Zhou Ming, renowned as the mastermind behind key industrial software used in planes such as the Boeing 787 and Airbus A380, has left his leadership role at US-based global engineering giant Altair to return to China. An announcement on the website of the College of Engineering at the Eastern Institute of Technology in Ningbo said Zhou had joined as a chair professor and the first dean of the college in June and was already setting up a research team. Zhou also confirmed the move on his personal...

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. Trump says he will arrange Putin, Zelensky meeting after speaking with both US President Donald Trump said on Monday that he was brokering a meeting between Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and their Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to be followed by a trilateral meeting that would include the US leader. 2. China’s exports, investments to Global...

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has confirmed that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit China at the end of the month for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit. His comments, made during talks on the two countries’ border dispute with Indian national security adviser Ajit Doval on Tuesday, came in the wake of a series of reports in Indian media that the visit would go ahead. It will be Modi’s first trip to China in seven years and raises expectations he will meet Chinese...

Denis Gagnon had long wanted to establish a manufacturing firm supplied only by American-made parts, a vision shaped by his experience in the international corporate world and his assessment of business risks offshore. He was an outlier in an era of globalisation when businesspeople, including his US peers, waxed lyrical about outsourcing from Asia to minimise production costs. The Gagnons, including his son William, run a medium-sized company called Excel Dryer in the US state of...

Few disputes in Asia are as enduring – and as polarising – as those over the South China Sea. For more than a decade, two sharply opposed narratives have dominated. In one, Beijing is seen as using force, or the threat of force, to change the status quo, undermining peace and stability. In the other, China is portrayed as exercising restraint, acting within its rights and working to safeguard regional stability. These perspectives are not merely different; they are mutually exclusive. One side’s...

The Chinese social media platform Weibo has shut down several accounts for “inciting gender antagonism” and vowed to continue cracking down on such behaviour. On Monday, the social media site announced via its official account that it had permanently closed an account named “Lilian Shuodao” for “continuously stigmatising the opposite sex and posting extreme anti-marriage remarks”. The term “opposite sex” referred to men. As of Tuesday, the banned account, which had 129,000 followers, was no...

Taiwan is moving to buy nearly 50,000 drones over the next two years as it seeks to bolster its asymmetric combat capabilities against mounting military pressure from Beijing. The move comes as the island’s military prepares to classify unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as consumables to accelerate procurement – a policy that mirrors a recent shift by the United States. According to a recent tender notice published on the Taiwanese government’s procurement website, the defence ministry’s Armaments...