China

BEIJING, December 25. /TASS/: Sino-Russian relations are strong as a monolith and do not change under the influence of the unstable international situation, Foreign Minister of China Wang Yi said on Sunday at a symposium dedicated to the Chinese diplomacy.

"Relations maintained between China and Russia are firm as a monolith. They are not susceptible to interference and provocations; major changes in the state of affairs do not hurt them," the Minister said.

BEIJING, Dec 25 (Reuters) - President Xi Jinping wants China to accelerate efforts to achieve self-reliance in agricultural technology, identifying seed development and core equipment among areas to focus on, state media reported.

The central leadership had said in 2020 that the country's seed industry was a weak link in the food chain and needed to make better use of science and technology to achieve a turnaround.

BEIJING, Dec 25 (Reuters) - China's Zhejiang, a big industrial province near Shanghai, is battling around a million new daily COVID-19 infections, a number expected to double in the days ahead, the provincial government said on Sunday.

Despite a record surge of cases nationwide, China reported no COVID deaths on the mainland for the five days through Saturday, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday.

BEIJING/TAIPEI, Dec 25 (Reuters) - China's military said it had conducted "strike drills" in the sea and airspace around Taiwan on Sunday in response to what it said was provocation from the democratically-governed island and the United States.

Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory, said the drills showed Beijing was destroying regional peace and trying to cow Taiwan's people.

BEIJING (AP) — China blasted an annual U.S. defense spending bill for hyping up the “China threat” while Taiwan welcomed the legislation, saying it demonstrated U.S. support for the self-governing island that China says must come under its rule.

“China deplores and firmly opposes this U.S. move,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement posted online Saturday, calling the new law a serious political provocation that blatantly interferes in China’s internal affairs.

Could the COVID-19 surge in China unleash a new coronavirus mutant on the world?

Scientists don’t know but worry that might happen. It could be similar to omicron variants circulating there now. It could be a combination of strains. Or something entirely different, they say.

“China has a population that is very large and there’s limited immunity. And that seems to be the setting in which we may see an explosion of a new variant,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi defended his country’s position on the war in Ukraine on Sunday and signaled that China would deepen ties with Russia in the coming year.

Wang, speaking by video to a conference in the Chinese capital, also blamed America for the deterioration in relations between the world’s two largest economies, saying that China has “firmly rejected the United States’ erroneous China policy.”

SHANGHAI/TAIPEI, Dec 24 (Reuters) - China expressed anger on Saturday at a new U.S. defence authorisation law that boosts military assistance for Taiwan, while Taipei cheered it for helping boost the island's security.

China, which considers democratically governed Taiwan its own territory, expressed "strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition" regarding the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

BAZHOU, China (AP) — Yao Ruyan paced frantically outside the fever clinic of a county hospital in China’s industrial Hebei province, 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of Beijing. Her mother-in-law had COVID-19 and needed urgent medical care, but all hospitals nearby were full.

“They say there’s no beds here,” she barked into her phone.

BEIJING/SHANGHAI, Dec 23 (Reuters) - China is expecting a peak in COVID-19 infections within a week, a health official said, with authorities predicting extra strain on the country's health system even as they downplay the disease's severity and continue to report no new deaths.

In the face of a surging outbreak and widespread protests against its "zero-COVID" regime of lockdowns and testing, China began dismantling it this month, becoming the last major country to move towards living with the virus.