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This is not your average cultural exchange. There are no obscure acrobatic troupes and no awkward high school students. Yo-Yo Ma will play the cello. Alice Waters will cook. Joel Coen will chat about ''True Grit,'' and Meryl Streep will do a reading. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

KINMEN, Taiwan -- Burrowing just a few feet beneath the surface of this island in the Taiwan Strait turns up remnants of what was once the most militarized zone on earth. Concrete tunnels that once served as air-raid shelters run beneath villages like a network of capillaries. The threat from Mao and the People's Republic of China began in 1949, when Communist soldiers trying to invade Taiwan made an ill-fated beach landing on this island, a few miles off the southeast coast of the mainland. Five years later, Chinese forces shelled the island for months, prompting the United States to contemplate using nuclear weapons against China. But even that attack did not prepare the island's residents and Taiwanese soldiers for the artillery barrage that came in 1958: a half-million shells over 44 days that killed hundreds. The Communists then switched strategies: for the next two decades, the shells they lobbed every other day were loaded with propaganda leaflets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- The documentary film ''Petition'' by Zhao Liang is considered by many of its viewers to be a fearless work of art. Shot over 12 years, it shows how the authorities muzzle and brutalize Chinese who, following an age-old tradition, travel to Beijing seeking redress for wrongdoing by local officials. In the middle of the shooting, Mr. Zhao came to believe security agents were stalking him. The film was finished, and made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2009, but was immediately banned in China. Officers asked about Mr. Zhao in his hometown. He turned off his cellphone and fled to Tibet for three weeks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CHONGQING, China -- The kindergarten musical climaxed in a whirlwind of violence: A teacher playing a Japanese soldier sliced down a peasant girl with a curved sword, just as two tykes in Red Army outfits took aim at him with plastic pistols. Dozens of girls in cerise silk outfits broke into song and dance in the schoolyard, and a teacher at the microphone delivered the lesson: ''If you don't put up your defenses, you'll lose your life.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TWO THOUSAND miles away from Yunnan and its sour papaya fish stews, Wang Li has driven half an hour with her family to Yunteng Shifu, which she considers the most authentic Yunnan restaurant in Beijing. ''The best thing about Beijing is its many provincial bureau restaurants,'' said Ms. Wang, 55, a retired doctor. ''Stay in one place, eat from all over!'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- This month China's great masses are being mobilized by their leaders for an unusual purpose. Employees at state-owned companies and at all levels of government are joining students from grade school to universities as they leave their homes, head out into the heat and do their duty: ensure the financial success of the government's latest propaganda film, ''Beginning of the Great Revival.'' The movie, which opened on Wednesday on almost all of the country's 6,200 screens, is part of a campaign to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party next Friday. It is also playing in 29 American theaters, including ones in New York and Los Angeles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CHENGDU, China -- Ever since Deng Xiaoping signaled in 1978 that it was fine to get rich, much of China has seemed hell-bent on that goal. But some local governments would like those who succeed not to lord it over others, at least when it comes to paying final respects. As of last month, in the cemeteries of this hilly megalopolis in south central China, modest burial sites are in. Fancy tombs are out. And in some places, so are fancy funerals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the days after a bus traveling from a Connecticut casino crashed last month in the Bronx, the bodies of 14 victims were laid to rest. But the body of the 15th and final victim, Wang Jianhua, has lain in a funeral home in Chinatown while his widow, in China, has sought permission to come to the United States for his funeral. On Wednesday, the widow, Lin Yaofang, said American consular officials had granted her a visitor's visa. ''There are so many emotions; I can't describe them,'' said Ms. Lin, reached by telephone at her home in Gui'an, a rural village in Fujian Province. ''I am so relieved. I get to see his face one last time.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

