Sharon Lafraniere New York Times

Communist leaders in China are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.

Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again.

Western journalists have lately been tolerated in China, if grudgingly, but the spread of revolution in the Middle East has prompted the authorities here to adopt a more familiar tack: suddenly, foreign reporters are being tracked and detained in the same manner -- though hardly as roughly -- as political dissidents.On Sunday, about a dozen Europea...

Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province. But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was...

The wife of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, was allowed to meet with her husband on Sunday at the prison in northeastern China where he is serving an 11-year sentence, but she was then escorted back to Beijing and placed under house arrest, a human rights group said. Prison officials had informed Mr. Liu that he won the award -- a...

Forget the calls by many Chinese patients for more honest, better-qualified doctors. What this city's 27 public hospitals really needed, officials decided last month, was police officers. And not just at the entrance, but as deputy administrators. The goal: to keep disgruntled patients and their relatives from attacking the doctors. The decision wa...

Communist leaders in China are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.

Many parents and grandparents in this mountainous region of terraced rice and sweet potato fields have long known to grab their babies and find the nearest hiding place whenever family planning officials show up. Too many infants, they say, have been snatched by officials, never to be seen again.

Western journalists have lately been tolerated in China, if grudgingly, but the spread of revolution in the Middle East has prompted the authorities here to adopt a more familiar tack: suddenly, foreign reporters are being tracked and detained in the same manner -- though hardly as roughly -- as political dissidents.On Sunday, about a dozen Europea...

Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province. But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was...

The wife of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, was allowed to meet with her husband on Sunday at the prison in northeastern China where he is serving an 11-year sentence, but she was then escorted back to Beijing and placed under house arrest, a human rights group said. Prison officials had informed Mr. Liu that he won the award -- a...

Forget the calls by many Chinese patients for more honest, better-qualified doctors. What this city's 27 public hospitals really needed, officials decided last month, was police officers. And not just at the entrance, but as deputy administrators. The goal: to keep disgruntled patients and their relatives from attacking the doctors. The decision wa...