Three people were stung to death after a truck carrying dozens of bee hives overturned in northeast China and three more were killed on the road as they tried to steer clear of the swarm, newspapers said on Thursday.

The bee-hive truck collided with a farm vehicle on Wednesday and overturned near Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, the China Daily said.

Pictures showed thousands of bees swarming around the accident site as workers, wearing protective clothing, cleared the debris.

The East Asia Economy and Trade News said three more people were killed hours later when two trucks collided as they tried to avoid the swarm.

There had been seven deadly accidents on the same section of road in three months, the newspaper said.

A campaigner for independence in China's heavily Muslim far west said Tuesday that police have arrested 90 people and were torturing some following a series of bombings that left a dozen people dead – allegations a government official immediately denied.

In the second attack in the restive region of Xinjiang in a week, bombers hit 17 sites – including a police station, government building, bank and shops – in the mostly Muslim city of Kuqa early Sunday.

Dilxat Raxit, a spokesman for the Germany-based, pro-independence World Uighur Congress, said ethnic Muslim Uighurs in Kuqa have called with reports of police torturing detainees. He claimed in an e-mail that more than 90 people have been detained, with others arrested in surrounding areas.

"I oppose the use of violence by both sides," Raxit said. "The international society should immediately get involved and demand that China stop the repression."

After a few days of rumours and conflicting stories, China has finally announced the launch timeframe for its next manned space mission. The Shenzhou 7 spacecraft will lift off somewhere between September 25 and 30. It will carry three astronauts into orbit, and stage China's first spacewalk. This is an unusual and somewhat unexpected development. For months, we have been expecting and October launch, with rumours tipping a mid-October flight. China maintained this position consistently in its media reports for a long time, never wavering from this claim.

For millions of Chinese children, a private school is the only route to education. Indeed, public institutions are only open to kids whose parents have valid residence permits, though authorities say they are looking to end the discrimination.

China dispatched large numbers of soldiers and armed riot police to quell two major protests, officials and a rights group said Friday, in the latest public discontent to rock the communist nation. In central Hunan province Thursday, 5,000 soldiers and armed police converged on a furious crowd of up to 10,000 demanding money back from an alleged fundraising fraud, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said.

FOUR months ago the architect Daniel Libeskind declared publicly that architects should think long and hard before working in China, adding, “I won’t work for totalitarian regimes.” His remarks raised hackles in his profession, with some architects accusing him of hypocrisy because his own firm had recently broken ground on a project in Hong Kong.

The visitors from China seemed innocuous enough. The five of them had flown in from Beijing to attend the 1989 American Physical Society Conference on Shock Waves in Condensed Matter in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Danny Stillman, director of the technical intelligence division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, met the visitors' plane, took care of their transportation and food needs, and escorted them through the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque. All five visitors seemed to be jolly academic tourists, but appearances can be—and in this case were—deceptive. In the next year or two, all five were revealed to be top scientists in the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, the equivalent of the combined US nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia. Those visitors from China were scouting the American turf.

The blazing pageantry of the Beijing Olympics—the most spectacular Olympian celebration in over 70 years—is rightfully being heralded as the symbol of China’s arrival as a global power. The bright Olympic spotlight showed the world a Chinese communist regime that is secure in its power, even if not in its legitimacy. While China cared deeply about the impression it made during its time in the international limelight (cared to the tune of $44 billion) such concern does not extend outside the Olympic venues. Dazzling show and winning gold medal count aside, the Beijing Olympics’ message was clear: China is now big and important enough to do what it wants. And anyone who doesn’t like it—including Chinese citizens—should tolerate China’s ascent in silence.

China gave Pakistan the blueprint for an atomic bomb, testing the finished product in 1990, and unveiled a sophisticated nuclear weapons complex to visiting U.S. scientists in the last decade, report former weapons lab officials. Former Air Force secretary Thomas Reed, a former weapons lab scientist, paints a portrait of China as a reckless distributor of nuclear weapons know-how in a report released Thursday in PhysicsToday magazine. He charges the Chinese with giving extensive weapons support to Pakistan in detail far beyond a 2001 Defense Department report that acknowledged such links. "The Chinese nuclear weapons program is incredibly sophisticated," Reed says. "The scary part is how much Pakistan has learned from them." The Chinese and Pakistani embassies in Washington did not reply to requests for comment on the report.

