A strange vitamin commercial Tom Hiddleston filmed for the Chinese market is blowing up on social media.

But the responses to the ad have been vastly different in and out of China.

The ad for Centrum multivitamins is shot from the viewpoint of Hiddleston’s female partner: she wakes up to find the actor making her (us) a salad breakfast, before he compliments her, reminds her to take her Centrum supplements, and leaves for work.

While many Western audiences have found the video unsettling,…

A law professor at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University who openly criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping has been suspended by the university, according to one of his colleagues and several academics familiar with the situation.

Xu Zhangrun, 56, was suspended this month after he wrote several articles criticizing Beijing over political and social issues, his colleague Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at the university, told the South China Morning Post.

In one opinion piece last year, Xu…

When Donald Trump pushed to “make America great again,” he might not have counted on losing so many friends along the way.

The European Union, one of Washington’s closest allies, is now increasingly wary of a protectionist US that prioritizes its own interests over rivals and friends alike.

That’s left several EU member states marching to link up with none other than China’s Belt and Road trade initiative against US warnings that the scheme leads to “debt trap” dependence on China.

The…

An 18-year-old Taiwanese cellist and actress has publicly declared her love for China following an online uproar over a rumor that her family are supporters of Taiwan independence.

The Chinese government regards the self-ruled, democratic Taiwan as a wayward province that will eventually be reunited with the mainland.

While some Taiwanese wants the island to be formally recognized as an independent country, Beijing has in recent years ramped up efforts to assert its sovereignty over the…

In the Inkstone index, we break down China into the simplest possible chunk: a single number. What can one number tell us about China? Quite a lot.

Forget the selfie stick, there is an even more irritating menace to modern travelers; one that has the power to ground flights, ruin holidays and make a persona non grata of its handler.

Whether over a remote Thai beach or one of Sri Lanka’s national parks, the distinctive buzz of a drone will infuriate even the most happy-go-lucky of holiday-goers, eliciting expletives and making middle fingers stiffen as it hovers overhead.

American space agency NASA has even studied what it calls “the…

If you’re trying to break the ice on a date tonight with someone who grew up reading and speaking Chinese, today’s Google Doodle is a good place to start.

Tuesday’s front page of Google in parts of Asia celebrated Sanmao, the late Taiwanese feminist writer whose free-spirited views on what a woman can do still resonate with Chinese readers today, almost three decades after she died.

A rarity for her time in a 70s Chinese society, Sanmao was the mistress of her own life.

At the age of 31 she…

On March 7, a package arrived at Javkhlantugs Ragchaasuren’s office in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Inside was a congratulatory plaque from YouTube: his channel, ArtGer, had surpassed the 100,000-subscriber mark.

The milestone is a commendable achievement for any new media platform, but for a channel dedicated to sharing the rela­tively unknown culture of Mongolia, it was a triumph.

Yet it was perhaps not a surprise considering ArtGer’s flagship program, Nargie’s Mongolian Cuisine, is one of the…

The map is not the territory. But for China, any map that doesn’t show its version of reality is one too many.

Chinese authorities last week destroyed 29,000 world map posters that depicted Taiwan as a country, underscoring Beijing’s unyielding campaign to minimize the self-ruled island’s standing.

Beijing does not govern Taiwan, but it claims the island democracy as its territory that must eventually be brought under its rule, by force if necessary.

The Chinese government has sought to…

David Kong felt shattered after a recent business trip to Chongqing.

It took him more than 30 hours to travel to the city from Beijing, on a hard sleeper known in China as the “green-skin train” for its distinctive dark olive hue.

The same 900-mile journey would have taken just three hours by air, or about 12 hours by high-speed train.

But Kong could not take either, as he was a “deadbeat.”

As one of 13 million officially designated “discredited individuals,” or laolai in Chinese, 47…