YICHENG, China -- Under China's family-planning regulations, most couples are barred from having more than one baby. Wang Hong and her husband, Zhang Jingfeng, are among those who were granted a second chance -- and decided against it. Instead, they have marshaled their resources behind their gregarious 9-year-old son, devoting two-fifths of their yearly income of 20,000 renminbi, or about $3,000, to send him to private school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- China, the world's largest tobacco producer and home to a third of all smokers, has issued a national ban on lighting up in hotels, restaurants and other indoor public spaces, the Health Ministry said on Thursday. The rules, which take effect on May 1 and spell out education provisions about the dangers of tobacco, include restrictions on cigarette vending machines and on outdoor smoking that affects pedestrians. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A look at notable restaurants that are worth a visit in four Asian cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HETAOCUN, China -- Compared with some of the more spectacular recent traffic jams in China, among them a 60-mile snarl last summer that paralyzed a major artery outside Beijing for two weeks, the thousands of travelers who spent the night trapped on a snow-coated highway in southwest Guizhou Province on Monday did not even warrant a mention in the local news media. The immediate effect of the information vacuum was to suck more unwitting victims -- including this reporter -- into the morass, which stretched for miles along the four-lane affair linking Guizhou north to Chongqing . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MURGHAB, Tajikistan -- On the outskirts of this wind-scoured town, founded in 1893 as a Russian military post, the construction of a new customs compound heralds the return of another major power. When it opens this year, the sprawling new lot will accommodate much larger caravans of Chinese trucks than the existing trade depot, speeding the flow of clothing, electronics and household appliances that have lately flooded Central Asia, from nomadic yurts on the Kyrgyz steppes to ancient alleyways in Samarkand and Bukhara. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- The photograph is so graphic that it appears cartoonish at first glance. A man lies on a road with his eyes closed, blood streaming from his half-open mouth, his torso completely crushed under the large tire of a red truck. One arm reaches out from beneath the tire. His shoulder is a bloody pile of flesh. His head is no longer attached to the flattened spinal cord. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- The photograph is so graphic that it appears cartoonish at first glance. A man lies on a road with his eyes closed, blood streaming from his half-open mouth, his torso completely crushed under the large tire of a red truck. One arm reaches out from beneath the tire. His shoulder is a bloody pile of flesh. His head is no longer attached to the flattened spinal cord. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- The Quxian Beggars Shelter in Sichuan Province did not provide much in the way of succor to the bedraggled men who sought help from its founder, a pig farmer named Zeng Lingquan. Instead, the authorities say, Mr. Zeng operated the unregistered charity as a sort of low-cost labor agency, selling at least 70 men to factories across the country where they toiled as virtual slaves. Most of the men, according to the Chinese media, were mentally disabled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- Liu Yang, a coal miner's daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility. Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING THE Cui Yongping Shadow Play Art Museum exhibits shadow puppets. Which is like saying the Louvre exhibits paintings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KASHGAR, China -- The brochure promised ''a piece of heaven,'' but Shangri-La, a half-built apartment complex on the dusty outskirts of this oasis town, was hardly that. The landscape was parched, and the most notable sign of life was a pack of goats chewing their way through a mound of trash. Beneath a plastic canopy marked ''sales center,'' the young Chinese saleswomen in ill-fitting miniskirts reassured prospective buyers. ''Don't worry, there's a man-made lake coming and all those houses will be torn down,'' one said, gesturing to the mud-brick homes occupied by Uighurs, members of the Turkic-language ethnic group that predominates in this far western corner of China known as Xinjiang. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- China had captivated the imagination of Paul Cabo for as long as he could remember. Maybe it started with the documentaries he saw as a child about the Great Wall. Or his desire to understand his recently immigrated Chinese classmates at Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island. Or maybe it was kung fu movies. Whatever the cause, four years ago it finally propelled Mr. Cabo, now 35, from a job as a Starbucks manager to a position as an English teacher in Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- In a move to call global attention to the imprisonment of her husband, the wife of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo has invited 143 Chinese activists, academics and celebrities to the award ceremony in Oslo. Her invitation list was released online with a letter saying the Chinese authorities were unlikely to allow her or her husband to attend the event on Dec. 10. ''This prize belongs to everyone, everyone who is Chinese and has been fearless in defending their dignity,'' the letter states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- A dispute between China and the United States over Beijing's subsidies to clean energy industries escalated on Sunday when a senior Chinese economic official warned that Washington ''cannot win this trade fight.'' In an abruptly scheduled news briefing here, the official, Zhang Guobao, sharply rebuked the Obama administration for opening an inquiry on Friday into the subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

