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Nurses, rail staff and royal mail workers are expected to strike this winter. Will Rishi Sunak’s ‘Operation Get Tough’ have any impact? And as protests continue to rage in China, the PM used the lavish Lord Mayor’s Banquet earlier this week to announce the ‘golden era’ of relations with China is over. The Guardian’s John Harris is joined by Rafael Behr and Zoe Williams, and will be speaking on China to the Guardian’s former China correspondent Tania Branigan

It is inspiring and encouraging to see young people in China pushing back against censorship and autocracy
On Monday evening hundreds of people gathered at Sydney’s town hall to mourn the deaths from a in Xinjiang province in China, where 10 people died and nine others were injured.
The gathering was not just a memorial. It was a chance to show support for in China in the days after the blaze.

Three years into the pandemic, China is still relying on snap lockdowns and mass testing – and that could spell trouble for the global economy
could unleash a new wave of volatility into a global economy already racked by inflation, energy shocks and the war in Ukraine.
The government’s continued reliance on lockdowns, quarantine orders and mass testing to limit the spread of the virus has provoked the biggest protest movement in decades. But there’s little evidence that authorities are willing to diverge from the path they have taken.

Gen Angus Campbell declares Australia and Japan are bound together by ‘increasingly shared strategic challenges’
The chief of the Australian defence force, Gen Angus Campbell, has offered a gloomy assessment of developments in the Indo-Pacific region, warning of a rise in “coercive statecraft and grey-zone activities”.
Ahead of a major defence review, Campbell has declared that Australia and Japan are bound together by “increasingly shared strategic challenges” in our region.

US secretary of state says Beijing’s ties with Moscow also discussed at alliance meeting after the two countries sent bombers into South Korean airspace
Nato allies are concerned about China’s rapid and opaque military buildup and its cooperation with Russia, and discussed concrete ways to address the challenges posed by Beijing, US secretary of state Antony Blinken has said.
“The members of our alliance remain concerned by the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] coercive policies, by its use of disinformation, by its rapid, opaque military buildup, including its cooperation with Russia,” Blinken told a news conference on Wednesday after a two-day meeting of foreign ministers from the defence alliance.

Cleopatra Wong, a kick-ass Interpol agent known to have influenced some of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, is to be revived in an upcoming Asian TV series. The female action hero was created by The ...

Educator Franklin Odo spent a career advancing ethnic and Asian studies across the country. He was the Smithsonian's first Asian Pacific curator.

The former president’s death drew tributes from Chinese people at a fraught moment for the current leader, Xi Jinping, who faces widespread criticism of his harsh Covid policies.

Plus China’s censors struggle to keep up with protests.

Announcements ordered the removal of ‘control orders’ and to designate areas as low risk
Authorities have abruptly lifted Covid restrictions in the Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Chongqing, where protesters scuffled with police on Tuesday night, as police searched for demonstrators in other cities and the country’s top security body called for a .
After days of extraordinary protests in the country that also prompted international demonstrations in solidarity, the US and Canada urged China not to harm or intimidate protesters opposing Covid-19 lockdowns.

After the pain of an energy crisis brought on by the Ukraine war, Europe is keen to reduce its strategic vulnerabilities to China, not to speak of other authoritarian governments.

Popular protests are more easily begun than ever before, but they are more likely to dissipate, too.