China expressed shock on Thursday after Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso called Taiwan a ”country”, and accused him of intervening in its internal affairs. Aso told a parliamentary committee that Taiwan is a ”law-governed country”, the latest in a series of remarks that have angered Beijing.
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing on Tuesday called on Japan’s leaders to stop visiting a controversial Tokyo war shrine, comparing their actions to the worship of Germany’s Nazis after World War II. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has made five visits to the Yasukuni Shrine since taking office in 2001.
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/ 26 February 2006
China’s agriculture minister has warned of a possible ”massive bird-flu outbreak” as the country announced two new human cases of the H5N1 flu strain, raising to 14 the number of reports of human infections since October. The latest human cases are a nine-year-old girl and a 26-year-old woman.
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/ 23 February 2006
China has announced a ban on cartoons that blend animated elements with live-action actors, a move aimed at nurturing local animators and apparently curbing the use of foreign cartoons. Popular children’s television shows featuring human hosts and animated elements such as Blue’s Clues from the United States and Britain’s Teletubbies could be included in the ban.
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/ 23 February 2006
China warned outspoken Hong Kong Bishop Joseph Zen on Thursday not to mix politics and religion, after Pope Benedict XVI named him a cardinal. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao also said Beijing’s position on refraining from establishing diplomatic ties with Rome had not changed because of the appointment.
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/ 16 February 2006
China has defended its internet censorship policies, saying its rules follow international norms and claims no one has been detained for writing online content. China is no different from Western nations, whose criticisms smack of ”double standards”, said Liu Zhengrong, deputy chief of the Internet Affairs Bureau.
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/ 13 February 2006
Ancient paintings which allegedly prove that the Chinese invented the game of golf up to 1Â 000 years ago are to go on display in Hong Kong in February, a news report said on Monday. The pictures from the 13th and 14th centuries show Chinese noblemen hitting balls into holes with clubs that look remarkably similar to modern golf clubs.
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/ 13 February 2006
Bored with the same old candlelit dinner, red roses and chocolate truffles on Valentine’s Day? Newly rich Chinese are looking to something decidedly more edgy — matching plastic surgery for him and her. In Shanghai’s increasingly competitive plastic surgery market, clinics are offering Valentine’s Day discounts.
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/ 13 February 2006
The number of twin births is rising rapidly across China as more women take fertility drugs, often in order to circumvent the nation’s stern population policies, state media said on Monday. At the Maternal and Child Hygiene Hospital in east China’s Nanjing city, 90 sets of twins and triplets were born last year, compared with usually just 20 sets annually.
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/ 10 February 2006
The Shanghai zoo, located in China’s economic capital, is storing the bones of dead tigers in distilled spirits and selling the resulting tonic as a health supplement, state press said on Friday. The zoo, which keeps up to a dozen tigers, has linked up with an alcohol producer to make the tiger-bone elixir.
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/ 10 February 2006
The Broadway and Hollywood classic The King and I is to be turned into a big-budget Chinese-language stage musical, a Hong Kong production company said on Friday. Music Nation said it would take its adaptation of the famed 1956 musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II on tour around China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
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/ 9 February 2006
Japan and North Korea ended five days of talks in Beijing on Wednesday unable to make progress on normalising relations, with sharp differences remaining over kidnappings, security and wartime history. Japan insisted throughout the talks that no progress would be made unless the issue of North Korea’s abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s was addressed.
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/ 8 February 2006
With vibrant economies and more than a billion people each, China and India might seem obvious candidates for the Group of Eight (G8), but analysts say the road to membership will be long. Russia is now heading the G8 for the first time, inevitably triggering questions about why the two Asian giants have not joined long ago.
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/ 7 February 2006
China has made representations to Pretoria over a series of crimes and murders of Chinese citizens in South Africa and on Tuesday urged its nationals to step up their vigilance in the country. ”Recently there are repeated cases where Chinese citizens were robbed or even injured or killed,” said foreign ministry spokesperson Kong Quan.
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/ 6 February 2006
Japan and North Korea wrapped up a third day of talks on Monday hoping to make progress on normalising ties, but the Stalinist regime’s abduction of Japanese citizens remained the major stumbling block. North Korea declared the abduction question settled after repatriating five kidnap victims following a landmark summit in 2002.
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/ 6 February 2006
China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric power project, will be completed in May this year, nine months ahead of schedule, state media reported on Monday. It will officially be completed in three months’ time when the main dam has concrete poured to 185m above sea level, according to Xinhua.
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/ 3 February 2006
A computer worm expected to begin corrupting files in infected machines around the world on Friday has so far caused no major damage in the Asian financial centres Hong Kong and Tokyo. Experts had warned earlier this week that the worm, known as ”Kama Sutra,” ”CME-24,” ”BlackWorm,” or ”Mywife.E,” could corrupt documents.
