Duncan Hewitt

The former legislator was supposed to retire from public life. But the Umbrella Movement changed all that.

Pro-democracy demonstrators continued to occupy central Hong Kong as the city's chief executive rejected their demands

One in five Hong Kong residents may leave because of its poor political prospects

Reports of the violence on local TV and radio actually served to bring other members of the public out onto the streets to express their anger.

More than 70 were arrested on Friday after some two hundred protesters burst through a police cordon

Hong Kong-born chanteuse Karen Mok is ready to take the West by storm.

Han Han makes enemies as he conquers the world literature stage.

As China grapples with rising nationalism and an influx of foreign residents, the country's long and contradictory relationship with outsiders is coming to the fore—and it's turning ugly.

For a media specialist, Guo Ke doesn't watch much TV these days. The dean of the journalism school at Shanghai International Studies University is too worried about the impact of popular shows on his 12-year-old daughter.

Shortages of diesel at gas stations, factories forced to suspend production, homes left without electricity. Hard to imagine that these could be the results of a government campaign, but that's recently been the case in some parts of China.

With Western music flooding the mainland, preserving China's traditional ethnic instruments is becoming more critical than ever.

China's Shanghai World Expo, which ended on Oct. 31, was certainly record-breaking. It clocked a staggering 73 million visitors, 9 million more than the previous record at Osaka in 1970.

As Beijing moves closer to a handover of power to a new generation of political leaders in 2012, jockeying for influence between rival factions is becoming more evident, with sometimes unexpected results. The annual meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee gave a major boost to current Vice President Xi Jinping's chances of succeeding President Hu Jintao, by electing Xi deputy chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission.

As a wave of strikes at Honda and protests over worker suicides at Foxconn led the firms—two of China's major foreign manufacturers—to offer workers significant pay raises, China watchers are wondering whether the country is facing the end of cheap labor.

Like many top students in Chinese high schools, Chen Yongfang dreamed of attending college in the United States. But unlike many of his classmates at Shanghai's Foreign Languages High School, Chen did not set his sights on Harvard, Yale, or any of the other Ivy League schools or big research universities long coveted by the Chinese.

Officials in China, where the response to HIV has long been hampered by a reticence to discuss sexual matters in public, are finally getting real about AIDS.

For decades, rail travel in China meant an arduous overnighter in a crowded East German–designed train, riding along a rickety old track. Now China is undergoing a rail revolution.

China's women, facing pervasive discrimination, decide to fight for their rights.

Beijing could have used the crisis as an excuse to slow market reform. Instead, it's all systems go.

Encouraged by government subsidies, many Chinese travelers are seeing their own country for the first time.

Real estate around the world may be on the skids, but China's homeowners are feeling little pain.

Thanks to developing economies, liberal-arts courses are blooming in the developing world.

The Chinese markets have plunged in recent months, but the growth continues and the future is bullish, says a leading analyst.

A tough town undergoes a crash course in compassion.

When Pan Jianfeng, a Shanghai ad consultant, was recently asked to recommend young local designers to an international agency, he sent three candidates with years of work experience.

It's the kind of scene that only a few years ago would have terrified the Chinese authorities. In the eastern city of Hangzhou, two men dressed like Japanese cartoon characters—with spiky white hair and wearing black leather—fight each other with giant swords for the affections of a pouting young woman in a yellow wig and a miniskirt.

As a former peasant who grew up in a traditional northern Chinese cave house, Xu Dufeng has always had close links to the soil. At the beginning of China's economic reforms in the 1980s, Xu would dig raw clay from the ground in the mountains near his home village and load it onto the back of his three-wheeled tractor.

Chairman Mao's portrait still decorates many households in Yaoli, a former communist guerilla base in China's Jiangxi province. But what mesmerizes the people these days is television.