Few in the Chinese capital are aware of the price their city would pay for staging the world’s first ‘green Olympics’ in August. The fabulous capital of Chinese emperors and the epitome of modern China’s ambitions is being driven to extinction by its chronic lack of water. And the Olympic games are expediting the city’s slow demise, according to experts.
With less than two months to go before the Beijing Olympics begin, analysts have rejected claims that terrorism is a major threat to the Games, despite recent reports from China of militant activity.
A mixture of pride and prickle pervaded China’s first public celebration of Duanwu, or Dragon Boat festival, in over half a century.
The national mourning observed this week for victims of the Sichuan earthquake is the first public remembrance in modern China’s history ordered to commemorate ordinary people rather than political leaders.
A sense of solemnity has enveloped most activities in the Chinese capital these days. Even the avant-garde shows in town strike a note of bereavement for the 50,000 people estimated to have perished in the deadly earthquake this week.
As the death toll from a devastating earthquake in south-western China continues to climb, the disaster is proving a credibility test for the government, whose mandate is derived from maintaining stability and social order and providing for the welfare of people.
Although the Japanese government is keen not to embarrass Chinese President Hu Jintao, while here on a ‘historic’ five-day state visit, the Tibet question does not seem to go away.
With Tibetan unrest smouldering and international pressure building up on Beijing to negotiate with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, Chinese officials have met with his envoys and pledged more talks in the future.
As Olympic torchbearer Senichi Hoshino started the Japanese leg of the relay in Nagano - home of the 1998 Winter Games - a prayer vigil began at the landmark Zenkoji Buddhist shrine in the city for those who have died in Tibet following the Mar.10 crackdown.
With demonstrations and counter-demonstrations anticipated this week when the Olympic torch relay makes its way through Canberra, a leading Chinese student’s association has called for politics to make way for harmony.
When the Eiffel Tower was lit up in red to celebrate the Chinese New Year in 2004 during the year of China in France, Chinese people generously professed their love for all things French. "The warmth the Chinese felt could not be described in words," gushed the People’s Daily.
With the Olympic torch passing safely through India, home of the government-in-exile of the Dalai Lama, China got what it wanted. But then so did the large community of Tibetan expatriates in this country: publicity for their cause.
As the outburst of anger among China’s restive ethnic minorities spreads, the danger for Chinese communist leadership is more than a a public relations fiasco ahead of the all-important Beijing Olympic games but a serious threat to its mandate, analysts here say.
China's hopes of conducting a non-controversial Olympic Games in August received two more blows on Tuesday.
China has invoked the authority of a legendary emperor, revered as the ancestor of all Chinese people, to bless the Beijing Summer Olympics and emphasise national unity. But lingering tensions in Tibet and a choppy passage for the Olympic torch detract from the lavish rites planned for the Yellow Emperor.
While the mid-March anti-Chinese protests in Tibet sent campaigners and sympathisers running to the Internet for news, or to post blog entries, Tibetan exiles in this northern Indian town turned to the lowly community bulletin board.
Caught between its position recognising Tibet as part of China and growing pressure from pro-Western lobbies within its policy-making elites to support protests by Tibetan separatists, the Indian government is hard put to define a coherent stand on developments across its border.
The head of the European Union's only directly elected institution has urged China to stop "demonising" the Dalai Lama.
Western diplomats and civil society representatives unexpectedly brought up the question of Tibet in the United Nations Human Rights Council debates in this Swiss city.
The crackdown by Chinese authorities on protesters in Tibet has elicited calls within Australia, a major sporting power, to boycott the Beijing Olympics.
When the Security Council is called upon to deal with a crisis that threatens the political, military or economic interests of any of its five permanent members, the U.N.'s most powerful body acts predictably: it does nothing.