Category: Pl

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…

As global trade fragments and tariffs return, economic power is increasingly defined not by financial scale alone, but by productive strength. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, leaders spoke openly about a harsher world order. Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng warned that trade wars have no winners. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for a new security architecture amid rising protectionism. French President Emmanuel Macron described a world becoming more fragmented and brutal. What is changing is not just trade policy, but the basis of power…

The Pentagon has signalled a shift for US forces in South Korea, pushing them to expand their role beyond North Korea to help deter Beijing in the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the region, according to experts. The analysis follows a visit to South Korea this week by Elbridge Colby, the US undersecretary of defence for policy and a key architect of the Pentagon’s National Defence Strategy. In his first trip outside the United States since taking office in April, Colby hinted at a possible restructuring of forces on the…

A publisher kindly offered me an opportunity to interview Eyck Freymann, a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University, and to review his new book, Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China. I think I must decline. I am sure he is a great scholar and thinker but I already have too many unread books on the shelves demanding my attention, a constant accusing presence reminding me what a slow and lazy reader I am. And Taiwan? I don’t think I want to waste time engaging with the indoctrinating framework…

As dwindling domestic profits push more Chinese firms onto the global stage, industry titans – forerunners who know what such a shift entails – are offering crucial advice for navigating challenges abroad. “The most important thing is to become a local company,” said Zhu Lei, chief marketing officer for air conditioner giant Gree Electric Appliances, which was among the first Chinese companies to enter the Latin American market. The advice comes as Chinese firms are expected to ramp up their international push this year, bolstered by fresh policy support and…

As of January, Zambia has begun collecting taxes and royalties from Chinese mining firms in yuan, and will cycle the currency directly back to Beijing to fund imports and service loans. Experts said the shift reflected the southern African country’s urgent need to ease a US dollar shortage and manage debt, rather than geopolitical alignment, but also a quiet advance for China’s long-term strategy to internationalise its currency. It had also created a tangible blueprint for other resource-rich, debt-laden African nations with deep trade ties to China, they added. Advertisement…