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Sichuan measures aim to encourage more people to have children after population fell for first time in 60 years
A Chinese province of more than 80 million people will lift restrictions on unmarried people having children and remove caps on the number of babies as part of a national drive to increase the country’s birth rate.
Sichuan’s health commission announced on Monday it would allow all people to register births with the provincial government from 15 February. It will also remove limits on the number of birth registrations for any parent.

Xiao Qian implies resumption of dialogue conditional on Australia taking a ‘constructive attitude’ and not ‘trying to smear China’
The Australian government has vowed to keep raising human rights concerns “at the highest levels” after Beijing’s ambassador urged the country to avoid “trying to smear China”.
After a thaw in the diplomatic relationship between the two countries, China has signalled its openness to resuming a dedicated human rights-focused dialogue for the first time in nine years.

Rush to return for beginning of first semester of university presents challenges for visa approvals, flights and accommodation
More than 40,000 university students have been left scrambling to make it to Australia in time for the new semester after the Chinese government announced a on recognising online degrees obtained from foreign institutions.
Under the new rules, all Chinese students enrolled to study online with overseas providers must be on campus for semester 1 – due to start in a matter of weeks in Australia.

In gathering histories from one of the country’s darkest, most divisive periods, the former Guardian China correspondent has created a gripping and important document
In the 1990s, something odd happened in Beijing’s burgeoning fine dining scene. Among the chic eateries, restaurants emerged with very simple dishes: meat and vegetables cooked in plain style with few frills. The diners were not there just for the cuisine, but to relive the experience of a period generally considered a disaster: the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. The plain dishes were meant to invoke a time of restrained, austere living, when people thought of the collective rather than the individual. Only the sky-high prices reminded diners that they were living in a time of Chinese capitalism.
This recasting of the Cultural Revolution as a period deserving of nostalgia began in the 1990s, but it is still in full swing, and it shapes a struggle for ownership of history in today’s China. In Red Memory, Tania Branigan tells a dark, gripping tale of battles between Chinese whose views of the period – violent nightmare or socialist utopia? – still divide family and friends. Branigan was the Guardian’s China correspondent between 2008 and 2015, and during those years interviewed people whose lives were formed, for good or ill, by the Cultural Revolution. This book is not primarily about what happened, but the way that memories of that time shape, and distort, the very different China of today.

But on Christmas Eve they had to evacuate," Bob Fu, a Chinese American pastor who founded ChinaAid, an organization providing legal services to Chinese Christians, told RealClearPolitics. "There were ...

House Republicans and Democrats plan much more scrutiny of the U.S.'s economic entanglement with China, and fears over TikTok are growing.

The Great Asian American Novel, if I had to pick only one. How does this book, set in San Francisco's Chinatown, manage to fit into its pages so much of Asian American history, and of love and life ...

Multiple student organizations collaborated to host a Lunar New Year celebration Saturday with food, musical entertainment and traditional games. The event — hosted by the Chinese Students Association ...

We need visibility of Asian stories that encompass: in theme, genre, and the term Asian itself. True progress requires traditional decision makers to prioritize the reach of diverse creators to wider ...

Exclusive: Letter to home secretary says bill echoes ‘dangerously broad laws’ that result in jailing of protesters
Hongkongers in Britain have called on Suella Braverman to reconsider controversial measures in her , which they likened to the repressive measures used to crack down on democratic opposition in their home city.
In a letter to the UK home secretary, aspects of the bill were described as “repressive measures that threaten to paralyse entire social movement” and posed a threat to their right to protest in Britain, including against Chinese communist repression in Hong Kong.

More than a hundred people from North Texas gathered in downtown Dallas to voice their opposition toward two Texas senate bills that they say are ...

After three years of lockdowns, the country was ill prepared for its abrupt ‘freedom’. Now, with some estimating 1m deaths, public anger is growing
When Sunny* thinks back to March last year, she laughs ruefully at the ordeal. The 19-year-old Shanghai student spent that month locked in her dormitory, unable to shop for essentials or wash clothes, even banned from showering for two weeks over Covid fears. In April, the entire city locked down.
It was the beginning of the chaos of 2022, as local Chinese authorities desperately tried to follow President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid decree while facing the most transmissible strain of the virus yet: Omicron. “Everyone was panicking, no one was ready,” she tells the Observer.