Dan Martin

President Jacob Zuma met his Chinese counterpart on Tuesday for talks aimed at broadening the relationship between Beijing and SA.

Flooding in China that has killed more than 700 people this year and inundated countless communities looks set to worsen.

A strong earthquake hit a remote mountainous area of China on Wednesday, killing about 400 people and injuring thousands.

China on Friday angrily protested at US President Barack Obama's meeting with the Dalai Lama, saying it had "seriously harmed" relations.

China's offer to hold talks with aides to the Dalai Lama is unlikely to bring a breakthrough on Tibet, experts cautioned on Saturday, saying it was a PR exercise ahead of the Beijing Olympics. Chinese state media said on Friday that government officials would meet soon with a representative of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

China has cracked a terrorist group plotting to kidnap foreigners during the Beijing Olympics, police said on Thursday. The announcement follows the revelation of two other terror plots last month, but there has been scepticism over whether Beijing is inflating a terror threat to justify tighter control on dissent ahead of the Olympics.

The muezzin's call to prayer at Kashgar's main Id Kah mosque is a loud reminder that millions of Muslims here in China's far west answer to a higher authority than the Communist Party. Muslim residents of this 2 000-year-old Silk Road city express quiet anger when asked about recent clashes in a nearby city between Muslims and Chinese police.

The father of China's latest bird-flu victim also has the disease, officials said on Friday, prompting World Health Organisation fears of possible human-to-human transmission. A Health Ministry statement said a 52-year-old man named Lu in the eastern city of Nanjing had the H5N1 strain, which killed his son on Sunday.

Several times this year, Tan Mingzhu had the terrible feeling her home in central China was about to collapse in on her family. Frightening tremors rocked their simple concrete dwelling 4km from China's mammoth Three Gorges Dam, ripping floor-to-ceiling cracks in the walls, and she doesn't hesitate in assigning blame.

China faced mounting pressure on Tuesday to honour pledges of media freedom made for the 2008 Olympics, with two Western groups accusing the government of harassing and unfairly jailing journalists. Reports by the Committee to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Watch said reporters still faced intimidation just a year before the Beijing Games.

Rioting has highlighted mounting pressures to change China's controversial population control policies, observers said on Wednesday, but the government shows no signs of buckling. Security reinforcements had moved into 28 towns in the southern Guangxi region after thousands of residents clashed in recent days with officials enforcing the so-called "one-child" policy.