News stories by Kit Gillet

Understanding that sex workers have rights too may still be some way off in China, but the government’s decision to stop police from parading them in public to humiliate them appears to reflect changing public attitudes toward those in the sex trade.

Thirty-six-year-old Luo Fusheng left his hometown in China’s Jiangxi province a decade ago to look for work to help support his family. Unskilled and with limited education, Luo eventually ended up in the factory city of Shenzhen, more than 700 kilometres to the south, where he now works as a security guard.

Wang Yibing had been married three years before she found out her husband was gay. He had known all along, yet, like many homosexual men in China, had chosen to enter into a traditional marriage to reduce the pressure he was feeling from his family and society.

China’s lifting of its longstanding ban on foreign visitors with HIV removes a restriction that many Chinese doctors and activists find discriminatory, but removing the stigma attached with the virus remains one of the biggest challenges ahead in facing the disease.

For six decades, governmental budgets and spending in China have remained classified and inaccessible to the general public. Yet this may be about to change.

The emails started arriving two weeks ago, first in a trickle but slowly in increasing numbers. They talked about a public forum to discuss plans for the controversial redevelopment of a historical area of the Chinese capital Beijing.

China may be under international pressure, especially from the United States, over the valuation of its currency, but is unlikely to back down in the short term given its worries about its export sector and the jobs that depend on it.