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Industry

China’s lab monkey prices hit Covid-era highs on new drug R&D demand

Long macaque breeding cycles and fully pre-booked colonies have forced some researchers to put critical studies on hold Suppliers are now generally quoting about 180,000 yuan (US$27,000) per animal. “It is not just a question of price,” said Guo, who works at the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Non-Human Primate Research. “In many cases, the monkeys simply cannot be bought. Suppliers say they have all been pre-booked.” Guo said his laboratory required between 30 and 50 monkeys each year for scientific work, including pathological and molecular biological analyses.

July 16, 2026

Industry

Jia Qianqian was a literary high-flier. Then came the online claims of plagiarism

Scandals are coming thick and fast in Chinese academia, with a former child prodigy also stripped of her master’s In a statement on Wednesday, Northwest University said its months-long investigation found that nine of Jia’s published papers contained plagiarised material. The university had terminated her teaching appointment and revoked her associate professor title. In addition, her 2009 master’s degree had been revoked after Shaanxi Normal University carried out its own review of her thesis and found plagiarism, the statement said. On July 8, President Xi Jinping called for greater efforts to crack down on academic misconduct at a meeting in Beijing. Improving China’s ability to innovate is a cornerstone of the government’s economic strategy.

July 16, 2026

Industry

US hardens AI stance on China as Anthropic calls for extending lead

AI company urges tighter export controls, saying Chinese rivals are rapidly closing the gap through unauthorised model distillation Washington is moving to strengthen its artificial intelligence posture towards China, with lawmakers advancing new export control bills and the Trump administration deepening cooperation with leading US AI firms as concerns grow that Beijing is rapidly closing the technological gap. A senior Anthropic executive said on Wednesday that the United States holds a six-to-nine-month lead in frontier AI models over Chinese competitors, while accusing Chinese companies of using unauthorised “distillation” techniques to replicate American advances. “We actually do have a pretty good handle on the lead. I think the six-to-nine-month figure is kind of an average if you look at models,” Tarun Chhabra, Anthropic’s head of national security policy, said during a discussion at the Aspen Security Forum. Chhabra characterised what he described as China’s use of model distillation as “adversarial”, describing it as “extracting the most valuable IP from the models”. He added that the United States could have been “a year to 18 months ahead” if Chinese firms had not engaged in the practice.

July 15, 2026

Industry

14-nation South China Sea statement is an expansionist overreach

On July 12, a coalition of 14 nations – the United States, Philippines, Australia, Canada, Britain, Japan, New Zealand, and seven European states including Germany, Italy and the Baltic nations – issued a statement marking the 10th anniversary of the South China Sea ruling at The Hague in 2016. The document recycled familiar arguments, urging compliance with the ruling and framing it as a cornerstone of the rules-based international order. But beneath it lies a fundamental disconnect from...

July 15, 2026

Industry

Trump intelligence pick to play ‘helpful’ role in agreeing economic strategy with China

Jay Clayton says US can still work together ‘on the world stage economically’ with Beijing despite the geopolitical challenges they face Jay Clayton, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, appeared before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on his nomination, where he was questioned on several key intelligence issues. Later in the hearing, lawmakers pushed back on the perceived ranking of Clayton’s threat assessment, stressing the importance of China as a geopolitical threat. “One, I strongly disagree with you about the issue of drug trafficking being more important at this point than the threat of China or Russia,” said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, with Clayton quickly clarifying he did not rank the threats in order.

July 15, 2026

Industry

EU accuses China of seeking to reshape global order in stark new strategy paper

China trying to ‘reshape the global order in line with their interests’, says EU in some of bloc’s strongest official criticism of Beijing In stark terms, the paper casts Russia and China as the two principal revisionist powers challenging European security and the international rules-based order. “At the centre of this transformation lies the determination of some powers, Russia and China foremost among them, to establish regional dominance and reshape the global order in line with their interests, fostering a return to a sphere-of-influence logic,” read the document, which was written by the EU’s External Action Service – its de facto foreign office – as guidance for the bloc’s first security strategy, expected later this year.

