East Asia

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 will be fixed, but we think that between now and October, our teams have sufficient time to deliver the tangible results,” EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic told reporters on Monday, according to Bloomberg News. He spoke after “intensive, focused and...

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China’s top leadership has warned of the dangers of extreme weather and the need for better forecasting and disaster prevention, according to state media. The Politburo issued the warning at its first flood and drought prevention meeting for the year in Beijing on Tuesday, a gathering chaired by Chinese President Xi Jinping. The Politburo urged local governments to take “forceful” measures against drought, flooding and typhoons, to “always put the safety of people’s lives first”, evacuate in a...

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Firefighter Ho Wai-ho, who was killed in Hong Kong’s deadliest blaze in decades, has been recognised for his bravery in this year’s Honours List, while eminent economist Lawrence Lau Juen-yee is among three recipients of the city’s highest award. Fencer Ryan Choi Chun-yin and cyclist Ceci Lee Sze-wing were also among the 466 individuals named in the 2026 Honours List on Wednesday, with the pair recognised for their achievements at last year’s National Games. Ho was posthumously awarded the Medal...

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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. The Chinese AI champion will double the price for access to its V4 AI models through its application programming interface (API) during peak hours – 9am to noon and 2pm to 6pm Beijing time – according to an email sent to service subscribers on Monday...

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This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. Hong Kong’s weather forecaster has warned of record high temperatures this year and next, with a developing El Nino potentially becoming the strongest on record. The Observatory said on Monday that sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean were expected to rise further, developing into an El Nino event this summer that would...

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Islamabad has warned that any attempt by India to deprive Pakistan of its share of water under the Indus Waters Treaty would amount to the “weaponisation of water” and could have serious consequences for regional peace and security. Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar and other government officials made the remarks at an international seminar on the 1960 World Bank – brokered treaty, which governs the sharing of water from the Indus River system between the nuclear-armed neighbours. The treaty has come...

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A suspected senior executive of Prince Holding Group, the Cambodia-based syndicate at the center of the largest asset forfeiture in U.S. history, has been arrested in Japan on suspicion of filing a falsified change-of-address form.

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President Lee says projects to secure overwhelming industrial strength; chip investments by Samsung, SK Hynix and local governments top $576 billion

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The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) is closely monitoring the revival of tourism ties between China and Japan, as this could potentially affect the inbound Chinese market to Thailand in the second half of the year, while the impacts of the Middle East conflict have yet to completely subside.

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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 the earliest example discovered on a vessel from the Yangshao culture (5000 BC–3000 BC). The association between dragons and ceramics persisted for centuries, with the mystical creature now closely linked to Chinese porcelain. Early depictions of...

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The yen sank past 161.96 per dollar in London trade on Monday (June 29, 2026) for the first time since 1986

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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 numbers, for use later this year when the Meta-owned service launches the feature. Users will need to know a person’s exact username before they can text them for the first time. United States tech giant Meta said on Monday that the new move was a step...

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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 joint platform to monitor trade flows and to set up working groups to ease bilateral economic tensions. EU-China Joint Statement by scmp

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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 and discovered that although taking to the skies had the edge for speed, rail won out for comfort and convenience. They set off from the SCMP’s Shanghai bureau at 2.34pm, taking separate taxis for Hongqiao International Airport and the adjacent railway...

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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 Tuesday, the High Court ruled that the civil service had sufficient basis to sack William Wong Wa-fun and strip him of 26 years’ worth of pension entitlements for violating the standards of conduct expected of a public servant. Mr Justice Russell...

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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. While collaboration between the two regions could become a powerful engine of growth, policies had to ensure inclusive and sustainable advancement, East Timor’s Vice Prime Minister Francisco Kalbuadi Lay said at the South China Morning Post’s GBA-Asean...

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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 soft power. Here, Vincent Chow looks at how China challenges core American assumptions about innovation and technology, and the historical stakes of their competition in artificial intelligence. In 1969, the renowned British sinologist Joseph Needham...

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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 National Immigration Administration announced the new criteria on Tuesday and said it would take effect the following day. The current system calculates points based on factors such as how old an applicant is, the age of their parents or how many days...

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[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 in Wan Chai, they are now a through school across three campuses, with over 1600 students and a global reputation for excellence. This growth in itself is remarkable, but what is more remarkable is how true the school has stayed to the values on...

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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-based Takshashila Institution, questioned whether weapons made in China were “foolproof or in muddy waters” and cautioned against the “reductive assumption that Chinese weaponry is uniformly poor in quality”. Instead, the report’s author Anushka...

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Unable to find work or afford rent, a growing number of young South Koreans are moving home and becoming "full-time children," adults who trade housework and caregiving for their parents' support.

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More than half of Japan's public junior high and high school seniors now meet the government's English proficiency targets, a record, the education ministry survey shows.

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Wang Hong, a Chinese mathematician who solved a century-old geometry problem in 2025, has been named a Silver Professor at New York University.

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A Vietnam Airlines flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Shanghai made an unscheduled landing in Hong Kong on June 24 after a passenger fell seriously ill mid-flight.

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Researchers in southern China have named a newly discovered fish after Blackpink's Jennie, crediting the K-pop star's music with carrying the lead scientist through years of study.

