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Three-year-old female Giant Panda "Yaya" climbs a tree in the Qinling Giant Panda Field Training Base in Foping county, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, January 28, 2013. "Yaya" was brought here a month ago to get trained in food seeking and climbing in the wilderness. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao)    Three-year-old female Giant Panda "Yaya" climbs a tree in the Qinling Giant Panda Field Training Base in Foping county, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, January 28, 2013. "Yaya" was brought here a month ago to get trained in food seeking and climbing in the wilderness. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao)    Three-year-old female Giant Panda "Yaya" gets trained in the Qinling Giant Panda Field Training Base in Foping county, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, January 28, 2013. "Yaya" was brought here a month ago to get trained in food seeking and climbing in the wilderness. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao)    Three-year...

Fourteen people pled guilty Wednesday for encouraging mass violence against government buildings and intentionally damaging property in Qidong City in eastern China's Jiangsu Province. On the morning of July 28, during a mass protest against a planned construction of a highly-polluting drainpipe project, Zhu Baosheng, Shen Yawei, Xu Jianjie and 11 others smashed office buildings and jumped on cars in the government compound, according to an open trial held in the local court. Prosecutors said their violent behavior caused property losses, injured police officers and severely disrupted public order, and that they should be held responsible for their actions. The 14 defendants pled guilty in court but argued on the length of their penalties. The court will announce the verdict at a later date. On the day of the crime, thousands of people in east China's Jiangsu Province took to the streets to protest against the drainpipe project that would have discharged waste wat...

A beach is crowded with tourists spending their New Year holiday in the tropical city of Sanya, Hainan province, on Jan 2. [SUN QING / FOR CHINA DAILY] Sanya may be the country's most popular resort during the coming Spring Festival, but the city's infrastructure is not yet ready for the booming tourism. "Downtown Sanya is designed for 300,000 to 400,000 residents, but during the peak tourism season more than 1 million people will flood into the city," Wang Yong, mayor of Sanya in Hainan province, said on the sidelines of the provincial legislative body's annual session on Monday. Authorities are speeding up construction, but because of the short annual construction period, it is not an easy job, he added. Due to the four-month typhoon season, the construction period in the tropical city is generally from December to September, and all construction is suspended during tourism seasons such as national holidays and in winter. The lagg...

29 January 2013 Last updated at 17:41 ET By Katie Hunt Business reporter, BBC News, Hong Kong Chinese consumer electronics company TCL is making a push into Hollywood When Iron Man 3 is released this spring, moviegoers eager to see the latest adventures of Robert Downey Jr's playboy superhero may catch a glimpse of a 110in giant TV screen made by Chinese consumer electronics company TCL. The film will also feature TCL phones and a scene where the Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard is blown to smithereens. The landmark, which hosts many a red-carpet premiere, has just been renamed TCL Chinese Theatre as part of a 10-year $ 5m (₤3.2m; 3.72m euro) deal. "TCL has attached great importance to the collaboration with Hollywood," said Li Dongsheng, TCL's chairman when the product placement deal was announced in January. His company is one of a growing number of Chinese corporations using Hollywood's marketing machine to promote their products t...

Taking advantage of her irresistible beauty and behaving lovely and coquettish before her preys, Zhao Hongxia managed to bring at least six high ranking Chongqing officials onto her bed and then film secretly the process of their sexual tryst. The sex videos directly led to the firing of 11 Chongqing officials and Zhao has been hailed the anti-corruption heroine of China. Zhao Hongxia has become the most widely searched term on Sino Weibo as well as Beidu on Friday, January 25, 2013, when the news became headline in Chinese media that the 10 officials of Chongqing were sacked due to involvement in the Chongqing sex-tape extortion scandal. Zhao Hongxia was the woman that filmed having sex with at least six of the 10 officials, directly leading to the officials' loss of jobs.     You might also like： Whistle-blower refuses Chongqing...

China's armed forces are battling a major corruption problem, with little political oversight and no whistleblower mechanism to counter graft, watchdog Transparency International said Tuesday. China, which has the world's largest active military, scored as a "high-risk" country on a new global index on defence establishment corruption launched by the Berlin-based organisation at a press conference in Taiwan. "The Chinese military acknowledges that there is a major corruption issue through its various promulgations, and it has put a variety of measures in place to limit this major concern," said Mark Pyman, director of the organisation's Defence and Security Programme. However, he said it is uncertain how effective these measures are, since the military does not allow the level of scrutiny required to ensure an anti-graft campaign is succeeding. "There are many areas where China is weak in its protections against corruption i...

Located approximately 6 km (3.73 miles) from the outskirts of the city of Dunhuang in Western China, lies Crescent Lake, an incredible oasis in the Gobi desert. Known as Yueyaquan in Chinese, the crescent-shaped lake is a major tourist attraction where one of the world's great shrines to Buddhism resides. Designated a World Heritage Site, the lake has been shrinking since the 1970s and is now about a third of its original size. In the last three decades alone, the lake has dropped more than 25 feet. However, it has been reported that the government has recently taken steps to preserve the site and restore the depth of the lake to previous levels. An ancient city that once served as China's gateway to the West, Dunhuang is now threatened by very modern demands. A dam built three decades ago to help local farming, combined with a doubling of the population, have overstressed a fragile desert hydrology that had been stable for thousands of ...