The European Union’s top envoy to Beijing has warned that China is adopting a hostility towards the West that is comparable to the Mao era, amid souring ties with Europe.Speaking at a reception for journalists held by the EU embassy in Beijing on T...

A new type of stainless steel developed in Hong Kong that can kill the Covid-19 virus on its surface within hours is expected to hit the market in the coming six months, reducing the risk of cross infection from contaminated doorknobs, lift buttons a...

More than 110 alumni of the British Chevening Scholarship have urged Beijing to unconditionally release detained Chinese activists Sophia Huang Xueqin and Wang Jianbing.Huang, an independent journalist known for her #MeToo activism, was awarded the p...

Didi Global, China’s leading ride-hailing company that will delist from the New York Stock Exchange due to Beijing’s data security concerns, has been fined by local authorities for operating with unlicensed cars and drivers, a compliance issue th...

Those who have been wondering what Hong Kong actress Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi has been up to may find some interesting clues on Chinese social media platform Douyin.“We are going to have a hotpot at my house – oh, oh, oh!” says Cheung in a jolly ...

Cathay Pacific is moving forward with plans to relocate some Hong Kong-based pilots to Los Angeles for up to four months, the latest in a series of contingency measures aimed at avoiding the financial hub’s strict quarantine requirements for aircre...

Beijing has told multinationals to sever ties with Lithuania or face being shut out of the mainland Chinese market, a senior government official and an industry body told Reuters, dragging companies into a dispute between the Baltic state and Beijing...

A journalist who helped cover Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs campaign for an international news agency was shot dead while watching TV in a store, in a brazen attack in what has long been regarded as one of the world’s most d...

From opulent backdrops to dreamy dance sequences and ultra-glamorous attire, Bollywood films are known for their larger-than-life depictions of Indian weddings.But real life has in recent years been mimicking reel life as Bollywood celebrities take t...

China’s top officials in Hong Kong have slammed the United States for using democracy as a pretext for stirring up trouble in the city, and joined a recent chorus of government voices in attempting to redefine the word’s meaning.Coinciding with t...

This article has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing.Hong Kong authorities have abruptly halted the sale of six flavours of French-imported ice cream from confec...

Japan’s Covid-19 infections are falling in contrast with rebounds in other parts of Asia, baffling experts.New daily infections have slowed to fewer than one per million people, the least among major economies except China, and fatalities have fall...

Foreign investors boosted their Chinese government bond holdings last month by the most since January as the yuan’s gains raised the attractiveness if the nation’s debt.Overseas investors bought 87.9 billion yuan (US$13.8 billion) of the bonds la...

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin apologised to the public after photos surfaced of her in a nightclub following the foreign minister testing positive for Covid-19.“I did wrong. I should have considered the situation more carefully,” Marin said ...

New Zealand plans to raise the legal smoking age by one year every year, effectively banning the sale of tobacco to people born after 2008.The government will introduce new legislation next year that will progressively lift the smoking age from 18, s...

US and Israeli defence chiefs were to expected to discuss possible military exercises that would prepare for a worst-case scenario to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities should diplomacy fail and if their nations’ leaders request it, a senior US of...

Chinese squid vessels were documented using wide nets to illegally catch already overfished tuna as part of a surge in unregulated activity in the Indian Ocean, according to a new report by Norway-based watchdog group that highlights growing concerns...

Hong Kong officials have said they will initially take an educational rather than punitive approach to enforcing the use of the official Covid-19 risk-exposure app in restaurants, which became mandatory on Thursday.But some businesses have complained...

Chinese researchers have developed a new material – inspired by the fractal networks of blood vessels – that they say can extract 20 times more uranium from seawater than other approaches.Uranium, a naturally occurring radioactive element, is mos...

Hong Kong residents will be barred from quarantine-free travel to mainland China if a coronavirus infection is identified in their neighbourhood under the city’s new health code system, and it could take up to three weeks to be cleared for entry ag...

Strengthening Taiwan’s ability to defend itself is “an urgent task” for the US, as China engages in destabilising and “intentionally provocative” actions towards the self-ruled island, a senior US defence official said on Wednesday.Assistan...

Outrage has spread on social media in Myanmar over images and accounts of the alleged killing and burning of 11 villagers captured by government troops in the country’s northwest.Photos and a video of charred corpses in Done Taw village in Sagaing ...

Experts have uncovered a previously hidden sketch beneath Rembrandt van Rijn’s The Night Watch, affording art historians new insights into how the masterpiece was painted, according to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.Museum director Taco Dibbits hailed t...

The flood of money into hyped-up industries involving the metaverse and semiconductors have led to overvaluations that could be harmful in the long run, warns Ni Zewang, chairman of Shenzhen Capital Group, a major government-backed venture capital fi...

