China Financial News

market’s recent decline as healthy. Stocks rose in Australia, Japan and South Korea in early Monday trade, with futures in Hong Kong also pointing to a higher open. The gains came after the S&P 500 jumped 2.1% Friday as the government avoided a shutdown, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 advanced 2.1%. The Golden Dragon index rose 2.7% with Chinese authorities set to announce measures to boost consumption on Monday. The dollar was steady.

China's State Council unveiled on Sunday a 'special action plan' to boost domestic consumption, featuring measures including raising residents' income and setting up a childcare subsidy scheme. The plan comes as levels of consumer demand have suffered various setbacks in recent years, due to factors like COVID-19 disruptions and a long property slump, chilling the propensity of households to spend and adding to deflationary trends. Expanding domestic demand It was issued to all regions and departments to «vigorously boost consumption, expand domestic demand in all directions, improve consumption capacity by increasing income and reducing burdens,» a report from the Council said. The plan comes a week after Chinese Premier Li Qiang's work report to the National People's Congress which focused on boosting household spending to cushion the impact of weak external demand. Pressure has been building on Chinese officials for consumer-focused stimulus measures to fend off deflationary pressures and reduce reliance on exports and investment.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. URUMQI, China—About a decade ago, some Western companies answered Beijing’s calls to invest in Xinjiang, an underdeveloped region in the country’s remote west. Some were drawn by the natural resources there.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Watching the automatic hand of the Manus AI agent scroll through a dozen browser windows is unsettling. Give it a task that can be accomplished online, such as building up a promotional network of social-media accounts, researching and writing a strategy document, or booking tickets and hotels for a conference, and Manus will write a detailed plan, spin up a version of itself to browse the web, and give it its best shot.

Gold Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) investors will continue to be the key drivers of gold demand in 2025, as per a report. Geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainties are expected to push gold prices higher, while central banks' actions will play a significant role in shaping the precious metal market, IANS reported. According to the Motilal Oswal Private Wealth report, gold emerged as one of the top-performing asset classes in India in 2024, with a remarkable 21 per cent return year-on-year (YoY). While high prices affected jewellery demand, the investment demand for physical gold, especially bars and coins, remained strong. Motilal Oswal reports that although the demand was subdued in 2024 due to high prices, it was expected to recover gradually in mid-January, driven by wedding season purchases. However, price stability will remain a key factor in this recovery.

Baidu released a new artificial intelligence reasoning model Sunday and made its AI chatbot services free to consumers as ferocious competition grips the sector. Technology companies in China have been scrambling to release improved AI platforms since start-up DeepSeek shocked its rivals with its open source and highly cost-efficient model in January. In a post on WeChat, Baidu announced the launch of its latest X1 reasoning model — which the company claims performs similarly to DeepSeek's but for lower cost — and a new foundation model, Ernie 4.5.

Pag pag pokhari maach makhan, saras boli muski mukh paan” is a Maithili saying that describes how the land has ponds at almost every step full of fish and the prickly water plants that produce makhana, whose popped seeds are becoming big business. In Greek mythology, Euryale was a Gorgon, a beautiful woman with monstrous features like the snakes for hair of her better-known sister Medusa. When a British botanist came across what looked like a beautiful water lily with menacing spikes on its stalks and leaves, he invoked the Gorgon in its scientific name, adding ferox, or ferocious, for emphasis. Euryale ferox seeds are sometimes called Gorgon nuts. The name was appropriate for another reason. Euryale means ‘far-roaming’ and the prickly plants grow across much of eastern Asia, probably distributed by migratory waterfowl. In 'Soup for the Qan', a translation of a 14th century CE dietary manual for China’s Mongol Emperor, many dishes are made with Euryale seed flour. These are clearly distinguished from the seeds of that other aquatic plant, the lotus, but in time this distinction became blurred. Makhana is often called lotus seed but in Chinese cuisine, actual lotus seeds are now more popular.

Xi Jinping has declined an invitation to visit Brussels for an summit to mark the 50th anniversary of EU-China diplomatic ties, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. Beijing told EU officials that Premier Li Qiang would meet the presidents of the European Council and Commission instead of Xi, the FT said, citing two people familiar with the matter whom it did not identify. The Chinese premier usually attends the summit when it is held in Brussels, while the president hosts it in Beijing, but the EU wants Xi to attend to commemorate half a century of relations between Beijing and the bloc, the newspaper said. Tensions between Brussels and Beijing have grown since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the EU accusing China of backing the Kremlin, the FT said. Last year, the European Union also imposed tariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports. «Informal discussions are ongoing, both about setting the date for the EU-China summit this year and the level of representation,» an EU official told the newspaper, while the Chinese ministry was quoted as saying it did not have any information to provide on the matter.

interest rate decision, global trends, tariff-related developments and trading activity of foreign investors will drive the equity market movement this week, analysts said. Among macroeconomic data announcement, WPI inflation for February is scheduled to be announced on Monday. «Persistent uncertainties surrounding global trade and the fear of a US recession may continue to influence the domestic market's momentum,» Vinod Nair, Head of Research, Geojit Financial Services, said.

A preliminary March survey of consumers showed sentiment sank by more than projected, while long-term inflation expectations jumped as the Trump administration pushes forward with higher duties on foreign goods just as price pressures showed signs of easing. Meanwhile, the UK economy shrank unexpectedly at the start of the year on weaker manufacturing and construction. In China, the economy remains hamstrung by persistent deflation.

