Emmanuel Macron has warned Beijing that Europe would be forced to retaliate with “strong measures” against Chinese goods – including punitive tariffs modelled after US policy – if a trade imbalance between the two sides remains unaddressed we...

Renowned Chinese poet Yu Xiuhua has made headlines by saying that the menopause was a happy thing and writing a poem in its praise. Yu, 49, from a village in central China’s Hubei province, achieved overnight fame in 2014 for her talented writing. ...

New, younger faces have won slightly fewer than half of the 90 seats in Hong Kong’s second “patriots-only” Legislative Council, and their immediate task will be to tackle the aftermath of the deadly Tai Po fire and implement systemic reforms. T...

China’s open-source artificial intelligence models accounted for nearly 30 per cent of total global use of the technology, while Chinese-language prompts ranked second in token volume behind English, according to a report. This year’s surge in op...

US President Donald Trump’s new global security road map has dropped any reference to denuclearising North Korea as a goal, fuelling speculation that Washington may be angling to boost the chances of a diplomatic breakthrough with Pyongyang in 2026...

Late one night in southern Nepal last month, whispers spread of an unusual wedding taking place. Inside a modest home, an 18-year-old girl was about to be wed to a Chinese national nearly twice her age. The match was illegal. Nepal’s minimum age fo...

Every quarter, Knight Frank publishes an index tracking the movement of prime residential prices and rents in leading cities around the world. Although the index is just a snapshot that should be treated with caution given significant differences in ...

The Hong Kong Insurance Authority has directed insurers to move quickly to assist victims of the Tai Po fire by directly contacting policyholders to help them claim compensation for about 12,000 insurance policies, according to CEO Clement Cheung Wan...

Chinese scientists have genetically modified a fungus commonly used in the production of meat substitutes to make it an even more environmentally friendly source of protein than chicken – one of the farmed animals that has the least impact on the e...

Spain’s ambitious multi-billion-euro plan to become Europe’s leading player in the electric vehicle market presents a golden opportunity for Chinese car brands, which could be vital to the strategy’s success, according to analysts. The Spain Au...

Malaysia’s former economy minister Rafizi Ramli has renewed his attack on Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s reformist agenda, alleging that anti-corruption officers targeted candidates who challenged the leader’s daughter in internal party polls e...

About a dozen families who lost loved ones in Hong Kong’s Tai Po fire have given samples of their DNA to authorities who are trying to identify victims still missing nearly two weeks after the deadly blaze. A source said police had contacted about ...

The first giant panda cub born in Indonesia is noisy, nursing well and showing other signs of good health, the conservation park where he was born said on Sunday. Indonesian Safari Park released video and photos showing the fuzzy newborn in an incuba...

Japan has dropped out of plans to build a major nuclear power plant in Vietnam because the time frame is too tight, Japanese ambassador Naoki Ito told Reuters, potentially complicating Vietnam’s long-term strategy to avoid new power shortages. Viet...

The numbers were tallied overnight and 90 newly minted lawmakers will begin their term in January after winning in Sunday’s Legislative Council election. The citywide poll which drew a turnout rate of 31.9 per cent – slightly higher than four yea...

Nearly 44 per cent of the Hong Kong Legislative Council’s seats have been reshuffled after four incumbent lawmakers lost their re-election bids and 35 others declined to run. Those four who failed to secure another term in Sunday’s poll were Kwok...

The United Nations on Monday hit out at global “apathy” over widespread suffering as it launched its 2026 appeal for humanitarian assistance, which was limited in scope as aid operations confront major funding cuts. “This is a time of brutality...

An eight-year-old boy in eastern China has ignited a heated online discussion after he chopped his mother’s gold necklace into small pieces and gave them to classmates as gifts. The boy’s unusual act, which was only discovered after the month it ...

China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier continued its military drill in waters near Japan’s Okinawa on Sunday, Tokyo said, after a rare military stand-off between Chinese and Japanese fighter jets the previous day. The Liaoning and three guided missile...

China has pledged to better coordinate its domestic economic work to account for international trade turbulence next year, with a high-level decision-making body calling for the promotion of “effective qualitative improvement and reasonable quantit...

As Britain’s Defence Secretary John Healey talks up his plans to buttress the UK military, doubts over funding and the country’s ability to move fast enough are unsettling the industry and armed forces. Healey in June laid out a 130-page defence ...

Thailand launched air strikes on Cambodian military positions on Monday after a Thai soldier was killed, pushing a shaky US-brokered truce to the brink of collapse as renewed fighting broke out along their shared frontier. Each side accused the other...

We have put together stories from our coverage last weekend to help you stay informed about news across Asia and beyond. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. Hong Kong Legco election’s 31.9% turnout surpas...

An Australian firefighter was killed overnight after he was struck by a tree while trying to control a bushfire that had destroyed homes and burnt large swathes of bushland north of Sydney, authorities said on Monday. Emergency crews rushed to bushla...

China’s big money is returning to African infrastructure as its state-owned firms evolve from mere builders into long-term financiers and operators. This is so they have enough “skin in the game”, according to one analyst, as Beijing seeks last...

