VisitCHN

SHANGHAI — The spacious duplex comes with crocodile-skin bedposts, hand-carved bronze doors inlaid with Swarovski crystals — and a $45 million price tag.
It is still on the market, but Charles Tong, the developer of Tomson Riviera, a luxury riverfront complex in the heart of the financial district here, says he is having no trouble finding [...]

BEIJING — Prime Minister Wen Jiabao crafted a portrait of a China on a steady course toward greatness on Friday, telling his nation’s unelected legislature that the government could expand social spending, increase lending, pour money into strategic industries and still meet its traditional 8 percent economic growth target in 2010.
But he also sounded a [...]

(BEIJING) — China said Friday it will target economic growth of 8 percent this year, increase spending on social programs and direct more development money at ethnic areas.
Although in recent years China has always set a goal of 8 percent growth and usually exceeded it, the target shows Beijing aims to avoid any slip after [...]

TOKYO (Reuters) – China is pushing for the yuan to be added to the basket of currencies that comprise the IMF’s special drawing rights, aiming for its inclusion in 2015, Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun said on Saturday.
Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan caused a stir last March by proposing the Special Drawing Rights (SDR), [...]

BEIJING – China hopes to revive stalled negotiations on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program within the next few months, an official newspaper reported Friday.
The comment from Beijing’s envoy to the six-country talks follows a flurry of diplomatic efforts in recent weeks to prod North Korea into rejoining the negotiations. Envoys held a number of [...]

BEIJING – China said Thursday it will continue to push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear standoff, rebuffing efforts by Western powers to introduce a new set of sanctions against Iran.
“We’ve been making diplomatic efforts and we believe they have not been exhausted, and we will continue to work with other parties to [...]

BEIJING – A kindergarten teacher in southwestern China has admitted she used an empty hypodermic needle to prick 63 of her students on the hands, feet and buttocks as punishment for bad behavior, state media reported Friday.
None of the children has tested positive for infectious diseases but their parents have demanded compensation totaling 1.8 million [...]

BEIJING – Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has pledged to extend job-creation programs and keep bank-credit flowing as Beijing tries to keep its factories humming and its workers employed at a time of growing trade tensions with the West.
Although the Chinese action is helping to keep the world’s economy afloat, the budget plan Wen outlined Friday [...]

Investigating officials have are looking into the case of Han Feng, an official from the Guangxi tobacco monopoly bureau, who allegedly wrote daily diary entries describing his sexual involvement with many of his colleges along with acts of receiving bribes, when these entries spread after being posted on the internet. The disciplinary officials and the [...]

BEIJING — Two senior United States officials arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for meetings aimed at smoothing relations with China after months of economic and political disputes.
The officials, Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg and Jeffrey A. Bader, the senior director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, are to hold high-level discussions [...]

BEIJING — Chinese security agents in Sichuan Province detained Liao Yiwu, a prominent author and critic of the government, as he prepared to fly Monday to a literary festival in Germany, human rights activists said.
It was the 13th time Mr. Liao had been prevented from leaving the country. The Associated Press reported that he had [...]

HONG KONG — The Heavenly Palace, the first module in China’s permanent space station, will be launched next year, a senior aerospace official confirmed Wednesday.
The official, Qi Faren, said the craft, an orbiting laboratory known in Mandarin as Tiangong-1, would initially serve as a docking station for other spacecraft. His remarks were carried by Xinhua, [...]

SANYA, China — A widening national toxic food scandal that has its roots in this tropical island resort area in the South China Sea has set off a rare case of public sniping between officials.
The scandal, which has been reported by official news organizations in the last few days, is centered on the cowpea — [...]

BEIJING — In a country where the press is tightly managed by the state, the identical editorials that appeared Monday in more than a dozen publications calling for reform of China’s onerous household registration system were noteworthy.
“China has suffered for a long time under the hukou system!” the editorials declared, using the Chinese term for [...]

The Rule Breaker
As China’s mandarins meet to discuss their future, a rogue bureaucrat is testing the limits of reform.
This week China opens its annual National People’s Congress in Beijing, where delegates from across the country will chat about policy and network behind closed doors. At the end, they’ll project an image of party unity for [...]

Nepal may be most famous for its majestic Himalayan peaks, but much of the country is a vast stretch of plains, the terai, which have long been underdeveloped and largely ignored by the two powers on either side. No longer. India has just launched a plan to spend $361 million over the next several years [...]