So that's all right, then. The British Government has asked China to carry out a full investigation, free from political interference, into the death of the British businessman, Neil Heywood. The Chinese have pledged a thorough and transparent inquiry. Everyone is happy, but nobody should be fooled.

I wouldn't be surprised if Monica Mason, the director of the Royal Ballet, was feeling pretty furious the last couple of days. Her young star, Sergei Polunin, walked away from the company two days ago without a word. There had been no particular sign, apparently, that he was unhappy or thinking of leaving; there were no negotiations that had broken down.

A Chinese court jailed a veteran dissident who organised a pro-democracy activist network for 10 years today for inciting subversion, his wife said.

In the preface to his exhaustive biography of the Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping, Ezra F Vogel recalls the moment the seed for the book was planted. Vogel, a professor at Harvard who has spent his career immersed in Japan and China, asked a seasoned journalist: "What would best help Americans understand coming developments in Asia" at the start of the 21 century? Without hesitation his friend replied: "Deng Xiaoping."

China's "Great Firewall" has been in overdrive over the last three weeks in an effort to prevent information leaking out about a man who apparently set himself alight in front of a portrait of Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

China has dismissed as "pure rumour" reports that retired president Jiang Zemin, who led the country through massive changes after the crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, has died.

Community that lived in seclusion for millennia faces threat to survival

On 4 June 1989, soldiers from the Chinese People's Army massacred thousands of their own people, who had been protesting for democratic reforms.

Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" is the closest thing to a bible that Marxist-Leninist, materialist and atheist Chinese society can have.

In 1991, researching a history of women reporters, I wrote to veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn requesting an interview. She declined to co-operate with a book which had women in the title, insisting that she was a reporter, not a woman reporter.

The Hong Kong government has decided to ban two former student leaders exiled for their roles in the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, activists said yesterday, accusing local authorities of kowtowing to Beijing.

China's Premier Wen Jiabao took the highly unusual step yesterday of visiting the country's top petition bureau in Beijing, where people who have had their rights abused by officialdom gather to seek help from the government.