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A new kind of preschool ​in China offers games, nibbles, treadmills and music for puppies, clawing out a fast-growing niche ‌in a booming industry as youthful owners spend more on pets increasingly regarded as family.

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Twenty Japanese entities, including multiple divisions of Mitsubishi Corporation, have been placed on a control list, which prohibits Chinese and foreign exporters from selling to them dual-use items made in China

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Republican Senator Steve Daines said he did not meet with Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang party, during her US visit earlier this month despite Cheng’s statements to the contrary, saying she met only with members of his staff. “She met my staff. She did not meet me,” the Republican senator from Montana told the South China Morning Post on Monday. Cheng visited Washington earlier this month as part of a broader effort to strengthen ties with US policymakers during...

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UK Trade Secretary Peter Kyle is seeking to boost UK services exports to China as he hosts a delegation from the country on Tuesday. Peter Kyle and China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao will jointly host the 15th UK–China Joint Economic and Trade Commission at Mansion House in London. They will launch a “trade booster” initiative designed to support UK businesses expanding their exports into China during the visit. Brompton Bikes and HSBC are among the British businesses attending, while firms...

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El gobierno de Xi Jinping presentó una visión de gobierno mundial basado en la consulta extensiva, la construcción conjunta y los beneficios compartidos. El vínculo con Argentina, un eje clave de la política exterior de Beijing.

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A US congressional hearing on Tuesday urged the United States to innovate faster, smarter and better to counter China’s growing technological muscle, even as several lawmakers slammed the US President Donald Trump administration for policies they said undercut US national interests. The testimony before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce comes as the two economic giants increasingly and aggressively face off over standards, economic models and supply chains, despite last month’s summit...

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Mercosur on Tuesday announced the start of trade negotiations with Japan and reaffirmed its intention to diversify alliances toward Asia during its biannual summit in Asunción, where Paraguay handed over the bloc's pro tempore presidency to Uruguay. The meeting, however, closed without an agreement on the internal distribution of export quotas under the treaty with the European Union, and again exposed the differences between Argentina and Brazil over the bloc's direction.

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The United States is working to hollow out the G20’s agenda and turn its December summit “into a backdrop” for a likely meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Miami, the South China Morning Post has learned. Two delegation members described the effort as the group’s top negotiators, also known as sherpas, met in Washington on Monday and Tuesday for their second in a planned series of sessions to draft the Joint Declaration that leaders are to issue at the...

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US Senator Steve Daines has urged Washington and Beijing to avoid escalating tensions through tit-for-tat actions, citing China’s recent export controls against American rare earth firms and the Pentagon’s decision to blacklist several Chinese technology companies. “These are unfortunate developments,” the Republican Senator from Montana said on Monday. Daines is a member of two of the most powerful committees in the US Senate: the Foreign Relations and Finance Committees. “The escalation on...

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As Hong Kong marks the 29th anniversary of its return to Chinese rule on July 1, the South China Morning Post talks to the city’s senior officials about the administration’s achievements so far and what may lie ahead. Hong Kong and mainland China are expected to begin sharing cross-border data within the year, when more companies will start operating in the Hetao innovation hub, the tech minister has revealed. In a wide-ranging interview with the South China Morning Post, Secretary for...

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Hong Kong authorities have put forward a sweeping overhaul of the city’s sexual offences laws, such as broadening the definition of rape, introducing new offences covering non-consensual acts involving children and persons with mental impairment, setting a uniform age of consent at 16, and removing gender-specific provisions. The proposals, which follow the Law Reform Commission’s reviews of sexual offences over the past decades, are undergoing a one-month public consultation. The government...

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A Shanghai family’s decades-long devotion to a vulnerable neighbour has led to the city’s first legal guardianship case involving people unrelated by blood. Ren, 71, inherited a quiet act of compassion from his parents, caring for his neighbour Xu, 56, for four decades, the Shanghai Law Journal reported. Xu was born with a mental disability. Originally from Xinjiang in northwestern China, he never married, had no children and has no surviving relatives He moved to eastern China’s Shanghai in the...

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The AI-driven price surge in the semiconductor supply chain is spreading beyond graphics processing units (GPUs) and memory chips to upstream materials and manufacturing inputs, creating new bottlenecks that could slow the buildout of global artificial intelligence infrastructure. Suppliers of once less-visible parts are gaining leverage as customers compete for limited capacity. These range from power chips and capacitors that regulate electricity inside AI data centres, to copper-clad...

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The Communist Party’s membership grew at a slower pace and its average age continued to climb last year, according to official data on the world’s second-biggest political party. In line with tradition, the data was released on the day before July 1, the date of the party’s founding in 1921. The party had 101 million members at the end of 2025, an increase of 1 per cent from the previous year, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Central Committee’s Organisation Department, the...

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Beijing has issued a preliminary verdict finding that pea-starch products imported from Canada were dumped in China, following Ottawa’s anti-dumping investigation into Chinese-made steel racks. “Relevant authorities have made a preliminary determination that imported pea-starch products originating in Canada have been dumped,” the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Tuesday. “The dumping acts have caused material damage to the domestic pea-starch industry.” Starting on Wednesday,...

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