The Wall Street Journal reports: "Chinese stocks rose and the yuan strengthened Friday, a respite from the early-year meltdown that wiped as much as $1.1 trillion from mainland markets, after authorities overnight removed a mechanism blamed for triggering more volatility. The Shanghai Composite Index finished up 2% at 3186.41 recovering from a 7% plunge Thursday. It finished down 10% for the week, its worst performance since the week finished Aug. 21....The narrower gains and losses signal that markets are starting to stabilize after a global selloff overnight."
The New York Times reports: " China has rejected criticism from the United States that its policies toward North Korea had failed, suggesting on Friday that it was the Americans, not the Chinese, who were largely to blame for the North's embrace of nuclear weapons....American officials have said that China, North Korea's main ally, is uniquely positioned to discourage the North's nuclear ambitions by cutting off oil shipments or disrupting its financial transactions....The United States is drafting a United Nations Security Council resolution to further disrupt trade in North Korea, including a partial ban on allowing North Korean ships to enter ports around the world, American officials have said."
Foreign Policy reports: "It's unusual for tearful recollections of China's painful political past to get time on the country's tightly controlled airwaves. But in late November 2015, on a popular television show, a gray-haired man picked up a guitar and crooned about the death of his father and the dissolution of his family during the Cultural Revolution, one of the nation's most traumatic decades....The musician, Yang Le, is an obscure 58 year-old harmonicist with a gruff yet soothing voice — one user on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo pointed out a remarkable similarity to Johnny Cash...."The reason that this song by Yang Le moved people so much," stated [a] Dec. 17 [China Star] article, 'is because even though it was a personal tragedy, it is also the shared disaster of a people and a country.'"