"Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Thursday his government would do everything it could to fight pollution and pledged zero tolerance for corruption, two highly sensitive topics that have become lightning rods for public discontent.Li, speaking at the opening of the annual full session of the National People's Congress, the country's largely rubber-stamp parliament, called pollution a 'blight on people's quality of life and a trouble that weighs on their hearts'[saying], 'We must strictly enforce environmental laws and regulations; crack down on those guilty of creating illegal emissions and ensure they pay a heavy price for such offences; and hold those who allow illegal emissions to account, punishing them accordingly.' On corruption, a deep-seated problem President Xi Jinping has vowed to fight, Li said the battle would not end...'We will see to it that every instance of corruption, should it be committed higher up or lower down, is severely punished,' reports Reuters. 

The Wall Street Journal reports, "Japan and China will hold their first security talks in more than four years later this month, a sign of a further thaw in relations that have been badly strained in recent years due to disputes over maritime territory and wartime history. Officials from the two countries will meet in Tokyo on March 19 to exchange views on security and defense issues, Japan's foreign ministry said Thursday. It will be the 13th meeting of the Japan-China security dialogue. The last meeting took place in January 2011 in Beijing...The announcement of the talks follows other recent signs of an improvement in the two nations' relationship, which has veered close to open conflict in the past two years due to a dispute over a group of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea controlled by Japan but claimed by China." 

"A new draft counterterrorism law here is provoking unusually strong condemnation, from multinational companies trying to do business in China to domestic dissidents trying to stay out of jail and from global human rights groups to foreign health workers. Governments around the world have dealt with the threat of terrorism by increasing surveillance and curtailing civil rights, but China's government, critics say, has exploited a genuine terrorist threat to further empower its repressive state-security apparatus [by] invoking the dangers of violent extremism to justify and expand an already harsh crackdown on civil rights and to punish foreign information technology companies that refuse to play by its rules...President Obama focused his ire on provisions in the law that would affect U.S. technology companies doing business here and force them to hand over the keys to their operating systems to Chinese surveillance. The new law is symptomatic of the gulf between China and the West over human rights, and it is widening a serious rift between Washington and Beijing over cyberspace," writes The Washington Post.