Author: News Agencies

In the past five years, China’s scale of cross-border e-commerce trade has increased by more than 10 times, People’s Daily reported on Tuesday quoting He Yadong, spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, during a news conference. In the first quarter of 2024, the cross-border e-commerce trade was 577.6 billion yuan ($79.76 billion), an increase of 9.6 percent year-on-year, of which the export was 448 billion yuan, an increase of 14 percent year-on-year according to the ministry. Preliminary statistics show there are more than 120,000 cross-border e-commerce entities in the country, at least 1,000 cross-border e-commerce industrial parks, and over 2,500…

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BY CHARLIE BUCKLAND Get married, buy a house and have children. That’s how most parents did it, and, they probably think other people should too. However, a TikTok trend with more than 27 million views has highlighted that achieving “traditional” life milestones is becoming increasingly out of reach for young people, with many pushing them aside until later in life. In these videos, young people do side by side comparisons of their parents at a certain age versus them at that age now. Often the parents are in the housing market and married with kids, whereas things are very different…

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BY YOUNG FEIYUE A gala featuring traditional Tanzanian music, dancing and acrobatics, along with a tourism documentary, impressed an audience that packed the China National Opera House in Beijing on May 15. The gala opened the 2024 China-Tanzania Culture and Tourism Year, and celebrated the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the countries. Sun Yeli, China’s minister of culture and tourism, Angellah Kairuki, Tanzania’s minister of natural resources and tourism, and Khamis Omar, Tanzanian ambassador to China, attended the opening ceremony and delivered speeches. “These have been six wonderful decades, strengthening the bonds between the two friendly…

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After enduring nearly two years of a “winter slump”, the Chinese consumer electronics market is showing signs of recovery, with the growing popularity of artificial intelligence and foldable smartphones expected to provide a further boost to sales, company executives and experts said. The forecast comes as Chinese tech companies are scrambling to roll out new AI hardware products — including AI PCs and AI smartphones among others — to stimulate consumer enthusiasm. The new launches, coupled with the arrival of a product replacement cycle, could inject new vitality for the market to draw a steeper growth trajectory, they added. A…

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Singapore Airlines has rewarded its employees with a bonus worth nearly eight months of salary, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Friday, May 17. The person asked not to be named because the information was not intended to be made public. Singapore Airlines did not respond to a request for comment. The company has reported an annual net profit of $1.98 billion in the 2023 to 2024 fiscal year. “The demand for air travel remained buoyant” throughout the year boosted by a rebound in North Asia as China, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan fully reopened their borders…

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When Ahmed Elsaid, an Egyptian university student in Cairo, chose to study Chinese in 2001, it was an act of youthful rebellion against his parents’ wish for him to become a doctor. Armed solely with photocopied textbooks and a handful of books about China, Elsaid embarked on a linguistic journey that would eventually transform into a lifelong career dedicated to cultural exchange between China and the Arab world. But his journey was far from easy. “Learning Chinese is difficult,” said Elsaid, now an Egyptian Sinologist and CEO of the Bayt Al-Hekma Cultural Group. “But the charm of the Chinese language…

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Google has fired 28 employees following a sit-down protest over the tech giant’s contract to provide cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government The terminations come after the group No Tech for Apartheid occupied Google offices in California and New York on Tuesday, April 16, to protest the $1.2bn contract known as Project Nimbus. Video of the demonstrations shared on social media showed police arresting employees in the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. In a statement on Thursday, Google said that physically impeding employees and preventing them from accessing company facilities was a “clear violation…

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By Zhang Zhouxiang Had a woman surnamed Xu, who has millions of followers on social networking sites, marked a video clip in which she claimed she found a Grade 1 student’s winter holiday homework in a restaurant in Paris, as “fictional”, the story would have made for a good, even laughable, joke. But instead, she claimed the story was real, even fabricating the student’s name, Qin Lang. There were some hiccups when someone cast doubts on Qin’s non-existent school, but Xu kept it going as long as she could, claiming later she had found Qin’s mother so the matter was…

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