Category: Pl

South China Morning Post

If there is a thread that provides coherence to Donald Trump’s mad emperorship, it is the frenetic invention of new, evermore dramatic diversions: no week can be allowed to pass without new melodrama that erases the chaotic melodramas of weeks past. Nor can a week be allowed to pass without the seeds being sown for next week’s melodramas. This week it is Iran, and the computer-gaming unreality of a scorched-earth US-Israeli bombardment that has generated convulsions across economies in the Persian Gulf. After dropping billions of dollars’ worth of ordnance…

World-renowned life scientist Shu Xiaokun has received numerous awards and significant funding from the US government over the past two decades. Earlier this year, he was appointed the prestigious Toby Herfindahl Endowed Chair professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), capping a career that included pioneering fluorescent protein tools in Nobel laureate Roger Yonchien Tsien’s laboratory. The motto of Shu’s lab is a quote from the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman: “If you’re not having fun, you are not learning. There’s a pleasure in finding things out.” Advertisement…

China and Japan’s long-standing rivalry has deep historic roots, and relations between the two have taken a significant turn for the worse in recent months. This series dives into the complicated ties of the two Asian powers in a turbulent 2026. Updated: 20 Mar, 2026 South China Morning Post

South China Morning Post

As Tehran signalled that Beijing could serve as a diplomatic broker in its intensifying war with the United States and Israel, analysts cautioned that the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement of 2023 could prove “hard to replicate”. They also highlighted the difficulty of Washington accepting third-party mediation, after US President Donald Trump confirmed that a planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing would be delayed by “five or six weeks” because of the armed conflict. Beijing has already engaged in high-level diplomacy and sent its special Middle East envoy to the…

China has followed last year’s secretive high-orbit satellite-to-satellite refuelling test with another in-orbit servicing mission that is aimed at advancing docking and refuelling technologies, while also testing ways to speed up the disposal of satellites at the end of their usefulness. Hukeda-2, which lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in the Gobi Desert on Monday, is China’s first commercial test satellite equipped with a flexible robotic arm to capture other spacecraft, the state-owned Science and Technology Daily said. “Unlike the rigid robotic arms commonly used on space stations,…

Iran’s missile and drone stockpiles will last another two or three months as US-Israeli strikes continue, while the US military is also depleting its interceptors, Chinese analysts have noted. However, how long the war lasts would depend less on stockpiles alone than on the effectiveness of new US deployments and President Donald Trump’s political calculus, one of them cautioned. Iran has continued its attacks on Israel and on US assets across the Middle East since the conflict was triggered on February 28 by US-Israeli strikes targeting its top leadership. Advertisement…

My grandmother kept her banknotes under the mattress. Even after savings accounts became common and the money my siblings and I gave her began to accumulate, she still preferred to hide cash away at home. She loved saving and hated spending. I thought of her when China’s leaders again emphasised the need to boost domestic consumption at this year’s “two sessions” meetings. With exports facing geopolitical headwinds and the property sector struggling, policymakers hope households will become a stronger engine of economic growth. Yet persuading Chinese families to loosen their…