BEIJING, September 22 (Reuters): China sentenced a former property executive who once called President Xi Jinping "a clown" to 18 years in prison for graft, a court said on Tuesday, in what some critics called an especially harsh sentence amid an ongoing clampdown on dissent. Ren Zhiqiang, the former chairman of Huayuan, a state-owned real estate group, was convicted for illegal gains totalling 112 million yuan ($16.5 million), according to a notice on the website of

HONG KONG, September 22 (Reuters): Hong Kong has no legal basis to demand that any particular rights be extended to 12 Hong Kong people detained in China as they tried to flee by boat and they will have to face the law there, the city's chief executive said on Tuesday. The 12 were arrested on Aug. 23 for illegal entry into mainland Chinese waters after setting off from Hong Kong in a boat bound for self-ruled Taiwan following a crackdown on pro-democracy activists in t

BEIJING, September 22 (Reuters): China is pushing growing numbers of Tibetan rural laborers off the land and into recently built military-style training centers where they are turned into factory workers, mirroring a program in the western Xinjiang region that rights groups have branded coercive labor. Beijing has set quotas for the mass transfer of rural laborers within Tibet and to other parts of China, according to over a hundred state media reports, policy documents from go

NINGBO, China, September 20 (Reuters): Authorities in China's northeastern Jilin province have found the novel coronavirus on the packaging of imported squid, health authorities in the city of Fuyu said on Sunday, urging anyone who may have bought it to get themselves tested. One of the packages had arrived in the city via the provincial capital Changchun, Fuyu city's health office said on its official WeChat account on Sunday. It asked people who had bought and eate

TAIPEI, September 20 (Reuters): Two days of Chinese military aircraft approaching Taiwan demonstrate that Beijing is a threat to the entire region and have shown Taiwanese even more clearly the true nature of China's government, President Tsai Ing-wen said on Sunday. Multiple Chinese aircraft flew across the mid-line of the Taiwan Strait and into Taiwan's air defence identification zone on Friday and Saturday, causing Taiwan to scramble jets to intercept. China cla

BEIJING, September 18 (Reuters): China aims to set up a space programme operating thousands of flights a year and carrying tens of thousands of tons of cargo and passengers by 2045, state news agency Xinhua quoted an official as saying on Friday. China is trying to catch up with Russia and the United States to become a major space power by 2030. Bao Weimin, a senior official at China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., told a conference that the planned space flight syst

TAIPEI/BEIJING, September 18 (Reuters): Taiwan scrambled fighter jets on Friday as 18 Chinese aircraft buzzed the island, including crossing the sensitive mid-line of the Taiwan Strait, in an escalation of tensions as a senior U.S. official held talks in Taipei. China had earlier announced the start of combat drills near the Taiwan Strait, denouncing what it called collusion between the island, which it claims as part of its territory, and the United States. U.S. Undersecretary f

WASHINGTON, September 17 (Reuters): The U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday it has charged five Chinese residents and two Malaysian businessmen in a wide-ranging hacking effort that encompassed targets from videogames to pro-democracy activists. Federal prosecutors said the Chinese nationals had been charged with hacking more than 100 companies in the United States and abroad, including software development companies, computer manufacturers, telecommunications providers,

WASHINGTON, September 16 (Reuters): The United States plans to sell as many as seven major weapons systems, including mines, cruise missiles and drones to Taiwan, four people familiar with the discussions said, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on China. Pursuing seven sales at once is a rare departure from years of precedent in which U.S. military sales to the island were spaced out and carefully calibrated to minimize tensions with Beijing. But the Trump admini

GENEVA, September 15 (Reuters): Nearly two dozen activist groups said on Tuesday that crimes against humanity and genocide are taking place against Uighurs in China's remote Xinjiang region, where more than 1 million people are held in camps. The spokesperson's office at the Chinese foreign ministry said it had not seen the letter, but rejected such allegations as "sensational topics concocted by some anti-China forces, a farcical attempt to smear and discredit Chi

