China

"As Nepal's traditional friend and neighbour, China deeply values its relations with Nepal. China stands ready to work with the new Nepalese government to expand and deepen friendly exchange and cooperation across the board, pursue high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, inject new impetus into our strategic cooperative partnership featuring ever-lasting friendship for development and prosperity and deliver more benefits for our two peoples," she told a regular press briefing at the ministry in Beijing on Monday.

"As of today, we will no longer release daily statistics on the pandemic, with any data released by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention for the purposes of reference and research," the health ministry said on its official website, RFA reported. The announcement came as China said on Monday that beginning January 8, it will put an end to a mandatory quarantine on arrival for overseas travelers that had been in place since March 2020.

Xi took his third term, but weeks later protests swept the country, featuring astonishingly brave acts of dissent and appearing to herald the abrupt end of the zero-Covid policy, the Guardian reported. Politically, 2022 was supposed to be a year of glory for the Chinese President, but instead it "gave Xi much more to worry about than to gloat over", says the veteran China expert Jerome Cohen.

The same study had predicted that if China abandons zero-Covid restrictions, as many as one and a half million people could die from Covid-19 over the next six months.

The report comes as the city grapples with an unprecedented wave of infections which have severely strained its hospitals and emptied pharmacy shelves, CNN reported. The state-run China News Service reported Monday that after receiving training, community doctors will administer the medicine to Covid-19 patients and give instructions on how to use them, CNN reported.

Covid-19 has been managed as a top category A infectious disease since 2020, putting it on par with bubonic plague and cholera. When the declaration was made to do so, authorities said it would be administered according to the Frontier Health and Quarantine Law.

According to state-run Global Times, handing over the epidemic data calculation to a technical organisation "is a reasonable move to provide professional epidemic figures". "The NHC will no longer release daily epidemic data from Sunday. China's CDC will release relevant COVID-19 information for study and reference," the NHC said in a statement.

It said that 71 Chinese air force planes, including fighter jets and drones, had entered Taiwan's so-called air defence identification zone, the BBC said. Taiwan is self-ruled - but China sees it as a breakaway province with which it will eventually reunite. Tensions between the two sides have steadily increased in recent months, BBC reported.

Cordyceps, also known as caterpillar fungus or the Himalayan gold, is an expensive herbal medicine in China. An IPCSC report has accused Chinese soldiers of illegally entering Arunachal Pradesh in search of the fungus - mainly found in the Indian Himalayas and on the high altitude region of the plateau in southwestern China.

And it may not be wrong to say that China's increasing influence over Pakistan, especially in terms of economic linkages, has amplified its domain, pushing Islamabad into policy-level challenges and economic dependence on Western countries, notably the US, who are the rivals of China. The West, especially the US, believes that China's debt diplomacy has effectively surrounded and trapped Pakistan through its massive investments in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which is an important part of Beijing's One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative.