Chinese divorce courts are places of peril for women

Mar 25th 2021 ACCORDING TO THE letter of the law, a Chinese family court should be a safe haven for Wang Fumei (not her real name), a 36-year-old battered wife and mother of two. In-store security cameras were rolling when her husband, a heavy-drinking gambler, came to the shop where she worked in southern China, and beat her without pity. The tape is now with the police. It gives Ms Wang grounds to invoke a law against domestic violence that took effect in 2016, allowing judges to punish abusive partners.…

Cloud-seeding will not solve China’s water shortages

Mar 25th 2021 BEIJING IN EARLY MARCH a small aeroplane being used by a local weather bureau crashed in a village in the southern province of Jiangxi. All five people on board were killed and one person on the ground was injured. Footage captured on mobile phones showed thick black smoke billowing from the ruins of a house struck by the aircraft, which had been deployed to seed clouds in the hope of causing more rain. Listen to this story Your browser does not support the <audio> element. Enjoy more…

Will countries boycott China’s Olympics in 2022?

Mar 25th 2021 NEW YORK IN 2015, WHEN the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to Beijing, some people criticised the decision because of China’s human-rights record. Just in the previous few weeks China had rounded up hundreds of civil-society activists across the country. But the rival candidate for the games was another authoritarian state, Kazakhstan. Democracies such as Norway had pulled out of the race. And few people even imagined that, within two years, China would be building a gulag in Xinjiang to incarcerate more than…