News - South China Morning Post

China’s US$1.2 trillion goods trade surplus last year has focused attention on electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels and industrial overcapacity. Tariffs, anti-subsidy investigations and localisation requirements have followed as trading partners respond to China’s manufacturing scale. Yet the less visible shift is happening in services. Services exports rose by 17.1 per cent year on year in...

A 74-year-old retired Hong Kong police officer lost control of his paraglider in strong air currents and was fatally injured after crashing on Lantau Island, a probe into the 2024 accident has found. A report published by the Air Accident Investigation Authority on Monday detailed the incident involving the pilot at Sunset Peak, Hong Kong’s third-highest mountain, on June 17, 2024. The authority u...

Hong Kong’s first Chinese-owned department store, Sincere, will close its historic branch in the city’s central business district in December after 126 years of retail history. The company revealed, however, that it would seek a new location in Central or Sheung Wan. Sincere announced on Sunday that the flagship store would shut in early December after lease renewal talks with the landlord broke d...

Chryssa Ntalaka’s classroom has become an object lesson in subtraction. The sole teacher in the last school on the idyllic Greek island of Kalamos has a shorter list of students every autumn. This year, just two. On September 23, the sixth graders sat at Ntalaka’s table beneath the whiteboard, in front of rows of unused desks and benches. When they head to middle school on Greece’s mainland next y...

Adrian Cheng Chi-kong, former heir apparent to Hong Kong’s New World Development (NWD), is expanding his K11 cultural retail business in mainland China, launching a venture of his own as his family’s property group grapples with heavy debt. Xiamen K11 Select, developed by Cheng’s K11 by AC Group along with state-owned Xiamen Rail Transit Group in the city in the southeastern province of Fujian, ha...

India has sold its Akash air-defence missile system to Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, giving it a foothold in Central Asia as it seeks to become a major global arms exporter. Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh confirmed the latest sales on Thursday last week, hinting at interest from elsewhere as he called the Akash “one of our success stories”. Developed by India’s Defence Research and Developmen...

South Korea ⁠said on Monday that a ⁠recent border blast that seriously wounded two ⁠of its soldiers was caused by mines planted by North Korea. North Korea, which has been fortifying its border with South Korea since April 2024, deployed up to 7,000 workers to install mines and fences this year, with some 50 incidents of ‌crossing the border, according to a briefing on Monday by the South’s milita...

Built to hunt tanks and support ground troops, the People’s Liberation Army’s main attack helicopter is increasingly being prepared for operations at sea. Crews of the Z-10 are training to fly from ships – a shift that could give Beijing extra firepower in an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Manufactured by AVIC subsidiary the Changhe Aircraft Industries Corporation, the Z-10 entered service with the...

An 86-year-old grandmother in China has become a social media sensation for operating a coffee shop for over a decade – a business she took over from her son in 2015, despite having no experience with coffee at the time. Zhao Qiying, affectionately known as the “Coffee Grandma,” revealed that the shop, located in downtown Qingdao in eastern China’s Shandong province, was nearly bankrupt due to her...

Brazil is set for a presidential run-off after right-wing challenger Flavio Bolsonaro won a surprise first-round victory, threatening Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s grip on power in South America’s largest economy. Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, took 47 per cent of the ballots in Sunday’s election, beating out Lula on 45 per cent. Brazilians will vote again on October 2...

The 2026 Nobel Prize season opened on Monday with the Medicine Prize being awarded to three scientists working on the mechanisms the brain uses to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells. Karl Deisseroth, 54, Peter Hegemann, 71, and Georg Nagel, 73, have carried out research into light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. They are based at universities in Germany and the United S...

Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has granted a banking licence to Bakai Bank, marking the first Central Asian bank to set up in Hong Kong amid closer ties in the economy and trade flows between China and the region, according to a statement on Monday. Bakai Bank, one of the largest lenders in Kyrgyzstan, will operate as a restricted licence bank in Hong Kong. It will be the 17th restricted lice...

