Taiwan, Asia | featured news

China's "Beijing Blues" has won the best film award at Taiwan's Golden Horse Film Festival, an event considered the Chinese-language Oscars. Hong Kong's Johnnie To is taking home the best director's award. "Beijing Blues" portrays the lives of the ordinary urban dwellers through the work of a squad of plainclothes crime-hunters.
At Saturday's ceremony, To won the award for directing "Life Without Principle," a movie about ordinary citizens' struggles in hard economic times.

A vivid mural in an Oregon town that depicts a Tibetan monk's immolation and promotes independence for Taiwan has created a dust-up with China.

The sign inside the mausoleum of Chiang Kai-Shek tells visitors to “please bow or show your respects” to the general who fought a bloody civil war against Mao Zedong and then fled China for Taiwan, where he spent years plotting to retake the mainland from its Communist rulers.

A group of Japanese activists swam ashore and raised flags early Sunday on one of a group of islands at the center of an escalating territorial dispute with China.

Taiwan snapped two straight quarters of contraction, but an uncertain outlook for its major trading partners prompted Taipei to revise growth forecasts for the year.

Traditional Chinese medicine is enjoying increasing popularity all over the world. But two recently published studies show that the treatments can be harmful. The papers focus attention on the fact that not all of the ingredients in TCM treatments are listed, or even legal, and that some can cause cancer.

At the 228 Memorial Museum, a shrine to the victims of a 1947 massacre by Chinese troops, staff were in mourning Sunday following the re-election of Ma Ying-jeou, a president they think wants to turn Taiwan over to China.

In unusual praise for China, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday that Beijing deserved credit for its relatively mild response to Washington's announcement last month of a $5.8 billion arms sale to Taiwan.

China’s foreign ministry spokesman said Monday that Beijing “firmly opposes” the Obama administration’s plans to upgrade Taiwan’s aging fleet of F-16 fighter jets, but the measured tone suggested Chinese leaders may want to avoid sparking a full-scale confrontation with Washington over the issue.

One of Taiwan's best regarded hospitals said HIV-infected organs were mistakenly transplanted into five patients after a hospital staffer misheard the donor's test results by telephone....