China urges relevant parties to exercise restraint and resolve disputes through political and diplomatic means amid rising tensions in Yemen and the Red Sea, Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun said at a press briefing in Beijing on Monday.
Guo was asked to comment on the recent attack by Houthi forces in Yemen on civilian and energy facilities in four cities in southern Saudi Arabia, injuring 73 civilians, including women and children, and damaging multiple energy and civilian facilities. The Houthis said they had also come under attack, resulting in casualties.
"Tensions in Yemen and the Red Sea have escalated in recent days, causing innocent civilian casualties and damage to energy and other civilian facilities. China is deeply concerned about this. Attacks on civilian facilities related to people's livelihoods are unacceptable. Rising turbulence in the region does not serve any party's interests. All countries' sovereignty and security should be respected, and political and diplomatic means are the only way to resolve disputes. China calls on all relevant parties to exercise restraint, ease tensions through communication and dialogue, and help bring the situation down as soon as possible," said Guo.
China urges restraint, political resolution of Yemen, Red Sea tensions: spokesman
China's benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closed almost flat on Monday amid a wide sell-off of artificial intelligence-related stocks triggered by calls from top executives of major U.S. AI developers to slow the pace of AI development, according to Timothy Pope, an analyst for China Global Television Network (CGTN).
The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 0.07 percent to 3,885.33 points on Monday, while the Shenzhen Component Index closed 0.64 percent lower at 13,384.57 points.
The ChiNext Index, tracking China's Nasdaq-style board of growth enterprises, lost 1.10 percent to close at 3,285.58 points Monday. The STAR Composite Index, which reflects the performance of stocks on China's sci-tech innovation board, closed 0.35 percent lower at 1,811.23 points.
Pope noted that despite the overall resilience of major indexes, AI hardware stocks were among the biggest losers on the day.
"The Chinese mainland markets proved pretty resilient today actually as global AI stocks wobbled. We saw oil prices jump and interest-rate hike bets rising as well. The Shanghai Composite Index ended the session pretty much flat, while the Shenzhen Component [Index] lost a little more than half of 1 percent. AI stocks around the world sank today after the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models. That was also backed up by OpenAI boss Sam Altman and some other industry leaders as well. But critically for Chinese companies, Amodei also called for tighter restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China. We saw AI shares on the A-share have been caught in a bit of a rotation cycle already lately, with investors switching in and out pretty aggressively from these AI hardware stocks. So that added some extra momentum to today's move out of that sector. They were falling and were one of the weaker sectors today," said Pope.
The analyst said stocks of listed big state-own banks saw an injection of capitals from investors amid AI sell-off.
"Investors took some shelter in financial stocks. The big state-owned banks were once again helping to support the Shanghai index and investors were also waiting for the latest bank-lending data, although that wasn't released before the close of the markets today. There was also a small rebalance in the STAR 50 today. A handful of new companies joined the high-tech index, but that didn't fundamentally change things for the pressured tech sector," he said.
Pope highlighted that Chinese investors will witness a slew of data release in the rest of the week, helping them to have a more comprehensive grasp of the status of the country's domestic demand.
"For the week ahead in China, it's going to be very data-heavy. Tomorrow we have a big data dump including fixed-asset investment, property data, retail sales and industrial production and that's really going to give the market some clues about the state of domestic demand after those very strong trade figures that we saw last week," he said.
Chinese stocks resilient as calls for AI slowdown trigger sell-off: analyst
