Pollution Rising Fast in China’s Seas

Rapid economic growth in China’s coastal regions has resulted in serious levels of ocean pollution, damaging marine life and posing a threat to humans. As much as half of China’s offshore areas are considered polluted.

CHINA: Click Your Kidney Away

In China, where a growing demand for organ transplants coupled with a dramatic shortage of donors has fuelled a rampant black market trade, selling your organs for cash is a mouse click away.

China Registers Rapid Growth – In Anxiety

Long considered a sign of weakness or a bourgeois indulgence, psychiatry is slowly entering the mainstream here, with a growing number of Chinese willing to talk through their problems with a therapist.

CHINA: Sympathy for Japan Drowns Out Historic Hate

Despite deep historic tensions between the two Asian powers, a surge of sympathy has emerged among Chinese toward victims of last week’s earthquake and resulting tsunami in northern Japan, which has left an estimated 10,000 dead or missing.

Eat Chinese, But Eat Safe

Despite a greater government effort to monitor food safety in the wake of high profile contamination incidents – including the 2008 melamine milk poisoning scandal that killed six infants and made 300,000 ill – the majority of Chinese still feel insecure about the food they eat.

China Learns to Live With Inflation

At Mr. Ma’s fruit and vegetable shop, located in a historic hutong alleyway a few blocks from the Lama Temple, the impact of China’s growing inflation is evident. In recent months, the prices of Mr. Ma’s products have soared. Eggs have gone from RMB 7 (6.5 RMB to a dollar) to RMB 10 per kilogram. Tomatoes have almost doubled. Cabbage has tripled.

CHINA: Men Becoming More Suicide-Prone

While new research indicates that China’s overall suicide rate has been in decline for the last two decades, some segments of the population – including urban males and the elderly – are increasingly likely to take their own lives, the result of breakneck social change in the world’s most populous country.

CHINA: Deaths Rise With Smoke

Five years ago China pledged to ban smoking in all indoor public places by January of this year. That promise remains unfulfilled and is today symbolic of the lack of progress made in the fight against tobacco use in China, where up to a million people die of smoking-related complications each year.

CHINA: Children Cry Out for Protection

A growing number of reports in China’s state media have thrust the issue of child abuse into the national spotlight. Many young parents and teachers today have shifting attitudes about corporal punishment, but incidents of abuse are being reported across the country. Affected children are virtually unprotected under the law.

Food Worries Rise in China

In China, a country with a history of famine and where rural dwellers still use the greeting "have you eaten?", food is close to sacred. Feeding the country’s massive population remains one of the biggest threats to future economic growth and social stability, experts warn.

China Moves to End ‘Modern Slavery’

Authorities in remote Xinjiang province rescued a group of mentally ill men last month. The men had been sold by a shelter operator and forced to work in a factory. The rescue shone a light on the darkest side of China’s rapid economic growth – slavery.

RIGHTS-CHINA: Crackdowns Do Little to Address Sex Work

Authorities in China are lauding a sweeping crackdown on prostitution across the country in recent months. But the sex trade continues to thrive in this booming nation, while services and support for women working in the industry remain inadequate, experts say.

CHINA: Scientists Push Desalination To Meet Water Shortages

While China faces grave water shortages, researchers at institutions across the country are working on new water- saving and desalination technologies that they hope can alleviate the crisis in the crucial years to come.

CHINA: Researchers Race Toward Renewable Energy

Researchers in China, the world’s leading provider of wind turbines and solar panels, are working toward making renewable energy cheaper, more efficient and a bigger part of the country’s power grid.

CHINA: Quest for Beauty Becomes A Health Risk

After her run to the finals of the 2005 "Super Girl" talent contest, Wang Bei, from central China’s Hubei province, lived on the cusp of pop stardom. In November, Wang opted for cosmetic surgery in an effort to improve her chances of success.

CHINA: As Poverty and Privilege Clash, Social Tensions Rise

In late October, a speeding Volkswagen struck two students as they roller skated on the grounds of Hebei University, leaving them motionless in a pool of blood. Security guards intercepted the driver as he attempted to flee, but he refused to leave the car. "Sue me if you dare," he warned, "my father is Li Gang!"

CHINA: More Growth Lies Ahead, But Hurdles Too

As China’s economy continues to soar, many experts here remain only cautiously optimistic about the country’s future growth, confident that its fundamentals remain strong but concerned that a real estate bubble and rising inflation could slow economic growth.

RELIGION-CHINA: Buddhism Enjoys A Revival

Quan Zhenyuan discovered Buddhism by accident. After the owner of a vegetarian restaurant here in the Chinese capital gave her a book about the religion, she became hooked. Today, Quan is one of a growing number of urban Chinese who turn to Buddhism for spiritual fulfillment.

CHINA: ‘Hukou’ Registration System Trips Over Inequity

Yu Mengxiang is a 24-year-old office manager at a foreign company in Beijing. Although he looks and acts like a typical urban male, his household registration – or ‘hukou’ – is in a village in north-east Liaoning province, which means he isn’t entitled to government benefits in the capital. Bucking conventional wisdom, he doesn’t want any.

CHINA: For Now, Old Beijing Community Gets a Reprieve

On a chilly but bright fall day near the Drum and Bell Towers, one of the Chinese capital’s top tourist draws, business is brisk for Boss Liu. Drivers working for Liu’s rickshaw business ferry dozens of foreign and domestic tourists through the historic alleyways of a treasured neighbourhood that, as recently as October, was slated for demolition.