分类： business

A major milestone in China’s expanding high-speed rail network has captured public attention across Chinese social media, as the landmark Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu high-speed railway’s Yangtze River underwater tunnel hits a critical construction benchmark.

Over the weekend following the late-March breakthrough, discussions of the cross-river tunnel project dominated national social platforms, with the topic “China to launch high-speed railway under the Yangtze River” trending on China’s leading microblogging platform Weibo at the end of March. As a core national infrastructure project listed in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) outline, the full 2,000-kilometer high-speed rail corridor carries a total investment of 500 billion yuan, equal to approximately $72.8 billion.

On March 29, after 23 consecutive months of safe, steady excavation, the domestically built “Linghang” shield tunneling machine completed a record 11.18-kilometer underwater digging run, successfully passing beneath the Yangtze River’s southern embankment. The tunnel in question, stretching between Chongming district in Shanghai and Taicang city in Jiangsu province, is the longest and largest high-speed rail cross-river tunnel ever built in China, with a total planned length of 14.25 kilometers. It is a central segment of the Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu high-speed railway, a key backbone route in China’s national “eight vertical and eight horizontal” high-speed rail network. Project estimates cited by China Central Television suggest the full corridor will generate up to 1.5 trillion yuan in added value across its entire industrial chain, delivering tangible economic benefits to more than 20 small and medium-sized cities along the route.

The Linghang machine’s single-drive excavation run marks a new global engineering achievement. The project requires a 11.325-kilometer uninterrupted single-drive digging distance, with the machine’s cutter head measuring 15.4 meters in diameter and the tunnel reaching a maximum depth of 89 meters below the riverbed. Designed to accommodate high-speed trains operating at speeds up to 350 kilometers per hour, the tunnel will allow trains to cross the Yangtze River without reducing speed, a feat that demands extraordinary engineering precision.

“At a speed of 350 km/h, the required construction precision falls within the millimeter range,” explained Wang Yi, deputy equipment manager for the project, in an interview with ThePaper.cn. Wang noted that underwater tunnel construction faces unique challenges from variable river water pressure, natural geological settlement, and other environmental factors. Even a minor alignment deviation can compromise operational safety and passenger comfort, placing extremely strict requirements on structural precision, track smoothness, and resistance to external interference.

This milestone is far more than a technical breakthrough, Wang emphasized. It cements China’s global leading position in high-speed rail underwater tunnel construction and proves the country has fully mastered core technologies for ultra-high-speed underwater tunnel projects, creating replicable, scalable expertise that can be applied to similar infrastructure projects worldwide in the future.

Shield tunneling machines, which require highly complex integrated systems and extreme manufacturing precision, are widely recognized as a key benchmark of a country’s advanced manufacturing capacity. A single Linghang-class machine is made up of more than 20,000 individual components, and its development tells a broader story of China’s decades-long progress in heavy manufacturing: from relying entirely on imported machinery 30 years ago to becoming a global industry leader.

China’s journey to domestic shield machine development began in 2002, when research and development of the technology was added to a national key scientific research program, launching the country’s localization push. Just two years later, in 2004, China’s first domestically built metro shield machine was unveiled in Shanghai and deployed successfully for soft soil excavation. Over the subsequent two decades, Chinese-developed shield tunneling machines have achieved continuous technological breakthroughs, with rising levels of independent innovation and intelligent integration. Today, Chinese-made shield machines are exported to more than 40 countries and regions around the world, holding roughly 70 percent of the global market share.

Once the full Shanghai-Chongqing-Chengdu high-speed railway is completed, it will drastically cut travel times between the Yangtze River Delta region in eastern China and the Chengdu-Chongqing economic hub in southwestern China, strengthening economic connectivity, facilitating regional integration, and driving balanced growth across the entire Yangtze River Economic Belt.

In a fresh escalation of the high-stakes conflict over control of strategically critical ports along the Panama Canal, a subsidiary of Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison Holdings has initiated international arbitration proceedings against Danish logistics giant Maersk, accusing the shipping group of colluding with Panama’s government to seize control of its terminal operations.

Panama Ports Company, the CK Hutchison unit that held long-term concessions for the Balboa and Cristobal ports at the Atlantic and Pacific entrances of the canal, laid out the new legal claim in an official statement released Tuesday. The company alleges that Maersk deliberately undermined its existing operating contract to clear the way for a Maersk-affiliated entity to take over operations of the high-traffic Balboa terminal. The arbitration will be conducted in London, though the firm has not publicly disclosed what financial or legal remedies it is pursuing through the process.

