China needs to transition its steel sector from a carbon-intensive process to electric steelmaking if it is to reach its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2060, according to a new report by US think tank Global Energy Monitor.Reducing the carbon dio...

The US House of Representatives foreign affairs committee will resume work later this month on Democratic-led legislation intended to boost competitiveness with China and push Beijing on human rights, after two days of debate on the measure.A spokesm...

Hong Kong’s struggling food truck operators are seeing encouraging signs that business will improve as the coronavirus pandemic eases, but they have also expressed hope the government will not scrap the scheme.Five trucks are operating regularly in...

China is expected to deliver 1.5 million doses of Sinovac coronavirus vaccines to El Salvador, just days after the US announced it would donate the same amount of shots to the Central American country.“In the next few days, 1.5 million Sinovac vacc...

Alarm bells are ringing in Pakistan after a car bomb exploded near the home of jailed jihadist leader Hafiz Muhammad Saeed in the eastern city of Lahore.Nobody has claimed responsibility for the June 23 attack, which killed three people and wounded 2...

Ukrainian authorities have found themselves buried in controversy after official pictures showed women soldiers practising for a parade in heels.Ukraine is preparing to stage a military parade next month to mark 30 years of independence following the...

Press and human rights organisations have criticised Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s weekly “contest” that roughly translates as “Lie of the Week”.Each week at his daily morning press conference, Lopez Obrador presents a few...

Hong Kong’s improving economy and a rebound in retail sales is spurring investors to bet on shops, as they expect the real estate segment to be among the first to benefit from the rising domestic consumption.The optimism has seen some early investo...

French far right leader Marine Le Pen this weekend hosts a party congress seeking to find new impetus for her 2022 challenge to President Emmanuel Macron after disappointing results in regional elections.Last month’s vote saw Le Pen’s National Ra...

Thousands of Nigerians would regularly travel to the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to make business deals before the pandemic struck.Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, buys more Chinese goods, including electronics, machinery and clothes...

With the remainder of US-led Nato combat forces on course to leave within July, Afghanistan is on the verge of a civil war that threatens to spill into neighbouring Pakistan, endangering the security of China’s overland link between Kashgar and the...

Hong Kong drinks giant Vitasoy has distanced itself from a leaked internal memo that expressed condolences to the family of a dead employee who was earlier involved in the stabbing of an officer.The company ramped up its support of a police probe int...

Russia has endorsed a Beijing-led initiative on data security, in the latest sign of cooperation between the two neighbours in emerging areas amid growing animosity from Washington.In a lengthy joint statement issued after a virtual summit between Pr...

Indonesia on Saturday imposed a partial lockdown in Jakarta, across the main island of Java and on Bali as the Southeast Asian nation grapples with an unprecedented wave of coronavirus infections.Mosques, restaurants and shopping malls were closed in...

Convicted forger Peter Chan Chun-chuen was released from a Hong Kong maximum-security prison on Saturday after serving eight years for faking the will of late tycoon Nina Wang Kung Yu-sum in an attempt to claim her HK$83 billion (US$10.7 billion) for...

It took a year of counselling and a lot of determination for Chris to beat his gambling habit a decade ago. The Hongkonger had to sell his flat to clear a mountain of debt, and almost lost his marriage too.Then the Covid-19 pandemic struck and the 37...

In the fourth of a five-part series on US-China technology policies, Jodi Xu Klein looks at a critical, yet often underappreciated, component: how important talent is to win the future in tech and how US policies aren’t helping to attract and keep ...

When Deng Yonggang was a younger man, he was one of the millions of coal-covered faces that helped power China’s massive economy. But in 2002, a major accident at his site in Shanxi, in central China, left Deng paralysed for the waist down. His coa...

In May, Myanmar media reported that the ruling junta had reorganised committees that work on the country’s joint projects with China, ousting all civilian leaders and replacing them with its own appointees.The personnel changes were made to the Chi...

Interest in the re-emergence of Asia has grown strong of late. It is important to remember that many elements that are seen as strengths of Asian governments and Asian society have historical origins.The economic success stories of Japan and the East...

The United Nations said on Friday that more than 400,000 people in Ethiopia’s crisis-wracked Tigray region are now facing the worst global famine in decades and 1.8 million are on the brink, and warned that despite the government’s unilateral cea...

Researchers at China’s top forensic academy in Beijing say they have found genetic differences between three ethnic groups in East Asia – northern Chinese, Korean and Japanese.These differences are coded in less than 50 variations across the sequ...

Fighting disease, death and disillusionment, members of South Korea’s rapidly dwindling sisterhood of surviving “comfort women” say they are facing the twilight of their lives with diminished camaraderie and will to wage political battles.Only ...

Ever since President Xi Jinping pitched the idea of a “global energy internet” to the United Nations six years ago, China has been trying to persuade the world to build the high-voltage highways that would form its backbone. That plan to wrap the...

South Africa registered more than 24,000 cases of Covid-19 on Friday, its highest tally of new infections since the pandemic began, as a third wave of the virus spread through a population in which just 5 per cent have been vaccinated.The surge in ca...

