Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to North Korea this week helped to improve Kim Jong-un’s international standing and gave him a “big strategic win”, analysts said. Pyongyang has become increasingly close to Russia in recent years and has sent thousands of troops to support its war against Ukraine, but Xi’s visit reinforced the long-standing economic and cultural ties between China and North Korea. It was the Chinese leader’s first foreign trip of the year and came less than a month after he...

Beijing has warned of a resolute response to the Pentagon’s newly expanded blacklist of Chinese companies, accusing Washington of using national security as a pretext to curb the development of Chinese firms. The warning came after the US Defence Department released its updated Section 1260H list on Monday as required by American law, expanding the roster to 188 entities, up from 134 last year. The list names what the department says are “Chinese military companies” operating, directly or...

China should not try to copy SpaceX despite the US company’s successful IPO, a leading economist has said. The company raised US$75 billion when it went public on Friday and made its chief executive Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. But Shen Yingchun, a professor at Beihang University, told Beijing Daily: “China does not need to and cannot copy SpaceX.” She said “the strength of the US model is efficiency”, using the market to drive down costs and forcing companies to innovate. Shen...

In the 21st century race to the moon, there is a question that engineers must ask: what happens when the main engine fails? China and the United States are answering this in contrasting ways. Their answers could reveal the value they place on human life. From the Apollo Lunar Module in the 1960s to Nasa’s new Orion spacecraft for the Artemis programme, the American architecture relies on a single, powerful main engine to do the heavy lifting. On the descent stage, one main engine controls the...

The United States can launch stealth bombers across continents, track missiles from space and deploy forces anywhere on the planet. But as the nation approaches its 250th birthday next month, studies suggest a more basic question demands attention in Washington: can the military reliably fuel, sustain and connect those forces in a crisis? From the skies to orbit, two new reports point to vulnerabilities in critical pillars of US power projection at a time of intensifying strategic competition...

Mainland China’s fourth-ranking official has hailed the “enthusiastic” participation of people from Taiwan at a cross-strait forum despite the “obstacles” placed in their way. The independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party this year tightened restrictions on the Straits Forum in Fujian province, imposing the first outright ban on local officials attending the event. Senior officials had already been prohibited from attending. Addressing the event on Saturday, Wang Huning, Beijing’s top...

China activated the world’s first three-band optical fibre communication system early this month, technology that its developers say could expand the carrying capacity of future AI networks. According to the project team, a single fibre can carry more than five times the traffic of conventional systems, while transmission capacity per core increases by nearly half. The project, completed in Qingdao in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong, was jointly developed by state-owned...

In an era of naval warfare defined by air superiority, precision missiles and autonomous drones, China’s navy appears to be bringing back the “big guns”. A new naval gun system is said to be in development which takes 155mm, or 6.1-inch, artillery shells. That would make it the largest of its kind in the world today. The naval gun has recently been spotted undergoing sea-based performance testing from an experimental warship, which suggests it is moving closer to being deployed by the People’s...

The Philippines’ confrontational approach to maritime territorial disputes, such as its championing of the 2016 South China Sea arbitration ruling, has not only failed to resolve regional tensions, it also risks undermining Asean centrality. In May, addressing Japan’s National Diet, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr announced that Manila would mark the ruling’s 10th anniversary in July, an occasion he said “embodies our determination to resolve disputes through peaceful means”. That is...