This latest legal action builds on a series of disputes that stretch back to early 2025. Back in February, Panama’s national government seized full control of both the Balboa and Cristobal ports, shortly after the country’s Supreme Court ruled that CK Hutchison’s original operating concession was unconstitutional. That court ruling and subsequent seizure triggered immediate diplomatic pushback from the Chinese government. Shortly after the takeover, Panama’s administration handed operational control of the two ports to subsidiaries of Maersk and Mediterranean Shipping Company, the two largest container shipping firms in the world.

Panama Ports Company first launched arbitration proceedings against the Panamanian government itself in February. By late March, the firm expanded its damages claim, stating that total losses related to the seizure now exceed $2 billion. The company emphasized in Tuesday’s statement that the new claim against Maersk is entirely separate from its ongoing legal efforts to hold Panama liable for what it describes as “anti-contract and anti-investor conduct.”

As of Wednesday, neither Maersk’s corporate leadership nor Panama’s government has issued an immediate public response to the new arbitration filing.

The unfolding legal conflict has further complicated a major pre-existing deal that has drawn global geopolitical and business attention. CK Hutchison first announced plans in March 2025 to sell the majority of its 40+ global port assets—including the two Panama Canal ports—to a consortium led by U.S. investment firm BlackRock, in a deal valued at $23 billion. The proposed transaction was welcomed by former U.S. President Donald Trump, who had repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims of Chinese interference in the operations of the vital global shipping lane. However, the deal sparked pushback from Beijing, and China’s antitrust regulator launched a formal review of the transaction last year. Since then, the parties to the sale have explored multiple adjustments to keep the deal on track, including the possibility of adding a Chinese investor to the buying consortium to resolve regulatory concerns.

As tensions escalate around the strategic Strait of Hormuz, energy and currency experts agree that while Iran can easily maintain operational control over this critical global waterway, dislodging the U.S. dollar from its decades-long dominance of the global oil trade will prove far out of Tehran’s reach. The standoff over the strait, through which roughly 20% of the world’s energy supplies flow annually, has become the central flashpoint of ongoing regional conflict, with former U.S. President Donald Trump issuing extreme threats against Iran over its claims to influence over the waterway. Tehran has already implemented a structured toll system for vessels seeking passage, allowing entry to ships from allied nations including Pakistan and China, and its decision to denominate these tolls in Chinese yuan has sparked widespread speculation that the petrodollar system – the longstanding arrangement under which global oil is priced and traded exclusively in U.S. dollars – could be facing a fatal collapse.

Iran has strong strategic and economic incentives to challenge dollar hegemony, notes Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an Iranian economy specialist at Virginia Tech. Decades of sweeping U.S. sanctions have left Tehran locked out of the global dollar-denominated financial system, giving Washington effective veto power over nearly all of Iran’s cross-border financial transactions. But even if Iran solidifies its control over Hormuz, leading currency experts argue that key Gulf oil-producing states – including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – show no willingness to abandon the petrodollar framework.

“The Strait of Hormuz was a freeway, and it’s going to become a toll road. The Iranians will control it, but king dollar is still king dollar,” explained Steve Hanke, a currency expert and professor at Johns Hopkins University.

To understand the dollar’s enduring hold on global oil markets, it is necessary to trace the origins of the petrodollar system back to 1974, when U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a landmark agreement with Saudi Arabia. Under the deal, Riyadh agreed to price all of its oil exports in dollars and reinforces its export surpluses into U.S. Treasury assets, a arrangement that rescued the dollar’s status as the world’s primary reserve currency just three years after President Richard Nixon ended the dollar’s gold convertibility, upending the post-WWII Bretton Woods system.

The 1974 deal produced two transformative outcomes: it sparked the eurodollar boom of the late 1970s, when dollar deposits held in foreign (mostly European) banks became the foundation of global cross-border lending, and cemented the dollar’s global dominance after the 1971 “gold shock” that threatened its status. Following Saudi Arabia’s lead, all other Gulf producers adopted the petrodollar framework, and by the mid-1970s, the region had become the largest single source of new capital for U.S. government borrowing via Treasury bond purchases.

David M Wight, author of *Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire*, notes that the petrodollar system has proven “remarkably resilient” across five decades of geopolitical upheaval. Contrary to popular narratives that frame the system as U.S. coercion of Gulf states, Wight emphasizes that the arrangement was mutually beneficial, built through negotiation rather than strong-arming. In the wake of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the Arab oil embargo that worsened U.S. inflation, Gulf leaders sought U.S. security guarantees in exchange for their commitment to the petrodollar, creating a longstanding geopolitical bargain that endures today.

That bargain is why many analysts have argued that Iran’s control of Hormuz could upend the entire system, especially amid shifting U.S. policy: Trump has alternated between threatening to destroy Iran’s civilization and suggesting he would withdraw U.S. forces and allow Iran to take full control of the strait, even telling U.S. allies to “go get your own oil” last week. Today, all Gulf states continue to peg their national currencies to the U.S. dollar, unlike the freely floating euro, and collectively held $315 billion in U.S. Treasuries by the end of 2025, with Saudi Arabia alone holding $134 billion in January 2026.

