It's been clear to me that the U.S.-Philippines alliance is something to watch this year but even I have been astounded by the speed of the events that have happened in the last month. I just came back from the PH and learned a lot /w @CamilleElemia nytimes.com/2023/02/20/wor… 1. Much of it is driven by the fear of a conflict over Taiwan. The Philippines sits across from Taiwan. We found out that among 3 out of the 4 defense sites that the PH will give the U.S. access to are facing Taiwan.

“Barrier-free internet” only at the hotel lobby. #Beijing2022 First time back in my only home for 10 years. More emotional than I thought I would be.

1. There are growing questions now among scientists about the real-world effectiveness of the vaccines made by China's Sinopharm and Sinovac. I spoke to several of them. nytimes.com/2021/06/22/bus… 2. What they are really puzzled about is the countries that have high rates of fully vaccinated people but are still experiencing outbreaks. Among them: Mongolia, the Seychelles, Bahrain, and Chile. 50 to 68 pct of the populations have been fully inoculated, outpacing the US.

1. I recently interviewed three single men who got vasectomies in China. All of them were childless. Their ages: 29, 27, 24. My latest w/ @elsiechenyi nytimes.com/2021/06/01/wor… 2. I was most moved by Huang Yulong’s account. Mr. Huang is a 27-yr-old bachelor from Guangzhou. He grew up as a “left-behind kid” and resented his parents for being absent from his life. (They were factory workers in Guangdong -- he was in Hunan.)

Yolanda Ouyang, 39, an employee at a state-owned enterprise in the region of Guangxi, was ecstatic. She had kept her 3rd child hidden for 2 yrs because she feared that she would be fired. “Finally, my child can come outside and play out in the open.” (1x) nytimes.com/2021/05/31/wor… Li Shan, a 26-year-old product manager at an internet company in Beijing: “No matter how many babies they open it up to, I’m not going to have any because children are too troublesome and expensive. I’m impatient and worried that I won’t be able to educate the child well.” (2x)

China's vaccines were supposed to be a win for Beijing. Instead, countries are complaining about a delay in shipments and other citizens are asking why their govts have chosen to go with inoculations that have weaker efficacy rates and little data. nytimes.com/2021/01/25/bus… 1. This matters because at least 24 countries, most of them from the developing world, have signed deals with the Chinese because they offered access at a time when richer nations had claimed most of the doses made by Pfizer and Moderna.

My first story of 2020 vs last story of 2020. It's been a year. I've gone back to read this story on Jan. 6 many times. My first instinct after speaking to Mr. Li Bin was this was just going to be a new cold virus. He even described it as such: "It felt like a common cold." nytimes.com/2020/01/06/wor…

My story today: Last year, a Chinese woman was savagely beaten by her husband. To escape, she jumped from the second floor of a building, leaving her temporarily paralyzed. She filed for divorce but the court said no. 1/7 nytimes.com/2020/09/16/wor… Domestic violence is usually considered a private matter in China and it was only in recent yrs that it was widely discussed. Many women are embarrassed to talk about it but the difference this time was this woman, Liu Zengyan, had video captured on security camera footage. 2/7

I took a break from coronavirus reporting to look at how China is collecting blood samples from men and boys to build a nationwide male DNA database. An American company, Thermo Fisher, is enabling this drive. nytimes.com/2020/06/17/wor… I started looking at this topic late last year when @emiledirks first got in touch with me with this v compelling pitch. He had me at "100+ government notices." We started talking.

1. Wuhan is calling its mass testing drive a "10-day battle." @vwang3 and I take a closer look at the government's plans to test 11 million residents. The numbers are staggering. nytimes.com/2020/05/14/wor… @vwang3 2. The official Health Daily newspaper said in a report on Thursday that Wuhan’s authorities would have to conduct at least 730,000 tests a day to finish within 10 days. The current testing capacity in Wuhan is around 100,000 tests a day under extreme circumstances.

1. Four Chinese cos. have started testing their coronavirus vaccine candidates on humans, more than the U.S. and Britain combined. But two of them have a long history of corruption and scandal, and all belong to an industry that is reviled by many in China nytimes.com/2020/05/04/bus… 2. In 2018, Chinese parents erupted in fury after they discovered ineffective vaccines had been given to babies. The public anger focused on Changchun Changsheng but the company that made a greater number of substandard vaccines was the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.