July 15, 2026

Industry

Global views of China and Xi improve as perceptions of US decline, Pew survey finds

China’s image has recovered from pandemic lows while confidence in the US and its global leadership has weakened The survey, released on Wednesday, polled more than 45,000 people across 37 countries spanning every region of the world, including many advanced economies and emerging markets, such as Argentina, Australia, France, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Turkey and the US. “Views of China were at or near historic lows in many countries during the Covid-19 pandemic but have since steadily increased,” Jonathan Schulman, a research associate at Pew Research Centre, said in a statement to the South China Morning Post. “Views of the US have declined in many places, and the share of people saying that the US is a reliable partner to their country has similarly fallen sharply.” The survey was conducted between February and May through telephone, face-to-face and online interviews, during a period when the US was becoming increasingly entangled in the conflict with Iran and other regional crises. One of the survey’s most notable findings is the shift in relative perceptions of China and the US.

July 15, 2026

Industry

US-Iran war: is Trump falling into a Vietnam ‘quagmire’?

Renewed strikes put Washington’s appetite for a prolonged war to a familiar historical test, analysts say The renewed cycle is testing both Tehran’s resilience and Washington’s appetite for a prolonged conflict, prompting some analysts to draw uncomfortable parallels with the political tolls that past US presidents faced in drawn-out wars such as in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The US military on Wednesday said it had launched a “90-minute wave” of precision strikes that had “further degraded Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz”. Tehran, which insists it controls the strait, has launched retaliatory drone and missile attacks on US-linked targets in Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait, vowing the waterway would stay closed “until the US ends its aggression”.

July 15, 2026

Industry

Christmas tree troubles, new Pacific missile launch: 7 US-China relations reads

We have selected seven of the most interesting and important news stories covering US-China relations from the past few weeks. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing. 1. US lawmakers push for fewer tax breaks to reduce reliance on China technology A growing number of US lawmakers see the tax code as a way to shift corporate America’s reliance on Chinese technology, framing economic ties as a national security risk. Read the full story here. 2. Lindsey...

July 15, 2026

Industry

China is now world’s No 1 science power, top Russian scientist Artem Oganov says

After receiving Chinese award, chemist and materials researcher says it gives him confidence that he’s ‘on the right track’ After Oganov visited China in 2008, he told colleagues and friends in Europe that the country was “on the way” to being No 1 in both industry and science, but said this was met with scepticism at the time. He told the South China Morning Post on Monday that, 18 years on, “China is No 1 – in industry, in economy, and indeed also in science.” Noting that America used to be the top scientific power, he pointed to the fact that China now accounts for a third of global scientific publications, adding that it was not just numbers, but “quality”. China holds the top spot in the 2026 Nature Index – an analysis of over 125,000 research articles published in 178 leading publications in 2025 – with the US in second place.

July 15, 2026

Industry

China warns of more extreme weather as Bavi leaves trail of rain, flooding

As northern regions log historic rainfall, experts caution that local storms are part of global chain of climate disasters Jilin weather authorities said that due to heavy rain, at least 10 cities in the foothills of the Changbai Mountains were at risk of landslides on Wednesday. The mountain range stretches across northeast China and into North Korea. The National Meteorological Centre issued a yellow rainstorm alert, the third strongest in a four-tier warning system. While the effects of Bavi were easing, forecasters said more storms were expected. China’s State Council warned that another five or six typhoons would be generated in the northwest Pacific Ocean and South China Sea by the end of next month, with two or three making landfall or affecting the country. Heavy rain and floods are expected in multiple regions through September, while Beijing, Tianjin, Fujian province, parts of Guangdong province and the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang are expected to get about 20 to 50 per cent more rain than usual, according to the State Council, China’s cabinet.

July 15, 2026

Industry

China report warns against European-led Nato 3.0 expansion in the Asia-Pacific

The alliance’s expanding military cooperation in the region will leave the bloc ‘increasingly at odds’ with multipolar world order The report follows the transatlantic security alliance’s summit in Ankara last week where the Nato 3.0 concept was formally embraced as its latest strategic direction. The term broadly refers to a structural overhaul that shifts greater responsibility for conventional defence on to Europe, while the United States recalibrates its global commitments. According to the CICIR, this marks a new phase in Nato’s evolution: from Cold War-era territorial defence against the Soviet Union, through out-of-area interventions and crisis management, to a Europe-led model centred on home defence and deterrence. The shift is being driven in large part by the Trump administration’s renewed emphasis on burden-sharing.

July 15, 2026