South China Morning Post

Traveling to Beijing? You will be landing at one of two airports, now that the capital’s highly anticipated Daxing International Airport has opened.

Known as PKX to flight insiders, the brand new airport designed by late British architect Zaha Hadid cost $11 billion and took five years to build.

If you’re traveling through Beijing, whether you transit through Daxing (pronounced da-SHEEN, as in Charlie Sheen) or the older Capital International Airport will be determined by your airline.

US…

People in Changsha, the capital of the southern province of Hunan, can now have a taste of the future by hopping into a self-driving taxi.

Launched by tech giant Baidu, trial passenger services started in the city on Thursday, about two years after Google’s self-driving unit Waymo started its pilot project in Phoenix, Arizona.

The taxi services, involving an initial fleet of 45 autonomous cars, are expected to run initially on 31-mile-long open roads before gradually expanding to cover the…

I left Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s first town-hall style dialogue session feeling pretty much the same I did on the way in – underwhelmed.

This was an opportunity for me to swap my journalist hat for that of a regular citizen of Hong Kong and take part in Lam’s first dialogue with the public in more than three months of anti-government protests.

Applications for the event opened last Thursday, and 150 people were randomly picked from more than 20,200 who signed up for a chance to demand…

On a remote mountainside overlooking a misty valley, rows of cannabis plants are growing near fields of tobacco and corn.

This isn’t a pot farm in California. It’s in southwestern China’s Yunnan.

China has one of the strictest drug control policies in the world. But here in a mountainous region bordering Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, cannabis is being touted as a crop that could bring untold wealth to farmers and businesses.

That’s because these plants won’t get you high. They don’t have enough…

A Chinese student association at a Canadian university has lost its club status over concerns about its alleged links to the Chinese government.

Objections to the Chinese Students and Scholars Association’s (CSSA) official status at McMaster University, near Canada’s largest city Toronto, stemmed from a protest campaign it had spearheaded in February in response to a talk given on campus by Rukiye Turdush, a Uygur activist.

More than 1 million Uygurs and other ethnic minority groups are…

In what the Trump administration hopes will help American firms compete with Chinese exporters, the US will be allowed to raise the cost of shipping goods from China.

Members of a United Nations postal agency, which includes China, struck a deal after two days of emergency talks in Geneva to let the US and other high-volume importers set their own rates for delivering small parcels from foreign countries.

Trump threatened last October to quit that agency, the Universal Postal Union, which…

Chinese pop superstar Faye Wong has been criticized by fans across the political spectrum for singing a well-known patriotic song ahead of a major political anniversary next week.

Wong sang a cover of My people, my country – a nationalistic “red” song originally released in 1985 to celebrate the achievements of the ruling Communist Party – in her signature breathy style.

The criticism lobbed at Wong, 50, from all sides shows the difficulty faced by international Chinese celebrities with…

A week before China’s national day celebration on October 1, tech giant Tencent is promoting a red Chinese flag filter to users of its all-in-one app WeChat.

On Monday, Chinese netizens began adding a small national flag to the right corner of their profile picture on Wechat. 

The online campaign was an instant hit on the super app. The service crashed at one point due to an avalanche of users, Tencent told the National Business Daily.

On another social media site, the Twitter-like Weibo,…

In an emotional message to the UN’s Climate Action Summit in New York this week, 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg slammed world leaders for failing to take action on climate change.

But China’s online community was largely unmoved and divided over whether her activism was meaningful.

“What this girl is doing is just talking the talk,” read a comment on China’s Twitter-like Weibo. 

“She started to go on strike at age 14. How much knowledge does she have? Without much…

As far back as the early 1980s, when talks with Britain over Hong Kong’s future began, the city’s property tycoons were Beijing’s main political allies. 

As the handover in 1997 neared, Beijing’s main preoccupation was to ensure Hong Kong’s continued stability. That meant retaining the confidence of the business community.

“Winning the support of major property developers was its top priority,” said Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, former secretary for transport and housing.

But two decades later,…