The Wall Street Journal reports: "In China's "war on pollution," five local officials stand accused of fighting back with cotton gauze. Investigators detained the five officials...after finding they had jammed the cotton gauze into air pollution monitors to make smog levels air appear cleaner than they really were...China's government has promised to clean up the environment and pledged greater transparency over air pollution. Cities across the country now update publicly available smog readings hourly. That puts local officials under increased pressure, particularly as they must also juggle the competing demand of sustaining economic growth....The environmental group Greenpeace said China is overall on a trajectory toward improved air quality, despite the alleged tampering by the five officials. Greenpeace says average levels of fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 fell 10% across 189 Chinese cities analyzed last year versus 2014....Xi'an isn't the only city falling under scrutiny. In April 2015, a vice minister of environmental protection, Wu Xiaoqing, said the government was embarking on a two-year crackdown on faking air-quality data."

Financial Times comments: "Chinese companies scouring the world to buy technology, brands and multinational corporations have sparked a significant trend this year. The scale is impressive….The acquisitions are generally welcomed by recipient countries…. Signs of resistance are mounting in the US, Australia and recently in Europe too. Nearly $40bn in planned Chinese deals have been scuppered since mid-2015, mostly because of tightened scrutiny over competition and national security concerns….Such repercussions were entirely predictable. The deal bonanza highlights stark asymmetries between China and the west, raising questions not only of corporate governance but also of whether there can be reciprocal treatment between a highly restrictive authoritarian state and open industrialised democracies….The plain fact is that western companies would stand little chance of securing Beijing's approval to buy an important state-owned Chinese corporation….Such a lack of balance is neither sustainable nor desirable. If China wants to continue to benefit from virtually free access to the best technology and brands the west has to offer, it needs to take reciprocity more seriously."