South China Morning Post

Joe Biden, a front-runner in the Democratic race for US presidential nomination, has come under bipartisan ridicule for playing down the notion that China is a rising economic and geopolitical threat to America.

“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” Biden said during a campaign stop in Iowa City, Iowa on Wednesday. “They are not competition for us.”

Biden’s view on China pits him against lawmakers and other presidential candidates who are wary of Beijing’s expanding global…

“Vulgar,” “arrogant,” a “low-life.” Ask Chinese state media for an assessment of FBI director Christopher Wray, and the response will be less than flattering.

Wray’s scathing critique last week of what he called China’s attempts to “steal its way up the economic ladder” at the United States’ expense quickly drew fire from nationalist voices across the Pacific.

An editorial by the reliably provocative Global Times, which is published by China’s Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, led…

To promote its “Belt and Road Initiative”, China has created several videos preaching the virtues of friendship between nations, including a music video that was parodied by the comedian John Oliver.

But in an apparent answer to China’s publicity campaigns, the United States has produced a video dissing Beijing’s trade push as a trap for its participating countries.

The video by the US State Department warns countries to be careful not to “get caught in the debt trap.”

The video has been…

China’s “thousand charming towns” initiative was supposed to dot the vast countryside with beautiful, liveable and themed villages. They carried names as eclectic and zany as Crayfish Town, Asian Games Town and Poetry Town. A planned Happy Town would come complete with a “sex park.”

But last week’s collapse of a private company behind many of these developments has left the future of those new towns unclear and thousands of investors desperate to recoup their money.

The sudden failure of the…

Villagers in central China were startled after a rocket engine fell out of the sky early Tuesday morning.

The engine and a white cylinder landed in the bushes next to a freeway that cut through the border of the inland Shaanxi and Hubei provinces. Characters on the cylinder read: “Chinese space flight.” Some fragments were found on the road and traffic police were called to the scene.

No one was hurt, but the rocket debris landings in China’s interior regions highlight the unique history…

A US State Department official has come under criticism for her racial characterization of the competition between America and China.

Kiron Skinner, whom Trump appointed in August as the director of policy planning at the State Department, said at a defense forum in Washington on Monday that China is the first major rival to the United States that is “not Caucasian.”

Critics argue that the remarks, first reported by the Washington Examiner, risk reviving the racist rhetoric of a “yellow peril…

A report by Human Rights Watch has revealed details of a mobile app being used by authorities in China’s far western region of Xinjiang to identify target groups for enhanced surveillance and monitoring.

The document, released on Thursday, sheds light on the technologies – from big data analysis to facial recognition and artificial intelligence – employed by China’s security agencies to build an extensive system for social control in the predominantly Muslim region.

The report said it…

Chinese film stars usually want nothing to do with authorities.

But on Monday, four actors and directors joined a press conference about piracy along with three police ministers and a Communist Party official.

Known for some of China’s most successful domestic productions, such as The Wandering Earth and Wolf Warrior II, the quartet – Wu Jing, Han Han, Huang Bo, and Shen Teng – issued a call to arms against illegal movie downloads.

“Sometimes on the way to my own movie premiere, sitting in…

As it struggled to pay back loans to Chinese firms, Sri Lanka’s handover in 2017 of a strategic port to China on a 99-year lease became a smoking gun for critics of Beijing’s “debt trap diplomacy.”

But a new study of China’s loans to developing countries challenges this view.

As part of its vast “Belt and Road Initiative,” Beijing is seeking to link China to Europe, the Middle East, Africa and beyond with new roads and ports, often with Chinese funding.

While Chinese President Xi Jinping has…

A number of public WeChat accounts in China have been shut down after calling on people to join a petition in support of a University of Minnesota student who has accused a tech tycoon of rape.

The accounts joined a campaign supporting the accuser after she filed a civil lawsuit against Richard Liu, the CEO of US-listed e-commerce giant JD.com, in a Minneapolis court last month.

The woman, Jingyao Liu, said that Richard Liu, 46, had groped her in a vehicle and then raped her in her room in…