Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday urged Russia and Mongolia to deepen their energy and financial bonds with his country while fending off “external interference”.

The three countries must further strengthen “solidarity” amid increasingly turbulent international dynamics, Xi said during his first trilateral summit with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and Mongolian President Khurelsukh Ukhnaa in three years.

“China is ready to work with Russia and Mongolia to strengthen political mutual...

A subsidiary of Ant Group has acquired a minority stake in memory chip developer InnoStar Semiconductor, signalling continued Chinese efforts to support domestic suppliers and reduce reliance on imported semiconductors.

Shanghai Yunya Enterprise Management Consulting, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ant Group, recently snapped up a 1.87 per cent shareholding in InnoStar for an undisclosed amount, according to registry records in late August from corporate information provider Aiqicha.

InnoStar had...

Hong Kong’s eight public universities have the capacity to take in more non-local students and the quota can be raised further without undue delay, the city’s education minister has said, revealing some have already hit the 40 per cent threshold in the new academic year.

In an exclusive interview with the Post, Secretary for Education Christine Choi Yuk-lin said the enrolment of non-local students studying undergraduate programmes at the public universities in the new academic year was already...

Around 400 children have fallen ill after eating free school meals in Indonesia’s western Bengkulu Province in the worst case of mass food poisoning to date linked to President Prabowo Subianto’s flagship food programme.

Prabowo launched the programme of free meals for children and pregnant women in January, but the initiative has been marred by mass food poisoning across the archipelago, affecting hundreds of people.

Last month, 365 people fell ill from free school meals in Central Java....

Hong Kong’s home sales remained above the 5,000 level for the sixth consecutive month in August, further strengthening the view that the city’s residential property market may have bottomed out.

A total of 5,291 homes were transacted last month, according to data from the Land Registry on Tuesday, continuing a run above 5,000 that started in March. While the volume fell 8.2 per cent compared with 5,766 in July, it was nearly 45 per cent higher than a year ago.

In the first eight months of the...

Malaysia’s tech sector could risk further US scrutiny over a plan to deepen ties with Chinese semiconductor firms, as it looks to move up the value chain while maintaining access to the world’s biggest consumer market, according to analysts.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who is currently on a four-day official visit to China, held high-level talks in Beijing on Tuesday with senior leaders in the Chinese tech sector.

Anwar earlier said the meeting aimed to “discuss and work on the formula” to...

Thailand remained in a political deadlock on Tuesday, as the Pheu Thai party hinted it could dissolve parliament and set the course for a general election, while the opposition People’s Party refused to back either the caretaker government, or the arch-conservatives who blocked them from power just two years ago.

The kingdom’s protracted political crisis has taken another messy turn since Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the daughter of the divisive billionaire Thaksin, was removed as prime minister last...

A small Taiwanese delegation of politicians and business leaders – including former Kuomintang chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu – will be attending Beijing’s World War II Victory Parade on Wednesday, despite warnings from the ruling party in Taipei.

Hung announced via social media on Tuesday that she arrived in the mainland capital the previous night and would be present at the parade.

“Today, we are able to attend together and take part in commemorating this victorious moment in a national catastrophe....

On-demand local services giant Meituan has become the latest Chinese Big Tech company to release an open-source large language model (LLM) to market, more than two years after it acquired mainland AI start-up Light Year for US$281 million.

Beijing-based Meituan, the long-standing leader of China’s food delivery market, on Monday released and open-sourced its own LLM, called LongCat-Flash-Chat, via artificial intelligence developer platforms Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as the model’s...

At this year’s meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), President Xi Jinping said China will launch 10 additional Luban Workshops in the organisation’s member countries over the next five years, providing training slots for 10,000 individuals.

Named after the ancient architect and inventor Lu Ban, the project is somewhat low profile compared to others in Beijing’s infrastructure-heavy Belt and Road Initiative.

But the vocational education programme has quietly expanded across...