JILI, China -- There was a time when clean water, mulberry trees and tiny, squirming, milky-white larvae made this village one of the most famous in all of China. The larvae spun cocoons, and the cocoons were spun into silk, and the silk traveled the world. It was made into gowns and garter belts, slippers and scarves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

KHOTAN, China -- As long as anyone here can remember, the muddy river that flows through this oasis city in southern Xinjiang has yielded creamy white stones, their rough edges polished smooth by the waters that tumble down the mountains from Tibet. And as long as anyone can remember, those stones -- a type of semitranslucent jade -- were about as valued as, well, a pile of river rocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

URUMQI, China -- The five-star hotels are full, bulldozers are making quick work of dreary slums and billboards for ''French-style villas'' call out to the nouveau riche. In the year since rioting between the Han and Uighur ethnic groups killed nearly 200 people in this city in far western China, life appears to be returning to normal. ''Don't worry, everything is peaceful now,'' said the perky bellhop at a hotel in the city's predominantly Han Chinese quarter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- A landslide buried and flooded hundreds of homes over the weekend in a remote mountainous region of Gansu Province. Officials said Sunday evening that 127 bodies had been recovered and that nearly 2,000 people were missing. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who frequently flies to major disasters, visited a town near the hardest-hit city, Zhouqu, in far southern Gansu, to supervise relief operations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- For China's investigative journalists, who grapple with heavy-handed censors and accusations of bribe-taking, the case of a Shanghai-based reporter appears to offer a positive turn. The episode did not start auspiciously for the reporter, Qiu Ziming, 28. He went into hiding this week after county police in Zhejiang Province announced they were seeking his arrest for reporting on accusations of insider trading at a paper company in a four-part series in The Economic Observer, a well-regarded weekly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BEIJING -- Protests over land grabs, industrial pollution and poor work conditions often rattle the Chinese authorities. Now add to that outrage over language policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LHASA, Tibet -- They come by new high-altitude trains, four a day, cruising 1,200 miles past snow-capped mountains. And they come by military truck convoy, lumbering across the roof of the world. Han Chinese workers, investors, merchants, teachers and soldiers are pouring into remote Tibet. After the violence that ravaged this region in 2008, China's aim is to make Tibet wealthier -- and more Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- When viewers tuned into China's most popular dating show this spring, they saw beautiful women, brutal rejections and plenty of money worshiping, as when a female contestant was asked by a possible date whether she would like to go for a bicycle ride. ''I'd rather sit and cry in the back of a BMW,'' she said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

CORRECTION APPENDED ZHONGSHAN, China -- If Wang Jinyan, an unemployed factory worker with a middle school education, had a resume, it might start out like this: ''Objective: seeking well-paid, slow-paced assembly-line work in air-conditioned plant with Sundays off, free wireless Internet and washing machines in dormitory. Friendly boss a plus.'' As she eased her way along a gantlet of recruiters in this manufacturing megalopolis one recent afternoon, Ms. Wang, 25, was in no particular rush to find a job. An underwear company was offering subsidized meals and factory worker fashion shows. The maker of electric heaters promised seven-and-a-half-hour days. ''If you're good, you can work in quality control and won't have to stand all day,'' bragged a woman hawking jobs for a shoe manufacturer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- On a hot morning in late May, while some 2,000 workers at a Honda parts factory were striking in China's south, 100 irate employees at a hotel in the heart of the capital staged their own protest. The Honda workers got lots of publicity. The hotel employees were mostly ignored. But the undercurrent was the same: labor disputes are becoming a common feature of the Chinese economic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ZHONGSHAN, China -- Wage negotiations between workers and managers at a Honda auto parts factory here ended on Friday night with the company's final offer of a pay increase that was substantially less than employees had been seeking, a worker involved in the discussions said. Although a spokesman for the company said the deal effectively ended two weeks of labor unrest at the Honda Lock factory here, it was unclear Friday night whether the 1,700 employees would accept the offer on Saturday or would go back out on strike. