Nan Li is associate professor of finance at the Antai College of Economics & Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. John D. Van Fleet supports industry relations for the Antai College.

It seems that nary a month goes by without some Anglophone media outlet making space for yet more misleading news coverage about Jack Ma's Ant Group and China's financial sector overall.

Last month's eruption was about supposedly new and nefarious regulatory actions infringing on Ant's hard-won entrepreneurial successes and innovations. If only they'

NEW YORK -- The U.S. and China have agreed in principle to hold a virtual meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping by the end of the year.

The arrangement was confirmed at a meeting between U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan and China's top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, in Zurich on Wednesday.

Washington will continue to engage with Beijing at a senior level to ensure "responsible competition," Sullivan told Yang, the White House said in a statement.

The fact that the

SHENZHEN -- China Evergrande's financial woes are being felt in the property developer's backyard as sales agents and homebuyers confront uncertainties in a sector that has been one of the most important drivers of economic growth.

Real estate agents in the southeastern Chinese city of Shenzhen say they have seen a marked slowdown in recent weeks as Evergrande's failure to meet debt obligations has made headlines, and government restrictions to cool the market continue to bite. The weak market sentiment extended to the larger Guangdong Province that is home to

NEW YORK -- U.S. President Joe Biden's agenda to rein in Big Tech took another step forward Wednesday with the nomination hearing for his pick to lead the antitrust division of the Justice Department.

"The American Dream is real, without a doubt, but we can't take it for granted," antitrust lawyer Jonathan Kanter told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Liberty depends on opportunity, and opportunity depends on free, fair, competitive markets."

The Big Tech critic was nominated in July for

MANILA -- The Asian Development Bank plans to create funds, possibly next year, to facilitate early closures of coal-fired power plants in Southeast Asia. The multilateral lender will buy such plants and take an active role in their management.

Working with governments and financial institutions, the ADB plans to launch the funds in countries such as Indonesia that rely heavily on coal for power generation, aiming to speed their transition to a low-carbon economy.

"To coincide with the United Nations' COP26 climate summit,

TOKYO -- The physical modeling of Earth's climate, for which Syukuro Manabe, senior meteorologist at Princeton University, was chosen as a recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in physics is a technology to simulate physical phenomena of the Earth on a computer. Aiming to create a "digital twin" of the real world, it is an indispensable tool for discussing plans for humanity's future, such as predictions on global warming and the effects of measures against it.

Meteorological modeling has developed from a simple

Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

The strategic competition between the United States and China is supposed to be a three-dimensional contest over security, economy and ideology.

In theory, maintaining a proper balance between these three main prongs seems both attractive and practicable, especially to Washington, which possesses significant advantages in all three domains.

In reality, unfortunately, security has a way of trumping economic and ideological competition because of its zero

BANGKOK -- Thai parliamentarians are taking another crack at passing a law to end the grim practice of torture and enforced disappearances before the country again faces international scrutiny for its human rights record.

A special committee is examining drafts that will be synthesized into one bill in time for a second reading after parliament begins its next session in November. A final vote during the pivotal third reading is expected just before Thailand faces the United Nation Human Right Council's Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in November.

These efforts to present Thailand

HONG KONG -- Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam has announced plans to create a new "metropolis" of up to 2.5 million people near the border with mainland China, looking to tie the former British colony closer to neighboring cities to boost regional development and tackle a chronic housing shortage.

In the fifth and final annual policy address of her term on Wednesday, Lam defended the national security law and political overhaul imposed by Beijing in the wake of widespread antigovernment protests in 2019, emphasizing the need to