Japan is turning to artificial intelligence to crack down on manga and anime piracy, aiming to stem copyright losses worth trillions of yen and recover revenue from one of its most valuable cultural exports. The move comes as creators increasingly lo...

China has reached a new trade surplus milestone, surpassing last year’s record to hit an all-time high of US$1.076 trillion in the first 11 months of the year – driven by extensive efforts to diversify export markets and supply chains amid uncert...

Hong Kong mother Moon Li was just HK$65,000 (US$8,350) away from paying off the mortgage on the flat she and her husband bought 17 years ago, but a deadly blaze at their Tai Po estate may have shattered her dream of owning a home. “I used to have a...

Younger Japanese are proving to be the most resistant to immigration, defying assumptions that generational change would produce greater cosmopolitanism. A new survey found that 70 per cent of those aged 18 to 39 expressed safety concerns about forei...

Beijing has lodged “counter-protests” against Japanese complaints over a weekend mid-air stand-off northeast of Taiwan near the Miyako Strait, accusing Tokyo of “purely ill-intentioned” rhetoric and “ulterior motives”. “Japan is deliber...

China is building the world’s highest unmanned mine at a forbidding altitude of 5,600 metres (18,372 feet), higher than the world’s highest known inhabited settlement. At the Huoshaoyun lead-zinc mine in Hotan county, Xinjiang, domestically devel...

Schiaparelli, a fashion house known for its unique and surreal designs, is set to make its Asian debut with a permanent outlet in Hong Kong, according to Hongkong Land. The shop in Landmark, one of the city’s premium shopping centres in the main Ce...

Hong Kong has now elected members to the new Legislative Council. Despite the temporary suspension of campaigning work and candidate debates after the Tai Po fire broke out, the polls were held as planned to avert a constitutional crisis. It was a to...

A Chinese woman who was unexpectedly reunited with the man who rescued her from the rubble of an earthquake more than 10 years ago when she was 11 has tied the knot with him. The story was revealed on November 29, in Changsha, Hunan province, in sout...

Mainland China’s coastguard has carried out its first-ever search and rescue exercise in a key section of the Taiwan Strait – one of the world’s most strategically vital and busiest waterways. The large-scale drills on Saturday centred around t...

Taking a short cut through Pattaya’s “Scammer Alley”, a neon maze of bars, hotpot restaurants and 24-hour Korean barbecue joints, taxi driver May shakes her head. The money washing around this Thai resort is so thick with fraud that even her ow...

US President Donald Trump solidified his takeover of Washington’s John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts on Sunday by hosting its flagship awards programme, mixing politics with a celebration of stars from music and film. This year’s Kenn...

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani posted a video to social media on Sunday explaining immigrants’ right to refuse to speak to or comply with agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), days after federal agents carried out a ra...

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing. Get faster notifications on the latest updates by downloading our app. Some 31.9 per cent of registered voter...

Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro said on Sunday he could abandon his presidential aspirations for a “price”, and suggested amnesty be granted to his father, the imprisoned far-right former leader Jair Bolsonaro. The ex-president’s eldest son ...

Huang Yiping is the dean of Peking University’s National School of Development and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank. He also sits on the Hong Kong stock exchange’s Mainland Ch...

Nigerian authorities have secured the release of 100 kidnapped schoolchildren taken by gunmen from a Catholic school last month, a UN source and local media said on Sunday, though the fate of the 165 students and staff thought to remain in captivity ...

When President Xi Jinping hosted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin earlier this year, the choreography was familiar: smiles, handshakes and talk of a “multipolar world order”. ...

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a major figure in implementing US President Donald Trump’s economic agenda including tariffs, disclosed on Sunday that he has recently divested his interests in a soybean farm to comply with the ethics agreement...

A water leak last month damaged hundreds of books in the Egyptian antiquities department at the Louvre, underscoring the deteriorating state of the world’s most visited museum just weeks after a daring jewel heist exposed security flaws. Specialist...

The UK will “turn the tide” on illicit finance at a landmark anti-corruption summit in London next year, the foreign secretary has said. Yvette Cooper confirmed on Sunday that Britain would host the summit at Lancaster House on June 23-24, 2026. ...

Celebrated British documentary photographer Martin Parr has died at his home in the western English city of Bristol, his foundation announced on Sunday. He was 73. Famous for his kitschy, colour-saturated images, Parr had a sharp eye for mundane oddi...

UK police were probing on Sunday an assault involving pepper spray at a Heathrow Airport car park that disrupted travel and left 21 people, including a three-year-old girl, needing medical treatment. In a departure from an earlier account of the inci...

US ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz and European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas were both visiting Jordan on Sunday to discuss humanitarian aid for Gaza. Their visits came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he expect...

Some 31.9 per cent of voters cast their ballots on Sunday in Hong Kong’s second Legislative Council election under a “patriots-only” system, beating the record low turnout of 2021 in a sombre poll held just 12 days after the tragic fire in Tai ...