"China has appointed a second senior official from the party diplomatic agency that traditionally deals with North Korea as new ambassador to its ally amid troubled bilateral relations....President Xi Jinping made the appointment in line with decisions made by the top national legislature. Ties between Beijing and Pyongyang are at their lowest in history as the latter has been conducting nuclear tests and testing missiles in defiance of existing United Nations resolutions, which Beijing supports. The top leaders in both countries, Xi and Kim Jong Un, haven't paid visits to each other yet. In a move widely considered as a snub to Pyongyang, last July Xi became the first Chinese president to visit South Korea ahead of its northern neighbor," writes Bloomberg.
Reuters reports, "China and Japan held their first security talks in four years on Thursday and agreed to keep alive and foster a nascent recovery in bilateral ties plagued by the legacy of Japan's wartime aggression and a territorial dispute. The world's second- and third-largest economies, however, failed to set a timetable for the implementation of a scheme designed to ensure real-time communication between their armed forces. Sino-Japanese relations have chilled over what China views as Japan's reluctance to properly atone for its wartime past as well as a dispute over a group of tiny East China Sea islets...Abe held formal talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping last November. In the meeting, hailed by Xi as the first step toward improved ties, the two agreed to work for the implementation of a bilateral crisis management mechanism."
"Late last year thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators poured onto the streets of Hong Kong calling for the right to elect the city's leader in 2017, free of interference by the central government in Beijing. In recent weeks protests have flared again; far smaller this time, but more violent and similarly fuelled by resentment of the mainland's encroachment. At issue has been the hordes of mainland Chinese who visit Hong Kong to buy goods for black-market resale at home, a racket described locally as 'parallel trading'. These new and nastier outbursts are about far more than shopping; they suggest that antagonism towards the mainland is deepening and spreading beyond the territory's urban core. This is causing anxiety among officials on both sides of the border," writes The Economist.