops’ with minerals projects as it tries to avert China trade war
The EU is “pulling out all the stops” to fend off an imminent potential trade crisis with China, the industry commissioner, Stéphane Séjourné, has said, as the bloc announced its backing for a string of critical materials projects. Séjourné said on Friday that the EU would support 46 new strategic projects to accelerate supplies of critical raw materials by 2030 across the bloc. “We could face a crisis in the coming months,” he said. “We may face trade tensions that could also trigger a crisis in a number of sectors.…
‘It gave me a superpower – question everything’: as punk turns 50, bands from China to Greenland explain how it fires up their lives
Ukraine: ‘I was lucky not to die. I had guitars with me on the frontline’ Andriy Zholob, vocalist/guitarist, Beton: When MTV arrived in Ukraine, I heard Nirvana, the Offspring, Bad Brains, Social Distortion and thrash metal, and realised that all this started from punk rock. Our drummer and I were in a ska-punk band first, but when our vocalist became pregnant we started Beton in 2017 and played lots of festivals. Everything changed with the invasion. In 2022, I started military service as a surgeon on the frontline. We were…
China’s succession crisis: a generation of entrepreneurs is retiring, but are their children ready to take over?
Growing up, Ayu would watch his parents put together hand made leather shoes on the ground floor of their three storey home in the Chinese city of Wenzhou. Their relatives in Europe would send photographs of designer products from Italy for the workers to base their designs on, and in the decades that followed, the tiny family-run workshop transformed into a 700 person factory. “The factory and the home were the same place. I watched them make shoes by hand, piece by piece, using small machines,” Ayu recalls of watching…