Flying into Singapore’s Changi Airport, visitors often remark on the hundreds of vessels, from supertankers to freighters, anchored along the coastline. Why are there so many? What are they doing there?

A decade ago, the global recession created a maritime car park of apparent ghost ships in the Singapore Strait – vessels sat idle in the world’s busiest shipping lane as companies were going bust or did not have enough business to justify their use.

Now there’s a similar stockpiling of ships…

Declaring a new cold war against China is easy, but working out how to fight it and win it is much harder. While almost everyone in Washington these days seems to agree that resisting China’s seemingly insatiable ambition is now America’s highest strategic priority, the nature and scale of the task is still enveloped in uncertainty.

No one seems too worried about this, however, because they assume that a new cold war with China is going to be easy to win.

The few attempts we have seen to…

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’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 upped the ante over its detention of two Canadians, accusing the pair of acting together to steal state secrets just days after Ottawa decided to proceed with an extradition hearing for a Chinese tech executive.

China’s arrest of the two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, had ignited indignation in the international community.

The arrests of the two men coincided with the detention of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese telecom firm Huawei, in December in…

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.

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

It was 10pm on Saturday night in Beijing’s busiest nightlife district.

A man and two women, dressed in baggy streetwear and looking for a great night out, were flummoxed: all the clubs were closed.

“It must be the two sessions,” said one of the three, a 20-year-old woman surnamed Zhang. “On a normal night people would all be clubbing right now.”

Beijing’s nightlife pros would know what’s happening.

The Chinese capital is placed under a security lockdown every March during the annual two…

The sun rises on an arid desert, baking any hint of dust out of a desolate landscape.

Another dry day on Mars.

Or, perhaps, on China’s Qinghai-Tibet plateau – an arid desert region that is “the place on Earth that is most unlike being on Earth,” according to Gao Junling.

Gao is the manager of a newly opened simulation camp intended to give tourists and perhaps researchers a taste of life on the red planet.

It comes at a critical time for China, which is keen to demonstrate its progress in…

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.