The Long March 12A, China’s first state-owned reusable rocket, made its debut launch on Tuesday morning but the recovery of the first stage was a failure. It was China’s second failed bid this month to return an orbital-class booster, a feat that has so far only been achieved by the US. The reusable rocket, designed…
Catch up on some of SCMP’s biggest stories about AI developments in China this year. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. DeepSeek’s AI breakthrough could alter China’s ‘national fate’ in US tech war DeepSeek, extolled by some as the “biggest dark horse” in the open-source large language…
Chinese chip designer Moore Threads Technology has unveiled a suite of new products, including its next generation of chip architecture and artificial intelligence chips as it looks to challenge US chip-making heavyweights Nvidia and AMD. The Beijing-based firm, hailed as China’s “little Nvidia”, introduced two forthcoming chips Huashan and Lushan, named after two famous Chinese…
It has been a turbulent year for the fraught US-China relationship. In the fourth part of a series looking back at the events of 2025, we examine the impacts of Trump’s foreign policy on global geopolitics. As the administration of US President Donald Trump ends its first year, expect the unabashed disrupter to continue applying…
Catch up on some of SCMP’s biggest China stories of the day. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. PLA division overseeing Taiwan sees newcomers in charge The Chinese military’s Eastern Theatre Command, the division that oversees Taiwan and that has been hit hard in Beijing’s anti-graft campaign,…
Former Hong Kong media boss Jimmy Lai Chee-ying has been found guilty on all three charges after a landmark national security trial, nearly five years after he was first denied bail following his arrest. The 78-year-old businessman turned opposition activist, who founded the now-defunct Apple Daily tabloid, was convicted on Monday of two charges of…
In 1865, when a British entrepreneur built a demonstration railroad near Beijing, Empress Dowager Cixi saw not progress but danger – of disruptions to feng shui, imperial graves and rural order – and had the tracks torn up. Two decades later, when a Chinese-built coal line threatened to steam too close to sacred grounds, Cixi’s…
The Hong Kong government has hit back at accusations in a US congressional commission annual report that Beijing has failed to honour its international obligations to protect the city’s autonomy and human rights, saying its remarks are “fact-twisting”. The report, released on Wednesday, also cited the legal team of jailed former media boss Jimmy Lai…
An inherent “asymmetry” of power poses a challenge to resolving South China Sea disputes via the quiet diplomacy traditionally favoured by Southeast Asian nations, a leading Malaysian security expert has said. Chinese analysts said Beijing supported the “Asean way” too, so long as sovereignty claims were resolved bilaterally. They also warned against external interference and…
A bipartisan commission focused on the rule of law and human rights in China is recommending that the US Congress scale up immersion programmes for Mandarin and other languages spoken on the mainland in American high schools and universities. The recommendation, made as part of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China’s (CECC) annual report, comes as…