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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. China has moved to stop “low-quality” companies from listing in Hong Kong as it seeks to slow but not halt an IPO boom. The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) has blocked listings by some companies with opaque offshore structures, while stressing that the market remains open for business. It shows how the regulator has learned from 2015, when a rush of low-quality issues helped to fuel a market bubble, and…

“It amuses me to think I may be the youngest thing in my flat,” says Chris Hall. The 74-year-old tax accountant has spent 40 years amassing nearly 3,000 textiles from across China, ranging from imperial robes to a weaving created to celebrate the 2008 Beijing Olympics — a significant collection which he has recently donated to the Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM).  Hall made the donation to secure the future of his archive and open it up to the people of Hong Kong — despite the joy he gets from…

In a tree-lined alleyway in Dafen, a tiny village on the edge of China’s sprawling southern technology capital Shenzhen, painter Qiu Junbin gently corrects the brushstrokes of a girl attempting to reproduce a picture of a sweeping seascape. The girl’s mother snaps photos of them in front of the colourful display of artworks hanging on the walls of Qiu’s modest studio. Qiu, 49, is leading one of the many “art experience” workshops that have cropped up in the past two years to attract tourists to Dafen, once known as the…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. Most of us have encountered artificial intelligence in the form of the chatbot. You ask a question and it gives you an answer. The exchange is low stakes because even if the AI is wrong the consequences are usually limited. Agentic AI breaks that model because it acts on its own. Give it a task and it will search, compare, decide and execute across digital systems on your behalf. The…

When German curator Tobias Berger moved to Hong Kong 20 years ago, the city’s cultural landscape was what he describes as a half-formed pyramid. “You need a museum at the top, commercial galleries and non-profit spaces filling out the rest of it,” Berger says. But at the time, apart from non-profit mainstays Asia Art Archive and Para Site (which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year), little of that existed. Today, the scene is transformed: from the 2000s on came the blue-chip galleries, Art Basel, the M+ museum, the Tai Kwun…

Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the EU trade myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. A planned EU tax on small parcels will not stem the flood of cheap Chinese goods entering the bloc, a senior official has warned. The spectacular growth of ecommerce companies such as Shein and Temu has swamped EU customs authorities that need to check whether the billions of parcels arriving into the bloc each year respect European safety standards and pay the right import duties. But Brussels’ plan to abolish…

On a recent evening in Beijing, more than 100 technology enthusiasts packed into a rooftop bar to learn how to use OpenClaw, a new AI tool that has taken China by storm. The open-source platform is used to create assistants that can do everything from browsing the web and sending messages to executing commands on a computer. Developed by a European engineer, OpenClaw has become so popular in China that “raising a lobster” — a nod to its crustacean logo and the time needed to install and train the AI…