The Government of the Republic of China was formally established in 1912 in Nanking, with Sun Yat-sen as President of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China under the Provisional Constitution of the Republic of China. This government moved… Read More ›

Chongqing
Japan objects as Chinese paper prints mushroom clouds on map
Japan on Tuesday vowed to make a stern protest to China after a regional Chinese newspaper printed a map of the country with mushroom clouds hovering over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and accused the Japanese of wanting war… Read More ›
The mystery shrouding China’s Communist Party suicides
Being a government official in China is not for the faint of heart, the thin-skinned or the fragile of mind. A recent state media report has reverberated online and in the Communist Party press by revealing that at least 54… Read More ›
New report says 15% of corruption accusations against China’s officials are made by mistresses
In the early days of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s drive to clean up the Communist Party’s image, disciplinary authorities benefited from the work of a group of accusers with particularly intimate knowledge of corrupt bureaucrats’ nefarious activities: their extramarital lovers…. Read More ›
China’s Bo Xilai allowed to appeal against life in jail
A court in eastern China on Wednesday allowed ousted former senior politician Bo Xilai to appeal against a guilty verdict on charges of corruption and abuse of power handed out last month which earned him a life sentence. Bo was… Read More ›
China’s Bo Xilai gets life in jail; conservatives deprived of charismatic leader
Chinese rule-of-law and reformist factions’ power struggle against Bo Xilai and his faction was a vital battle for the establishment and implementation of the rule of law and further economic reform. In a nutshell, the fight concerned the rule of… Read More ›
China: Guangzhou to empty labour camps
Guangzhou plans to empty its hard-labour camps by year’s end, state media reported yesterday, the latest locality to phase out the notorious punishment. Rights advocates have long complained that the “re-education through labour“, or laojiao, system which lets police send… Read More ›
China’s Bo Xilai tries to save his skin
The trial of Bo Xilai started to turn into an episode of Maury. Revelations about the tangled web of strained and complicated relationships within his family were used as his testimony, particularly when the evidence seemed most piled up against… Read More ›
China’s Bo Xilai to stand trial Thursday
The trial of disgraced senior Chinese politician Bo Xilai will start on Thursday, when he will face charges of bribery, corruption and abuse of power in China’s most divisive and dramatic case in decades. The long-awaited trial of Bo, 64,… Read More ›
China charges Bo Xilai with corruption, paves way for trial
China charged disgraced senior politician Bo Xilai with bribery, abuse of power and corruption on Thursday, paving the way for a potentially divisive trial that President Xi Jinping will want smoothly handled as he pushes major economic reforms. Bo, 64, could… Read More ›
What to make of Xi Jinping’s Maoist turn
With a number of Mao-like pronouncements emanating from Beijing in recent months, some observers of Chinese politics think Xi Jinping might be turning Maoist. The most recent example is an editorial published earlier this week in the authoritative People’s Daily… Read More ›
Exposure via internet now China’s top weapon in war on graft
Think tank finds online reports spur far more corruption investigations than traditional media. The internet has become the primary tool for exposing corruption on the mainland, “removing a corrupt official with the click of a mouse”, according to a leading… Read More ›
Uneven economic growth in China’s regions
When looking at Chinese growth, it’s easy to think of the country as one entity, and one figure. Will GDP expand by 8 per cent this year, or “just” 7? However, China is a bit bigger than just one number. With… Read More ›
The Chinese on a personal level: White man in China
I went to China in 2011 by way of Hong Kong. I met up with a friend of mine I had met in Vietnam who was living in Hong Kong; he offered to show me around. Hong Kong, of course,… Read More ›
Australian firms to ramp up China ventures
Originally posted on Craig Hill:
Craig Emerson Australian companies are ramping up their investments in China as they express renewed confidence about the nation’s economic growth while also warning of tougher competition from Chinese rivals. Almost three quarters of the…
Trial of China’s Bo Xilai opens next week
China‘s disgraced former senior politician, Bo Xilai, will go on trial next week, a Beijing-backed Hong Kong newspaper said on Friday, in what would be the final act of a drama that has shaken the ruling Communist Party. Bo, once… Read More ›
Southern China officials called on to be monogamous
An anti-graft official in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou called on government and Communist Party officials to be faithful to their spouses after a slew of local scandals, the China Daily reported today. Mei Heqing, a standing member of the communist… Read More ›
