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PHNOM PENH: China's embassy in Cambodia said on Saturday (Jan 17) that a recent spate of disappearances of Chinese nationals into cyberfraud compounds poses a "serious obstacle" to the allies' ties. Ambassador Wang Wenbin urged Phnom Penh to strengthen a crackdown on the illicit industry in a meeting with Cambodia's top ministers, a statement on the embassy's WeChat account said. "China is highly concerned about a number of recent cases involving Chinese citizens going missing or disappearing in Cambodia," it quoted Wang as saying. Most of the harmful cases involving Chinese nationals were related to online fraud, Wang said, adding they were "inconsistent with the traditional friendship between China and Cambodia". The Cambodian government has said it is cracking down on the illicit industry, which employs at least 100,000 people in the Southeast Asian country, according to United Nations figures. Initially largely targeting Chinese s...

China has halted imports of soybeans from five Brazilian exporters after inspectors found pesticide-treated wheat mixed into a cargo bound for Beijing, officials from both countries said on Thursday. The suspension by China's General Administration of Customs was communicated to Brazil's agriculture ministry on Wednesday and made public on Thursday. The ban cover s two Cargill facilities and one plant each run by Louis Dreyfus Co., CHS Agronegocios and 3Tentos Agroindustrial. Four of the plants are in Sao Paulo state. One is in Rio Grande do Sul. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge , our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Inspectors in China discovered the contamination during checks at a port. The ship Shine Ruby was carrying about 69,000 tonnes of soybeans. Inside the hold, they found roughly ten tonnes...

Russia's economy has been dominated by energy, raw materials and heavy industry, while light manufacturing - clothing, household goods, consumer electronics - lags behind China's capacity - a contrast repeatedly noted by international institutions like the World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). But advantage no longer guarantees sales, said Zhou. Visitor numbers never fully recovered after the pandemic and the outbreak of the Ukraine war. "Even after visa-free travel started, arrivals haven't come back the way people hoped," he said. "There are barely any customers." The slowdown is reflected in rental prices. A local tailor, identified only by his surname Wang, said monthly rent once peaked at about 500,000 yuan during the boom years. Today, after renegotiations and landlord concessions, it remains below 30,000 yuan. "The size of the rent cut mirrors the drop in sales," he said. "Those who do c...

BEIJING - China on Jan 14 reported a strong export run in 2025 with a record trillion-dollar surplus, as producers braced themselves for three more years of a Trump administration set on slowing the production powerhouse by shifting US orders to other markets. Beijing's resilience to renewed tariff tensions since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 has emboldened Chinese firms to shift their focus to South-east Asia, Africa and Latin America to offset US duties. With Beijing looking to exports to counteract a prolonged property slump and sluggish domestic demand, the record-shattering surplus risks further unsettling economies concerned about China's trade practices and overcapacity, as well as their over-reliance on key Chinese products. The manufacturing powerhouse's full-year trade surplus came in at US$1.19 trillion (S$1.5 trillion) – a figure on a par with the gross domestic product of a top 20 economy globally like Saudi Arabia ...

SHANGHAI: China's securities regulator vowed to step up market monitoring and crack down on excessive speculation, as the country's benchmark stock index hovered near a decade high with record turnover this week. The statement came after Chinese bourses said on Wednesday (Jan 14) that they would raise the minimum margin requirement for new borrowings to 100 per cent from 80 per cent, effective Jan 19, a move approved by the regulator and aimed at cooling the red-hot market. The Shanghai Composite Index has gained 6 per cent over the past month. The China Securities Regulatory Commission said in a statement it would carry out timely counter‑cyclical adjustments and strengthen supervision over trading activities and information disclosure. The regulator also said it will crack down on illegal activities such as excessive speculation and market manipulation, aiming to sustain the market's positive momentum. Recent weeks have seen hectic trading in sectors such as artific...

A mobile application, bluntly named Are You Dead, has gone viral in China, topping Apple's App Store charts for paid apps there over the past weekend. Priced at 8 yuan (about S$1.50), the app – which reads as Sileme in hanyu pinyin – is aimed at China's rapidly expanding population of older residents and young singles who live alone. It prompts users to check in once a day by pressing a large green button.  If they fail to do so for more than two consecutive days, the app automatically notifies by email an emergency contact nominated by the user. China's English-language newspaper Global Times reported that the app downloads spiked in recent days and it has gone viral on Chinese social media, with many short videos discussing it. The heated debate was over its controversial and morbid name rather than its function. This stemmed from the common belief among the Chinese that using a product with such a grim and unpleasant name would bring ill luck and lead to the user...

For a world already uneasy over the huge imbalances in trade, another outcome is a global financial system increasingly reliant on liquidity sourced from the Asian country A RECORD trade surplus racked up by China is washing up around the world, as export earnings that once ended up in state coffers instead fund massive private purchases of overseas securities and business expansion abroad. Rather than leaving most of last year's US$1.2 trillion windfall in the hands of the central bank, some two-thirds of the foreign assets sourced primarily from global trade ended up with companies, individuals and state lenders. That brings with it the risk of a sudden capital reversal that China does not immediately control, especially in a world where the yuan is allowed to strengthen. Investors comprising China's so-called non-official sector saw their holdings of assets abroad soar by more than US$1 trillion in the first three quarters of last year, according to the latest available d...

BAODING, China--As the dry, freezing winter air envelops his home, 72-year-old farmer He Wenxiang sits on a bed wearing several layers of clothing including a black fur-collared jacket and a cap. He takes ⁠a thermometer off the wall that reads about 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit). Despite outside temperatures ‌of minus 1 C (30 F), He runs ‍his gas boiler only occasionally to warm up the radiator in his bedroom. "Life isn't easy," he said. "If any colder you couldn't take it." He is one of several people in his village outside the city of Baoding, in China's Hebei province south of Beijing, choosing to barely heat their homes because of rising natural gas prices after cash-strapped governments scaled back subsidies designed to drive a transition to clean energy. In another village nearby, a woman who only ‍gave her surname Song stands in the ​sun in an alleyway selling used electronics...

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