Category: Pl

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…

Cambodia has carried out a massive raid on scammer gangs, detaining more than 2,000 people amid pressure from China to crack down on its online fraud industry. Nearly 1,800 Chinese nationals were among those held, according to the Cambodian interior ministry. A ministry statement said that Cambodian police had conducted a large-scale enforcement operation on Saturday morning at an online fraud compound in Bavet, the largest city in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng, which borders Vietnam. Advertisement A total of 2,044 foreigners were detained, of whom 1,792 were from…

Israel’s ambassador to China has hailed the historical connections between the two countries and called for closer socioeconomic ties in a rare column for Chinese state media. Eli Belotserkovsky’s signed Chinese-language article for state news agency Xinhua comes amid global conversation over the Board of Peace, US President Donald Trump’s newly created body to tackle the Palestinian issue. The Jewish and Chinese civilisations had amassed rich historical wisdom and knowledge over millennia, Belotserkovsky noted in the article published on the Xinhua website on Friday. If combined, that wisdom would not…

State media has released rare footage of one of the PLA Navy’s most advanced destroyers warning off foreign aircraft near Taiwan with electronic jamming missiles. CCTV said it was the first time the Yanan had been shown using “electronic countermeasures” in “waters near Taiwan island” to warn off foreign aircraft. Advertisement The report did not specify where or when the encounter took place, or what country the aircraft were from. In the clip aired on Thursday, a crew member using binoculars appears to detect a potential threat and give orders…

The rats were eating away at the PLA’s budget and undermining combat readiness, the military mouthpiece said, and had to be eradicated. “[We] must take strong and forceful measures to crack down on corrupt practices that undermine the building of combat abilities, and thoroughly investigate and root out those ‘big rats’ who tamper with military spending,” the PLA Daily said in a commentary on Friday. Advertisement It was an unusual literary reference for the publication and dates back to the Book of Songs in classical Chinese poetry. Advertisement Authorities have…

China did not slip into outright deflation last year and that in itself matters. When weak global demand, geopolitical frictions and a prolonged property correction weighed heavily on sentiment, consumer prices stayed marginally positive. The latest data suggests an economy not in free fall but navigating a transition towards more balanced and sustainable growth, albeit at a subdued pace. December’s inflation figures underline this point. Consumer prices rose by 0.8 per cent year on year, the fastest pace since early 2023, and monthly inflation turned positive after a brief dip.…

A 45-year-old woman, identified only by her surname Bu, had lost contact with her family for more than a decade. She was found in late 2024 in a rural area in Heshun county in the central Chinese province of Shanxi, more than 100km (62 miles) from her home. Bu had an advanced university education but she also had a history of mental illness, and the discovery that she had given birth to several children with a villager raised suspicion that she was a victim of human trafficking and rape. Advertisement…

Chinese scientists have unveiled a cooling technology that can plunge a liquid cooling medium from room temperature to sub-zero levels in less than half a minute. This leap in thermal engineering offered a promising heat management solution for energy-hungry data centres that were mushrooming across China and the United States, they said. By harnessing the unique behaviour of ammonium thiocyanate in water under pressure, the team created a liquid cooling system that mimics squeezing a “wet sponge” – when releasing pressure, it triggers rapid redissolution of salt, absorbing massive amounts…