China’s Global Investments Climbing, But Troubled

China’s overseas investments neared $80 billion in 2012, according to the latest tally by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington D.C. think, and may well hit $100 billion a year in the coming years.

But rapid, further expansion is far from assured, says Derek Scissors, a China analyst at Heritage, who is the keeper of the data. That’s because more than 90% of Chinese overseas investment, as measured by the dollar value of the deals, comes from state-owned enterprises, Heritage calculates. And investments by those entities sometimes produce opposition in the receiving countries – as well as in China.

Video: Anti-Censorship Protesters Hauled Away

Men in plain clothes hauled away protesters on the fourth day of demonstrations outside the offices of Southern Weekly, the Guangzhou-based newspaper that has been embroiled in a censorship dispute with propaganda authorities over the past week.

Arriving around 1:45 p.m., the protesters held up banners and drew a crowd of about 20 other protesters, observers and journalists.  Roughly half an hour later, a van pulled up and several men jumped out and wrestled two of the protesters into the van, before speeding off.

A third protester in a wheelchair, seen in the video above, was knocked out of his chair and carried down the street by the police. When a second van arrived, four men carried the protester down the street and into the van as he screamed “I’ve been kidnapped.”

More details here.

After Censorship Showdown, Southern Weekly Hits Newsstands

Southern Weekly, the daring Chinese newspaper that made headlines of its own this week thanks to a high-profile clash with propaganda officials over censorship, hit newsstands as scheduled, indicating the paper’s clash with authorities has been at least partly resolved.

Copies of the new edition of the newspaper were available at newsstands in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou on Thursday. The top story was a feature about child welfare tied to a deadly fire at an orphanage in the central Chinese province of Henan on Friday.

Muckraking Under Attack in Hong Kong, Reporters Say

Hong Kong’s free-wheeling press corps—whose muckraking tendencies have been known to make Beijing squirm—will soon have its wings clipped if a government proposal moves forward, activists said Thursday.

In a paper submitted to the legislature this week, the government has proposed blocking public access to the personal information of company directors. Such a change would pose a threat to “most of the investigative reporting in Hong Kong,” said Mak Yin-ting, who chairs the Hong Kong Journalists Association and calls the proposal the biggest threat to local press freedom since the city’s showdown over a proposed anti-subversion law in 2003.

Photos: It’s Cold in China

Colder than usual temperatures have affected the country this year, as China experiences its coldest winter in almost three decades. More images after the jump.

Top China Stories from WSJ: Ping An Sale, Inflation Fears, Censorship

China’s coldest winter in almost three decades is stoking inflation fears as some food and energy prices rise amid an unusual cold snap; Chinese regulators are expected to veto the sale of HSBC’s stake in Ping An Insurance (Group) Co. of China, people familiar with the deal’s progress said; rebellion among Chinese journalists over the Communist Party’s censorship methods spread to the capital, where editors at a large Beijing daily confronted propaganda authorities in a late-night attempt to assert their independence, according to a journalist at the publication.

Video: China’s New ‘It’ Girl, 72-Year-Old Grandpa Liu Qianping

A 72-year-old Chinese man has become one of the country's hottest fashion models–of women's clothing. His cross-dressing antics have taken the nation by storm. WSJ's Josh Chin reports from Beijing.

Wong Kar-wai Scores With ‘The Grandmaster’

After a decade of preparation and three years of filming, Wong Kar-wai’s “The Grandmaster” opened in China on Tuesday, and any lingering questions over whether the movie would live up to its lofty expectations immediately evaporated.

Face-Off in a Beijing Newsroom: An Insider’s Account

Fallout from a high-profile conflict over censorship between Chinese propaganda officials and journalists at Southern Weekly, one of China’s most daring newspapers, has spread to sister newspaper Beijing News, which lost a dramatic stand-off with authorities late Tuesday night over the reprinting of an editorial that was harshly critical of Southern Weekly.

The Beijing News’s publisher, Dai Zigeng, and editor-in-chief, Wang Yuechun, threatened to resign over authorities’ insistence that the paper publish an editorial from the nationalist-leaning tabloid Global Times that said supporters of Southern Weekly’s clash with censors were being actively supported by overseas human-rights activists.

Spreading discontent among Southern Media’s journalists has galvanized free-speech advocates in China, and is widely seen as a significant test of new Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s approach to concerns over media restrictions.

After the jump: The edited account of a journalist at the Beijing News who was in the newspaper’s offices during Tuesday night’s stand-off.

Southern Weekly: Of Cock-Ups and Conspiracies

• Commentary

By Russell Leigh Moses

Observers outside of China tend to see events here as being shaped by a calculating Party apparatus. More often than not, however, incidents are shaped by either cock-ups or conspiracies.

The recent censorship efforts at the newspaper Southern Weekend might well be both—and neatly summarize the problems and possibilities surrounding the early efforts of new Chinese leader Xi Jinping to stimulate the political system.