Full Coverage: East Asia

28.04.2005 Under proposals for UN reform, Japan and Germany are strong candidates for permanent seats on the Security Council. Aid promises may be one way to win valuable votes from African countries. Oxfam is unimpressed that poverty is becoming a political football.

27.04.2005 The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference will be held in New York next week, at a highly sensitive time. This briefing provides a full background to the treaty and the current concerns surrounding Iran and North Korea.

22.04.2005 China rightly gets the blame for importing illegal timber from Indonesia. But there should be greater awareness that the finished goods often end up in houses in Canada and the US. Campaigners are calling for new laws in those countries.

20.04.2005 China and Japan are falling out in a big way, as neighbours so often do. China tends to get the international blame for its human rights record but Japan is at fault for airbrushing truths about the war from its history books.

16.04.2005 BEIJING, Apr 15 (IPS) - When Chinese censors axed a novella about steamy sex in the People's Liberation Army, it was the timing of its appearance earlier this year that proved most crucial in effecting the ban.

15.04.2005 GM rice is banned in China but even this most authoritarian of regimes has been unable to control the risk of contamination.

13.04.2005 Top Chinese and Indian officials have started the process of settling a territorial dispute in the troubled province of Kashmir, which has soured relations between the world's two most populous nations since 1962. A rapproachment between the two neighbors could have far-reaching diplomatic and economic repercussions, says one analyst.

13.04.2005 China shows no sign of kowtowing to the widely held view that new communications technologies will defy the repressive habits of authoritarian regimes. Popular student online bulletin boards are the latest target for closure.

11.04.2005 To government and business officials from Australia and New Zealand gathered last week to begin to seek slutions to climate change beyond 2012--when the Kyoto Protocol expires--that would involve the U.S. and China, neither of which is currently bound by Kyoto provisions.

10.04.2005 AED believes that, with positive economic and social development, much can be done to help empower Southeast Asians to continue to combat the causes of human trafficking.

08.04.2005 China continues to pose all the difficult questions. The EU and US are doing their utmost to wriggle out of the new free trade environment for textiles in order to protect domestic industry. Oxfam points out that trade is helping China to lift millions out of poverty. We can't have it both ways.