During his visit to the region last week, US vice president Joe Biden expressed support for allies South Korea and Japan in their defiance of China’s air defence zone. Photograph: Lee Jin-man/Reuters

South Korea has extended its own air defence identification zone to overlap with a similar area declared by China two weeks ago, as regional tensions (...)

Former Chinese politician Bo Xilai speaks in a court room at Jinan intermediate people’s court in Jinan, eastern China’s Shandong province, yesterday.  Photograph: AP

Disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai has called his former protege Wang Lijun a liar during his trial, while maintaining that his wife, Gu Kailai, wa(...)

Song Zhengqiong, holding her daughter, cries in front of her damaged house after the  earthquake at Longmen village in Lushan county. Reuters/Jason Lee

Rescue workers struggled along narrow roads, many of them blocked by landslides, to reach villages devastated by a powerful ea(...)



South Korean soldiers patrol inside the barbed-wire fence near the border village of Panmunjom yesterday in Paju, South Korea. North Korea seems to be following its usual strategy of using belligerent language to win concessions on aid and, ultimately, achieve a peace treaty with the US. Photograph: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty

Military tensions reached a new high on the Korean peninsula yesterday as North Korea reportedly moved an intermediate-range missile to its eas(...)

Vietnamese naval soldiers patrol at Truong Sa Dong island in the Spratly archipelago in January. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan all claim territory in the sea, including the Spratly and Paracel archipelagos. Photograph: Quang Le/Reuters

China has stepped up its presence in disputed territories in surrounding oceans with a series of naval drills at the disputed Spratly Islands, (...)

A subway in Shanghai yesterday where a TV  screen shows   China's newly elected president  Xi Jinping. Photograph: Carlos Barria/Reuters

In the months leading up to the National People’s Congress, which yesterday appointed Xi Jinping as president, the Xinhua n(...)