US recession. A raging tariff war. Supply chains in disarray. Companies grappling with uncertainty. Governments on tenterhooks. It hasn't even been two months since Donald Trump was sworn in as US President and it has been more dramatic than an episode of his reality show The Apprentice. On March 5, Trump underlined this with his plan forreciprocal tariffs on countries such as India and China. “Whatever they tariff us, other countries, we will tariff them. That’s reciprocal, back and forth,” Trump said in his first address to the joint session of Congress.

Maya’s team—which included another woman, two men and a child— was carrying the skin of an adult tiger and 17 kilos of bones. Before “someone from Meghalaya” could come and collect the consignment from Maya, the police swooped in. “We were stunned to find that these were the remains of a second tiger— we had already missed the first tiger,” says Pranjal Baruah, a range officer of Kamrup, Assam, who had spearheaded the initial probe. Forensic tests traced the skin to one of the three missing tigers from the faraway Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in Maharashtra. That was a clue something was going awry with the striped beast. Even as India’s tiger population has been steadily climbing over the past couple of decades, it could get derailed. A surging appetite for tiger bones in China and Vietnam and the revival of a smuggling route through Mizoram-Myanmar have reignited dormant trafficking networks. The Assam case was transferred to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), an arm of the ministry of environment and forests, which cracks down on organised wildlife crime. The agency’s trail led to multiple arrests in Maharashtra. They also caught Mishram Jakhad, an octogenarian from Dwarka in Delhi, believed to be a key link between tiger poachers and smuggling syndicates.

China though it has not got the sensational public attention the AI model received. China’s biotech research is redrawing the global map. The axis of innovation is tilting from the West to Beijing. Scores of small biotech startups, which have sprung up across China over the last decade, are coming up with medical breakthroughs. Impressed by the speed of drug research and new treatment modalities, global pharmaceutical companies are throwing princely sums to buy leads, which have the potential to be drugs. There is a big lesson or two here for India, which has been prioritising generics over innovation. The quiet change in China is stark. Barely two decades ago, it was looked down as a big factory for low-cost production of chemicals and raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry. Now savvy and young scientists, trained in the US and Europe, are regrouping in their home turf. Popularly referred to as sea turtles (which return from the sea to the beach to lay eggs), they come back with their knowledge of science and business. This disruption has become an existential risk for the centuries-old, entrenched American and European pharmaceutical industries.

Baloch Liberation Army's hijacking of the Jaffar Express could intensify the growing mistrust between China's policy circles and Pakistan's security apparatus, as Beijing remains increasingly concerned over its vast investments in Balochistan. Chinese officials continue to voice concerns over the deteriorating security situation in the region, despite Pakistan's deployment of the Special Security Division (SSD) — a 15,000-strong force dedicated to protecting Chinese personnel involved in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). However, there are deepening doubts within China about Pakistan's ability to ensure security in the volatile province. In 2017, China proposed establishing joint security ventures with private security firms to protect Chinese nationals in Pakistan.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. SINGAPORE—In 2002, with China’s shipyards producing just 8% of global commercial tonnage, then-Premier Zhu Rongji challenged his nation. “China," he said, “can hope to become the world’s No.

vocational courses and provide training on artificial intelligence applications to help students find jobs as the world’s second biggest economy confronts a record number of graduates this year. Universities are required to help students become more employable by establishing vocational training centers and collaborating with enterprises to offer 1,000 micro majors and 1,000 vocational training courses, according to a notice from the Ministry of Education. The institutions should also solicit employment and education projects in the field of AI and carry out specialised training on AI applications, the ministry added.

China's securities watchdog will step up monitoring fake information in the stock market and work with the police and cyberspace regulators to crack down on those who disseminate false news, which is being made easier by AI, official media reported on Saturday. Regulators will «hit early, hit hard, and hit at the heart» of the issue, the Securities Times said. Artificial intelligence has become a new tool for creating and spreading misleading information to con investors or manipulate stocks, luring investors with the prospect of getting rich quickly, the Shanghai Securities News said in a separate article.

Indian equities by the Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) continued in the first fortnight of March where they sold shares worth Rs 30,015 crore. The total FII selling in this year so far has been at Rs 1,42,616 crore. In January, FPIs sold shares worth Rs 78,027 crore and followed it up with a sell-off amounting to Rs 34,574 crore in February.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A mineral-rights deal that the Trump administration says will make the U.S. vested in Ukraine’s defense has an instructive historical precedent in Washington’s unofficial oil-for-security pact with Saudi Arabia.

Indian Commonwealth Games champion and Olympian Lakshya Sen bowed out of the All-England Open 2025 after losing his men's singles quarter-final match in Birmingham on Friday. Lakshya Sen, 15th in the men's singles badminton rankings, lost 21-10, 21-16 against reigning Asian Games champion and world No. 6 Shi Feng Li of the People's Republic of China, as per Olympics.com. Sen matched the sixth seed Shi Feng Li shot for shot in the early exchanges to lead 4-3 before the latter picked up nine successive points and took control of the game. The Indian badminton player managed to pick just six points for the rest of the first game as Shi Feng Li comfortably wrapped out the opener. Lakshya Sen mounted a brief comeback to lead Shi Feng Li 11-8 at the second-game interval. However, Shi Feng Li switched gears after the break to win the contest in 45 minutes. This was Lakshya Sen's third defeat in seven meetings against Shi Feng Li.

This month, many investors feel dazed and confused. No wonder: as the U.S. government flirts with another shutdown and U.S. President Donald Trump intensifies his trade war, indices of economic uncertainty have skyrocketed above even the 2020 pandemic or the global financial crisis of 2008.