China on Friday confirmed that two police officers were stabbed to death and five others were injured during the latest in a series of attacks in the restive Central Asian region of Xinjiang. The officers were 'investigating a previous case' when they were ambushed by attackers who were hiding in a cornfield on Wednesday night in Xinjiang's Jiashi county, the official Xinhua news agency quoted a police spokesman as saying. Police were investigating the attack, the agency said without giving any further details. The German-based World Uighur Congress reported the deaths on Thursday and said at least 20 people were arrested following the attack in Jiashi, which is about 100 kilometres east of China's westernmost city of Kashgar.

"This is incredibly dramatic for a global perception of China, and also for China's self-perception [that] it can handle something on this scale," says historian Jonathan Spence of Yale University. "It's a kind of financial coming-of-age. It'll be an important marker, probably in a positive direction, as far as we can tell at the moment."

China has stepped up random checking of blood of travellers entering the country as part of the efforts to prevent the spread of HIV. Under the new exercise, 312 travellers were found to be HIV positive in the first seven months of this year, up 19 per cent year-on-year, a report said. They were among 756,000 travellers on whom random blood checks conducted at border crossings, according to the report compiled by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the quality watchdog.

A Chinese man accused of murdering six policemen has attracted increasing levels of approval and adulation from internet users as his trial begins in Beijing.

CHINA today handed over documents to the International Gymnastics Federation who demanded evidence that its Olympic gymnasts were old enough to be competing.

Customers in China of Apple Inc.'s iTunes online music store were unable to download songs this week, and an activist group said Beijing was trying to block access to a new Tibet-themed album.

For all the global hand-wringing over how international gymnastics officials will ever figure out whether three members of the Chinese women's team were old enough to compete, doctors and forensics experts said it's actually not too difficult.

The Beijing International Media Center (BIMC), which will serve more than 5,000 non-accredited reporters during the Games, opened a Muslim restaurant and worship room on Monday.

Remain calm, don’t fight back and try to send a text message to the police. That’s how Chinese police have advised people to respond if captured by terrorists during next month’s Olympic Games, the official Xinhua News Agency said Friday.

The Beijing Olympics has been seen as a key driver in China’s economic development. Now the Olympics are pretty much here, is the Chinese juggernaut about to grind to a halt?

The poet Woeser has long been a rarity — a Tibetan living in China who doesn’t flinch from publicly criticizing the Chinese government. Now the activist is taking another unusual step.

China’s central government and the Shanghai city government are discussing the possibility of merging Shanghai Airlines with China Eastern Airlines , major business magazine Caijing reported on its website on Wednesday.

Thailand and China offer the most attractive stock selections in Asian markets after prices fell, making them cheap as earnings growth accelerates, Merrill Lynch & Co. told its wealthy clients.

Behind the studio sets, however, world broadcasters have been squaring off for months with Chinese officials over censorship. Among the issues: what they’ll be allowed to get on video, where they can work and whether they can broadcast live. They’ve faced

Beijing continues to shake off foreign residents like a dog sheds fleas. This stealthy, but effective campaign is hitting students, teachers, and entrepreneurs, and others that have invested their futures in China’s are feeling the pinch.

Chinese officials say the investigation into Monday’s twin bus bombings in southern China has shown no link with terrorists targeting the Olympics. The Chinese government says terrorists inside China have plotted to attack the Beijing Olympics, but has pr

The Chinese Communist Party leadership attaches overwhelming importance to China’s hosting of the Olympic Games next month. How events unfold will determine whether it has succeeded in its primary aims of reinforcing its legitimacy and enhancing its statu

To win the race for gold this summer, Beijing has been working to improve its chances in areas where the gold medals are plentiful — focusing especially on sports that have not been China’s traditional strong suits.

Big Oil is easy to kick around — just ask any Democrat in Congress. But China’s threats to Exxon Mobil are in another league. Its bid to use Exxon Mobil as a wedge against its rival Vietnam is a case in point.

Chinese police are investigating a bizarre text message warning residents of Kunming to avoid buses hours before two bomb blasts killed two passengers in the Monday rush hour, local media reported.

The Olympics is a political event; simply stated, it is a competition among nations, and the performance of the national team is a symbolic projection of national power. This explains much of China’s behavior leading into the Beijing games.