This article was translated from Chinese into English using Alibaba’s Qwen3.7-Plus, then checked and tweaked for accuracy by a South China Morning Post journalist. It is for reference only, and is not the official English version of the original Chinese document. Alibaba owns the SCMP.

Britain’s disgraced former prince, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has launched a High Court challenge “to quash search warrants” obtained by police ahead of his arrest earlier this year, the judiciary has confirmed. The London court was set to hold a private hearing on Thursday, the judiciary said in a statement on Monday, as King Charles’ brother challenged Thames Valley Police over searches of his...

A reported plan to station US defence personnel inside Taiwan’s military headquarters would take cooperation from external help into the heart of defence planning, potentially angering Beijing while raising questions over Taipei’s policymaking autonomy and military secrecy. According to Taiwanese media reports at the weekend, the Pentagon plans to send one official from the Office of the Under Sec...

For decades, China’s property sector was defined by spectacular scale: farmland transformed into suburbs, skylines rising across regional hubs and, more recently, the prominent unravelling of heavily indebted developers. Yet beneath those dramatic changes, a far quieter and more consequential transformation is taking shape. Official figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics in Septemb...

Southeast Asian governments are learning some hard truths about the data centre boom they spent years working to attract, analysts say – it promises jobs, digital infrastructure and a foothold in the AI economy, but the rapid buildout is also straining power grids, land and regulatory systems. “There is this enthusiasm to attract investments, but now it raises the question: at what cost and at wha...

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced early elections Monday after his government suffered a bruising legislative defeat last week on emergency measures related to the country’s housing crisis. The vote will be held on November 29. In recent weeks, Spaniards have demanded solutions from the government over housing affordability, holding protests in cities across the country after public o...

Hong Kong lawmakers have backed the government’s proposed tax incentives for large innovative companies, but many said on Monday that the planned five-year concession period is too short to attract major firms to establish headquarters or expand operations in the city. Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu in his policy address last month said the government planned to submit a bill introducing prefere...

Eight more companies from countries belonging to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative have applied to list in Hong Kong, the city’s trade promotion chief has revealed. Frederick Ma Si-hang, chairman of the Trade Development Council, also said on Monday the city’s economy would benefit from improving China-US ties. Speaking on the sidelines of the Global Youth Powerhouse Summit, Ma said interest in H...

Chinese doctors have performed an unprecedented surgery to save an unborn child who developed a fast-growing tumour. A medical team from Shenzhen and Hong Kong recently completed a challenging, precise reduction of a foetal chest tumour while the baby was still in the womb, offering new hope to families facing similarly dire prognoses. Jointly performed by doctors from Shenzhen Baoan Women’s and C...

Taipei’s top diplomat is in Arizona this week to open a de facto consulate and tour the state’s semiconductor corridor, even as US President Donald Trump has just wrapped up the pageantry of a state visit for President Xi Jinping. Lin Chia-lung, Taiwan’s foreign minister, arrived in Phoenix late on Saturday for a three-day visit that highlights the deepening economic ties between Washington and Ta...

Malaysia was aflush with Formula One fever this weekend, rekindling talk of permanently bringing the race back to the Southeast Asian nation after a long hiatus – despite days of traffic chaos that left thousands of fans stranded for hours. More than 260,000 people flocked to Sepang International Circuit in Selangor state for the Bahrain Grand Prix, which was originally meant to be held in April b...

The mother of slain Hong Kong socialite Abby Choi Tin-fung has accused her former in-laws of living off her family’s wealth without contributing anything to her grandchildren. Cheung Yin-fa testified in the High Court on Monday about the relationship between her daughter, ex-son-in-law Alex Kwong Kong-chi, and his family in the years leading up to the influencer’s slaying in February 2023. Kwong,...

Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Hospital launched its first phase of operations, treating nearly 300 patients at its family medicine centre on Monday morning, with the daily number projected to reach 1,800 by the end of the year. While some patients expressed satisfaction about the service, lawmakers called for more frequent connecting transport services and better publicity on transit options. Positioned to...