Taiwan and the United States will hold trade talks next week, the de facto US embassy in Taipei said on Friday, resuming long-stalled discussions as Washington seeks to deepen its support for the Chinese-claimed island.The Trade and Investment Framework Agreement talks, or TIFA, stalled after former US president Barack Obama left office in 2016 and his successor Donald Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, focused his attention on China, the world’s second-largest economy.The TIFA…

The Chinese LGBT community is up to five times more likely to get depression than the general public, and close to 60 per cent surveyed face the risk of being depressed, a new report has found.The Chinese Gender and Sexual Minorities Psychological Health Survey was conducted by the Beijing LGBT Centre and experts at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and released on Thursday. It was based on 9,355 collected questionnaires, with an average age of 22.It found that 59…

China’s central government has expressed strong support for Hong Kong joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), after its financial secretary said the city intended to become a member of the 15-nation trade bloc in what could be a boost to its flagging logistics sector.The China-backed RCEP was signed in November and includes the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) plus China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. By eliminating…

A growing number of local authorities across China are temporarily closing coal mines to avoid more deadly incidents ahead of the Communist Party’s 100th anniversary next week, but the move is expected to add more pressure to commodity prices in the world’s second largest economy.China’s biggest coal-producing province Shanxi, which accounted for about 14 per cent of total global coal output last year, announced on Thursday the immediate closure of two local mines for at least a month following…

A Chinese professor has become an overnight celebrity, not for academic achievement, but for sharing his feelings of helplessness about how to help his daughter perform academically.Professor Zhang Xiaoqiang from Chongqing University in western China wrote a line in his introduction on the university’s official website which has since gone viral.“Though I have tutored more than 70 postgraduate students, I still have totally no idea how to educate my middle-school daughter,” he wrote.The remark…

Taiwan will tighten border controls to keep out the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus, authorities said on Friday, requiring arrivals from five countries, including Britain, to be placed in centralised quarantine facilities.Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said that starting from Sunday, entrants from Bangladesh, Britain, Indonesia, Israel and Peru would have to spend 14 days in government-run facilities.People coming from Brazil and India already face such quarantine, while all…

At least 18 people – most of them children – were killed in a deadly blaze at a mixed martial arts school in central China’s Henan province in the early hours of Friday morning.Four others were severely injured and 12 sustained minor injuries in the fire that broke out at the boarding school in Shuangqiu city’s Zhecheng county in the early hours of Friday, according to state media reports.The children, aged between seven and 16, were asleep on the first floor while school owner Chen Lin and his…