The European Union set an October deadline for “tangible results” in tackling its growing trade deficit with China, after the two sides held talks in Brussels in an attempt to avoid a trade war. “Not everything will be solved, not everything wi...

Retaining existing customers and a potential resurgence of Russian competition may be among the biggest challenges for sales of Chinese weapons systems, according to a report from an Indian think tank. The study, published this month by the Bengaluru...

[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] Kellett, the British International School in Hong Kong, turns 50 this year and they have much to celebrate. Half a century from their humble beginnings as two primary classes...

Mainland Chinese immigration authorities are standardising their assessment regime for approving residents to settle in Hong Kong and Macau by replacing the previous points-based system with unified criteria, offering applicants more certainty. The N...

For most of his adult life, Siranudh “Psi” Scott kept a dark secret. Allegedly abused by his older brother as a teenager, he buried the trauma, chose to remain silent and – outwardly at least – carried on as a scion of one of Thailand’s mos...

Chinese artificial intelligence unicorn DeepSeek is introducing peak-hour surcharges for its API services, bucking a fierce domestic price war it helped start, in which rivals have been aggressively undercutting each other to capture market share. Th...

More Singapore residents aged below 40 had never married in 2025 than in 2020, government data released on Tuesday showed, with the sharpest increases among those aged 25 to 34. The findings come from the Department of Statistics’ General Household...

East Timor is seeking to turn closer ties between Asean and China’s Greater Bay Area into investment and technology opportunities, even as the bloc’s newest member faces a major challenge of building capacity to benefit from regional integration....

A former senior Hong Kong prosecutor has lost a judicial challenge against his dismissal over remarks made in two emails questioning the integrity of police and inviting colleagues to attend a June 4 Tiananmen Square vigil. In a judgment delivered on...

Malaysia will deploy military veterans as full-time hostel wardens at a group of elite boarding schools from Wednesday, in a new push to curb bullying after a series of abuse cases stirred widespread public anger over student safety. The first 16 for...

India has stepped up engagement with Chinese media as Beijing presses New Delhi to issue visas to its journalists ahead of a possible visit by President Xi Jinping later this year, though any breakthrough on the issue is likely to take time, accordin...

This article was first published on July 1, 2011 Plane beats train, but winning isn’t everything by Will Clem, Shi Jiangtao Two South China Morning Post reporters yesterday pitted the new high-speed Shanghai–to–Beijing train against an airliner...

China and the European Union released a joint statement on Monday following talks between China’s Minister of Commerce, Wang Wentao, and the EU’s trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, in Brussels. During the meeting, the two sides agreed to establish a jo...

WhatsApp, one of Hong Kong’s most popular messaging apps, will soon no longer require users to share their phone numbers before they start texting. Starting this week, users can reserve a unique username, which allows them to text without swapping ...

When late Venezuelan ⁠leader Hugo Chavez built this coastal housing development bearing his name as part of his socialist revolution, residents found ⁠a fresh start after deadly floods had decimated the area more than a decade earlier. But after ...

The Philippines is uniquely positioned to serve as a gateway for Greater Bay Area businesses into Southeast Asia, the country’s trade secretary said on Tuesday, as she outlined Manila’s push to promote a pro-investment environment. Speaking at th...

The dragon’s serpentine forms have adorned Chinese pottery for millennia, and this mythical creature has come to symbolise power, strength, and good fortune. Dragon motifs on pottery date back nearly as far as Chinese written history itself, with t...

Singapore authorities have caught a rider seen in a viral video striking a “Superman” pose while riding an e-bike in the latest of a series of crackdowns. In the video, taken in the early hours of May 23 outside Keppel MRT station, the rider is c...

Security around the Malaysia-Thailand border has been tightened after two Malaysian men were wounded in a roadside bomb blast in Narathiwat province, an area riven by a deadly insurgency against Bangkok. While police say the men – Abdullah Syarapi ...

Flight schools across China said they had been told to suspend training and undergo safety inspections by authorities after a light sport aircraft crashed into Beijing’s tallest skyscraper on Friday. The pilot was killed when he flew the two-seater...

Nepal has culled more than 600,000 birds and destroyed around 1 million eggs as an outbreak of H5N1 bird flu spreads across the Kathmandu Valley, shutting the capital’s only zoo and raising fears among scientists over the virus’ potential to muta...

A former Hong Kong lawmaker who previously headed the city’s largest, now-defunct opposition party has been released from prison after completing his sentence in a landmark subversion case. Wu Chi-wai, former chairman of the Democratic Party, which...

We have selected seven stories from the SCMP’s coverage of Asia over the past week that resonated with our readers and shed light on topical issues. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. Malaysia has never ...

A passenger jet reported striking a drone while approaching JFK International Airport on Monday, and just hours later, a helicopter pilot alerted a close call with a remote-control plane near the same airport. The Federal Aviation Administration is i...

Hong Kong is rolling out a series of discounts, shopping perks, giveaways and countless deals to celebrate the 29th anniversary of the city’s return to Chinese sovereignty on July 1. To get you in the public holiday spirit, the South China Morning ...

