Courts in China have sentenced three key figures of a notorious Myanmar crime syndicate to death for operating large-scale cross-border telecoms fraud networks and causing the deaths of four Chinese nationals. The Quanzhou Intermediate People’s Court and the Nanan City People’s Court in southeastern Fujian province handed down the rulings against syndicate head Wei Huairen, his nephew Chen Dawei and accomplice Liao Jingfang on Tuesday, following a trial held in May, state broadcaster CCTV...

For anyone who has visited the Chinese galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is one work that stops them in their tracks. Stepping into Gallery 206, home to Chinese Buddhist art, visitors are met by a monumental wall – over 15 metres wide and 7.5 metres tall (nearly 50 feet by 25 feet) – covered in a Buddhist assembly so vast and majestic that it momentarily erases the Manhattan bustle outside. Here stands the Medicine Buddha, a 14th century Yuan dynasty (1279-1368)...

The fields in Xinjiang’s Awati county – a cotton hub hit by US sanctions – were nearly ready for the October harvest. Yusup Molamaiti, a 36-year-old technician, recalled what it was like manually planting and harvesting 37 mu (about 2.5 hectares or 6 acres) of scattered plots of land. “Planting a single mu took up to three hours with two people laying plastic film by hand,” he said. Harvesting would lock his family into year-round labour, yielding just 250-300kg (551-661lbs) per mu. Today, his...