Reuters writes, "U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday accused China of restricting navigation and overflights in the disputed South China Sea, despite giving assurances that such movements would not be impeded.Addressing a regional meeting in Kuala Lumpur that has been dominated by the South China Sea, Kerry said China's construction of facilities for "military purposes" on man-made islands was raising tensions and risked "militarization" by other claimant states.Kerry's blunt criticism of Beijing, in front of his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, is likely to lift the South China Sea up the agenda when Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Washington next month, some experts said.

"The Shanghai Composite Index ended 0.9% lower at 3661.54 and the smaller Shenzhen Composite shed 0.7% to 2113.65 as investors continue to assess the level of regulators' commitment to support mainland stocks. China's main stock index is 29% off its mid-June peak and has fallen 11% since July 23. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index closed 0.6% lower and a gauge of Chinese companies listed in the city fell 0.3%. On Thursday, fresh worries emerged that China's stock regulator might start approving firms' share-placement applications as early as this Friday. The prospect of new shares could prompt investors to withdraw cash from existing positions, stoking further instability," reports The Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times writes, "Only one thing is certain about the secretive annual meeting of Communist Party leaders at Beidaihe, a seaside resort 160 miles east of Beijing: that nothing is certain, including when, who, what - even if. Yet many ordinary Chinese are intensely interested in the traditional summer gathering on the Gulf of Bohai, where the party's Central Committee began meeting in the 1950s to escape the sultry heat of the capital and, legend has it, to politic in an informal atmosphere where new ideas could be proposed with relatively little risk to the proposer. For weeks, the rumor mill in Beijing, which flourishes under conditions of habitual secrecy and tight censorship, has been churning. One of the contending rumors is that President Xi Jinping did not want a meeting this year, so as to not give an opportunity for politicking to "old comrades," a reference to former President Jiang Zemin and his supporters, who some analysts believe are resisting the anticorruption campaign that Mr. Xi began after he took power in late 2012 and that has shaken Chinese politics to the core."