There have been reports that the Russian military worries that providing China with advanced weapons may threaten Russian security. At the same time, Russian military industry circles worry that China may steal Russian technology by reverse engineering. However, Russian President Vladimir… Read More ›
China’s jailing of 20 ethnic Uyghurs this week on terrorism and separatism charges using online activism as a basis for their conviction reflects government moves to increase media controls and use weak laws to suppress voices in the troubled Xinjiang… Read More ›
When Beijing was choking on record levels of smog, observers wondered whether China would ever get its pollution problem under control. It’s an insanely difficult question, with huge implications from climate change to the global economy. Here’s one stab at an… Read More ›
The Internet is getting creaky and old. It is rapidly running out of space and remains fundamentally insecure. And it turns out that China is streets ahead of the West in doing anything about it. A report published in the… Read More ›
North Korea’s nuclear program poses a serious threat to China’s own relations with its neighbours, Kevin Rudd has warned officers at Beijing’s main defence academy. In a speech at China’s National Defence University, Mr Rudd said Pyongyang’s antics threatened… Read More ›
Much like the 16,000 dead pigs found floating in a different part of the river, the discovery of over 1000 dead ducks in the Nanhe has raised some serious questions. Foremost amongst them is how they died and why they… Read More ›
A photo of new first lady Peng Liyuan in her younger days, singing to martial law troops after the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters, flickered across cyberspace this week. It was swiftly scrubbed from China’s internet before it could… Read More ›
China’s expanding investment portfolio in Cambodia has brought into sharper focus the darker side of the Asian giant’s “development projects” in the impoverished Southeast Asian nation. And it is in the southwestern corner of Cambodia – known for its rich… Read More ›
A major Asian investment bank says the seeds of a future financial crisis in China have been sown. Nomura is warning that debt levels in China are teetering at unsustainable levels. Debt in China is believed to be between 150… Read More ›
Indonesia has revealed for the first time that it complained to China over its issuance of passports that feature a controversial map laying claim to almost the entire South China Sea. The “nine-dash line” map featured in new Chinese passports… Read More ›
Xinhua quotes economist Wu Jinglian as saying, in quite a few years in the past, Chinese authorities have earned profits of nearly $5 trillion in selling to property developers the land they expropriated from peasants. In the course of large-scale urbanisation,… Read More ›
“It’s over for America,” a Chinese academic told me in late 2008, two days after Goldman Sachs turned itself into a commercial bank in order to fend off possible collapse. “From here on, it’s all downhill.” Sitting in Beijing as… Read More ›
Ming Pao says in its report today titled PLA New Rules: Treasonable Speech Guilty of a Crime, “The Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Political Department has promulgated “Regulations on the Standards for Prosecution of the Crime… Read More ›
Nuclear escalation on the Korean Peninsula demands creative solutions. With a 2,200-year history of non-aggression, China is in the best position to take the lead – and relieve the United States of a burden it has shouldered for too long…. Read More ›
A Chinese amphibious task force sparked jitters around the region by reaching the southernmost waters of its claimed domain A fully equipped PLA amphibious task force has reached China’s southernmost claimed possession in the South China Sea in an unprecedented… Read More ›
I live next door to Jin Baozhu, a widow and mother of three grown sons. She spent her career as a worker in a factory that made glass for industrial products. She is seventy-six and lives on a pension of… Read More ›
Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao says in its exclusive report on March 22, “At the time around the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), quite a few CCP central leaders’ children conducting further study or having settled down… Read More ›
China confirmed it will sell a new 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor to Pakistan that the United States says would violate Beijing’s obligations under a nuclear supplier control group. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei was asked Monday about a report in the Free Beacon March… Read More ›
For those of us who live in the democratic world, its taken for granted that a social utility such as Twitter is an open forum, where people can say just about anything and not worry about censorship. Not only are… Read More ›
Last June, Russian President Vladimir Putin chose Beijing as the first destination of his visit abroad after he was reelected Russian president. He made the choice to show the importance he attached to relations with China. Before his visit, he… Read More ›
Vietnam has accused a Chinese vessel of firing on a Vietnamese fishing boat in the disputed South China Sea and setting its cabin alight, exposing tensions in the region over rival claims to the gas-rich waters. The government described the… Read More ›
Chinese state media reported that, from January of last year to the end of last month, more than 20,000 college students in the central city of Wuhan applied for 160 million yuan of “high-interest rate loans” from Home Credit China. Beijing’s saturation coverage… Read More ›
Chinese President Xi Jinping began on Sunday a tour of Africa that underlines the continent’s strategic importance to China both for its resources and as a market place, signing more than a dozen trade and cooperation deals with Tanzania. Visiting,… Read More ›
Chinese President Xi Jingping has continued his visit to Russia, aimed at bolstering the friendship between the two nations and increasing cooperation. The visit, his first since officially taking office last week, demonstrates that China is seeking to overcome past… Read More ›
The thing to remember about China is that all unions are state controlled. Independent unions are illegal. Yet China Foreign Teachers Union (CFTU) claims to be the one exception in the whole country. It seems impossible to believe that the Chinese… Read More ›