When a villager in the southern province of Guangdong was walking near his home on a mild day shortly after Christmas in 2019, he noticed a yellow suitcase beneath an expressway embankment. Inside was the headless body of a woman. When police arrived...

Diners at a sleek teppanyaki restaurant in Tokyo’s Asakusa district wait happily as chefs sear marbled Kobe beef over open grills. Expectations are high at Kisshokichi, one of the world’s largest Kobe beef chains. But behind the brand’s success...

Hongkongers have snapped up the first batches of free tickets to visit two PLA naval ships within minutes of their release for a weekend port call in the city. A South China Morning Post reporter observed that the initial batch was gone within four m...

Like other advanced cities, Hong Kong faces a range of clearly defined challenges that must be directly addressed in the next few years. Two that stand out are the effects of climate change and the consequences of an ageing population, which, one way...

The world’s largest buyer of biopharmaceutical royalties has set up its first Asia-Pacific base in Hong Kong, joining a string of multinational corporations in the pharmaceutical sector establishing offices in the city as out-licensing deals by mai...

Esmeraldo Maligsa, a farmer and president of the Bohol Ube Growers Association, harvests 2,000kg (4,400lbs) of ube, the purple tuber native to the Philippines, every seven months. He and the other farmers in his group manage a collective yield of bet...

Hong Kong is uniquely positioned to connect Asean with the Greater Bay Area and build a “powerful and complementary partnership” amid a shifting geopolitical landscape, the city’s leader has said. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu made his remar...

Hong Kong has surrendered its IPO fundraising crown to Nasdaq following SpaceX’s blockbuster listing earlier this month, but it did so while seeing its IPO proceeds register a year-on-year rise of about 84 per cent in the first half of 2026 – con...

Beijing has publicised three cases of local governments falsifying achievements to boost their records, which involved manipulating revenue data, misusing special-purpose government bonds and concealing off-balance-sheet debt. Chinese state news agen...

Japan is accelerating plans to acquire and develop military drones by stepping up cooperation with Ukraine and learning from Kyiv’s wartime experience against Russia as it seeks to deploy more unmanned systems across its territory. Complementing th...

Nearly a year has passed since Hong Kong launched the first phase of its carer support data platform last July, linking the Social Welfare Department, Hospital Authority and the Housing Authority into a single alert system for “high-risk carers”....

Australia’s competition regulator said on Tuesday it had taken Amazon’s Australian ‌unit to court, alleging its Prime subscription contracts contained unfair terms that allowed the company to add advertising to its video streaming platform. The...

After playfully sneaking onto a train and being transported away unexpectedly, a deaf and non-speaking man from central China was finally reunited with his biological family recently – following 35 years away from home. On June 11, Lei Zeqing joyfu...

Hong Kong has no plans to expand proposed tighter regulations on prepaid beauty and fitness contracts to cover dance and yoga studios, as those venues have generated relatively few complaints, an official has said. Winsome Au Wai-sum, deputy secretar...

A self-exiled billionaire Chinese business tycoon once believed to be among China’s wealthiest men was sentenced on Monday to 30 years in a US prison for a massive financial fraud that a federal judge said cost over 1,000 people worldwide hundreds ...

South Korea’s US$518 billion semiconductor push aims to transform the artificial intelligence boom into a durable industrial advantage and keep up with leading rival China, according to observers. The plan is intended to secure supplies of advanced...

Shanghai has been urged to build itself into a hub serving the rising outbound investment needs of Chinese firms, potentially increasing rivalry with Hong Kong as both cities race to augment their status as financial centres. The suggestion by Liu Xi...

The parents of a seven-year-old Michigan boy who weighed 116kg (255 pounds) when he died have been charged with murder, torture and child abuse, prosecutors said. “Clearly the parents were feeding the child improperly, to say the least,” Genesee ...

A blast from an explosive device wounded Ukrainian oligarch Vadym Yermolaiev and two others in Monaco on Monday, authorities said, in a “deliberate” act unprecedented in the principality. Three people including a teenager were wounded in the expl...

Peru’s conservative president-elect Keiko Fujimori vowed to restore “order and hope” as final results showed she narrowly won the election in the latest victory for a resurgent Latin American right. She inherits the task of running a country hi...

More than 100 people just deported from the United States were being held in a hotel when earthquakes struck Venezuela, setting off a scramble to find survivors and bodies buried in the rubble, according to survivors. A deportation flight from Miami ...

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, it confronts a new world order dominated by its relationship with China. In this wide-ranging series, we examine the pressure points and possibilities in those ties, from hard tech to ...

Lutao Cen was swimming off Margarita Island, where he has lived for four decades, when twin earthquakes measuring above magnitude 7 struck northern Venezuela within two minutes. Only after returning to shore did he learn what had happened. Messages f...

The recent visit of Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, carried the task of accelerating the development of the Northern Metropolis. This is not another urban expansion, but a strategic test of whether Hong Kong can reinv...

Alex Murdaugh was back in court Monday on charges he killed his wife and son, appearing silently at a pretrial hearing that was mostly short on substance but long on spectacle as the true-crime sensation continues to captivate. Murdaugh’s murder co...