The geopolitical and economic landscape has shifted substantially since the 1970s, however. The U.S. has grown far more reliant on deficit spending, reducing the relative importance of Gulf investments, while Gulf states have evolved into more mature, diversified investors. In the 1980s, Gulf purchases of Treasuries covered roughly 10% of annual U.S. deficit spending; today, that figure stands at just 2%, according to analysis by former CIA economist Jess Hoversen of Column Bank. U.S. government spending has exploded in recent decades, but a bigger shift comes from Gulf states themselves: many now run domestic budget deficits as they invest heavily in local economic diversification projects, particularly Saudi Arabia’s push to reduce its reliance on oil exports, which led Riyadh to issue $82 billion in sovereign debt in 2025. Gulf states are now net borrowers rather than large net buyers of U.S. government debt, reorienting their surplus capital toward U.S. equities, global alternative assets like European football clubs, and domestic infrastructure.

“Defining the petrodollar today has changed from decades ago,” noted Brad Setser, a former U.S. Treasury economist now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Gulf states are borrowers now and not as big buyers of treasuries.”

Still, the system’s underlying vulnerabilities have been laid bare by the recent regional conflict. The Financial Time reported that multiple central banks have sold off large holdings of U.S. Treasuries in response to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, driving a sharp surge in 10-year Treasury yields from 3.9% pre-war to roughly 4.4% today. Higher yields raise borrowing costs for U.S. consumers and the federal government alike, and mark an unusual break from historic norms: during periods of global crisis, investors typically flock to U.S. Treasuries as a safe-haven asset, pushing yields down rather than up.

Despite these growing pressures, experts say the deep liquidity of U.S. capital markets – the ability to buy and sell dollar-denominated assets quickly and at scale – remains the core reason Gulf states will not abandon dollar pricing. While Hanke acknowledges that U.S. geopolitical moves including sweeping sanctions, regional wars, and tariffs have eroded the dollar’s standing over the long term and opened space for competing currencies, the unmatched size and liquidity of the U.S. capital market will keep oil priced in dollars for the foreseeable future.

The dollar’s dominance has already faced incremental challenges at the margins. After Western sanctions imposed following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia now sells most of its oil and gas to China in yuan, and sanctioned Iran also conducts its oil sales to Beijing in the Chinese currency. This bifurcation of the global oil market means that the dollar and U.S. debt markets are not receiving the typical boost they would see during a period of high oil prices and regional conflict: blocked from exporting through Hormuz, Gulf states are not reaping the windfall from elevated energy prices that would normally flow into dollar assets, while major non-Gulf producers like Russia are not reinvesting their profits in dollars.

“We have a meaningful rise in the price of oil, but Gulf countries are not benefiting from it. So who are the big beneficiaries? One is Russia, which won’t save in dollars,” Setser said.

Even as the role of petrodollar surpluses has evolved, Wight argues that the system remains politically and economically critical enough that the U.S. would bring significant pressure to bear on any Gulf state that moved to price oil in an alternative currency like the euro or yuan. “I think there is pressure from the US to keep these transactions in dollars and thus far, the Gulf states have been happy to go along with it,” he said.

As the global reserve currency for the world’s most traded commodity, the dollar is deeply embedded in global trade networks, creating sustained global demand that keeps its value high relative to other currencies. This dynamic actually benefits major export economies like China and the Eurozone, which gain a competitive trade advantage from a weaker domestic currency, meaning even major potential rivals to the dollar have little incentive to push for an end to the petrodollar system.

“There are some advantages to being a reserve currency, but also drawbacks, one of which is that it makes it harder for you to promote your own exports,” Wight explained.

This combination of deep structural inertia, competing geopolitical and economic interests, and the unique liquidity of U.S. dollar markets means that the petrodollar system will remain largely intact despite Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz and incremental challenges to dollar hegemony. “There are these challenges at the margins, but it’s hard to unseat the king,” Hanke said.

Global financial markets reacted dramatically early Wednesday, with Asian equities jumping to multi-session highs and crude oil prices tumbling double-digit dollars per barrel, following a last-minute breakthrough: the United States and Iran have reached an agreement for a 14-day ceasefire that will reopen the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz for global shipping.

In early morning trading across Asia, major benchmark indices posted double-digit percentage gains in some cases, a sharp turnaround from weeks of volatility stoked by geopolitical tensions. Japan’s Nikkei 225, the region’s most closely watched benchmark, climbed 5% to hit 56,106.18 minutes after opening. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 notched a 2.6% rise to 8,952.30, while South Korea’s Kospi outperformed most peers with a 5.9% surge to 5,819.97. In Greater China markets, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index gained 2.6% to 25,767.42, and mainland China’s Shanghai Composite added a solid 1.7% to close in on the 4,000 point threshold at 3,957.55.

