South China Morning Post

Everybody loves “rule of law,” or at least loves invoking it to score points.

As in US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s recent speech, it is often deployed to praise a given political system or deride another – to make some variant of the claim that “we have rule of law and you do not.”

More subtly, some advocacy groups and research organizations rank large numbers of countries along some sort of rule of law index, measuring which states have “more” vs. “less,” or “thicker” vs. …

China’s annual “two sessions” parliamentary meetings are underway. Inkstone will be bringing you the most interesting stories from the sidelines of the sessions.

Beijing has publicly thrown its weight behind tech giant Huawei’s move to sue the US government, and called upon Chinese companies not to be “silent lambs.”

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi took the opportunity to back Huawei at a press conference on the sidelines of China’s annual political meetings on Friday, a day after the company’s filing of a lawsuit against the US government in a bid to overturn a federal ban on its equipment.

“We support the company and the individual in question in…

I knew traveling as part of a tour group was the pits. I knew that the Lunar New Year holiday is the worst time to travel.

Yet when my father proposed that my family go with a group of 20 other people to Thailand for Lunar New Year, I complied.

I did it out of guilt and a sense of duty, as a prodigal Chinese daughter who in the past eight years had barely seen my family. Short on time to plan a trip myself but feeling compelled to spend some time with my family, I thought I’d put up with the…

Now hiring: workers at the world’s biggest iPhone factories.

Tibetans and Uyghurs need not apply.

The exclusion of ethnic minority job seekers was openly stated by a recruiting agency for Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier, in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

In response to an inquiry from Inkstone, Foxconn said on Friday that it had begun an investigation into the agency and vowed to help end discriminatory hiring.

“It has come to our attention that an unauthorized recruitment agency…

China might just have made a major concession in the US-China trade war – just as long as it keeps its word.

The nation is expected to pass a new law next week to make forced technology transfer illegal while also lowering barriers for foreign firms to enter the domestic market, a senior economic planning official said on Wednesday.

“China will roll out more opening-up measures in the agriculture, mining, manufacturing and service sectors, allowing wholly foreign-owned enterprises in more…

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has sued the American government and accused it of hacking, a move that is likely to raise the stakes in a legal and technological fight between the United States and China.

Huawei has filed a lawsuit against the US government in a bid to overturn a ban on its products, the company said on Thursday in Shenzhen.

It also accused the US of previously hacking into its servers, though it provided no fresh evidence to support the charge.

The lawsuit and the hacking…

China’s annual “two sessions” parliamentary meetings are underway. Inkstone will be bringing you the most interesting stories from the sidelines of the sessions.

China has to restrict access to Tibet because some foreigners cannot handle the altitude, a top official in charge of the region has said.

Wu Yingjie, the Communist Party chief of the Tibet Autonomous Region, said travel restrictions to the region are necessary because some visitors suffer from altitude sickness.

“After considering the special geographical and climatic conditions, we adopted a series of regulations on foreigners entering Tibet in accordance with the law,” Wu told reporters on…

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.