Frenemies: Tense undercurrents for US-China state dinner

It's never good when tension is on the dinner menu. When Chinese President Xi Jinping and wife Peng Liyuan visit Washington later this week, President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, face the daunting task of trying to throw a warm and inviting dinner party for guests of honor accused of cyberspying on the U.S., trampling human rights and engaging in assertive military tactics. China, in turn, is miffed at the U.S. for what it says are groundless accusations about hacking, and wants the U.S. to butt out of territorial disputes in the South China Sea. Not to mention the Old Faithful of disputes, Taiwan. Read more

China dissident's wife rejects invite to State Department

Relatives of Chinese dissidents met Wednesday with Secretary of State John Kerry as the Obama administration sought to demonstrate it won't gloss over human rights during this week's state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping.But the message was in danger of backfiring after the wife of one prominent dissident — Gao Zhisheng, who says he was tortured with an electric baton when he was held in detention and endured years of solitary confinement — refused the invitation. "They haven't talked to us in five years, for all the time we've been here, so why should we attend a meeting now?" Geng He told from her home in Cupertino, Calif. Gao himself vows to never leave China despite the hardships and having to live apart from his family. Read more

Chinese leader to address UN on gender equality, vexing some

Chinese leader Xi Jinping will preside this weekend over a U.N. conference on gender equality, which some activists say is galling given China's recent detentions of women's rights activists and its history of stopping people from attending U.N. meetings to discuss such issues. Scheduled to draw more than 80 national leaders at the United Nations' headquarters in New York on Sunday, the meeting co-hosted by China comes 20 years after Beijing held a groundbreaking U.N. conference on women's rights in which Hillary Clinton equated women's rights with human rights. Read more

He said what? China's Xi Jinping makes 'House of Cards' joke

Xi Jinping did something unusual, almost unheard of, for a Chinese President: He cracked a joke. In public. Well, sort of. Talking about his three-year crackdown on corruption in a speech during his visit to the United States Tuesday, XI insisted it was aimed squarely at stamping out graft and not purging political rivals. This is not, he said, with a smile a "House of Cards" -- a reference to the Netflix blockbuster that charts the intrigue and treachery of Kevin Spacey's power hungry politico Francis Underwood. Read more

Gao Zhisheng: Chinese lawyer describes 'torture'

Prominent Chinese dissident and human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has broken his silence to describe how he was allegedly tortured and kept in solitary confinement while in detention. The 51-year-old lawyer was released from prison in August 2014. At the time, his lawyer described Mr Gao, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, as emotionless, "basically unintelligible" and missing teeth due to malnutrition. Read more

Police make 19,000 triad arrests in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong

Nineteen thousand suspects have been arrested in a drive against organised-crime in China, state media said. A three-month operation led to the arrests in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong province. Police said triad gangs were increasingly expanding into mainland China. The crimes involved include drug dealing, gambling and prostitution. Triads are transnational crime groups, often based in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, but operating globally. Read more

Xi Jinping Hears Tough Complaints of American Business

On a day that President Xi Jinping wanted to show off the significance of China’s huge market to American business, the titans of the American tech industry lined up for a 10-minute photo opportunity with Mr. Xi here at Microsoft’s campus. The first in line to meet Mr. Xi, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief of Facebook, spoke Chinese with him, enough to get a laugh from the Chinese leader. Read more

Cooperation and Conflict on Menu When Obama and Xi Jinping Meet

President Xi Jinping of China will arrive in Washington on Thursday for high-stakes meetings with President Obama that spotlight both the depth of their relationship and the increasingly bitter disputes that have strained it. The summit meeting will offer a chance for Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi to showcase their cooperation on tackling climate change and to signal to the world that both nations remain interested in maintaining a partnership. Read more

Cultural Revolution Shaped Xi Jinping, From Schoolboy to Survivor

When the pandemonium of the Cultural Revolution erupted, he was a slight, softly spoken 13-year-old who loved classical Chinese poetry. Two years later, adrift in a city torn apart by warring Red Guards, Xi Jinping had hardened into a combative street survivor. His father, a senior Communist Party official who had been purged a few years earlier, was seized and repeatedly beaten. Student militants ransacked his family’s home, forcing them to flee, and one of his sisters died in the mayhem. Read more