China’s flagship sovereign wealth fund has revealed that it opened a representative office in London shortly after Donald Trump’s victory in last year’s US presidential election, a move made amid increased scrutiny of Chinese investments in the United States. The London office was officially registered in December 2024, with the mission of “advancing the company’s overseas investment business” and “promoting cross-border investment cooperation”, China Investment Corporation (CIC) said in its...

China is about to switch on a satellite “super factory” able to produce 1,000 units annually – a major step in Beijing’s race to build low Earth orbit constellations as part of its ambition to one day rival Elon Musk’s Starlink. The facility, located inside the Wenchang spaceport in China’s southernmost Hainan province, integrates a “factory-to-launch” pipeline that assembles, tests and pairs satellites with rockets. This makes it the only base of its kind in the country and Asia’s largest...

China’s economy is projected to grow by 5 per cent in 2025 before slowing to 4.5 per cent in 2026, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday, offering a slightly more upbeat outlook underscoring its view of the country’s resilience despite persistent trade frictions. The annual assessment released on Wednesday showed an upwards revision of 0.2 and 0.3 percentage points from the IMF’s October forecast, as the world’s second-largest economy rolled out stimulus measures and faced...

China’s consumer prices rose for a second straight month in November, with inflation hitting its highest level in nearly two years, in a tentative sign that the country’s persistent deflationary pressure may be starting to ease. The national consumer price index (CPI), a major gauge of inflation, rose 0.7 per cent year on year last month, the largest increase recorded since early 2024, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday. The reading was slightly above...

A new report recommends European companies avoid an overreliance on China or the US in their supply chains, as companies find themselves squeezed between Beijing’s preferential policies for local companies and Washington’s trade volatility. The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China advised companies to “eliminate single-source dependencies on both China and the United States where possible” in its “Dealing with Supply Chain Dependencies” report released on Wednesday. “We are probably only...

Guangdong, China’s largest provincial economy, has vowed to double its economy by 2035 from 2022 levels, in line with the central government’s target of becoming a medium-level developed country by that year. “Looking ahead, from the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party (in 2022) to 2035, Guangdong aims to achieve socialist modernisation and build a modern, new Guangdong within 13 years,” provincial authorities said in their five-year plan proposals released on Monday. “By that time,...

US President Donald Trump’s green light for Nvidia to sell H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips in China signals a calculated shift to export older technology, according to analysts who see the move as aiming to fortify the US market share while dampening China’s urgency for self-reliance. But some predict an ongoing policy tug of war in the US between advocates of this week’s relaxation and those who prefer continued tight restrictions on hi-tech gear shipped to China. Trump said on Monday...