Laurence Westwood

China’s environmental awakening has brought cleaner skies and greener industries, but the costs of decades of ecological devastation remain immense. Mao Zedong was not a farmer. Though born into a peasant family, he had little farming experience. It was political struggle that interested him. This struggle would come to define his whole life; struggle against everything he thought was holding China back from becoming the Marxist utopia it was destined to be. In 1917, as a youth, he famously...

Zheng Liu’s study of independent bookselling in China reveals a vibrant retail culture but skirts the politics that shape it. The independent bookshop is one of modern capitalism’s most stubborn survivors. From Britain to America, it has endured the onslaught of scale and algorithms, adapting itself into something more than a retail space: part salon, part sanctuary and part civic square. That same romance now attaches itself to China’s flourishing crop of design-led bookstores - those...

Cyber fraud, human trafficking and weak states have fused into a criminal ecosystem that even China’s heavy hand struggles to dismantle Chinese actor Wang Xing with Thai police authorities In January of this year, eleven members of the mafia family Ming were executed in China. Their crimes included homicide, illegal detention, and the operating of cyber scam centres across the border in Myanmar. Five members of the family Bai were sentenced to death back in November, and there are more trials...