Isaac Stone Fish

China is turning independent coal mines into state-run operations, showing a desire to control the energy sector and indicating Beijing's impatience with private companies that get too big.

Why the Chinese themselves, and not outsiders, will cash in on the next big wave of growth.

In a once unthinkable move, Taiwan and China signed a new pact last week to slash tariffs and open up business between the erstwhile adversaries. Some are greeting the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement as the end of a Cold War–style freeze. The reality? The deal marks a high point for cross-strait relations, but it could ultimately bring more trouble.

Western companies aren't the only ones victimized by intellectual property theft. Here's how Chinese firms have learned to protect their bottom lines.

Since March, China has been plagued by a spate of horrific copycat murders. On May 12 a man hacked seven kindergartners and two adults to death with a cleaver; this came on the heels of five reported assaults on Chinese schoolchildren in which 17 were killed and almost 100 injured.

Both China and the usual Western nations sent observers to monitor Sudan's recent elections, but they didn't seem to be watching the same polls. While Washington criticized the vote that returned Omar al-Bashir to power for "serious irregularities," Beijing called the affair a "smooth and orderly…success." The difference isn't entirely surprising: the West views Bashir as the mastermind of the Darfur slaughter, while China sees him as a business partner who has granted Beijing billions of...

Han Chinese think Tibetans are ingrates who don't appreciate the boon Beijing has given them. This week's earthquake showed wealthy Han that Tibetans are not so well off after all.

Last week a shanghai court sentenced rio tinto executive Stern Hu to 10 years in prison for bribery, a crime that's far more common in China than both Chinese and foreign businesspeople like to admit.

Why China's 'Happy Farmer' took off.

China's growing defense budget has many neighbors worried that this economic hyperpower has global military ambitions too. But when Beijing recently announced that its military budget will rise by a relatively modest 7.5 percent in 2010 (last year registered a 14.9 percent hike), pundits debated what the slowing rate of increase means for China's role in the world.

As China prepares to become the world's second-largest economy in 2010, its leaders are struggling to express a convincing and satisfying ideology that assuages international fears about the country's global intentions.

As China's mandarins meet to discuss their future, a rogue bureaucrat is testing the limits of reform.

North Korea's contradictions have confounded the West for decades. How does a poverty-stricken state that barely survives off foreign aid still trumpet its self-reliance?

Whether they like it or not, China has been very good for Tibetans.

When Google threatened to pull out of China last month, many experts interpreted the move as a last-straw response to Beijing's aggressive policy of Internet protectionism.

The day before Hillary Clinton gave a speech last week about China's cyberattacks and its threat to the free flow of Internet information, the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal released their 16th annual Index of Economic Freedom, which ranks countries according to the ability of their citizens to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please.

China's real-estate market has been booming for most of the decade, and this past year was no exception: in December alone, prices in 70 of its large and medium-size cities rose by 7.8 percent.

China's love affair with rogue states.

Abroad, China seemed barbaric for executing a bipolar drug mule last week. At home, though, it was just what the doctor ordered.

The places Obama won't visit on his first trip to China.

Novelist Yu Hua captures China's extremes—without being banned.