South China Morning Post

What would a biopic of Freddie Mercury be like if it didn’t mention the word “gay?”

Just ask China’s movie-goers.

Tens of thousands of Chinese have watched the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody since its Friday release in the world’s second-biggest film market.

But the movie contained almost nothing to hint that the Queen frontman was anything other than a red-blooded macho heterosexual.

Chinese censors have scrubbed about three minutes of homosexual-related content from the film.

Although…

The root of China’s pandemic food safety problem? The powerful and the people are not eating the same food.

Food safety in China can be a highly emotive and incendiary issue because of the country’s appalling record over the past decade, including a litany of public health scandals affecting children.

Chinese parents are constantly on edge because of the alarming occurrence of such scandals in the past, involving unscrupulous businessmen taking advantage of ineffective law enforcement and the…

It’s been 10 years since he worked at a carmaker, and Zhu Beibei still remembers the acrid stench of rubber tires.

Then 19, it was his first job out of technical school in Wuhan, central China. He was paid 900 yuan ($134) a month and there was a lot of overtime. He quit after six months.

“I had to wake up at 2pm and work until at least 10am,” Zhu, now 29, told the South China Morning Post. “Every day I worked like a robot.”

After he left, he bounced around various jobs, including selling…

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.

At least 47 people are dead and 640 are injured, 90 of them seriously, after an explosion in a chemical plant in China’s eastern Jiangsu province on Thursday.

The Yancheng municipal government said in a statement on Friday that nearly 3,000 people – employees of nearby plants and local residents – had been evacuated after the blast at the Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical plant, which had the force of a minor earthquake.

Executives of the plant have been taken into police custody and schools and…

As China finds itself locked in a trade war with the world’s No 1 economy, there are perhaps few partners more important than the No 2.

As a bloc of 28 countries, the European Union is the world’s second-biggest economy, sitting between the United States and China.

The significance of staying close with the EU will not be lost on China’s president Xi Jinping.

Having landed in Rome on Thursday, Xi will use his next three days in Europe to try to ease fears that Beijing has become a threat to…

A homeless man in Shanghai has become a celebrity overnight thanks to his eloquent commentary on the classics of Chinese literature.

But since then he’s been inundated by media attention that he doesn’t want, saying that he would rather be left alone. He said that if people really care about him, they should read more books.

Videos of the 52-year-old Shen Wei have been gaining momentum on Chinese social media since Wednesday, earning at least 14 million views on microblogging site Weibo.

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English is a mandatory subject in China, from primary school to college.

The nation’s students spend hour upon hour studying English grammar, memorizing vocabulary and practicing their writing skills.

But not everyone finds the investment worth it.

Hua Qianfang, a nationalistic writer with a large online following, said in an online post this week that most Chinese people had no reason to learn English, calling it a “trash skill.”

The post has gone viral, leading to heated debate online.

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China wants to become a high-tech superpower. One of the hardest parts of that ambition? Getting airborne.

We asked our newsletter subscribers what they wanted to know about China’s aviation industry. Here are the answers to questions on everything from China’s equivalent to the Air Force One, to why a country that has launched lunar probes and built aircraft carriers has yet to develop an engine for commercial jetliners.

Subscribe to our newsletter and let us know what else you want to know…

The international swimming community is in mourning after Kenneth To, a star Hong Kong swimmer, died at the age of 26 in Florida.

“Words cannot express how saddened I am at the passing of Kenneth To,” Ryan Lochte, a 12-time Olympic medalist, said in a social media post.

“I’m so grateful to have been able to call him a friend and to have gotten to know him over the past several years,” Lochte said.

Words cannot express how saddened I am at the passing of Kenneth To. The world has lost an…