The prospect of greater Chinese involvement in the Middle East peace process was raised in mid 2013 when Beijing invited both Israeli and Palestinian leaders for separate meetings to discuss the resumption of the Arab-Israeli peace process. Newly elected Chinese leader Xi Jinping used the meetings to unveil his four-point peace proposal for the settlement of the Palestinian issue.

Films from Asia are the clear winners at the 2014 Berlinale film festival in the German capital. Chinese thriller “Black Coal, Thin Ice”, scooped the top Golden Bear prize, while Liao Fan, who played the lead role in the film, won the Silver Bear for Best Actor. Told through flashbacks, the story is about a former policeman investigating gruesome murders in 1990s northern China.

A group of Chinese bloggers asked the United States to take up the cause of Internet freedom in an unusual meeting on Saturday with Secretary of State John Kerry. One by one, the bloggers voiced concerns to Mr. Kerry, who arrived here on Friday to discuss regional issues with China’s leaders, that the ability of Chinese citizens to gain access to information was under siege and that the country’s prospects for becoming a democracy were uncertain at best.

Large Chinese investors have been disappointed. Smaller traders, however, are busy. Agriculture was perhaps the most obvious of the state’s plans to fail. Dependent upon massive irrigation schemes and the liberal use of fertilizer, it was an industry that was highly vulnerable to disruption. The irrigation programs were in turn dependent upon electricity, which required large amounts of maintenance. When the system began to deteriorate at any point, it deteriorated everywhere and failed completely.

An international, China-led operation called Cobra II has seized huge quantities of rare wildlife products and marked the first time Beijing authorities have arrested a wildlife crime suspect overseas.

Read more: China Leads International Seizure of Wildlife Products | TIME.com http://world.time.com/2014/02/11/china-leads-international-operation-to-...

France became the first European country this week to join a worldwide effort to destroy ivory. The goal is to send a warning to ivory traffickers and to anyone who might not consider buying it a serious crime.

Earlier this month, a group of Japanese officials came to Glendale, Calif., with an unusual demand: They wanted the city to take down a public monument in the park next to its public library. The bronze statue of a girl in traditional South Korean dress seated next to an empty chair is a memorial to the 70,000 to 200,000 Korean, Filipina, Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesian and Dutch “comfort women” — a euphemism for sex slaves — conscripted into Japanese military brothels during World War II.

When 34-year-old Hong Kong singer and actress Ella Koon penned a column for the respected local paper Ming Pao on Jan. 24 entitled "Kick Out Hatred and Discrimination," she was trying to beseech her fellow Hong Kong residents to be more tolerant toward mainland Chinese visitors. Instead, she has found herself pilloried online in a display of hatred toward mainlanders that's become eerily typical over the past several years.