News stories by Gordon Ross, page 2

Thirteen years ago a local official in north-east China’s Heilongjiang province tried to extort money from a woman named Liu Jie, who operated a successful cow farm.

Long before Liu Xiaobo, China’s most prominent political dissident and co- author of the Charter 08 call for political reform, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for 'incitement to subvert state power,' his wife, Liu Xia, had accepted his fate.

The Nu River flows from the Tibetan highlands through China’s western Yunnan province, cutting between two mountain ranges before rushing through Burma into the Andaman Sea. It is home to a third of the country’s ethnic groups and a diverse ecosystem of 7,000 species of plants and 80 rare or endangered animals and fish.