Late last month, the American actor John Cena issued a grovelling public apology after having referred to Taiwan as a “country” in an interview to promote his latest film. Though he was using the term to refer to a linguistic media market with a discrete distribution channel, not to the status of the island of Taiwan in international law, the Chinese government would make no allowance for such distinctions. What are we to make of this episode?

Thousands of police were deployed in Hong Kong on Friday and the organiser of the territory’s now-banned annual vigil of China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown arrested, as the authorities tried to prevent people from gathering for any kind of remembrance of the events of 1989.Hong Kong usually holds a mass vigil to remember those killed when soldiers stormed the square, which was packed with protesters calling for democracy, but police have banned the events for the past two years blaming the co

Ground down by the sapping realities of modern city life, China's youth are "lying flat", the latest buzzword for those tapping out of a culture of endless work with little reward.With growing inequality and rising costs of living nudging traditional markers of success out of reach, some young people are choosing to do the bare minimum at work, dialling back the go-getting aspirations their parents once harboured."Tang ping" – or "lying flat" – has emerged a

The late George Shultz, United States (US) Secretary of the Treasury under President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan, was one of the finest public servants in recent American history. When I was the last British governor of Hong Kong, he once offered me wise advice about dealing with the People’s Republic of China.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday approved the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use – the second Chinese jab to receive the WHO's green light.The United Nations (UN) health agency signed off on the Beijing-based firm Sinovac's two-dose vaccine CoronaVac, which is already being deployed in several countries around the world."I'm happy to announce that the Sinovac-CoronaVac vaccine has been given WHO emergency use listing after being found to be safe, effe

Malaysia scrambled jets to intercept 16 Chinese military aircraft off the country's coast in the South China Sea, a rare incident that the foreign minister angrily denounced Tuesday as an "intrusion".It took place Monday off the Malaysian part of the island of Borneo over the fiercely contested waters, where China and Malaysia have overlapping territorial claims.The Chinese air force transport planes approached Malaysian airspace in "tactical formation" and flew to wi

China reported the world's first human infection of the H10N3 bird flu strain on Tuesday but said the risk of it spreading widely among people was low.A 41-year-old man was admitted to hospital with fever symptoms in the eastern city of Zhenjiang on April 28 and was diagnosed with H10N3 a month later, China's National Health Commission (NHC) said in an online statement."The risk of large-scale spread is extremely low," the NHC said, adding that the man was in a stable cond

China has announced that it will allow each couple to have up to three children, marking the end of a strict two-child policy.The change was approved by President Xi Jinping in a politburo meeting, state media outlet Xinhua said.It comes after a census published every 10 years showed that China's population grew at its slowest pace in decades.This added pressure on Beijing to boost measures for couples to have more babies and avert a population decline.Shrinking populations are problemat

The security alliance and relationship of the Philippines and the United States (US) is among the oldest, and most complex in Asia. The close ties between the US and the Republic of the Philippines (RP) can be traced back to the colonial period when the Philippines was a protectorate of the US.

It has now been a year and a half since we started living with – and too often dying from – COVID-19. Although the pandemic is by no means over, it is not too soon to take a step back and draw some preliminary conclusions from the experience.One conclusion that has turned out to be especially tentative concerns the source of the pandemic.