CNN reports: "A foreign bank has been given access to a key piece of China's financial system for the first time. Standard Chartered (SCBFF) said Monday that it is the first foreign lender to receive permission to hold and safeguard the assets of local investors in China. The license granted by the China Securities Regulatory Commission allows the bank to act as a custodian for investment products sold by both international and local asset managers and funds. Standard Chartered is based in London but focuses on emerging markets. Its shares jumped nearly 2%. 'This is a big step forward in the further opening up of China's domestic financial markets and a testament to our commitment to supporting China's financial reform and innovation,' Jerry Zhang, CEO of Standard Chartered in China, said in a statement. Acting as a custodian can be a big business. One of the leading global players, JPMorgan Chase, had assets worth more than $23 trillion under management in 2017, generating $3.9 billion in revenue for its securities services business. Big Western banks have been trying to break into China for years, but their progress had been slowed by restrictions on their activities and rules that limited them to minority ownership of ventures in the country."

The New York Times reports: "The ranks of the richest people on the planet are no longer dominated by stuffy industrial tycoons and real estate barons with multigenerational empires. China minted two new billionaires each week last year, according to a study on wealth by the Swiss bank UBS and the consultancy PwC. And this is a younger, self-made Asian class that is redefining what it means to be ultra-wealthy. China added a net total of 55 new billionaires last year. (Actually 106 people in the country joined the superrich league during the period, but almost half of that amount also dropped off the list.) That brought the grand total of billionaires in the country to 373, or nearly one in five of the global total. Billionaire wealth in China has increased almost 40 percent, to $1.12 trillion year-on-year. Based on current rates of growth, Chinese billionaires will outnumber their American counterparts within four years. Technology is helping to line the pockets of many new Chinese billionaires — including Zhang Yiming of the video-sharing app ByteDance and Wang Jian, the co-founder of the Shenzhen-based gene sequencing company BGI. China is now producing almost as many unicorns, or companies worth at least $1 billion, as the United States."

The Wall Street Journal reports: "Scientists from China's military are significantly expanding research collaboration with scholars from the U.S. and other technologically advanced countries, at times obscuring their affiliation from their hosts, according to a new research report and interviews with academics. The People's Liberation Army has sponsored more than 2,500 military scientists and engineers to study abroad over the past decade, according to research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. ASPI is a nonpartisan think tank that was created in 2001 by the Australian government, which is engaged in a sharp debate about Chinese Communist Party interference in its domestic affairs. The volume of peer-reviewed articles produced by PLA scientists working with academics outside China grew nearly eight times during the same period, from 95 in 2007 to 734 last year, the report says. In some cases, the Chinese scientists masked their ties with the PLA, enabling them to work with professors at leading universities like Carnegie Mellon without the schools' knowledge of their military affiliation, according to Wall Street Journal interviews."