SHANGHAI -- The threat of an immediate default by China Evergrande Group receded Wednesday with a pledge by the troubled property developer to meet a key bond obligation, but the risks to China's economy are far from over.

Evergrande said Wednesday that it will make a 232 million yuan payment ($35.9 million) on yuan-denominated debt due Thursday. While has not stated whether it will pay $83.53 million in interest on a dollar bond due the same day, it

TOKYO -- The ruling Liberal Democratic Party's presidential election is shaping up to be a tight race among the top three contenders, a Nikkei/TV Tokyo survey has found, making it increasingly likely that the winner will be decided through a runoff.

Former LDP policy chief Fumio Kishida led in lawmaker support, with vaccination czar Taro Kono right behind him and Sanae Takaichi trailing in third place, according to the survey conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Each lawmaker has one vote in the Sept. 29 election to pick

SEOUL -- South Korean presidential candidate Yoon Seok-youl on Wednesday promised a better relationship with Japan, stressing the importance of a bilateral intelligence-sharing agreement whose future has been uncertain under the current administration.

The former prosecutor general, running in the March 2022 election under the banner of the conservative opposition People Power Party, released a foreign policy and security platform that calls for building a "future-oriented relationship" with Japan under a 1998 joint declaration. He seeks a summit to set

UNITED NATIONS -- A diplomatic face-off is developing in New York between two representatives of Afghanistan -- the Taliban and the remnants of the government led by former President Ashraf Ghani, who fled the country after the Islamist militants took over Kabul.

Last week, the secretary-general's office received a communication from the "Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to the U.N.," signed by Ghani-appointed Ambassador Ghulam Isaczai, containing the list of Afghan delegates for the assembly, according

TAIPEI/TOKYO -- Taiwan has formally applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the cabinet said late Wednesday, in a move expected to trigger opposition from China.

Taiwanese authorities have submitted the application to New Zealand, which acts as the depositary for the Pacific rim trade pact, and sought the support of all existing members. Details on the application will be announced Thursday.

The move comes less than a week after China last Thursday applied for membership in the CPTPP, which

Katsuji Nakazawa is a Tokyo-based senior staff writer and editorial writer at Nikkei. He spent seven years in China as a correspondent and later as China bureau chief. He was the 2014 recipient of the Vaughn-Ueda International Journalist prize.

TOKYO -- China's official application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, formerly known as the TPP, last week caught many by surprise and was seen as an abrupt move by President Xi Jinping's administration.

But the application

William Pesek is an award-winning Tokyo-based journalist and author of "Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan's Lost Decades."

As China confronts the great reckoning market players long feared, ghosts from crises past haunt the conversation: Alan Greenspan and John Meriwether.

Greenspan is the human bubble maker who ran the U.S. Federal Reserve in the frothy 1990s. Meriwether ran the hedge fund that the Fed chairman helped bail out in 1998, setting the stage

NEW YORK -- France will send its ambassador back to the U.S. next week, and French President Emmanuel Macron will meet with U.S. President Joe Biden in Europe next month, the two leaders agreed in a phone call Wednesday, as the longtime allies try to contain the fallout from their biggest diplomatic row in recent memory.

The presidents spoke at Biden's request to discuss last week's announcement that Australia was bailing out of a deal with France to replace nuclear-powered submarines in order

TOKYO -- Foreign businesses in China are becoming key targets in a growing number of intellectual property lawsuits filed by Chinese companies. Enhanced IP legislation, which has led to high amounts of damages for violations granted by courts, has opened the floodgates for litigation.

As Chinese firms have become more protective of their own IP rights, the number of IP-related lawsuits filed in China in 2020 was more than three times the figure for 2016.

The trend has meant that Japanese companies, for example