News stories by Mitch Moxley, page 5

Collapsed buildings, homes turned to rubble, students killed or trapped in the wreckage of schools and dormitories — last week’s 7.1-magnitude earthquake in western China’s remote Qinghai province offered chilling reminders of the Sichuan earthquake that killed almost 90,000 people in 2008.

A once-in-a-century drought in south-west China has sparked concern over how China, which has one-fifth of the world’s population but just 7 percent of its water, has managed its water supply and growing network of hydroelectric dams.

Shortly after Liu Yan’s four-year-old son, Liu Yi, was bitten by a dog, he did what any responsible parent would do: took his child to the hospital for a vaccination. Two weeks later, after the fourth injection, Liu Yi became violently ill.

Expanded overseas bureaus, more Chinese and foreign-language editorial products reaching global audiences and now, a reformatting of the country’s most widely read English-language newspaper. These are signs of the expansion of China’s state media, one that President Hu Jintao has described as an 'increasingly fierce struggle in the domain of news and opinion'.

After Chen Lusheng, a police sergeant from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, died in December after an off-duty night of heavy drinking with local officials, his superiors tried to have him designated a 'martyr' who 'died in the line of duty,' so that his family would receive greater compensation.

Life for China’s 130 million migrant workers has never been easy. In recent years, however, family life for the ‘liudong renkou’ (floating population) was showing signs of improving — until the financial crisis.