TAIPEI, September 15 (Reuters): The Vatican has asked Taiwan not to worry about the extension of a deal between the Vatican and China on the appointment of bishops as it was a religious matter and not a diplomatic one, the island's foreign ministry said on Tuesday. Pope Francis has signed off on a two-year extension of the agreement that critics have condemned as a sell-out to the communist government, a senior Vatican source said on Monday. The Vatican is Chinese-claime

BRUSSELS, September 14 (Reuters): European Union leaders told Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday to open up markets, respect minorities and step back from a crackdown in Hong Kong, also asserting that Europe would no longer be taken advantage of in trade. Anxious to show that the EU will not take sides in a global standoff between China and the United States, German Chancellor Angela Merkel joined the bloc's chief executive and chairman to deliver a tough-talking messag

September 14 (ANI): In a stunning revelation, a Chinese virologist has claimed that the coronavirus was created in a government-controlled laboratory in Wuhan, the original epicentre of the outbreak and offered scientific evidence to back her claims. In an exclusive conversation with 'Loose Women', a British talk show, Dr Li-Meng Yan, the scientist said she was assigned to investigate "new pneumonia" in Wuhan. She said that she discovered a cover-up operation regar

Beijing, September 14 (IANS): In an interesting development, ByteDance has reportedly said it will neither sell TikTok's US operations to Oracle nor give the source code to any US buyers, state-owned China Global Television Network (CGTN) reported on Monday. The report came as The New York Times and other US media outlets reported on Sunday that Bytedance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, has chosen Cloud major Oracle over Microsoft to run its US operations as a 'trusted tech pa

Itanagar, September 12 (IANS): Five young men from Arunachal Pradesh, who went missing on September 2 and were later found to be in Chinese territory, were handed over to India by the People's Liberation Army on Saturday amid the ongoing stand-off between the two sides at the Line of Actual Control in Eastern Ladakh area. The missing five returned to India 11 days after they were said to have been abducted, defence sources said. The five youth were handed over to Indian autho

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 11 (IANS): Five youths from Arunachal Pradesh, who went missing on September 2 and were later found to be in Chinese territory, would be handed over to Indian authorities on Saturday, Union Minister Kiren Rijiju announced on Friday. Rijiju, the Union Youth Affairs and Sports Minister and an MP from Arunachal Pradesh, in a tweet, said: "The Chinese PLA has confirmed to Indian Army to hand over the youths from Arunachal Pradesh to our side. The handing over i

WASHINGTON/MOSCOW, September 11 (Reuters): Russia and China dismissed on Friday allegations by Microsoft Corp that hackers linked to Moscow and Beijing were trying to spy on people tied to both U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Advisers to both presidential campaigns are assessing risks from digital spies around the globe, as the two candidates face off on Nov. 3 in one of the most consequential U.S. presidential elections in decades. The Micro

BEIJING/NEW DELHI, September 11 (Reuters): China and India said on Friday they had agreed to de-escalate renewed tensions on their contested Himalayan border and take steps to restore "peace and tranquillity" following a high-level diplomatic meeting in Moscow. Chinese State Councillor Wang Yi and Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar met in Moscow on Thursday and reached a five-point consensus, including agreements that troops from both sides should quickly disengage

New Delhi, September 11 (PTI): Noting that the current situation at their border is not in the interest of either side, India and China have agreed on a five-point roadmap including quick disengagement of troops and avoiding any action that could escalate tensions for resolving the four-month-long face-off in eastern Ladakh. As the two countries reached the agreement during the talks between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Thursday eveni

TAIPEI, September 10 (Reuters): Taiwan denounced China on Thursday over large-scale air and naval drills off its southwestern coast which it called a serious provocation and a threat to international air traffic. It urged Beijing to rein in its armed forces. China, which claims democratic Taiwan as its own, has stepped up military exercises near the island, in what Taipei views as intimidation to force it to accept Chinese rule. Yeh Kuo-hui, from Taiwan's defence