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/ 2 February 2006
China has banned Hollywood’s Memoirs of a Geisha a week before it was due to be released over fresh speculation that the Chinese actresses’ roles as Japanese courtesans could spark public controversy. The film tells the story of a girl from a poor Japanese fishing village who is sold to a geisha house and goes on to romance a rich businessman.
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/ 2 February 2006
A blast at a state-owned coal mine in northern China killed 23 workers and caused 53 others to be poisoned with carbon monoxide, the government said on Thursday. The blast occurred Wednesday at the Sihe coal mine in China’s Shanxi province when 697 workers were mining the pit, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
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/ 30 January 2006
Fireworks explosions killed 36 people and injured hundreds more in China as traditional Lunar New Year celebrations led to much mayhem as well as joy across the nation, officials and state media said on Monday. In the most serious accident, 36 people died when a storeroom full of fireworks exploded, Xinhua news agency said.
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/ 27 January 2006
International media rights groups condemned China on Friday over the jailing of journalist Li Changqing for three years on charges of providing ”alarmist information” to an overseas website. Li was sentenced on Tuesday by a court in Fuzhou in the southeastern province of Fujian for publishing an article about a local dengue fever outbreak.
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/ 27 January 2006
The frontman of United States rock band Nine Inch Nails has become the latest celebrity to speak out against Chinese cruelty towards cats and dogs, through an animal rights video launched on Friday. "Every year, millions of cats and dogs are killed for their fur," said Trent Reznor said.
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/ 26 January 2006
Google and other Western internet companies are competing in a ”race to the bottom” as they bow to Chinese censors in order to gain a slice of the world’s most promising market, critics said on Thursday. The Silicon Valley-based online search engine has agreed to censor websites and content banned by China’s propaganda chiefs.
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/ 25 January 2006
Mongolia’s Parliament elected Miyeegombo Enkhbold, the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party’s chairperson, as the country’s new prime minister on Wednesday, Chinese state media said. The election of Enkhbold (41) a former Ulan Bator mayor, marks an end to the political upheaval that emerged this month after his party withdrew from a coalition government with the Democratic Party.
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/ 25 January 2006
China is in the grip of a worsening HIV-Aids epidemic, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warned on Wednesday, as new official figures showed earlier assessments had overestimated the number of cases. ”Make no mistake, China’s Aids epidemic is growing,” the WHO’s chief representative in China, Hank Bekedam, told a press conference.
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/ 23 January 2006
China’s economy likely became one of the world’s five biggest in 2005 as booming exports and surging investment again helped secure growth of well above nine percent, analysts said on Monday. Ahead of Wednesday’s release of China’s 2005 economic data, analysts expect the world fastest growing major economy to surge between 9,5 and 10,3% to surpass the two-trillion-dollar mark.
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/ 20 January 2006
The United States online auction service eBay on Friday scrapped all sellers’ transaction fees in China, in an effort to compete with local competitors offering free services, including Yahoo-invested Alibaba.com. The move means that sellers won’t get paid until the buyers receive and are satisfied with the products, it said.
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/ 18 January 2006
Chinese authorities banned 79 newspapers and seized 169-million publications deemed illegal in a nationwide crackdown last year, the country’s top propaganda official announced. Seventeen production lines making pirate compact discs were also shut down and 50 types of computer software games banned, said Liu Yunshan on Tuesday.
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/ 18 January 2006
North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il was reportedly heading home on Wednesday on a special train, ending a secretive week-long visit to China that apparently focused on nuclear weapons and economic reforms. Press reports said the famously reclusive Kim, who is afraid of flying, had left Beijing on Tuesday night and crossed the border back into North Korea on Wednesday morning.
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/ 13 January 2006
After days of frenzied speculation, a television station claimed on Friday to have captured proof of reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il living it up at a luxury hotel in China. The grainy footage broadcast by Japan’s Nippon Television station in Tokyo showed a bespectacled man with Kim’s trademark bouffant hairstyle surrounded by men in black as he got out of a limousine.
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/ 12 January 2006
The location of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il remained a mystery on Friday amid a series of rumours that he was in Beijing, possibly for nuclear talks. Other rumours, quickly picked up by global media outlets, had him in southern China near the border with Hong Kong staying at a luxury hotel while more speculation placed him in Russia.
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/ 11 January 2006
China’s foreign minister began a six-nation African tour on Wednesday, which analysts say will focus on boosting energy ties and forging stronger global political alliances to counterbalance United States dominance. Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing will visit Cape Verde, Senegal, Mali, Liberia, Nigeria and Libya during the trip, set to end on January 19.