Heavy, prolonged rainfall in southern and central China has resulted in weather warnings for flash flooding, landslides and waterlogging. The band of rainfall spanned 1,000km (620 miles) and steadily moved eastwards across the regions on Tuesday. It was a slow-moving band of rain, formed from the convergence of multiple bands originating from the Bay of Bengal, South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Coupled with low wind speeds, high daily and hourly rainfall totals have been recorded, with as much as 75mm locally in Hunan, 85mm in Anhui in a…
Category: The Guardian
Chinese authorities destroy villager’s ramshackle 10-storey Studio Ghibli-esque home
A ramshackle 10-storey home that had become an offbeat tourist attraction in south-western China has been torn down, ending a years-long battle between the structure’s owner and local authorities. Chen Tianming said local authorities took just hours to return the stone bungalow – which had been transformed into a pyramid-shaped structure of plywood rooms stacked upon one another – back down to its original single storey. “I don’t feel regret, because regret is useless,” Chen told the AFP news agency. “I also don’t blame myself for failing to protect it…
Torrential rain and floods kill at least 25 people in southern and central China – video
Tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes, with heavy rain expected to continue across southern and central parts of the country – including Jiangxi, Anhui, Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong and Hainan provinces – with a high risk of further landslides and flash floods The Guardian
Trump claims he will speak to Taiwan’s president, departing from decades-long diplomatic norms
Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would speak to Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, an unprecedented move for a US leader that could roil US relations with China. “I’ll speak to him,” the US president told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland before boarding Air Force One when asked about Lai. “I speak to everybody … We’ll work on that, the Taiwan problem.” Responding to Trump’s comments on Thursday morning, Taiwan’s foreign ministry said Lai would be happy to speak to the US leader, according to Reuters. US and Taiwanese…
Nvidia’s revenue blows past Wall Street expectations as AI boom accelerates
Nvidia continued its years-long streak of beating Wall Street’s expectations for growth on Wednesday, reassuring most investors that the AI boom, particularly the global explosion of datacenters, will continue apace. “The buildout of AI factories – the largest infrastructure expansion in human history – is accelerating at extraordinary speed,” said Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, in a statement. “Agentic AI has arrived, doing productive work, generating real value, and scaling rapidly across companies and industries.” Many analysts view Nvidia’s financial performance as a broader referendum on the AI buildout. The most…
Are Xi and Putin still ‘best friends’? – The Latest
Xi Jinping welcomed Vladimir Putin to Beijing with pomp and pageantry, just days after hosting Donald Trump. But as Russia’s war in Ukraine makes Moscow increasingly dependent on China, and western leaders thaw relations with Beijing, what does the power imbalance mean for Xi and Putin’s relationship? Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s deputy head of international news, Devika Bhat The Guardian
Same but different: how Xi and China welcomed Trump and Putin
Days after Donald Trump was greeted in Beijing with a military band, an honour guard and dozens of youths waving American and Chinese flags, Vladimir Putin arrived in China to an almost identical spectacle. The choreography of the two welcomes appeared deliberately mirrored, designed to showcase Beijing’s ability to host leaders from Washington and Moscow with equal grandeur. But China also made sure the differences were noticed. Trump was met at the airport by China’s vice-president, a largely ceremonial role outside the Communist party’s real power structure, while Putin was…
Xi and Putin highlight close China-Russia ties during Beijing visit – video
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, have praised relations between their countries. During Putin’s two-day visit to Beijing, bilateral talks between the leaders reaffirmed Russia and China as close partners in trade and international affairs The Guardian
Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass review – furry foes out of their depth in candy-coated Chinese adventure
This expensively rendered, eye-searingly bright animated feature from China rests on a truly weird premise. Tom and Jerry, the cartoon foes of yore, are chasing each other around a museum in present-day New York City when they are supernaturally transported, thanks to a magic compass doodah, to a quasi-medieval China where humans mix freely with gods and cryptozoological animals including phoenixes, gargoyles and talking rats. Which, admittedly, isn’t a massive conceptual leap from Tom and Jerry’s usual imaginary world, where a cat and a mouse can be endlessly regenerated after…
Germany urged to stop admiring Beijing and wake up to ‘China Shock 2.0’
Germany must stop admiring China’s success in the EU or it will sleepwalk into the kind of deindustrialisation the US experienced 25 years ago, a leading Brussels thinktank has said. With China’s surplus with Germany having doubled between 2024 and 2025 from $12bn (£9bn) to $25bn, creating a $94bn trade imbalance, the Centre for European Reform (CER) said Europe’s largest economy risked a repeat of what happened in the US in 2001 when a sudden surge in imports permanently hollowed out towns in the American midwest. “China Shock 1.0” not…