Every journalist knows that a single death is a tragedy, a million a statistic. 68,000 people have recovered from the coronavirus outbreak, while nearly 5,000 have died. @vwang3 and I zoom in on two of them: two 29-yr-old female medical workers from Wuhan. tinyurl.com/qmqcype @vwang3 We know that older people with pre-existing conditions form the bulk of fatalities but I've been thinking about the outliers: the younger people who have appeared to have recovered and then died suddenly. The most famous one was the whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang.

1. I've been covering the coronavirus outbreak in China since last December but I think what's going on outside China is really worrying, and revealing. My latest with @imakiky What a Party in Japan May Tell Us About the Coronavirus’s Spread nyti.ms/2PbP5DI @imakiky 2. First of all, there are many anecdotal reports from Japan that many of these people had no symptoms. Many found out later that they had the virus only after being tested. Public health experts say there's no evidence that asymptomatic people can spread the virus but ...

1. The Communist Party would like you to believe that they are getting the coronavirus outbreak under control. Yes, the no. of recoveries has exceeded deaths; the daily tally of new infections and deaths has declined steadily since Feb. 12. But it's too soon to conclude anything. 2. Public health experts say in many epidemics, we often see more than one peak. The biggest question to me is that most of China isn't back at work yet. Read this @caixin article:

caixinglobal.com/2020-02-18/few…

1. An American woman who left a cruise ship in Cambodia last week and flew to M'sia has tested positive for the coronavirus. Hundreds of passengers from the ship have already departed for several countries. Health experts say they are alarmed. w @RCPaddock nyti.ms/2SzIgy9 @RCPaddock 2. Eyal Leshem, a public health expert from Israel, called the disclosures “extremely concerning” and said the passengers’ travel onward from Kuala Lumpur increased the risk of a pandemic. “We may end up with 3 or 4 countries with sustained transmission of the virus.”

1. There's a lot of buzz on the astronomical jump in cases from Hubei on Wednesday -- 14,840 new confirmed cases, almost 10 x compared to a day earlier. New deaths rose to 242, more than double fr day b4. The govt has changed the diagnostic criteria used to confirm cases. More .. 2. Effectively, this means the govt is giving doctors greater discretion to clinically diagnose patients. Previously, they could only confirm cases with the nucleic acid test kits. But a govt expert said recently these were only 30-40 percent accurate.

I'm back in the saddle after heading to SG for my Lunar New Year vacation. In this piece, I look at how China's health care system, already stressed in normal times, is now stretched to the brink with the coronavirus.

nyti.ms/2RSsjl5 I started reporting on this when it was a localized medical mystery in late December. When I left for my vacation, the cases had hovered at 41 for days. In the past week, they have skyrocketed to 2,700. I'm still reeling.

1. Folks, a while back I said there was no need to run for the hills after China first started reporting the mysterious pneumonia like illnesses in Wuhan. I still maintain that but I am now more worried. nytimes.com/2020/01/15/wor… 2. First of all, these patients in Thailand and Japan say they have had no exposure to the Huanan seafood market that China says is at the epicenter of all the cases. This suggests that the virus is spreading in Wuhan.

I was having mild labor contractions in a hospital in February when I got a tip that Chinese researchers were mapping the faces of Uighurs using DNA samples. I said: Wait, what? nyti.ms/34Ni9Hq I gave birth 3 days later and tried to spend my maternity leave reading up on DNA phenotyping – basically, the police can use blood samples to recreate composite sketches. So far, they haven’t been v useful but have resulted in some arrests in the U.S.

I traveled to rural Vietnam to try to understand why the Vietnamese would be willing to be transported in container trucks to Britain. I found poverty and desperation on a level I haven't seen in a while. My story: nyti.ms/2Puop24 I heard the Vietnamese community is divided about the news that the 39 victims in the container truck found in England could be Vietnamese. Some are sympathetic but others say they deserve it because they chose to be smuggled out.

Today, I’m thinking of Zhang Xianling, who lost her only son, Wang Nan, 30 years ago. Wang, 19, told his mother that he wanted to “record history.” Before he left for Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989, he asked her: “Do you think the troops would open fire?” She said she did not. Three hours later, he was shot dead by soldiers. That was how Ms. Zhang became central to the #tiananmenmothers, always calling on the government to account for its role in the massacre. I tried to visit her 5 years ago in April, together with @maximduncan.