The mistress-industrial complex in China
Is adultery the key to solving China’s corruption problem? Among the many notable features of the latest grainy sex tape circulating on the Chinese Internet — a video of former Chongqing official Lei Zhengfu atop his then-18-year-old mistress in 2007… Read More ›
China: Murder victim Neil Heywood ‘was MI6 informant’
Neil Heywood, the British businessman murdered in China, regularly provided information on Bo Xilai, the powerful politician, to MI6 before he was killed, a new report has claimed. The revelation in the Wall Street Journal raises new questions about the… Read More ›
China: Wang Yang, the party chief who transformed Guangdong
This is the first of SCMP’s two-part series on Guangdong party chief Wang Yang, a reformist who has turned the province into a base for high-end manufacturing. SCMP reports: “‘Empty the cage and let the right birds in’ was Wang… Read More ›
Fear and loneliness in China
What kind of society will China’s new leaders inherit? China has developed at unimaginable pace, lifting millions out of poverty. But as part of a series of viewpoints on challenges for China’s new leadership, Gerard Lemos, who conducted research in… Read More ›
China: Internal circular on Bo Xilai’s crimes signals imminent trial
Ming Pao says that there was an internal circular giving more details of Bo’s case, including that Bo’s wife Gu Kailai had taken bribes worth more than 20 million yuan (US$3.14 million), while Bo himself had directly taken bribes worth… Read More ›
Murder, sex and lies: the biggest scandal in the history of China’s communist party
On the 26th of September, the state news agency Xinhua, published an official account on the investigation on Bo XiLai, the ex-communist party leader of Chongqing (a Southern Chinese city with a population of more than 28 million). In the report, Bo is accused of “bribing”, “involvement”… Read More ›
China at crossroad: risk of disintegration
The disintegration of the giant Soviet Union took everyone by surprise. The reasons for the disintegration remain a mystery for most analysts. Perhaps we Chinese, with a history of quite a few disintegrations, may understand it better. Like China with… Read More ›
China: Bo Xilai doomed for his Role in Wang Lijun’s and Gu Kailai’s cases
At 8.56pm on Thursday, Xinhua’s english.news.cn gave a detailed account of Wang Lijun’s case, which revealed Bo Xilai’s role in Gu Kailai and Wang Lijun’s cases Xinhua said: “Relevant testimonies from witnesses showed that on Jan. 28, Wang Lijun reported… Read More ›
Bo Xilai involved in Wang Lijun’s case but cannot be prosecuted
Hearing of the case of Bo Xilai’s close assistant Wang Lijun was over yesterday, but Bo Xilai was not mentioned either by the court or the media. However, as Wang’s crime of taking technical spying measures on various people without… Read More ›
China hints at lenient sentence against ex-cop
China signalled Tuesday it will be lenient with an ex-police chief enmeshed in a political scandal roiling the country’s leadership, saying he cooperated with investigators who brought down a top Chinese politician’s wife for the murder of a British businessman…. Read More ›
Tight security as China opens police chief trial
Police and security forces surrounded a courthouse in southwest China on Monday, ahead of the long-awaited trial of the mafia-busting cop at the centre of the Neil Heywood murder scandal. Wang Lijun, the flamboyant former police chief and vice-mayor of… Read More ›
Chongqing mother shoved into cement mixer after illegal land grab
A Chongqing woman was in intensive care yesterday after allegedly being pushed into a running cement mixer during a dispute over illegally seized land. Peng Shuhua , 37, who runs a medical clinic in Dianjiang county in the southwestern municipality,… Read More ›
China’s reserve of talented leaders: Wang Yang
I was quite impressed when SCMP reported that, in a speech in May, Wang Yang expressed the view: “The party can’t make you (citizens) happy.” He said, “We should eradicate the wrong concept that happiness is a benevolent gift from… Read More ›
Conflicting news in China on Bo Xilai’s destiny
According to SCMP‘s report by Shi Jiangtao from Beijing today, entitled Next step this week in Bo’s fall from grace, “NPC Standing Committee may vote to remove fallen Chongqing party chief from legislature, a precursor to his expulsion from the party…. Read More ›
China: Bo Xilai to be expelled from party
Ming Pao and Singtao Daily report: according to Asahi Shimbun, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have decided at their Beidaihe meeting to expel Bo Xilai, former secretary of CCP Chongqing Municipal Committee, from the party. They both report:… Read More ›
China court hands Gu Kailai death sentence with reprieve
A Chinese court today sentenced Gu Kailai to a death sentence with a two-year reprieve after finding her guilty of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood, in a crime that triggered the divisive downfall of Gu’s ambitious politician husband, Bo Xilai,… Read More ›
