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China's Ministry of Finance listed RMB 14 billion of sovereign bonds in Hong Kong across five maturities, reinforcing Hong Kong's role as the main offshore hub for RMB assets. The issuance arrives against a backdrop of sustained growth in the offshore RMB bond market and efforts by the exchange to attract more listings.
Shiyao Group has won FDA permission to begin US clinical trials of a long‑acting peptide that acts on both GLP‑1 and GIP receptors for weight management in people with obesity or overweight plus comorbidities. The clearance permits investigational trials but falls short of marketing approval; success would boost China’s ambitions to compete in the lucrative obesity‑drug market dominated by Western firms.
Spot gold fell below $5,000 per ounce and silver dropped over 2% on Monday, reversing recent gains as traders engaged in profit‑taking and repositioned amid a stronger dollar and firmer yields. The move raises questions about the durability of safe‑haven demand and could exert pressure on miners and commodity‑linked economies if it persists.
At Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, Warren Buffett outlined ten practical principles for investors and citizens: beware trade protectionism, guard against inflationary fiscal policy, be modest about technology you do not understand, favour patience plus decisive action, and protect reputation. His remarks stress long-term compounding, vocation, curiosity and the role of trust in sustaining markets as he phases in succession at Berkshire.
China’s Spring Festival Gala has been repurposed into a high‑stakes marketing and technical showcase for AI firms, with Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and Baidu spending heavily on sponsorships, hongbao and live technical support. The central question is whether holiday‑driven spikes in downloads and engagement can be converted into lasting user habits and commercial ecosystems.
ByteDance has temporarily suspended Doubao’s video‑call feature, reflecting concerns about moderation, privacy, and operational costs tied to real‑time generative audiovisual interactions. The pause signals how Chinese tech firms are balancing product innovation with regulatory compliance and reputational risk as they race to match advanced Western AI models.
OpenAI has hired Peter Steinberger, founder of the open‑source AI agent project OpenClaw, and will place OpenClaw under a foundation supported by OpenAI. The move underscores OpenAI’s bet that multi‑agent, action‑oriented systems are the next major product frontier, while rekindling concerns about whether corporate sponsorship will erode open‑source independence.
Elon Musk announced that Starlink will soon operate beyond Earth, signalling SpaceX’s intention to make its satellite broadband an integral part of lunar and interplanetary missions. Realising that ambition will require technical changes, regulatory coordination and the maturation of SpaceX’s launch capabilities, while raising strategic questions about spectrum, debris and military use.
China Coast Guard vessels, including the ship Yongshu, remained on patrol across the South China Sea during the Lunar New Year, conducting drills, evidence-gathering with drones and long deployments without shore contact. The missions blend operational preparedness with domestic political messaging about defending maritime rights while crews endure weeks away from home.
Soldiers from the late Wang Zhuoran’s unit visited his parents over the Lunar New Year, offering practical help, reading letters from comrades and joining distant colleagues by video. The visit combined private consolation with public commemoration, reflecting how the PLA and state media use personal stories to reinforce morale, legitimacy and civil-military ties.
Toshio Motoya, founder and CEO of APA Hotels and a prominent funder of Japanese ultranationalism who drew global condemnation for placing books denying the Nanjing Massacre in hotel rooms, died at 82. His death raises questions about the future of the networks and institutions that promoted historical revisionism and a more militarised Japan.
The PLA garrison in Hong Kong released a Lunar New Year video that frames soldiers' holiday duty as an act of companionship and civic service. The clip is a targeted soft‑power effort to humanize the military presence in the city and to normalize its role amid ongoing political sensitivities.
Israel’s attorney-general, Gali Baharav-Miara, said she has not yet reviewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pardon request and will follow standard procedures in examining it. The decision now turns on legal advice to President Isaac Herzog and could have major implications for Israeli institutions, public trust, and political stability.
A border police officer in China, unable to return home for four years, was reduced to tears when reunited with his mother, a scene carried by state media. The episode illuminates the personal sacrifices associated with long border deployments and how Beijing uses human stories to bolster support for its security apparatus.
A string of unexpected developments in 2025—from TikTok users migrating to Xiaohongshu, to a transformer shortage limiting AI scalability—upended Chinese business. The year highlighted how geopolitics, surging technological demand and shifting consumer culture can swiftly elevate winners and expose strategic weaknesses.
Tencent has introduced a suite of WeChat features for the Lunar New Year—golden Moments that can drop red envelopes when liked, AI‑generated New Year songs, and customizable red‑packet covers. The updates are designed to boost engagement, encourage payments, and create shareable seasonal content, while raising questions about data use and regulatory attention.
A Chinese research team recorded macaque brains during rule‑learning tasks and found two independent neural representational spaces: one encoding stable decision logic and another encoding variable sensory features. The separation helps primates transfer abstract rules to new situations and suggests a biologically inspired design principle for improving AI generalisation.
Chinese researchers report that macaque brains form two independent neural representational spaces — one encoding stable decision rules and the other encoding current sensory specifics — enabling rapid transfer of learned rules to new tasks. Published in Nature Communications, the study suggests a biological model that could inform AI architectures for better generalisation and adaptability.
Tencent has enabled a gold‑coloured New Year Moments effect in WeChat that activates when users publish a Yuanbao‑made greeting, and Yuanbao has added extra high‑value red packets as part of a RMB 10 billion Spring Festival campaign. The move highlights an escalating competition among Chinese tech firms to lock users into AI and payments ecosystems through festive incentives, while also exposing how WeChat’s sharing restrictions serve as a gatekeeper for third‑party promotions.
During the 2026 Lunar New Year China’s leading robotics firms expanded humanoid robot roles from Spring Festival Gala performances to real‑world service and industrial deployments. Advances in motion, autonomy and multi‑agent coordination pair with early commercial rollouts in retail and manufacturing, signalling a shift from spectacle to practical utility while raising questions about mass production, costs and technological bottlenecks.