Crude oil markets, which had seen prices spike sharply after the conflict closed the strait to commercial shipping, saw an immediate and steep correction. Benchmark U.S. crude plummeted $16.84 to settle at $96.11 per barrel in early trading, while international benchmark Brent crude fell $14.51 to $94.76 a barrel. The sharp drop comes as no surprise to market analysts: nearly 20% of the world’s daily oil supply transits through the Strait of Hormuz, making the waterway one of the most critical energy chokepoints on the planet. For resource-import dependent economies like Japan, the reopening of the strait removes a major near-term threat to energy security.

The breakthrough followed a flurry of diplomatic activity through Tuesday evening. After Pakistan’s prime minister publicly urged U.S. leadership to extend its original deadline for reopening the strait and pressed Iranian officials to resume commercial navigation, U.S. former President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday he would pause planned strikes against Iranian civilian infrastructure, including bridges and power plants, that had been threatened in recent days. Iran’s foreign minister confirmed that the strait would remain open for all commercial shipping for the 14-day period, under supervision by the Iranian military.

Even as markets rallied, analysts struck a cautious tone. Tim Waterer, chief market analyst at KCM Trade, noted that the current market momentum is rooted in cautious optimism rather than unbridled celebration. “The ceasefire is only two weeks long, and markets will be watching closely to see whether shipping through the Strait of Hormuz normalizes as promised and whether the fragile truce can pave the way for a more durable peace agreement,” Waterer said.

The ceasefire announcement ended weeks of sustained market volatility that began when the conflict broke out in late February. On Tuesday, U.S. equities already began pricing in the potential for a diplomatic breakthrough, with the S&P 500 erasing all earlier losses to close 0.1% higher. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged down 0.2% (a drop of 85 points), while the Nasdaq Composite also closed 0.1% higher.

Other asset classes also reflected easing geopolitical risk. In U.S. bond markets, the yield on 10-year Treasury notes eased to 4.24%, down from 4.30% earlier Tuesday as investors moved back to safe-haven assets following the news. In foreign exchange markets, the U.S. dollar softened against major peers, falling to 158.54 Japanese yen from 159.52 yen earlier in the week, while the euro rose to $1.1671 from $1.1597.

This report was contributed to by AP Business Writer Stan Choe in New York, with reporting from Yuri Kageyama based in Tokyo.

China’s domestic tourism industry delivered steady year-on-year growth during the 2026 three-day Qingming Festival holiday, new official data shows, reflecting sustained momentum in the country’s domestic consumption and cultural travel sectors.

Released on Tuesday by China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the data confirms 135 million domestic trips were taken across the country between Saturday and Monday, when the 2026 holiday was held. This figure marks a 6.8% increase compared to the same holiday period in 2025. Total domestic tourism expenditure hit 61.37 billion yuan, equivalent to roughly $8.95 billion, representing a 6.6% annual rise. The ministry confirmed that the entire national cultural and tourism market operated safely, stably and in an orderly fashion throughout the long weekend.

Qingming Festival, also widely known as Tomb Sweeping Day, is a centuries-old Chinese tradition centered on honoring deceased ancestors and revolutionary martyrs. This year’s observance fell on Sunday, creating the standard three-day weekend holiday from April 4 to 6. Across the country, memorial events drew large crowds to cemeteries, memorial halls and revolutionary heritage (or “red tourism”) sites, where visitors laid floral tributes and held silent remembrance ceremonies.

Beyond traditional commemorative activities, spring leisure travel emerged as a major driver of holiday consumption. As temperatures warm across most of China, flower viewing and outdoor recreational activities became top travel choices for many holidaymakers. The ministry also noted that scheduled concerts and music festivals held over the weekend gave a clear boost to related local cultural and hospitality spending, while the country’s fast-growing nighttime tourism segment continued its steady expansion.

A key factor boosting longer-distance travel this year was the alignment of the Qingming holiday with scheduled spring breaks for K-12 and university students in multiple Chinese provinces, including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Guizhou. This overlap created extended combined breaks of up to six consecutive days for residents in these regions, leading to a sharp rise in family vacation travel. Official data shows the share of minors among passengers on commercial flights and high-speed rail rose notably, alongside a clear increase in the number of travelers taking trips longer than 800 kilometers. Overall, family travel bookings accounted for 37% of all total tourism reservations for the holiday, cementing family groups as the largest core consumer group for the Qingming weekend.

The steady growth of domestic tourism during the holiday adds to broader signs of recovering domestic consumption in China, with the cultural and travel sector continuing to evolve to meet changing traveler demand, from short local getaways to extended cross-region family vacations.