The Biden administration on Friday hit 22 senior Myanmar officials and family members with sanctions over the government’s crackdown on democracy protests after the coup. The action was accompanied by the removal of sanctions on three Iranian indus...

While the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed the world to a crawl, the success of a mobile game about a snail making its way through a post-apocalyptic planet has lifted its Chinese developer’s profile ahead of a potential public listing.Qingci Games, ba...

The death of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has triggered memories in China of the birth of Washington’s tougher approach towards Beijing, but has also been a reminder that stable relations may still be possible.In Rumsfeld’s first d...

Why is Marxism thriving in China and not Marx’s place of birth? Why is Buddhism practised more in East Asia than India? Why does Islam have more followers outside Saudi Arabia?Ideas and religion spread through globalisation, but it was really their...

Hammered by tariffs, coronavirus pandemic-fuelled disruptions and rising costs, some global manufacturers are reducing their reliance on Chinese factories and moving assembly lines to Vietnam, Malaysia and other lower-cost countries, or even Japan.Bu...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel signalled a relaxation of quarantine rules for fully-vaccinated Britons on Friday following a meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson aimed at shoring up post-Brexit relations.Covid-19 travel restrictions wer...

The Communist Party has stepped up recruitment of young blood as it looks to the future, with more than 80 per cent of new members since January 2020 aged 35 or younger.Ahead of its centenary on Thursday, China’s ruling party announced early this w...

Nearly two decades after masterminding the 2002 bombing of a Bali nightclub that killed 202 people, the terrorist known as the “Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia” remains a thorn in the side of both the United States and Indonesia.Riduan Isamuddi...

Once recognised as one of the safest cities in the world, Hong Kong is now facing some hard questions about the risk of domestic terrorism and potential for more “lone wolf-style” attacks on police after a man stabbed an officer in the back and k...

China’s state planning agency has unveiled a plan to build a network of new institutions to upgrade the health care sector over the next five years, with a focus on tackling infectious disease outbreaks.Improving the capacity to identify and stop i...

Chinese military observers have dismissed US media reports that China is building a network of nuclear missile silos in its northwestern desert, saying that they would be too vulnerable to attack and the technology involved is obsolete.A report publi...

A chip company affiliated with Tsinghua Unigroup emerged in May as the fifth-largest smartphone chip provider in China from nearly ground zero a month earlier, making it an up-and-coming player in the market as Huawei’s chip unit continues to strug...

China’s internet regulator said it has stopped Didi Chuxing from registering new users, two days after the country’s dominant ride-hailing service completed the largest initial public offering (IPO) by a Chinese company this year in New York.“I...

Beijing’s representative office in Hong Kong has sent teams to visit 1,500 low-income households in an unprecedented outreach campaign, revealing the ramped-up charm offensive one day after the centenary of the Communist Party and the 24th annivers...

A Dutch court on Friday approved an Australian request to hand over the alleged leader of an Asian drug syndicate who has been compared to Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.Tse Chi Lop, a Chinese-born Canadian national, was arrested in ...

The Indonesian health minister has defended the country’s use of China’s Sinovac vaccine, blaming a surge of Covid-19 cases over the past month on the more contagious Delta variant.Budi Gunadi Sadikin said on Friday it was wrong to blame the vacc...

Both Hong Kong and mainland China have backed the United States-led initiative to implement a global minimum tax rate, with the city’s financial secretary supporting efforts by the international community to “combat tax evasion”.Mainland China,...

Next Digital, which stopped publishing its flagship newspaper Apple Daily last week, has reversed its announcement to cease operations just two days after telling staff that it would shut down on July 1.The troubled media company apologised to employ...

Protesters have toppled statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in the Canadian city of Winnipeg as anger grows over the discovery of the remains of hundreds of children in unmarked graves at former indigenous schools.A crowd chanted “no prid...

A popular protest chant during Hong Kong’s 2019 social unrest was political in nature and aimed at overthrowing an administration “currently under the enemy’s control”, a pro-government historian has said at the first national security law tr...

Backs straight, heads high, three dozen Commu nist Party members in red neckties who hope for leadership posts belt out a poem by revolutionary leader Mao Zedong at a historic mountainside battle site in central China.“We stay upright even as we ar...

America’s State Department has identified the national security law in its latest human-trafficking report as a factor impeding Hong Kong NGOs from helping victims of the trade, as it placed the city on a watch list for the second year in a row.Sho...

Taiwan will postpone four referendums due to be held next month because of fears about the spread of Covid-19, the election commission said on Friday, as the government raced to contain a new outbreak at a Taipei wholesale food market.Taiwan has been...

Hundreds of Taiwanese people eager to get a coronavirus vaccine have booked tours to Guam after the US Pacific territory offered jabs to foreign visitors, a travel agency said on Friday.Tiny Guam, for which tourism is a major economic driver, has lim...

Cambodia is no longer included in a United States programme providing scholarships to study at elite American military academies, the US said amid its concerns over China’s military presence in Cambodia which have led to strained relations between ...