More than half of the 27 journalists imprisoned in China are ethnic Tibetan or Uyghur, says the Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) in a report posted on its website. more ›

Three men were handed jail sentences for up to a decade in a secret trial last year for "inciting subversion of state power" through their criticisms of former president Jiang Zemin. The details of the trial have only now emerged through a Hong Kong-based rights organisation, writes Will Clem of the South China Morning Post: more ›

Seeing Red in China has translated a most fascinating account written by Ge Xun (葛洵), a Chinese man who migrated to the United States in 1986. He was back in Beijing recently to take care of funeral arrangements for his mother who had just died at the age of 83. After he was done with family matters, Ge planned to pay a visit to famed "Tiananmen Mother" Ding Zilin (丁子霖), a retired professor whose son was killed in the June 4 crackdown in 1989, and who now leads a group of women like herself to press the government to uncover the truth. more ›

A controversial bill that is being proposed in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region will, if passed, make real-name HIV testing and disclosure compulsory. Under the regulation, which is still in draft form, HIV-positive patients would have to  inform their partners of their status within three days of receiving test results, failing which this would be done by health workers. more ›

Nicola Davison of The Guardian reports on the upswing in business that the surrogate industry is expecting in the Year of the Dragon. She speaks to a woman surnamed Gao, a surrogate mother on the hunt for the next infertile couple seeking a womb: more ›

Jende Huang writes on Sino-NK about the illicit trade in crystal meth between North Korea and China. Curiously, China doesn't seem to be too keen in reprimanding the DPRK for the production and export of meth, or bingdu (冰毒) in Chinese. more ›

Literary badboy and rally driver Han Han (韩寒) is set to take anti-fraud crusader Fang Zhouzi (方舟子) to court for claiming online that some of his works were probably ghost-written. more ›

Most people in China prefer to have sons instead of daughters to continue the family name, but not one young woman in Yancheng, Jiangsu province. In fact, she wanted to have a girl so badly she took a pair of scissors and snipped off her five-month-old son's penis. The court has handed her a five year prison sentence. more ›

In order to dive into the world of rural sex workers so as to better understand and to speak up for them, Liumang Yan decided to become a prostitute for a day last week. To be more exact, she didn't exactly prostitute herself -- she offered sexual services free of charge to migrant workers. Along the way, she posted updates on Sina and Tencent Weibo, telling her followers about the hardships faced by the women she met, and the men she served. more ›

Shanghai police have begun investigating the case of Ryan Fedoruk, the Canadian scammer and fake landlord who sublet 30 apartments to 80 tenants before fleeing with RMB300,000, after Eva Gao, the local lawyer who is providing victims with legal aid, handed over statements by 45 people who say they have been swindled by Fedoruk. Shanghai PSB's economic crime investigation department said it would investigate the whereabouts of the man after they were done looking through the statements. more ›

Lots of foreign scammers milling about in Shanghai doing their thing these days, it seems. First there was Ryan Fedoruk, the Canadian fake landlord who sublet 30 apartments to 80 tenants before fleeing with RMB300,000. And then yesterday, a Nigerian man was charged at the Shanghai No.1 Intermediate People's Court.for concealing criminal income totaling more than US$265,000, according to the Shanghai Daily: more ›

It's been a couple of days since we told you about Ryan Fedoruk, the Canadian scammer and fake landlord who sublet 30 apartments to 80 tenants before fleeing with RMB300,000, and still, the man is nowhere to be found. Victims tell Shanghaiist they were told by police on their last check a couple of days ago that Fedoruk still hasn't left China. But who knows? Our friend could have walked over a bridge to Vietnam without his passport, or trekked over from Tibet to India, or walked over the frozen Yalu River to the DPRK. more ›

"I know Fedoruk. He is a scammer and he ran away, owing me tens of thousands yuan," said a landlord victim who refused to be named. "He rented the apartments, then he sublet them and disappeared with the money he owed to me and to the poor tenants, but I will find him." more ›

India is set to lodge a formal protest with China over the ill-treatment of one of its Shanghai-based diplomats in Yiwu more ›

Information continues to trickle in ever-so-slowly on the so-called new social benefits system that China is rolling out for expatriates here. Now, they're saying some -- not all of us! -- will be allowed to retire and to withdraw our pensions here. But who will get it, and who won't? Nobody seems sure. more ›

Kill them, of course. A man surnamed Jiang has been detained and charged for killing one and injuring three others after they interrupted the little rumpus-stumpus he was having with two hustlers in his car parked on a road in Foshan, Guangdong. The details: more ›

Protesters in Wukan, the village that captivated China watchers around the world during their bold stand-off with the Chinese government, have packed up shop and gone home after government concessions. more ›

AP reports that government officials forcefully shut down an outdoor Christmas party organised by Christians in Xitan village (溪坦村) in Zhejiang province. Xitan bills itself as a "Christmas village", and it comes under the jurisdiction of Ruian city which is home to many underground churches and manufactures some 500 million yuan in Christmas products each year. more ›

The Beijing municipal government announced new rules yesterday requiring internet users to register on Chinese microblogging platforms with their real names before they are allowed to publish posts. Under the new so-called "Weibo Development and Management Regulations", microblog users would still be able to continue to post under nicknames, but each account can now only be activated if they are first tied to a real identity. Users who do not register within the next three months may find their accounts frozen and unable to publish new posts. more ›

Here's yet another prime example of how Taiwan is light years ahead of the rest of Asia: A court has ruled against an employee of a gay massage parlour who sued his boss for defamation after he used his image in an advertisement placed on a gay magazine. The judge's rationale? The assertion that someone's gay is no longer defamatory today. more ›

"For the first time on record, the Chinese Communist party has lost all control, with the population of 20,000 in this southern fishing village now in open revolt." So begins Telegraph correspondent Malcolm Moore's report of what he has personally witnessed in the fishing village of Wukan, Guangdong over the past few days. Enraged over government land grabs, villagers have now overrun local authorities and driven police out. They remain barricaded within their village, roadblocks set up by both police and villagers preventing food and water from entering. Here's a roundup of what's happening. more ›

A 38-year-old South African woman by the name of Janice Bronwyn Linden (pictured right) has been executed more than three years after she was arrested for being found with 3kg of methamphetamine upon her arrival in the Guangzhou airport. Her death sentence was carried out by lethal injection (and witnessed by her own family members) just days after a Filipino was executed for a similar crime, sparking protests in the city of Manila. more ›

"...The more important thing is that during the past ten years, China's legal system has gradually caught up with the rest of the world's, and the Chinese market has been applying international regulations to control itself." more ›

The office of the Karmapa Lama has issued an official statement in response to charges by the Indian police that he was taking foreign money and acting as a spy for China: more ›

Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent for The Guardian, spent the weekend at an auction in Beijing attended by well-heeled buyers ready to pay top dollar for spirits and tonics with tiger, rhino horn and pangolin ingredients. Watts watched silently at first, but eventually decided to reveal he was a journalist so he could ask staff about the illegality of the stuff on sale. Here's what happened: more ›

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Shanghai Daily reports: "Three local officials are among the six men detained for having sex with two teenage girls in Lueyang County, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, according to the police." more ›

Residents of Shenzhen can let out a sigh of relief and help people on the streets without the fear that the person they're helping is going to turn around and sue their rescuer. In light of the recent Yueyue debacle, Shenzhen has drafted China's first Good Samaritan Law to encourage the general public to help those in need. more ›

Wow. If this can happen in Taiwan, what are the chances that it'll happen in China too? more ›

We told you on Sunday how a Russian woman was sentenced to death in Zhuhai for heroin smuggling. A 35-year-old Filipino man is set to join her in the gallows for the same crime -- he was found carrying 1.495 kg of heroin in September 2008 at the Guilin International Airport, and his execution is set for December 8. more ›