Melinda Liu

Alexander F. Yuan/APAt a Chinese auto show.  when a little-known Chinese company agreed to purchase Hummer from General Motors in June, the deal was initially seen as another symbol of a rising China's might.

In China, foreign businessmen who play hardball can wind up doing hard time. 

The businesswoman accused by Beijing of starting the riots blames China for oppressing the Uighur people.

When Congress included a "Buy American" clause in the $787 billion stimulus package, mandating the use of U.S.-made iron and steel in stimulus-funded projects, critics decried it as dangerous protectionism.

China's first gay pride event was met with red tape.

Twenty years after her teenage son's death in Tiananmen Square, Ding Zilin waits for an apology she says will never come.

China is now the world's largest market for cars; Chinese leaders aim to own the biggest piece of it.

The mood in china appears to be reaching a tipping point, as its normally bland leaders abandon cautious diplo-speak under the pressures of the global financial crisis.

During the 2008 Olympics, international audiences oohed and aahed over Beijing's stunning new structures: the world-renowned Bird's Nest national stadium, the surreal China Central TV headquarters designed by Rem Koolhaas and the futuristic National Center for the Performing Arts.

China's nationalistic tendencies surge back to the surface.

As exports plummet and coastal factories close, Beijing looks inland for a new economic model.

The confrontation last week between a U.S. ship and five Chinese naval craft was just the latest of many low-grade military clashes in the South China Sea, the site of numerous territorial disputes.

The role of bloggers has been firmly established: they are self-appointed ombudsmen, documenting mistakes by media and government. But in China, where the Web is less censored than the mainstream media, Netizens have carved out an especially crucial role.

The Chinese government has long been filled with crooked cadres who take the money and run. But as the nation's economy slows down, grassroots resentment toward official corruption is brewing.

Is Beijing, which is famously allergic to intervention, about to get involved in Afghanistan? It sounds crazy, yet there are intriguing signs. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently floated the notion at a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, calling it a "possibility for the future."Chinese Foreign Ministry official Qin Gang quickly rebuffed the notion last week, saying that except for United Nations' peacekeeping operations, "China never sends troops abroad," and that "media...

Beijing is pumping more than half a trillion dollars into the Chinese economy in order to stave off unrest. It has good reason to worry.

Before it passes, the global economic crisis may topple its share of leaders. Will China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao become a casualty? That's the speculation, thanks to an Oct. 14 article in the Hong Kong magazine Kaifang ("Open").

It wasn't all for show. China opts to keep in place some of its Olympics Games pollution control.

The Nobel Foundation has been known to pick dark-horse candidates to drive home an ideological point (see Al Gore). How intriguing, then, that the Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute is fingering Chinese activist Hu Jia as a front runner for this year's Peace Prize.To hand China's first Peace Prize to a little-known dissident would be a rebuke to its leaders, who tout themselves as stewards of China's "peaceful rise" to great power status.

Could a New Zealand dairy trader have done more to prevent China's milk scandal? At press time, Sanlu Group milk products contaminated with the toxic chemical melamine had killed four babies, sickened 53,000 and triggered import bans and recalls worldwide.

The milk crisis spotlights flaws in Beijing's food system.

By now, it's clear that both Chinese and visitors alike reveled in the 2008 Games, even many skeptics. The merry national atmosphere is quite different from the mood before Aug. 8, when officials worried about polluted air, terror attacks, even the performance of high-profile athletes like hurdler Liu Xiang.

Is not gold. China debates its obsession with bringing home the most Olympic gold medals.

China's most modern citizens aren't drawing it any closer to the West.

The spectacular opening ceremony is a symbol of Chinese might—butalso of redemption.

Beijing's brass lags behind leaders of nations with similar incomes.

With 18,000 still missing after China's quake, Beijing is organizing a massive campaign to log corpses and establish a DNA database that will help survivors learn the fate of disappeared relatives.The work holds none of the glitz of America's "CSI" television series, which portrays forensics as a glamorous job.

For two and a half years, Sichuan native Yu Hongbin has worked in Shenzhen, the Chinese boomtown on the coast opposite Hong Kong, making chips for Nokia cell phones.

The last time China suffered a disaster on the magnitude of the recent Sichuan earthquake, its Maoist leaders spurned psychology as a "bourgeois" discipline.

A rugged diaspora is aiding the province as it recovers from the quake.