China’s most wanted man shot dead
After an eight-year manhunt across four provinces, involving tens of thousands of police officers, China’s most-wanted criminal died just nine miles from his mother’s home. Zhou Kehua, 42, was cornered in an alley behind a shoe shop in the central… Read More ›
China ends silence on Gu Kailai murder case
A remarkable 3,400-word article on the trial of Gu Kailai for the murder of the British businessman Neil Heywood has been published by China’s official news agency, Xinhua. It breaks the near-total silence that state-run media had maintained on the… Read More ›
Gu Kailai murder trial to start on Thursday in China
Gu Kailai, wife of disgraced former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, is expected to stand trial on Thursday accused of killing a British businessman, a lawyer for her family said yesterday. The case is at the centre of a scandal… Read More ›
China says Bo’s wife indicted for homicide
China has indicted Gu Kailai, the wife of deposed Communist Party politician Bo Xilai, for intentional homicide, in the latest development in a political scandal that has shaken the Party’s once-in-a-decade succession. Gu and family employee Zhang Xiaojun will be… Read More ›
Frenchman goes to China as Bo Xilai witness
A Frenchman who was being held in Cambodia because of his alleged links to Beijing’s biggest political scandal in two decades has been flown to China, where he is wanted as a witness in the case, Cambodia’s information minister said… Read More ›
The mystery of China’s security tsar Zhou Yongkang
SCMP reports on China’s security tsar Zhou Yongkang’s speech, carried yesterday in Qiushi Journal, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s political theory magazine. SCMP says that Zhou condemns “the use of torture and the suspicious deaths of suspects” in a speech… Read More ›
No news on Bo Xilai being deprived of immunity
According to Xinhua report, “The National People’s Congress formally removed Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing, as a deputy to the country’s top legislature, paving the way for formal prosecution.” However, SCMP reported on June 28 that according… Read More ›
Chinese communist party’s four perils according to party birthday editorial
People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s mouthpiece, published an editorial on June 30th to mark the 91st anniversary of the founding of the CCP. Usually, the CCP takes such an occasion to give important instructions to its members and… Read More ›
Bo’s power base has not suffered much in Chongqing
In my post “Chinese rule of law and democracy advocator Qiao Shi returns,” I said quite much on the question of whether Bo Xilai would return as he said to his Japanese friend. Qiao Shi’s case is quite different from Bo’s…. Read More ›
Cambodia arrests Frenchman linked to China’s Bo Xilai scandal
A French architect with ties to disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has been arrested in Cambodia, the French embassy said Tuesday, in a new twist to China’s biggest political scandal in decades. Cambodian police said the arrest of Patrick Devillers… Read More ›
Bo Xilai purged Wang Yang’s followers in Chongqing
Ming Pao reporter Mai Jun reports from Chongqing that on June 18 the reporter visited Chongqing, before the opening of Chongqing Party Congress today, to collect missed details of the political storm of Bo Xilai’s downfall. His findings will be… Read More ›
Top Chinese official arrested for giving spy secrets to US
A state security official has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the United States, sources say, a case both countries have kept quiet for several months as they strive to prevent a fresh crisis in relations. The official, an… Read More ›
Bo’s allies possible 18th Congress delegates
SCMP reports today: “Chongqing Mayor Huang Qifan and several top officials, who once worked closely with ousted party boss Bo Xilai, are among the 50 people on the municipality’s delegate shortlist for the Communist Party congress later this year.” The… Read More ›
China state-run businesses to invest 350 billion yuan in Chongqing
Thirty of China‘s biggest state-owned businesses have signed contracts worth about 350 billion yuan ($55.3 billion) with the southwestern municipality Chongqing, Chinese media reported on Sunday, in a sign of Beijing’s determination to bolster confidence in the city formerly run… Read More ›
Bo Xilai’s relatives’ extensive web of foreign firms
The announcement in mid-March that Bo Xilai had been stripped of his political posts has exposed the former high-flying Chongqing party chief to the glare of publicity, shining attention on his family’s links to a web of foreign companies. These… Read More ›
Bo’s successor woos more foreign investors for Chongqing
Chongqing‘s party boss has told a group of visiting business leaders from Hong Kong and abroad that the municipality will be more open to foreign investment, in a bid to reassure them in the wake of Bo Xilai‘s downfall. “Chongqing… Read More ›