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China has backed a landmark rainforest protection fund launched by Brazil at the Cop30 climate summit on Thursday but is not expected to announce any financial contribution during the event, Brazil’s finance minister said at a press conference. The launch of the Tropical Forests Forever Facility is one of the main outcomes of this year’s UN climate conference so far. It is a multilateral mechanism designed to reward tropical nations for keeping their forests standing rather than clearing...

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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva kicked off the Cop30 climate summit on Thursday, urging leaders to turn promises into action while highlighting his country’s work within the Brics group to reaffirm the importance of climate finance, capacity building and technology transfer in global cooperation. The meeting comes amid the notable absence by the United States. President Donald Trump, who ordered the country’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in January, declined an invitation...

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China’s Mars orbiter Tianwen-1 has captured a rare snapshot of a mysterious interstellar visitor that has ignited debate among scientists about its origins. The object – designated 3I/Atlas – is only the third ever detected entering our solar system, and new images, released on Thursday by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), offer a closer look at the presumed comet. Tianwen-1 snapped the pictures from about 30 million km (18.6 million miles) away on October 3. The object, which was...

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The quest to understand the “God particle” may have just hit a wall in China. An ambitious multibillion-dollar plan to build the world’s largest particle collider – a machine that could have placed the country at the pinnacle of global basic research and scientific talent – may be abandoned, according to its lead scientist. The Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), designed to smash electrons and their antimatter counterparts to study Higgs bosons with unprecedented precision, was not put...

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After China and the US reached an agreement on soybeans, Beijing has signalled its intent to seek favourable terms, with the scale of future imports dependent on the competitiveness of American crops, a commerce official said. “With the adjusted tariffs, China will encourage companies to import agricultural products from the US in line with market principles,” said Chen Chao, director general of the Department of American and Oceanian Affairs at the Ministry of Commerce, in a speech at the China...

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The United States must take urgent action if it is to avoid a “logistical catastrophe” in any possible conflict with China, military strategists have suggested, describing supply lines as its biggest weakness. Decades of neglect, cost cutting and personnel shortages – as well as poor maintenance and systemic decline – have directly undermined the US deterrence strategy in the Pacific, according to an analysis published on the military website Breaking Defence. While most public discussion...

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Chinese scientists and engineers have pushed far beyond a string of US military bases known as the second island chain, reaching a seamount in the western Pacific Ocean 2,000 metres (6,561 feet) below the surface to test a smart mining vehicle designed to harvest cobalt-rich deposits, gathering critical performance data. The robotic miner showed its ability to traverse rugged seabeds littered with cobalt crusts, autonomously adjusting its posture to avoid overturning or being...

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The ripple effects of the record-breaking US government shutdown have spread beyond Washington, denying US agricultural officials an opportunity to deepen cooperation with Chinese companies at a high-profile trade fair even as bilateral tensions show signs of easing. The Post learned on Thursday that, because of the shutdown, representatives from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) did not attend this year’s China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai. This marks the first absence of...

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TikTok owner ByteDance has launched a recruitment drive for senior specialists in embodied intelligence, signalling its growing ambition in the development of humanoid robots. Volcano Engine, the Beijing-based tech unicorn’s cloud computing division, was offering a monthly salary of 95,000 yuan (US$13,328) to 120,000 yuan, according to a job posting. It marked the company’s clearest move into humanoid robotics as it specifically sought humanoid specialists rather than general robotics...

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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. Chinese student boom helps create more university spots for Americans: study China’s university boom has helped boost US postgraduate education and local economies in college towns, according to a new study.
2. Chinese trade negotiator urges US to boost agricultural cooperation China’s key trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, has called on the US to create “a...

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China’s Ministry of Finance returned to the international bond market for the first time in a year on Wednesday, offering US$4 billion in sovereign notes and giving international investors a chance to register their opinion on the country’s economic outlook amid receding trade tensions. The issuance came just days after a truce in the long-simmering US-China trade dispute and followed Beijing’s unveiling of its 15th five-year plan for economic and social development. The offering of US...

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In recent months, the European Union has been more Trumpian on China, renouncing part of its free-trade DNA in favour of increasingly protectionist policies. Just like its role model in Washington, the EU has tried to exact geopolitical and economic concessions from Beijing by escalating to de-escalate – a brinkmanship approach that seems to come straight from US President Donald Trump’s playbook in his trade war against China. But the recent trade detente reached by Trump and Chinese President...

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang warned that China “is going to win” the race to develop next-generation artificial intelligence, urging Washington to speed up its efforts. The head of the world’s first company to reach US$5 trillion in market value told The Financial Times that Beijing’s energy subsidies were boosting its drive to build cutting-edge semiconductors used to power AI technology developments. “China is going to win the AI race,” the British newspaper cited him as saying on Wednesday at an...

