Receive free Country Garden Holdings Co Ltd updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Country Garden Holdings Co Ltd news every morning. Shares in Country Garden slumped to a record low on Monday after the Chinese property developer suspended trading in at least 10 of its mainland bonds. The company, formerly the largest developer in China by sales, missed international bond payments last week in a sign that a two-year liquidity crisis across the real estate sector was threatening to escalate. Shares in the…
Day: August 13, 2023
Goodbye to science funding bias in China? Graft-busters target the practice of ‘saying hello’
The reviews are based on an applicant’s track record, rather than just on the value of the project, and some applicants seek out the reviewers to try to sway their decision. According to a report by the foundation in July last year, over 70 per cent of reviewers surveyed in 2021 said they had been approached during a project review. Advertisement The foundation said earlier this month that since the start of the joint task force with the CCDI it had received 58 complaints about such approaches. The cases were…
iPhone maker Foxconn’s cautious pivot to India shows limits of ‘China plus one’
When Foxconn chair Young Liu was in Tamil Nadu two weeks ago to discuss more investment by the iPhone manufacturer in the southern Indian state, two ministers from neighbouring Karnataka sought him out for their own meeting — and later produced documents claiming Foxconn also intended to build two factories in their state. While Foxconn insisted it had not committed to any project, the Karnataka government’s lobbying was a sign of the intense competition brewing in India to attract more investment from the world’s biggest contract electronics manufacturer, as Apple…
North Korea’s Kim Orders Sharp Increase in Missile Production
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made another inspection tour of major munitions factories and ordered a drastic increase in production of missiles and other weapons, state media said Monday, days before South Korea and the U.S. begin annual military drills that North Korea views as an invasion rehearsal. Kim’s push to produce more weapons also comes as U.S. officials believe Russia’s defense minister recently talked with North Korea about selling more weapons to Russia for its war with Ukraine. The Korean Central News Agency said…
How China’s Communist Party seeks to win friends and influence through Mideast political groups
“Party-to-party diplomacy has several objectives, from normalising a one-party system among China’s partners to cultivating and developing ideological political partners in countries of strategic interest,” he said. “In the case of the Middle East, party-to-party diplomacy has been employed to cultivate ideological partners or, at least, reinforce mutual respect for China’s core principles, especially one-party rule.” Advertisement The international department of the Central Committee, the Communist Party’s top leadership body, oversees party diplomacy. Established in 1951, the department was largely tasked with handling ties with communist parties of other countries…
China expands farmland in bid to cut foreign food reliance
Receive free Chinese agriculture updates We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Chinese agriculture news every morning. In the western Chinese city of Chengdu, once popular hotpot restaurant Star Shining in the Clouds has closed its doors for the last time, one of several businesses to shut as the government tries to increase the amount of land under cultivation. Local authorities have taken over 6,700 hectares in Chengdu alone, closing multiple companies, as part of a bigger nationwide push to plant corn and soyabean to…
Researchers question the effectiveness of China’s game time restrictions for minors in reducing heavy play
Children in mainland China are subject to some of the world’s strictest restrictions on online gaming time, but a new study published in Nature found no evidence that those government-imposed rules had reduced heavy gaming. Researchers from universities in the UK and Denmark pulled anonymised data from US game engine developer Unity, covering 7.04 billion hours of playtime from 2.4 billion mainland Chinese gamer profiles from August 2019 to January 2020. Those profiles include both children and adults, the researchers noted, because the data they obtained did not include age…
US nuclear submarine weak spot in bubble trail: Chinese scientists
The team, led by Zou Shengnan, used computer modelling to determine whether it was possible to detect the almost imperceptible bubbles produced by a nuclear-powered submarine cruising at high speed. 02:52 China warns Aukus against going down ‘dangerous road’ over nuclear-powered submarine pact China warns Aukus against going down ‘dangerous road’ over nuclear-powered submarine pact The result “provides a new solution for the detection and tracking of submarines”, according to the paper published on August 1 by the Chinese Journal of Ship Research. Advertisement The journal is run by the…
Cambodia’s Gambling Hotspot Reduced to ‘Ghost Buildings’
Before COVID-19, Chinese investors turned Cambodia’s sleepy seaside city of Sihanoukville into a ‘round-the-clock gambling hotspot. But China’s economy has been grappling with a post-pandemic slowdown, and now the buildings by the beach — abandoned by Chinese investors — have become eyesores. More on this from Hul Reaksmey in Sihanoukville. Camera: Pin Sisovann. Voice of America
China pumps up narrative of happy Uyghurs in Xinjiang among Pakistanis
“Chinese Rahat Abdullah” has become a regular on Pakistani social media channels, YouTube and Facebook, wearing Atlas silk dresses, Pakistani clothing, or traditional Chinese outfits. Regarded as a Chinese internet star, she also sings in Urdu on local radio and cooks Uyghur dishes on Pakistani TV programs – though she refers to the dishes as Chinese food. Her sudden rise in popularity has raised questions among Uyghurs living in Pakistan about Beijing’s efforts to use local Uyghurs as pro-Chinese Communist Party propaganda tools to downplay the Chinese government’s horrific treatment…