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- In public, he was a twice-divorced computer science professor dedicated to his students and to caring for an elderly mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. In private, the professor, Ma Yaohai, 53, led a life that became intolerable to Chinese authorities: for the past six years, he was a member of informal swingers clubs that practiced group sex and partner swapping. In online chat rooms, his handle was Roaring Virile Fire. He organized and engaged in at least 18 orgies, most of them in the two-bedroom apartment in Nanjing where he lived with his mother, according to prosecutors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- Full Internet service was restored to the vast western Chinese region of Xinjiang on Friday, 10 months after it was blocked following deadly ethnic rioting that convulsed the regional capital, Urumqi. The blockage was the longest and most widespread in China since the Internet became readily available throughout the country a decade ago. The announcement was made in the morning, and many residents in cities across Xinjiang took the day off from school or work to rush to Internet cafes, where they pored through months of unread e-mail messages or chatted via instant messaging. Some also dived back into online gaming, one of China's most popular pastimes (''World of Warcraft'' imitators being the most played). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- Two lawyers who represented a follower of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement have had their licenses permanently revoked, a move that prevents them from ever practicing law in China, the lawyers said Monday. The ban on the two, Tang Jitian and Liu Wei, was the latest incident in a wide crackdown by the Chinese government on human rights lawyers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- Grant Xia had the misfortune of trying to take up violin as an amateur during the collective madness of the Cultural Revolution. Chinese officials banned classical music and sent musicians to re-education camps. Mr. Xia's family collection of more than 1,000 vinyl records was destroyed. Mr. Xia soon stopped playing the violin. Then, in 1973, as the United States began re-establishing diplomatic ties with China, President Nixon sent the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra to Beijing. It was the first time an American symphony orchestra had performed in China since the Communists won the civil war in 1949, and it helped pave the way for a return of Western art and culture to China when the Cultural Revolution ended three years later. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- Gao Zhisheng, a prominent human rights lawyer whose 13-month disappearance at the hands of Chinese security agents stirred an international outcry until he resurfaced in March, has again vanished, his friends said Friday. Associates said Mr. Gao failed to return to a Beijing apartment on April 20 after spending more than a week in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region in western China, where he had been visiting his father-in-law. Mr. Gao telephoned his father-in-law as his plane left Urumqi, saying he would call upon his arrival in Beijing, they said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- A powerful earthquake in northwest China killed at least 300 people, injured 8,000 and left many others buried under debris on Wednesday, Chinese state media reported. The quake, which struck at 7:49 a.m. in Qinghai Province, had a magnitude of 7.1 according to China's earthquake administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SANYA, China -- One developer is building what he calls Asia's largest hotel, with space for a casino and a greyhound racetrack. The Visun Royal Yacht Club, China's largest, plans to buy a helicopter for the use of its members. A golf course that charges $180 per round is opening 220 villas, each with its own butler, swimming pool and spa -- ''I want to get it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most spas anywhere,'' the manager says. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEIJING -- Rescue workers in northern China struggled Monday to reach 153 miners trapped a day earlier when water gushed into a warren of tunnels dug for a new underground coal field. Government officials say an additional 108 men scurried to safety as the mine began flooding Sunday afternoon. A preliminary investigation suggests that miners may have broken through to an adjacent subterranean pit where water had been accumulating, according to the official Xinhua news service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]