If we are to take recent news reports at face value, the collective conscience of the world’s consumers can be eased: conditions at Chinese factories are improving. Last year, The New York Times told us that these workers are “cheap no more.” This February,… Read More ›
For a Russian to live in Beijing is to experience time travel. Things long gone in Russia still appear in China with no sense of irony. There are endless displays of hammer-and-sickles, Red stars, and exhortations to Obey the Communist… Read More ›
Leery of product safety in China, Zhu Zhangjin is urging farmers to invest abroad like he has. Zhu Zhangjin calls himself a farmer, but he has little time or love for mainland farm goods. Nor is he afraid to speak… Read More ›
Scheduled to be the tallest tower in China and the second tallest building in the world by 2015, Kohn Pedersen Fox’s 660-meter-high Ping’an International Finance Center has received a major unexpected set back. Following an industry wide inspection conducted last week, Shenzhen government officials have discovered… Read More ›
When the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on March 14, aerosols were thick over Beijing and the Bo Hai Sea. Although dust hung heavy over the plain, some mountain peaks (such as those of the Taihang Shan)… Read More ›
“Are you under great pressure that your husband is always introduced as Peng Liyuan’s husband?” Well-known talk-show host Dou Wentao asked Peng Liyuan, China’s current first lady. She was at that time much more famous than her husband Xi Jinping,… Read More ›
If you follow Chinese politics at all, you’ll have heard of a word that’s become synonymous with corruption and privilege — “princeling”. The term refers to the offspring of Chinese party officials, and is often used to describe those who leverage… Read More ›
Japan and the United States have started talks on military plans in case of armed conflict over a group of East China Sea Islets claimed by Tokyo and Beijing, Japanese media said on Thursday, prompting China to complain of “outside… Read More ›
Fresh from his “surprise” election as president of China last week, Xi Jinping is about to set off on his first foreign trip. Later this week, he will travel to Moscow. The choice is a traditional one, and redolent of the Cold War,… Read More ›
Millions of tonnes of untreated refuse from the countryside end up in rivers and lakes annually. Many were shocked when thousands of dead pigs were found floating on Shanghai’s Huangpu River this month, but animal carcasses are not the only… Read More ›
The Chinese government on Tuesday continued to deny that a Chinese frigate locked its radar on a Japanese destroyer earlier this year. The denial comes a day after Tokyo-based Kyodo News quoted unnamed “senior Chinese military officials” admitting for the first time that it’s happened… Read More ›
In news hailed by ammunition manufacturers worldwide, India has successfully tested the 290 km range Brahmos supersonic underwater cruise missile. A jubilant scientist announced that “this was the first time a cruise missile has been successfully launched vertically from a… Read More ›
Bride trafficking to China from Southeast Asian countries which do not border on that country looks set to grow, says the UN, with the first reported cases from Cambodia in 2012. “The numbers of identified cases are still small, but… Read More ›
Singtao Daily says today, “After Xi Jinping issued his eight regulations to establish his image, there are still a large number of officials who dare to violate discipline. The Central Discipline Inspection Commission issued a circular yesterday on six typical… Read More ›
Jack Nguyen had sold 20 of his 30 containers of imported American grapes when a fresh round of rumours hit the internet and state-run media: Chinese fruit on sale in Vietnam might look good, but it contains deadly levels of… Read More ›
If politics were a TV show, consider this season of “Pacific Antics”. The United States government has consistently sent “dual messages” to China. On the one hand, diplomatic, military, and other foreign-related policy indicates aggressive defence posture and retaliation preparedness should a… Read More ›
China’s current transportation development plans call for huge numbers of new airports, but building them looks to be untenable, both economically and environmentally.82 new airports by 2015 The Twelfth Five-Year Plan’s goal of building 82 new airports by 2015 will… Read More ›
The Chinese news site People’s Daily Online recently posted an article entitled China’s money supply should not be misinterpreted defending the money printing tendencies of the Chinese government. The author, Niu Wenxin, attempts to make a case as to why… Read More ›
He may no longer be prime minister but Kevin Rudd is about to again strut the world stage in support of an article for Foreign Affairs magazine on relations between China and the US. Mr Rudd has scheduled trips to… Read More ›
While many Western analysts focus on the balance of reformers and conservatives in China’s new leadership, most overlook the absence of career diplomats and foreign affairs experts at the highest level of power in Beijing. China is rising as a global… Read More ›
China is poised to launch its most serious economic reform drive since the 1990s after a series of top appointments at the weekend put the architects of Zhu Rongji‘s clash with state owned enterprises in charge of key economic agencies…. Read More ›
It’s been a busy and grisly weekend for Hong Kong police detectives.On Friday, Saturday and Sunday different people in different parts of the city committed three separate murders. Each was committed with a knife and in each case the murder… Read More ›
Bumbling and gaffe-prone, Major General Mao Xinyu has become the laughingstock for a country with increasingly mixed attitudes towards its most celebrated leader. Mao Zedong‘s grandson just can’t catch a break. The most-mocked man at China’s annual rubber-stamp congress was… Read More ›
Taiwan is set to produce 50 medium-range missiles next year that will target military bases in southeast China, a media report says. The article on Monday came after former defence minister Michael Tsai revealed in a recently published book that… Read More ›
China’s quality watchdog told Volkswagen AG (VOW) to recall vehicles fitted with the direct-shift gearbox system, after Europe’s biggest carmaker was targeted at China Central Television’s (CCTV) annual consumer-rights day program. The program targeted several western companies, raising considerable criticism of CCTV from China’s… Read More ›
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