South China Morning Post

In a downtown cafe in Washington one recent winter morning, patrons turned their heads toward Xia Yeliang, who was giving an impassioned defense of Donald Trump’s politics.

But curiosity would likely have turned to surprise had the customers known who he was.

Xia is a Chinese dissident who signed the seminal Charter 08 pro-democracy manifesto and who was stripped of his Peking University professorship in 2013 amid reports he had delivered “anti-Party and anti-socialist” speeches to students.

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The city of Berlin sat at the very center of the Cold War between East and West. The Wall, Checkpoint Charlie. The Berlin Airlift and the advent of modern spycraft.

But the ideological fight between communism and capitalism wasn’t all based there.

An exhibition currently running in the German capital is all about what one of its curators, Natasha Ginwala, calls an “overshadowed chapter” in the Cold War.

Well away from central Europe, the CIA trained exiled Tibetans in the arts of guerrilla…

You can tell a lot of things from the way someone walks.

Just ask Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Watrix, which says that its software can identify a person from 165 feet away – even if they have covered their face or have their back to a camera.

Police on the streets of Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing have already run trials of the technology, said Huang Yongzhen, co-founder and chief executive of Watrix, in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

“We are currently working…

Chinese coffee lovers have been waiting in line for hours to get a taste of Tim Hortons in Shanghai, after the Canadian chain opened its first ever shop in China.

On the menu: the brand’s fabled Double Double (two creams, two sugars), macchiatos made with Canadian maple syrup, and ciabatta topped with “Montreal beef.”

There are even coldwater shrimp that the menu boasts go “winter-swimming all year around” – winter swimming being seen as a health-giving activity.

But there are also…

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.

For those paying attention to China’s social media, it’s hard not to notice that the accusation of “insulting China” has been increasingly common in recent years.

In the latest case, a new cosmetics advertisement for the Spanish fashion house Zara featuring a Chinese model has stirred up debate on the topic of “uglifying China.”

Since the ad “Beauty is Here” was released on China’s Twitter-like Weibo last week, a number of angry Chinese internet users have accused the company of defaming…

China’s factories were the backbone of the country’s economic resurgence in the last four decades.

But as the Chinese economy slows and the nation seeks to move away from the production line, more and more China’s young migrant workers are ditching the factories to find easier jobs with “more freedom” in the growing services sector.

One of them, Li Tao, who earns a living as a food courier in Guangzhou, said working in China’s massive courier business it was a better option than factory work…

In the horror game Devotion, a Taiwanese cult follower kills his daughter with venomous snakes.

In real life, the game’s developers seem to have killed their instant hit in China with Winnie the Pooh.

Released February 19 on PC games distribution platform Steam, Devotion received a positive rating from 95% of the more than 4,000 gamers who posted reviews in the first four days.

At one point the indie title, from Taiwan-based studio Red Candle, was the most popular game on Chinese streaming…

A Chinese county has suspended fracking operations after a series of deadly quakes triggered protests against the natural gas project.

Three earthquakes of magnitude 4.7, 4.3 and 4.9 occurred in Rongxian county in the southwestern province of Sichuan between Sunday and Monday, causing two deaths and 12 injuries.

Earthquakes touch a particularly sensitive nerve in Sichuan, where a magnitude-8 earthquake left 87,000 dead in 2008.

On Sunday and Monday afternoon, more than 1,000 residents…

A little more than eight months after they first shook hands, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un will meet this week for a second time to continue their talks about denuclearization.

The leaders of the United States and North Korea first met in June in Singapore, where they agreed to the “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

That wasn’t the first time North Korea had made that promise – the country signed a denuclearization deal with its southern neighbor as early as 1992, and has…