Randal Shelby planned carefully and waited years to ditch a career spent in hospitals and medical centres to chase a dream in which he traded antiseptic hallways full of sick patients for the great outdoors. His new life started six years ago, after he secured about US$1.3 million in financing for a Case combine and other equipment, fertilisers, seed and labour needed to produce soybeans and rice, staples that enjoyed strong demand overseas, primarily from China. High fuel costs, rising interest...

Beijing could step up military and coastguard activities near Japan if tensions escalate further following Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s provocative remarks on Taiwan, according to analysts. “It cannot be ruled out that there will be new military activities near the Diaoyu Islands,” a government adviser said, referring to the disputed group of islands known as the Senkakus in Japan. The islands, located in the East China Sea, have long been a source of tension between the two...

Chinese internet search giant Baidu on Tuesday reported a 50 per cent increase in artificial intelligence-related revenue in the three months ended September from a year ago, which was the bright spot to an otherwise lacklustre financial quarter. The Beijing-based company’s third-quarter revenue declined 7 per cent year on year to 31.2 billion yuan (US$4.4 billion), owing to sluggish demand in its advertising business, while its net loss hit 11.2 billion yuan on asset writedowns. While its core...

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. US pulls missile system from Japan as Beijing-Tokyo row over Taiwan deepens A US missile system that could strike Beijing has been withdrawn from Japan, Japanese media reported on Monday, amid sharply escalating tensions triggered by the Japanese prime minister’s recent remarks on Taiwan. 2. China’s dominance shrinks US remote sensing share from 88% to...

Alibaba Group Holding’s new multipurpose artificial intelligence consumer app, Qwen, has the potential to become China’s “super-app” in the AI era in the same way Tencent Holdings’ WeChat defined the mobile internet age, analysts say. Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s own model series of the same name, Qwen quickly jumped to fourth overall on Apple’s app store for free apps in Hong Kong and fifth in mainland China on its second day of beta testing. The app, billed as “the best personal AI assistant”,...

A prominent American economist has cautioned that the United States and China risk developing a “fixation” with national security, a tendency he said was distracting from the domestic challenges facing both countries. “We’ve taken the concept of national security too far,” said Stephen Roach, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre, at the US-China Hong Kong Forum on Monday. He called on Washington and Beijing to draw a clear distinction between economic and national...

While the world’s attention is drawn to US President Donald Trump’s tug of war with China over trade tariffs and technological embargoes, a new development in the Ukraine war is catching the eye of geopolitical observers. Pokrovsk, a city in Donetsk Oblast, has emerged as the most critical flashpoint in Russia’s war on Ukraine. At the intersection of major supply highways and a key railway junction, it serves as a vital logistics hub for Ukrainian forces defending central and western Donetsk....