Jailed media tycoon Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and two co-defendants have been found guilty on unauthorised assembly charges stemming from last year’s ­banned Tiananmen Square vigil.Thursday’s ruling at the District Court means that all 24 opposition a...

The CEO who last week laid off 900 employees in a single Zoom call has apologised after he attracted sharp criticism when the video was posted on social media.Vishal Garg, head of online mortgage originator Better.com, convened employees over the vid...

Hong Kong police have arrested a man in connection with the kidnapping of a toddler and domestic helper who were dramatically rescued on Wednesday just hours after they were bundled into a car, then locked inside a shipping container.The 19-month-old...

The carefully developed goodwill between China and Japan is at risk, with Beijing threatening to “reconsider” bilateral relations with Tokyo over former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe’s recent comments in support of Taiwan.Already tense tie...

When Norwegian telecoms firm Telenor Group announced the sale of its Myanmar operations to Lebanese investment firm M1 Group in July, the people of Myanmar were five months into nationwide protests and strikes opposing the February 1 coup, which thre...

Apple Inc’s self-driving car project has lost three key engineers in recent weeks, adding to a rash of departures from a tumultuous business with daunting ambitions.Eric Rogers, billed as Apple’s chief engineer for radar systems on the project, l...

Rising food costs pushed China’s consumer inflation up last month to the highest level in almost a year and a half, but with “price pressures generally easing”, once sky-high factory-gate inflation eased in November.China’s official consumer ...

The following top 10 buzzwords of the year have been released this week by the National Language Resources Monitoring and Research Centre, an institution administered by the country’s Ministry of Education, after checking billions of posts on Chine...

A secret meeting to discuss plans to send an armed militia to invade the Malaysian state of Sabah on Borneo island is believed to have been held by a senior local government official in the southern Philippines, a senior regional security source has ...

Hong Kong is set to hold its Legislative Council election on December 19, the first citywide poll since Beijing revamped the electoral system to ensure only “patriots” hold political power. In the final instalment of a four-part election series, ...

The US House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved forced labour legislation that would ban the importation of goods sourced in China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. But while the bill has broad, bipartisan support, its immedi...

In a shock to the Indian military, its most senior serving soldier, Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat, was killed in a helicopter crash on Wednesday as he was flying to give a lecture at the Defence Services Staff College (DSSC) in Wellingto...

About a third of Hong Kong residents have invested in, or used, cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange, the second-highest engagement with the new asset class among developed markets surveyed by credit card company Visa.Crypto or cryptocurrency is a ...

Lawyers in China should consciously “follow and embrace” the leadership of the Communist Party, President Xi Jinping has told a Politburo study session.He also said the party should strengthen its “political guidance” of lawyers.“[We should...

Lawyers for a Maryland woman charged along with her husband in a scheme to sell Navy submarine secrets to a foreign government denied on Wednesday that she had contemplated fleeing the United States to avoid arrest. Instead, they said, contempt for t...

Australian companies are continuing to do business with China not just for commercial reasons but because of a focus on climate change and carbon emissions reduction policies, new research has found.Even though political relations between the two cou...

A research team in China has built and tested a prototype hypersonic flight engine based on a bold design by a Nasa scientist more than two decades ago.Unlike most hypersonic aircraft with an engine at the belly, the Two Stage Vehicle (TSV) X-plane p...

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus has been detected in at least 57 countries, according to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, calling on governments to take action sooner rather than later.In South Afric...

Work-from-home guidance will return, Covid-19 health certificates are to become mandatory in large venues and mask rules will be extended to combat the Omicron variant as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a move to his Plan B to tackle t...

Commercial planting of genetically modified (GM) soybeans and corn in China moved a step closer this week following the “rapid introduction” of draft criteria amid Beijing’s increasing concerns over grain security and self-sufficiency.The propo...

President Joe Biden said on Wednesday he had warned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of unprecedented US sanctions should Russian troops massed on the border of Ukraine launch an attack.A day after talking for two hours by video link, Biden sai...

The United States imposed an arms embargo and new export restrictions on Cambodia on Wednesday over what it said was the growing influence of China’s military in the country, as well as over human rights and corruption.The actions by the department...

Canada and Britain have announced diplomatic boycotts of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, joining the US and Australia in taking such action amid allegations of human rights abuses in China.Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday said...

Robert Dole, the long-serving US Senate leader, who died aged 98 on Sunday, is remembered by many as a war hero and a Trump supporter. He also left a heavy, decades-long footprint on Washington’s China policy.Dole is expected to become the 33rd ind...

The European Union has threatened China with a World Trade Organization lawsuit if reports of an embargo on Lithuania’s exports to and imports from China prove accurate.The warning follows accusations by Lithuanian business figures that Chinese cus...

While US President Joe Biden seeks “strategic competition” with China and “common-sense guard rails” to avoid veering into conflict, former diplomats and other China observers say that the bipartisan hostility China faces in Congress is preve...