The sheer scale and speed of China's effort ratchets up pressure on the US, where President Donald Trump's administration has launched a program called Operation Warp Speed to accelerate vaccine research and development. In total, five vaccines developed by Chinese companies are being tested on humans, the most in any country.

The Chinese military has defended its increased budget of $179 billion for this year, saying it is in line with the challenges faced by the country.

China's finance ministry said on Tuesday that it would subsidise Chinese and foreign airlines for cargo flights to and from the country in an effort to support the cargo industry and stabilise the global supply chains.

Even during his trip to Israel on May 13, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had asked Tel Aviv to reconsider some of its joint projects with Beijing. The recent pressure from US marks an escalation of the heightened feud between Washington and Beijing over the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic.

According to the annual report from the Supreme People's Procuratorate submitted to the national parliament, 18,585 people were prosecuted for crimes related to corruption in 2019, a 90 percent year-on-year increase.

Hong Kong's airport is one of the world's busiest but arrivals and flights have collapsed in the wake of the global pandemic. Transit services at the airport, which have been suspended since March 25, will partly resume on June 1, Chief Executive Carrie Lam told reporters.

Shi Zhengli, a virologist renowned for her work on coronavirus in bats, said in an interview on Chinese state television that viruses being discovered now are just the tip of the iceberg and called for international cooperation in the fight against epidemics.

China warned on Monday that it will take countermeasures if the United States insists on undermining its interests regarding Hong Kong, following the latest comments from Washington about possible sanctions over new national security legislation for the city.

China's foreign ministry office in Hong Kong said on Monday some actions during last year's pro-democracy protests were errorist in nature and roublemakers colluded with foreign forces, posing imminent danger to national security.

The Mars mission is among a number of new space projects China is pursuing, including putting Chinese astronauts on the moon and having a space station by 2022.

With the world distracted by the coronavirus pandemic's devastating toll, China has taken a series of aggressive actions in recent weeks to flex its economic, diplomatic and military muscle across the region.

China has reported 51 new coronavirus cases including 40 asymptomatic infections, majority of them in the contagion's first epicentre Wuhan, where over six million tests have been conducted in the last 10 days, health officials said on Monday. The country's National Health Commission (NHC) said that 11 new imported cases were reported on Sunday.

The United States should stop wasting time in its fight against the coronavirus and work with China to combat it, rather than spreading lies and attacking the country, the Chinese government's top diplomat Wang Yi said on Sunday.

The Chinese virology institute in the city where Covid-19 first emerged has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new contagion wreaking chaos across the world, its director has said. Scientists think Covid-19 -- which first emerged in Wuhan and has killed some 340,000 people worldwide -- originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.