South China Morning Post

Mass demonstrations in Hong Kong against a proposed extradition bill have been making headlines around the world.

But what about in mainland China? As we’ve explained, Hong Kong is legally part of China,  but it enjoys many freedoms, including an unfettered internet.

Most mainland news outlets have stayed silent on the continuing demonstrations against the bill, which could allow suspects to be extradited to mainland China.

Following a huge demonstration on Sunday and violent protests on…

When former US President Richard Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai gifted him a bag of his favorite sweets — White Rabbit rolls.

The chewy milk flavored Tootsie roll-like candy is a beloved Chinese brand. Its iconic white rabbit image evokes a strong nostalgic feeling for generations of Chinese who grew up eating the candy in the 80s and 90s.

Now White Rabbit is selling milk tea, and Chinese people are all over it. So much so that many are willing to line up for…

Protests in Hong Kong over an extradition bill have paralyzed traffic near government headquarters, the main site of the 2014 Umbrella Movement pro-democracy demonstrations calling for freer elections.

Here we answer some of your most frequently asked questions.

Is Hong Kong a country?

No. Hong Kong is a special part of China with its own currency, legal systems and civil liberties unavailable in much of the rest of China.

Hong Kong had been a British colony for more than 150 years,…

Online shopping, ubiquitous in China, is now available behind bars.

In the southern megacity of Guangzhou, Conghua Prison has become the first in the country to allow inmates to shop online via touch-screen computer terminals, according to Chinese state media.

Once a month, inmates can buy groceries, choosing from more than 200 items and paying normal market prices. The prison houses more than 1,000 inmates.

Milk, instant noodles, preserved meat, cigarettes and even Lao Gan Ma — a chili…

Street demonstrations are a colorful feature of life in Hong Kong, a former British colony that retains many civil liberties despite legally being a part of China. But getting official data on exactly how many people show up is trickier than you’d think.

The controversy surged in headlines again this week. The organizers of a massive demonstration against a proposed extradition law said more than one million people were there. The police said 240,000 people took part at its peak.

Clearly,…

What was on Donald Trump’s mind days before he decided to turn up the heat on China?

Former US president Jimmy Carter has offered a clue, recalling a phone call they shared in April this year, three weeks before Trump threatened to dramatically raise tariffs on Chinese products.

“The main thing that he emphasized to me was, the main purpose of his call, was to say very frankly to me on a private line that the Chinese were getting way ahead of the United States,” Carter said Sunday.

What…

Hundreds of businesses in Hong Kong have vowed to shut up shop for a day on Wednesday to allow workers to join another protest against a plan to allow extraditions of criminal suspects to mainland China.

As of Tuesday afternoon, a growing, crowdsourced list of nearly 1,000 businesses, including bakeries, toy stores and snack shops, said they would close their doors the day when the city’s legislature is set to debate the proposed extradition bill.

Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, has refused…

There’s a joke going around China that the trade war is really between Washington and one Shenzhen neighborhood: Yue Hai.

The district is home to some of China’s biggest tech names: social media giant Tencent, telecoms maker ZTE and drone giant DJI. 

“Rather than China, it seems the US government has started a tech war with Yue Hai. It is the district officer who should attend the negotiations with US President Donald Trump,” said the joke that has since gone viral.

In Yue Hai’s restaurants…

Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Hong Kong on Sunday to say “no” to Beijing.

They objected to a government plan to allow the semi-autonomous city to send fugitives to mainland China.

Protest organizers estimated that more than 1 million people joined the June 9 march on Hong Kong Island, making it the biggest demonstration in the city’s history – ever. The police put the number of protesters at about 240,000.

Here is what you need to know:

What is the extradition…

Until recently, a Chinese programmer was working on a facial recognition project that compared women’s social media selfies with stills from porn videos.

After a storm of criticism, he’s shut it down.

Programmers are mocked on Chinese social media as jiepanxia – men willing to enter into a relationship with a woman who has had a number of sexual partners.

The developer, who went by the pseudonym Li Xu, claimed his goal was to help male programmers identify “promiscuous” women who had…