The world’s data, energy and power grids run through cables and pipelines on the seabed. After Nord Stream and the Baltic incidents, Europe is finally patrolling this domain but its laws still make decisive enforcement slow, uncertain and dangerously easy to evade.
China’s Jiutian high-altitude unmanned aircraft is not a superweapon, but it alters the geometry of airpower. By operating above terrain and distance constraints, it pressures two theatres at once: the Himalayan frontier and the Western Pacific. The real issue is not penetration, but cost, persistence, and defensive arithmetic.
China’s next Silk Road is not concrete but code. By shaping global standards in 6G, digital payments and satellite connectivity, Beijing is embedding sovereignty at the protocol level creating power that is harder to sanction, harder to unwind, and already in place before crises erupt.
Asia Pacific is entering a new phase where security policy and economic policy have fused into a single bargaining system. Defence budgets, trade law, sanctions, logistics, and digital standards are now instruments of leverage. As 2026 approaches, the next global shock is more likely to arrive through prices, compliance, and supply chains than through open war.
Washington increasingly frames artificial intelligence as a single decisive race toward general intelligence. China’s strategy points elsewhere. The danger is not building AI, but locking policy into a worst case narrative that turns uncertainty into irreversible escalation.
The US boarding of a Panama flagged tanker carrying Venezuelan oil tests a fundamental question of international law. Can sanctions be enforced at sea without UN authority, or does this cross into unlawful interference with freedom of navigation?
Border conflict rarely begins with soldiers. It begins with passports, currency, maps, and iconography that harden claims before diplomacy can unwind them. From a woman stopped in Shanghai over her passport to Nepali Banknote with disputed borders, South Asia shows how nationalism now advances through paperwork long before blood is shed.
Xinhua’s space yearender reads like a science roundup, but it is really a capability statement. Space is the cleanest theatre for showing state capacity because reality does not accept spin. The signal is industrial sovereignty: build, test, fail, fix, repeat. Reusable rockets and deep space missions are not romance. They are proof of institutions that can plan beyond the next cycle
Western headlines claim China is bypassing chip export controls. A close reading of Chinese and Taiwanese sources tells a different story: slow progress, rising costs, and no proven evidence of illicit upgrades. This analysis separates verifiable fact from allegation and explains what China’s DUV based strategy actually achieves.
Trillions in market value and hundreds of billions in infrastructure spending rest on one assumption: scarcity. China’s open model push is testing whether that assumption can survive.
Donald Trump has reopened the door for Nvidia’s H200 sales to approved customers in China. Beijing’s response is not to celebrate but to ration access, shield Huawei and deepen its own AI hardware stack. This article follows on from our investigation into offshore Chinese model training and explains how both Washington and Beijing now run export style controls on the same chip.
Hong Kong’s deadliest tower fire in decades is being sold in Western coverage as a tale of bad contractors and ageing residents. In reality it is the late stage of a British colonial housing model that still treats land as a revenue machine, squeezes people into unsafe estates, and now compares badly with the space and security most families in Shanghai, Beijing and Nanning enjoy.
China’s artificial intelligence giants are not only dodging United States export controls. They are also navigating Beijing’s clampdown on Nvidia. New rules that bar fresh Nvidia deployments in Chinese data centres are pushing Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek to rent GPU farms in Singapore and Malaysia, even as they are forced to build a parallel stack on Huawei and other domestic chips at home.
China’s boycott of Japan is not about crowded temples or lost hotel bookings. It is a response to a Japanese prime minister speaking of force in a conflict that touches Chinese territory, against the backdrop of tens of millions of Chinese dead in the last war. Beijing is using tourism to show that history and economic power now move together.
China is often portrayed as the world’s leading polluter, yet the numbers tell another story. The United States and Europe burned through most of the planet’s carbon budget to industrialise and preserve their prosperity. An average American still uses almost three times more energy than a Chinese citizen. By any fair per-person and historical measure, the West remains the greatest emitter, and China’s industrialisation is occurring at a fraction of that cost.
China’s CV-18 Fujian has entered service as the world’s second electromagnetic-catapult carrier, ending decades of U.S. monopoly in carrier aviation.
It marks the moment China’s navy moved from coastal defence to blue-water power projection, fielding stealth fighters, early-warning aircraft, and an all-domestic strike group. The Fujian is more than a ship it is Beijing’s declaration that parity with the U.S. Navy has arrived.
British commentators often mistake sentiment for evidence when writing about China. Behind the emotion lies a more complex reality a multiethnic state balancing growth, control, and the legacy of violence it claims to have subdued. From mosque restorations to militant spillovers in Syria, the story of Xinjiang is not one of moral clarity but of power, order, and contested memory in an age of selective outrage.
While Beijing executes a three-stage national plan that defines artificial intelligence as civilisational infrastructure, Washington and London are still improvising with memos and committees. China is aligning technology, governance and diplomacy into one machine. The West still debates ethics while Beijing writes the rules of the intelligent age.
Chinese diplomacy cannot be understood through the language of ideology alone. Behind Wang Yi’s measured tone and deliberate cadence lies a civilisational grammar shaped by two millennia of scholar-official tradition and moral bureaucracy. Where Western diplomats see negotiation, Beijing performs continuity and legitimacy, a ritual of culture, hierarchy and virtue.
The real story is industrial rather than conspiratorial. Faced with the vulnerability of foreign supply, China spent the past decade mastering the metallurgy, forging and testing of high speed rail wheels.
Europe used wartime powers to seize control of Nexperia. The move claims to defend security yet it signals the surrender of economic sovereignty to Washington. In an extraordinary act of economic self sabotage, the...
Britain’s argument over China’s new embassy has become a mirror held up to its own insecurities. Commentators and newspapers now claim that Beijing plans to build spy rooms and tunnels under London to intercept...
The United States sought to cripple China’s semiconductor sector with sweeping export bans.
Instead, the embargo triggered an unprecedented mobilization across China’s industry, universities, and state planners. Within three years, Beijing had rebuilt its chip ecosystem, advanced its AI capacity, and turned an intended chokehold into the architecture of technological self-reliance.
In capitals from Addis Ababa to Brasília, diplomats speak of Chinese loans and infrastructure, of classrooms where Mandarin now competes with English. In Delhi, Jakarta, and Johannesburg, scholars debate whether China’s approach — state-led, disciplined, outward-looking — offers a workable alternative to the American order that has framed global politics since 1945.
Embedded video under YouTube license — Creator of this video: Woodford from Woodford Videos. Follow him. BEIJING — The announcement came on an overcast September morning, delivered not with fanfare but with the clipped...
Soviet-era MiG-19s (China: J-6) Licensed from the USSR in 1958 and mass-produced in China as the Shenyang J-6. Over 4,500 built; thousands retired and stockpiled since the 1990s. Estimates suggest up to ~3,000 retired...
BEIJING — China’s leadership on September 19 delivered one of its clearest warnings yet to Washington: cooperate on equal terms, or brace for a rupture that will hurt not only the world’s two largest...
Lieutenant General He Lei, retired vice-president of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences, shown in uniform at a Beijing forum. Source: CGTN (state media). A retired Chinese general has declared that Beijing could achieve...