All coverage of Hong Kong, ranked by recency.
Online claims that archaeologists have identified the source of mercury in the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang – China’s first emperor, who unified the country more than 2,000 years ago – have revived interest in ancient cinnabar sites in northwestern China’s Shaanxi province. The claims, which sent related hashtags trending on social media late last month, centred on three sites in Xunyang where ar...
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.] Artificial intelligence has rapidly evolved from an emerging technology into a cornerstone of Hong Kong's economic transformation strategy. Under the Government's AI+ initiative, further reinforced by the First Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of the HKSAR (2026-2030), the city is stepping up efforts t...
In April last year, Brussels launched an obscure “import surveillance task force” to track the impact of US President Donald Trump’s trade war with China on the EU economy. The bloc was concerned that Chinese shipments bound for the United States would be diverted to Europe at lower prices, imperilling local manufacturers. Eighteen months on, the European Union is on the cusp of its own trade w...
Anti-South Asian hate in the United States has spiked since Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office for a second term, with racist, dehumanising and xenophobic slurs and narratives proliferating across both mainstream and fringe social media platforms, a US-based report has revealed. The report, titled “The Rising Tide of Anti-South Asian Hate in the United States”, by the Washington-based Cen...
A new embodied AI model known as Maxwell – developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Industries – has shot to first place on the Meta-World benchmark for robot physical tasks. Maxwell scored 91.9 – the highest ever recorded on the simulation benchmark. Meta-World was set up by researchers from Stanford University, UC Berkeley and other institutions t...
Hong Kong’s inaugural five-year plan highlighted its DNA as an international city while emphasising the market economy, the chief executive has said. Speaking at a National Day reception on Thursday, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said the city needed a blueprint with strategic vision amid the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape and accelerated growth of artificial intelligence, as he hig...
Huawei Technologies is making rapid progress in rolling out a new breed of advanced chip based on its self-developed Tau Scaling Law, with the Chinese company set to adopt the processors across the newly released Mate 90 smartphone series. The roll-out marks another step forward in the Chinese tech giant’s push to overcome stringent US export curbs, which has seen Huawei rewire its smartphone b...
A growing number of young Chinese women are paying for romantic photo shoots with male models, seeking a brief taste of love through a novel form of emotional companionship. This trend has gained significant traction on mainland social media, with customers spending up to 8,000 yuan (US$1,200) for an hour-long session featuring couple-style poses, including hand-holding, embraces, staged kisses...
Britain’s MI5 spy agency issued an unprecedented alert on Wednesday to warn that a Chinese organisation was involved in funding academic research into topics such as AI on behalf of Beijing’s state security service. In its “Espionage Alert”, MI5 said more than 100 UK-based academics had contributed to projects funded by the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI), which had “very st...
The US artificial intelligence giant Anthropic has warned of the potential danger posed by Chinese firm Z.ai’s GLM-5.3, with the open-weight model showing a troubling mix of powerful hacking abilities but weak safety constraints. GLM-5.3 almost matches Anthropic’s most advanced model in terms of its cyber capabilities, but has far weaker safeguards, meaning there is greater potential for the mo...
A mainland Chinese tourist who won a HK$10,000 (US$1,275) McDonald’s voucher in Hong Kong has turned her last 24 hours in the city into a whirlwind giveaway to the elderly, cleaners and the homeless. The woman, who shared her spree on Chinese social media platform RedNote, said she won the “Hong Kong McDonald’s HK$10,000 subsidy” through Alipay on Saturday. According to a screenshot of her post...
Apple has claimed the top spot in China’s smartphone market following the release of its iPhone 18 Pro series, giving a potential boost to a sluggish handset market weighed down by weak consumer demand and soaring component costs. Sales of the new Pro models in their first three days after launching on September 18 were 12 per cent higher than sales of the iPhone 17 Pro line-up during its entir...
Hong Kong’s biggest press union has welcomed the police’s swift response after a local newspaper received a threatening letter, urging authorities to handle similar cases at other outlets with “equal efficiency.” Hong Kong Journalists Association. Photo: Selina Cheng/HKFP. Police apprehended a suspect just hours after the editorial team of Sing Tao Probe, a consumer advocacy platform under the ...
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek on Wednesday open-sourced a suite of core tools tailored for Huawei Technologies’ Ascend AI chips, marking a step forward in the country’s push to end dependence on processors from US giant Nvidia amid US export curbs. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek released six software modules that mirror its prior open-source tools for Nvidia’s AI chips, aiming to b...
The sprawling online hunt for information about Winston Lee, a Korean student who is among seven defendants in a Cornell University sexual assault lawsuit, is increasingly crossing borders, with English-speaking social media users calling on their Korean counterparts to help uncover more information about him. As the “Cornell 7” case continues to draw intense attention across the United States,...
China’s corporate sector remains considerably weaker than it was before the Covid-19 pandemic, but the country is emerging as a key beneficiary of the global artificial intelligence boom thanks to its ample power capacity, according to a Natixis survey of thousands of firms and a separate research report. Profit margins at Chinese firms had stabilised at about 4.5 per cent for the first half of...
China’s broadcasting regulator has called for greater support for live-action dramas as the government seeks to steer the booming microdrama industry towards higher-quality production and tighter rights safeguards amid the rapid rise of AI. Artificial intelligence (AI) has created innovation and production possibilities for microdramas, while also posing challenges over content quality and righ...
Japanese BitTorrent users who thought they were simply downloading adult videos for free are increasingly receiving court notices and demands for hundreds of thousands of yen, as copyright holders step up efforts to identify users through their IP addresses. One self-employed man in his 40s living in Tokyo began using the file-sharing software after reading about it online. He would start downl...
Hong Kong’s crackdown on visitors abusing visas to illegally offer tour guide, photography and other services has failed to deter adverts for such unlicensed work on mainland Chinese social media ahead of the National Day “golden week” break, the South China Morning Post has found. A search of RedNote by the SCMP turned up accounts listing themselves as Shenzhen-based photographers offering the...
Executives at Hong Kong’s largest listed companies have a severe lack of technological expertise, with fewer than 1 per cent of directors possessing dedicated artificial intelligence or cybersecurity skills, according to a new report by Grant Thornton Hong Kong. The firm’s 15th annual Corporate Governance Review – which surveyed 100 major listed firms on Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Composite Index – ...
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he does not want to work with China on addressing artificial intelligence (AI) risks, arguing that cooperation could undermine America’s lead in the fast-moving technology, as he announced a voluntary accord signed by the leaders of six major US tech companies to address growing concerns surrounding the technology. “Whoever wins superintelligence wins. ...
