China Seeks to Join Brazil’s WTO Challenge Against US Tariffs of up to 37.5%
China filed a request in Geneva on 10 August to join as a third party the World Trade Organization consultations opened by Brazil against US tariffs of up to 37.5%, saying it has a substantial commercial interest in the dispute. The move extends China’s legal challenge, launched in 2018, against Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974, which Beijing says allows Washington to determine violations and impose penalties without multilateral authorization. China’s Commerce Ministry has called the 12.5% rate applied to Chinese goods an act of unilateralism and protectionism. Brazil initiated its WTO case on 30 July.
Read More:
China and Indonesia Hold Naval Exercise as Taiwan Conducts Anti-Blockade Drill
On 12 August, China and Indonesia held a joint naval navigation exercise in waters east of Taiwan, featuring maritime communications, formation manoeuvres and replenishment at sea. Beijing said the drill aimed to deepen practical cooperation and safeguard regional peace and stability, while Jakarta described it as a routine Passing Exercise by a warship returning from Russia. Taiwan’s China-policy body condemned the activity as a military provocation as the island conducted its first joint navy–coast guard anti-blockade exercise during the 10-day Han Kuang war games.
Read More:
Senior CPC Official Visits Cuba as China Calls Ties “Good Friends, Good Comrades and Good Brothers”
Liu Haixing, head of the Communist Party of China’s International Department, met Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and Communist Party international chief Emilio Lozada García in Havana on 9–10 August during centenary commemorations for Fidel Castro. Liu described China and Cuba as “good friends, good comrades and good brothers” whose ties have reached an “unprecedented new height”, reaffirming support for Cuba’s socialist path, deeper cooperation and coordination to uphold international fairness and oppose hegemony. Amid intensified US sanctions, Beijing called for an end to the blockade and unilateral sanctions, saying they violate international law and the UN Charter. China’s support included US $80 million, 60,000 tons of rice and 5,000 photovoltaic systems.
Read More:
Zhu Rongji, Premier Who Cleared Debt Chains and Refused Devaluation, Dies in Beijing at 98
An obituary issued jointly by the Communist Party’s Central Committee, the national legislature, the State Council and the top political advisory body credits Zhu – vice premier from 1991 and premier between 1998 and 2003 – with untangling the ‘triangular debts’ choking state industry, reining in inflation to achieve a soft landing, introducing a central-local tax sharing system, and encouraging exports while holding the renminbi steady through the Asian financial crisis.
Read More:
New Spacecraft Manufacturers Surge 185.7% as China’s Frontier Industries Add 561,000 Companies
Data released on 8 August by China’s market regulator showed that 561,000 new companies were registered in frontier and high-tech industries during the first half of 2026, including 55,000 generative AI firms, up 28%, and 116,000 humanoid robotics companies, up 9.5%. New spacecraft and launch-vehicle manufacturers surged 185.7%, while high-tech manufacturing enterprises reached 330,000 after 15,000 additions. New integrated-circuit makers rose 24.2%. Meanwhile, 7,632 new-energy vehicle-related, 5,089 photovoltaic and 155 lithium-battery companies were deregistered as some sectors consolidated.
Read More:
Eight Polysilicon Producers Holding over 90% of Capacity Pledge to Halt Below-Cost Solar Sales
Signed in Shanghai on 6 August, the initiative sets no fixed price but a cost floor, calculated under a group accounting standard issued on 27 July and reinforced by a market-regulator compliance meeting on 31 July, letting producers whose capacity long outran demand rebuild margins collectively rather than singly; polysilicon futures have since risen about 13.8% to CNY 37,040 (US $5,160) per tonne, a level Global South importers of the world’s cheapest modules will eventually meet.
Read More:
Nanning Park Turns 2,250 Tonnes of Daily Waste into Power, Heat, Metals and Bricks
Operational since late 2021 across some 73 hectares, the Shuangding Circular Economy Industrial Park routes the residual warmth of its furnaces into co-located organic waste, sludge and medical waste lines, strips slag for metals and eco-friendly bricks and recycles 1,700 tonnes of water a day, yielding nearly 600 kilowatt-hours per tonne on investment estimated at 2.56 billion yuan (US $379.33 million), while collection rates in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia run as low as 31 and 67 percent.
Read More:
South-to-North Middle Route Delivers 80 Billion Cubic Metres to 118 Million over 12 Years
Peer-reviewed modelling published in Nature Communications attributes 40% of Beijing’s groundwater storage recovery over 2006-2018 to the diverted supply, with increased precipitation and reduced irrigation contributing 30% each, meaning that the aquifer rebound the operator credits to the canal rests on a package of engineering and demand-side policy rather than on the transfer alone, a distinction that matters for water-stressed economies weighing comparable schemes.
Read More:
Collider in Beijing Yields Clearest Evidence in a Half-Century Search for Matter Made of Force
Sifting more than 10 billion J/psi decay events gathered since a 2008 machine upgrade, the BESIII collaboration reported on 5 August that the particle X(2370) shows no trace of a decay mode forbidden to flavour-singlet states, a signature Carnegie Mellon physicist Colin Morningstar calls ‘the strongest evidence yet that particles dominated by a glueball component can exist in nature’.
Read More:
Top Hospitals to Scale Back Routine Outpatient Care as Clinics Gain 12-Week Prescriptions
With no mandatory gatekeeper in place – patients may still present at any level of care without a referral – the State Council’s April measures work through inducement rather than obligation, combining higher grassroots reimbursement and no repeat deductible on downward transfer with a primary tier that handled 5.56 billion visits in 2025, or 52.6 percent of the national total, while cross-level referrals rose by more than 50 percent since 2020.
Read More:
UN Judge Reads Kunqu Plot from Movement Alone as Viewers Cite Asian and African Parallels
Artists of the Zhejiang Jingkun Art Center staged an unannounced corridor performance in a public area of the United Nations complex in New York on 4 August, where staff and visitors followed the excerpts through symbolic gesture rather than dialogue; one visitor said she did not understand the language but felt the emotion, finding that older cultures across Asia, Africa and indigenous communities ‘have so much in common’ – mutual recognition rather than one-way export.
Read More: