In remarks made by Singapore's K Shanmugam on the conclusion of his back-to-back introductory visits as foreign minister to the United States and China, he noted that comments he made on the US-China relationship during his visit to Washington were warmly welcomed in Beijing. more ›

Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper has ended his five-day visit to China with a one-hour meeting Saturday evening with Bo Xilai, the embattled Communist Party chief of Chongqing who is now facing a serious setback in his ascent to the Politburo with the disappearance of his erstwhile right-man, former police chief Wang Lijun. more ›

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After featuring the political calligraphy of Bo Xilai prominently on its front page for two consecutive days on Feb 8 and Feb 9, Chongqing Daily appears to have done an about-face in its treatment of the municipal Communist Party chief. Today, it was Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan that occupied much of the paper's front page. 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 ›

A delegation of Syrian opposition groups  visited Beijing earlier this week and met with Vice Foreign Minister Zhai Jun, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed. This is the first contact reported by the Chinese government since violence broke out in the Middle Eastern country. 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 ›

Rep. Pete Hoekstra's creepy, racist Superbowl ad was just asking to be spoofed. And now, Funny Or Die has come up with the first of what we think will be many parodies. more ›

State broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) has officially launched CCTV America in its bid to capture a greater share of the global audience. The new operation, located out of a brand new studio in Washington DC, will be produced by about 100 journalists in 15 bureaus in North and South America, offering viewers four hours of programming daily in three programmes: Biz Asia America, a business news broadcast; The Heat, a talkshow; and Americas Now, a news magazine programme. more ›

Zhang Renliang (张仁良), the former Jing'an district chief who was sacked last year in the wake of the devastating 2010 fire that ravaged an apartment building, killing 58 and injuring 71, has been given a political resurrection with his new appointment as deputy party secretary of Xinjiang's Kashgar prefecture. Zhang's new job comes just seven months after he was sacked from Jingan district, along with dozens of other officials that were either replaced, punished or jailed. more ›

Angry Syrian and Libyan demonstrators threw rocks, eggs and tomatoes at the Chinese embassy in Tripoli to protest China's veto of a UN Security Council resolution urging Syrian president Bashar al-Assad to step down: more ›

Vice president Xi Jinping (习近平), the man widely tipped to take over leadership reins from president Hu Jintao very soon, is due for a visit to Iowa. The state's governor Terry Branstad has rolled out the red carpet even before Xi's arrival, describing his trip as the biggest thing that's happened to Iowa since Pope John Paul II visited in 1979: more ›

Political has-been and erstwhile presidential hopeful US senator John McCain ruffled a few Chinese feathers over the weekend at a security conference in Munich by announcing that "The Arab Spring Is Coming To China." more ›

"If only Hong Kongers knew this: that if the mainland does not have democracy, Hong Kong will not have democracy, and there will be no changes in its circumstances. If Hong Kong does not have democracy, then there will be no security for Hong Kong's liberty and rule of law, and there will be no change in its circumstances. If Hong Kongers took their dissatisfaction and anger, and used it to push for democracy in Hong Kong and the mainland, then Hong Kong would stand to gain from it, and so would the mainland." more ›

Simmering discontent among Hong Kongers with travellers and birth tourists from the mainland has reached a new flashpoint after members of the HKGolden.com forum raised more than HK$100,000 to take up a full-page advertisement in Apple Daily featuring the image of a locust overlooking the city skyline of Hong Kong. more ›

CNN's Fareed Zakaria asks Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong a few questions about China in a recent interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Video and transcript after the jump... more ›

Al-Jazeera's Melissa Chan gives us a fascinating glimpse of student life at a Chinese Communist Party school. more ›

Two interesting soundbytes from US presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich from the GOP debate in Florida Thursday night: more ›

Lobsang Sangay, Kalon Tripa of the Tibetan government-in-exile, comments on the recent shootouts on Tibetan protestors in the first few days of the Chinese New Year, and calls upon Tibetans to halt celebrations of Losar, the Tibetan New Year. Transcript after the jump... more ›

US billionaire Warren Buffett may have appeared on this year's chunwan (春晚), CCTV's Chinese New Year gala show, but even that wasn't enough to turn around the long-standing decline of the annual affair. Barbara Demick and John Lee of the Los Angeles Times write that increasingly heavy-handed censorship has caused several heavyweight celebrities to drop out of the show and driven viewers away: more ›

Transcript after the jump... more ›

BBC's Beijing correspondent Damian Grammaticas is back from a week in Taiwan covering the recent elections. He reflects: more ›

South Korea's Chosun Ilbo has translated some very interesting comments by Kim Jong-nam -- the eldest son, and at one point, the presumed successor of the late Kim Jong-il -- made to Yoji Komi, an editor at the Tokyo Shimbun daily, in private emails sent between 2004 and 2011. In the emails, Kim reveals he has never met his half-brother Kim Jong-un, that his regime will not last very long, and that the "Great Successor" once went to Japan on a fake passport. He also admitted to being "protected" by the Chinese government: more ›

Guangdong's Wukan village will re-elect new village leaders after a wave of massive protests which lasted for around 3 months captured nationwide attention. Lin Zulian (林祖恋), the protest leader as well as the chief of a committee running the village after protesters gained control, has been appointed as the village's Party Chief and is to organize the upcoming village election. more ›

"This is how a free and democratic New China will be. All governments at various levels all the way to the central government will be elected through popular, fair and anonymous voting. They will be responsible to the people that elected them. It will be a fulfillment of Sun Yat-Sen's Three Principles of the People, of Lincoln's idea of government of the people, by the people, for the people; and Roosevelt's Four Freedoms. This will guarantee the independence, solidarity and unity of the nation, as well as its cooperation with the democratic nations of the world." more ›

A Guangdong member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's political advisory body, has proposed to build a "Goddess of Harmony" (和谐女神像) at an important bridge linking Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macau. more ›

Ma Ying-jeou (马英九), chairman of the Kuomintang, was re-elected as the president of the Republic of China (Taiwan), winning 51.6% of total votes cast, a comfortable 800,000 vote lead over his top contender, Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). James Soong (宋楚瑜) of the People First Party received 2.8% of the vote. more ›