News stories by Gordon Ross

China’s rapidly growing legion of microbloggers is proving a worthy foe against ongoing government efforts to monitor, influence and censor information on the country’s vast Internet. Government efforts have failed to curb an outpouring of anger and grief in the wake of the recent Wenzhou train disaster.

Despite government efforts to curb the number of people it puts to death, China continues to execute more people than the rest of the world combined, and corporal punishment remains popular among the citizenry.

Despite notable successes in the battle against HIV and AIDS in China, discrimination against infected people remains rife here and critics continue to question the Chinese government over allocation of treatment funds.

At the upcoming Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) summit, to be held on the tropical Chinese island of Hainan Apr. 14, discussion will focus not only on deepening economic ties among members, but will also likely touch on global political events, including the crisis in the Middle East and North Africa. But China insists the club has no political agenda.

Peng Gaofeng spent three years looking for his abducted son, launching an Internet campaign that eventually drew 300,000 followers. Last month, Peng was reunited with his son, and the 34-year-old has vowed to help the thousands of Chinese parents who are still trying to find their missing children.

China’s top legislative body is considering scrapping the death penalty for 13 non-violent crimes, including tax evasion, tomb raiding and animal smuggling. But the impact these changes will have on the total number of prisoners the country puts to death is uncertain.

Despite what are often overwhelming obstacles, a gutsy minority of investigative reporters in China continues to expose official corruption and criminal behaviour. But they do so at their own peril.

More than a year after the riots in China’s remote Xinjiang autonomous region, the country’s bloodiest ethnic clash in decades, calm has returned to the capital Urumqi. But the underlying tensions remain — tensions that Beijing will be forced to address as it moves forward in its campaign to develop the country’s west.

Last June, when thousands of Iranians — many organised through social networking websites such as Twitter — took to the streets to protest the outcome of the country’s presidential election, a Chinese English-language newspaper, ‘Global Times’, published an editorial critical of the Western media’s coverage of the protests.

In 2003, a number of Xu Cong Yang’s possessions — including jewelry and a rare stamp collection — went missing. The culprit, he believed, was a company owned by the local government in a central Chinese city that Xu had enlisted to insure the items.