China

Emily McCarthy thought the foul smell in her new Florida town house was coming from Samson, the family dog. McCarthy and her husband gave the English Springer bath after bath. But the stink wouldn't go away. And that wasn't all. Electrical outlets turned black. The air conditioner went on the blink. Then McCarthy, 33, started waking up with a bloody nose. It turns out the home was built with imported Chinese drywall.

Beyond triggering a growing chorus of international criticism, China's detention of an Australian mining executive is a reminder that doing business here carries risks not found in other major economies. The controversy has sparked heated exchanges between Chinese and Australian officials in recent days, with Australians complaining that the Chinese have not released any evidence backing the charges against Stern Hu, an iron ore negotiator for mining giant Rio Tinto.

China fired back against proposed tariffs on Chinese tires imported to the United States by announcing today that an anti-dumping and anti-subsidies investigation would be launched on American auto parts and chicken products, state media reported. The move could signal the start of more trade tensions between the massive trade partners at a time when the two economic powers were expected to lead the globe out of the financial crisis. "This case is perceived as a turning point in U.S.-China relations and likely to represent a trend toward subtle, if not overt, forms of protectionism from both sides," said James Zimmerman, a partner in the law firm of Squire Sanders & Dempsey in Beijing.

When Pasadena-based Avery Dennison wanted to build its road and traffic business in China a few years ago, it hired people like Lily Tang. The Beijing homemaker had an asset the company craved: political connections. Tang's husband, Chen Qi, is a senior official at the China Communications and Transportation Assn., a quasi-governmental group led by former ministers.

Railroad tickets are a dangerous business in China. Retired military man Wang Hanlin opened a travel agency here a decade ago, but found that the best seats disappeared no matter how early you tried to buy them. When he asked why, Wang recalls, he was told to keep his mouth shut. When he persisted, he got his answer from six thugs who jumped him in broad daylight and beat him with a pipe, smashing his legs.

Inside a courthouse cordoned off by yellow tape and a phalanx of police, the alleged perpetrators of China's tainted-milk scandal are being brought to trial here. But the sensational consumer safety case has been shrouded in so much secrecy that it is hard to say whether justice is in fact being done.

Chinese police detained at least five parents for 24 hours to block a news conference at which they planned to publicize the plight of their children, who are suffering from kidney stones as a result of drinking tainted baby formula. The parents were seized about 11:30 p.m. Thursday and taken to a hotel often used by police as a temporary detention center on the outskirts of Beijing.

Like many Chinese peasants of his generation, 53-year-old Wang Zhengnian had never seen a cow until he reached adulthood. He certainly never drank a glass of milk. The fact that Wang now spends his days tending 400 cows on a farm near Beijing says a lot about the way China created a dairy industry out of thin air. But in their haste, the Chinese made mistakes that left six babies dead and hundreds of thousands ill from tainted milk. Milk is not part of the traditional Chinese diet.

China's economy grew to become the world's third-largest in 2007, new data showed Wednesday, another milestone in the country's stunning ascent in the global pecking order that put it behind only Japan and the United States. China has grown tenfold in the last 30 years, and the revised data leapfrogged it ahead of Germany. But overtaking the United States is another matter.

A court handed down a death sentence today to a man who manufactured a milk additive that caused thousands of Chinese babies to develop kidney stones, some of them fatal. The defendant, Zhang Yujun, was the first of 21 defendants to be sentenced by the provincial court in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, in China's most famous product tainting case. Another defendant, Zhang Yanzhang, received a life sentence.