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The conviction of Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong is another hostile act. How can Britain ignore Beijing’s provocations and human rights abuses?
The UK pushed hard to secure the release of Jimmy Lai, the newspaper publisher and British citizen who was a leading light in Hong Kong’s brutally suppressed pro-democracy movement. So, too, did press freedom and human rights campaigners. But the Beijing-appointed high court judges in the former colony convicted him anyway, finding Lai guilty last week on fake charges of trying to (CCP). For Xi Jinping, China’s dictator-emperor, there is no greater crime.
Protesting to China’s ambassador, the UK’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, as “politically motivated”. She’s right, of course – but her angry words will make no difference. Beijing’s contempt for Britain’s views is as painfully obvious as the UK’s weakness and indecision in the face of Chinese hubris. The breaking of its solemn promise to respect Hong Kong’s freedoms after the 1997 handover typifies the arrogance and untrustworthiness of Xi’s CCP.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator

Videos and photographs show how the Chinese authorities have tried to dismantle Zion Church, a Christian network with branches across the country.

Lai, who is facing life in prison, always said he owed Hong Kong, a city that had given him "everything".

From pop to politics, it’s been quite the year. Were you paying attention? Let’s find out …
1-5 Please pay more attention. 6-14 Very good. But spend less time looking up from your phone in 2026. 15-20 Please write this next year.

A reordering of the rules of trade, set on top of transformational change in technology, demographics and climate, is remaking jobs, politics and lives.

Minister says risk to ‘any individual’ from cyber-attack is low and that it is still unclear who is responsible
The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office was hacked in October, a minister has said.
Chris Bryant, a trade minister in Keir Starmer’s government, told Sky News there was a low risk to “any individual” from the cyber-attack.

Joint venture will take over part of app’s US operations, including data protection, algorithm security and content moderation


TikTok has reached a deal to form a joint venture that will allow it to continue operating in the US, five years after Donald Trump over privacy and national security concerns, a move that further strained relations with China.
ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, has signed a deal with Larry Ellison’s Oracle, the private-equity group Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX that will allow it to retain control of its core US operations.

Pandas have stood for friendship between China and Japan since 1972. But the last two are about to go, and a dispute over Taiwan could get in the way of sending more.

Exclusive: Clashes over rural plots are increasing, as people whose big-city plans have evaporated return home to face local governments groaning under huge debt
Standing inside the temple armed with buckets of rice, the villagers gaze out at police officers armed with riot shields and sticks, the sound of shouting audible over banging drums.
Then the tension erupts. A , some villagers throw handfuls of rice at the officers, a traditional custom for dispelling evil, while others hoist religious artefacts onto their shoulders and march away, past groups of police and other officials.

In 1989, Gen. Xu Qinxian defied orders to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing. Now, leaked video from his court-martial is on YouTube.

From 1 January, contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – part of a carrot-and-stick approach by the government to increase births
China is set to impose a value-added tax (VAT) on condoms and other contraceptives for the first time in three decades, as the country tries to boost its and modernise its tax laws.
From 1 January, condoms and contraceptives will be subject to a 13% VAT rate – a tax from which the goods have been exempt since China introduced nationwide VAT in 1993.

Canadian Centre for Architecture, MontrealThe birth of the People’s Republic is seen as a time of drab buildings. But this dazzling show, featuring a factory in a cave and a denounced roof, tells a wildly different story
In 1954, an issue of Manhua, a state-sponsored satirical magazine in China, declared: “Some architects blindly worship the formalist styles of western bourgeois design. As a result, grotesque and reactionary buildings have appeared.”
Beneath the headline Ugly Architecture, humorous cartoons of weird buildings fill the page. There is a modernist cylinder with a neoclassical portico bolted on to the front. Another blobby building is framed by an arc of ice-cream cone-shaped columns. An experimental bus stop features a bench beneath an impractical cuboid canopy, “unable to protect you from wind, rain or sun”, as a passerby observes. “Why don’t these buildings adopt the Chinese national style?” asks another bewildered figure, as he cowers beneath a looming glass tower that bears all the hallmarks of the corrupt, capitalist west.