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Multinational corporations including French beauty giant L’Oréal and Canadian sportswear brand Lululemon have pledged continued investment in China at the world’s largest trade fair in Shanghai, signalling confidence in the world’s second-largest economy amid signs of a consumer recovery. Speaking on the sidelines of the China International Import Expo (CIIE), L’Oréal chief executive Nicolas Hieronimus said “investing in China is investing in the future”, citing the country’s recovering luxury...

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With nearly one month before Hainan, China’s southern island province, launches a separate customs regime, President Xi Jinping has urged officials to ensure the process goes smoothly so the region can spearhead the country’s opening up. “The strategic goal of building the Hainan Free Trade Port is to establish it as a significant gateway leading China’s opening up in the new era,” Xi said on Thursday in Sanya, a city in southern Hainan, during his tour of the tropical island. “This is an...

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China recorded a year-on-year uptick of 8.5 per cent in marriage registrations over the first three quarters of 2025, a rare piece of positive demographic news as the country’s population continues to shrink and rise in average age. The increase suggests that a host of recently introduced pro-marriage policies are starting to pay off, but experts cautioned the number of marriages would still decline over the long term as the pool of younger adults dwindles. A total of 5.15 million couples...

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With Beijing signalling a restart of Nexperia’s chip exports to safeguard the global semiconductor industry, uncertainties continue to swirl around the resumption of deliveries from China, said a major German automobile supplier amid plans to reduce its production and slash working hours at individual locations. “Our task force is working intensively to secure our chip supply. The situation remains very tense across the industry,” a spokesman with German car-part supplier ZF Friedrichshafen told...

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During a whirlwind visit last month to Kuala Lumpur, US President Donald Trump oversaw a peace accord between Thailand and Cambodia and secured trade and critical minerals agreements with those two countries as well as with Malaysia and Vietnam. At the same time, US and Chinese negotiators met in the Malaysian capital, addressing trade disputes to pave the way for Trump’s summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Busan last week. The talks yielded progress on tariffs and rare earth exports. For...

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Beijing has criticised a cross-party group of New Zealand lawmakers for attending a reception held by Taiwan’s de facto embassy, saying they had violated the one-China principle. Last week, the Chinese ambassador Wang Xiaolong wrote to a number of parliamentarians who had attended the October 24 event at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office to mark the foundation of the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name. Wang warned them that their attendance breached New Zealand’s foreign policy and...

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China’s key trade negotiator, Li Chenggang, has called on the US to create “a favourable atmosphere” for agricultural cooperation between the two countries. “We hope the US will work together with China, with a focus on the broader picture, to create a favourable atmosphere for practical cooperation in areas such as agriculture,” Li told a visiting US agricultural trade delegation in Beijing on Tuesday, according to a statement published by the Ministry of Commerce on Wednesday. Li said there...

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Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has urged major greenhouse gas emitters to make stronger commitments in a meeting with Chinese Vice-Premier Ding Xuexiang ahead of this year’s Cop30 climate talks. Beijing has been trying to maintain a prominent role in global efforts to fight climate change. A source familiar with the discussions said the talks had been “brief and cordial”, with the Brazilian president using the occasion to thank Beijing for its diplomatic support over hosting the...

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In the 10th year since founding Pony.ai in the US, James Peng has completed the autonomous-driving company’s second share listing, with its debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Thursday coming less than a year after it started trading on the Nasdaq. “Because our home base is in China, I think listing in Hong Kong will definitely help us in terms of branding, in terms of the proximity to our home base,” Peng said in an interview. Based in Guangzhou and incorporated in the Cayman Islands,...

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China’s university boom has helped boost US postgraduate education and local economies in college towns, according to a new study. The country’s massive higher education expansion – which lifted annual undergraduate enrolment in China from about 1 million in 1999 to 9.6 million by 2020 – resulted in waves of students going abroad and produced measurable effects inside US universities, according to a team at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-profit based in Cambridge,...

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Chinese self-driving technology firm WeRide, fresh off raising HK$2.39 billion (US$307 million) in a Hong Kong share sale, plans to rev up commercialisation of autonomous taxis and expand into markets like the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Japan. Tony Han, founder and CEO of the Guangzhou-based company, said WeRide would deploy 10,000 robotaxis worldwide over the next few years, adding that its fleet could eventually grow to hundreds of thousands in line with the ultimate goal of “supplying...

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China’s start-up developers of artificial intelligence applications significantly lag behind their US counterparts in global recurring revenue, making overseas expansion the default strategy for these mainland firms, according to a new report. As of August, only four of the world’s top 100 AI apps from private companies by annual recurring revenue (ARR) were Chinese, according to a report jointly released last week by domestic research firm Unique Research and San Francisco-based consultancy...

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