Six months ago, in discussing the massive influx of Chinese businesses into Cambodia, I wrote that “there is a real danger that Chinese businesses will simply try to replicate the exploitative model of labour relations that Chinese workers are now beginning to reject at home.” Sadly it seems that process has already begun. Photograph of Royal Palace in Phnom Penh at sunset.

The sentencing on 21 October of a teenager to life in prison for the murder of a medical intern and the stabbing of three other hospital workers in the north-eastern city of Harbin has once again highlighted the increasingly serious problem of assaults on medical workers by patients and other members of the public.

For business leaders attending a “small and medium-sized enterprise summit” in Guangzhou last weekend, it was very much a tale of two business models, the traditional “made in China” model and the newer more innovative “create in China” model.

The prize for Most Misleading Headline of the Week goes to the China Daily last Friday for its proclamation “Migrant children to sit gaokao in cities.” If true, this would be the answer to millions of migrant workers’ prayers for their children who, have to return “home” to the countryside to take the national college entrance exam. Photo by emop, available at flickr under a creative commons license..

What happens when a Chinese construction company tries to bribe a senior government official in Botswana to turn a blind eye to structural problems discovered in a new school the company was building in the Okavango delta?

Sichuan, the Chinese province perhaps most synonymous with the export of rural labour, now has more rural labourers employed at home than in other provinces. In the first half this year, there were 10.9 million rural workers from Sichuan employed inside the province,and 10.1 million rural migrants outside the province, according to official statistics.

Zhao Lupo is a hero. The 40-year-old migrant worker from Anhui reportedly saved five people during the devastating rainstorm that hit suburban Beijing last week. But when he went to the local village disaster relief office he was told to get lost because local villagers had priority in the distribution of relief supplies.

During his concert tour of Hong Kong last week, “New Worker” Sun Heng once again called the public’s attention to the threatened closure of the Tongxin Primary School for the children of migrant workers, which he helped set up on a deserted factory site on the outskirts of Beijing in 2005.

It was no surprise that when the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) announced in early June that raising the retirement age for workers in China was unavoidable due to people’s longer life expectancy, it quickly galvanized a heated public debate.Front page photo of worker in Xi'an's old city by Mathieu Gasnier.

The suspicious death of Chinese labour activist Li Wangyang on 6 June has triggered a wave of anger and massive demonstrations here in Hong Kong, putting pressure on the Chinese government for a special investigation into his death and the torture he suffered during his 21 years’ in prison.