Emily Feng

Taiwan's president, Tsai Ing-wen, has won a landslide victory in a hotly contested election, dealing a stinging rebuke to Beijing's efforts to control the island's democratic government.

"Democratic Taiwan and our democratically elected government will not concede to threats and intimidation," Tsai declared to thousands of cheering supporters at an election rally outside her party's campaign headquarters Saturday night. "The results of this election have made that answer crystal clear."

Millions of Taiwanese are preparing for key elections this weekend — and some are even flying back by plane to vote.

Taiwan does not allow absentee voting, so those abroad have to return to the exact county where they were born, or where they have a registered household, to cast their ballot.

China produces huge amounts of online data — and little of it is protected. That has led to a thriving market for stolen personal information, from national identification numbers to home addresses.

Some of it is used for state surveillance, while much of it is used for private extortion and fraud.

Wang Yi, a leader in one of the most well-known Christian congregations in China, has been quietly sentenced to nine years in prison, according to a statement on the website of the Intermediate People's Court of Chengdu Municipality.

Updated Dec. 13 at 10:07 a.m. ET

Eye Central Television is a popular satirical TV news show in Taiwan with an active social media presence. One day in April, it received a Facebook message from someone using the name Tina Hsu, but this was no ordinary fan.

Hsu's Facebook profile was blank; it had just been created that morning.

At a recent election campaign event in Taiwan, a procession of women beat ceremonial drums, dance and wave lotus-shaped umbrellas in celebration. But beyond the slogans promising national security and prosperity, the topic on everyone's mind is what to do about China.

The star of the event is Han Kuo-yu, a pro-Beijing candidate running for president with the opposition Kuomintang, who poses a stark contrast with the current leaders.

President Trump has signed a bill signaling support for Hong Kong's protests, prompting Beijing to issue a sharp response and summon the U.S. ambassador to China.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 allows the United States to level sanctions on individuals who carry out human rights violations in Hong Kong, which has been rocked by mass protests for more than five months.

Living quietly in Taiwan are several dozen young Hong Kong protesters who, one night in July, vandalized Hong Kong's legislature during ongoing anti-government protests.

Their arrival in Taiwan has revived a fierce debate on the small, self-ruled island over whether it can — or should — accept Chinese citizens seeking safety.

Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET

Millions of people turned out to vote in Hong Kong's district elections on Sunday — a peaceful action nonetheless seen by many as an act of protest.

Normally low-key affairs, elections this year for district councilors — akin to community representatives — have been widely seen as a referendum on popular support for anti-government protests that are now in their sixth month.

When Liu, a 31-year-old Chinese insurance firm manager, learned she was pregnant in 2017, she resolved to keep her baby.

She tried to hide the fact that she was unmarried and pregnant from her colleagues at the private insurance firm where she works in Shanghai. She paid her own hospital bills rather than rely on public insurance and risk exposing her secret to the hospital and her employer.

Prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong has been barred from running in local district council elections after an official said his calls for "self-determination" in the territory were inconsistent with pledging an oath of allegiance to the city and its constitution.

Wong, who has been arrested twice since mass protests in the city began in early summer, is the only candidate to have been disqualified from the Nov. 24 poll on grounds of his politics.

One afternoon last month, Serikjan Bilash went to the watchdog organization he co-founded in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to celebrate the opening of its new office.

Since its founding in 2017, the organization, Atajurt Eriktileri, has publicized thousands of accounts of ethnic Kazakhs who are among the primarily Muslim minorities rounded up in detention centers in Xinjiang, China.

The U.S. ambassador to China is pushing back against Beijing's criticism of a new State Department requirement that Chinese diplomats must report certain meetings they have in the U.S.

The State Department announced Wednesday that it is requiring all Chinese diplomats in the U.S. to notify them of meetings they plan to have with local and state officials as well as educational and research institutions. However, there is no penalty associated yet with failing to report such meetings.

In Hong Kong these days, conflicting views of the ongoing anti-government protests are painfully felt in Yuen Long, a town far to the northwest of the glittering skyscrapers on Hong Kong island. It's famed for its cuisine and ancestral temples — and for its pro-Beijing sympathies.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam delivered her first policy address Wednesday since pro-democracy protesters took to the city's streets almost five months ago.

But she had to do so by video, after chanting opposition lawmakers forced her from the chamber.

The annual policy speech was unusually short and focused on the deep social and economic inequalities that have proliferated in Hong Kong. Lam pledged to provide better welfare policies while making substantial increases in affordable housing.

This August, Aibota Zhanibek received a surprising call in Kazakhstan from a relative through Chinese chat app WeChat. It was about her sister, Kunekai Zhanibek.

Aibota, 35, a Kazakh citizen born in China, knew that Kunekai, 33, had been held for about seven months in a detention camp in China's Shawan county, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. For six of those months, Kunekai was forced to make towels and carpets for no pay, Aibota says. On the call, Aibota was told that Kunekai had been released and assigned a job in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

Hundreds of masked protesters peacefully marched through Hong Kong's central business district Saturday afternoon, some linking arms to form human chains, in defiance of a decision to ban face masks at public gatherings only the day before.

They chanted a new demand, adding to a list of five demands reiterated over more than four months of protest: "We have the right to wear face masks."

Hong Kong's embattled chief executive, Carrie Lam, says she is invoking emergency powers to ban face masks during public assemblies starting at midnight Friday (12 p.m. ET).

The ban on face masks is an attempt to quell increasingly violent anti-government protests that have racked the city for more than 17 weeks.

"One thing is certain. If lawbreakers are not wearing masks, it is much easier for us to prove the charges and bring them to courts," said Hong Kong's security secretary, John Lee Ka-chiu, at a last-minute news conference held to announce the ban in Hong Kong.

Updated at 7 a.m. ET

Near Beijing's center, along Chang'an Avenue — the Avenue of Eternal Peace — more than 100,000 performers and soldiers readied for a mass military parade that would unveil China's newest fighting technology, including a hypersonic missile and stealth fighter jets.

At promptly 10 a.m. Tuesday, the parade began with 70 rounds of cannon fire.

Major streets have been cordoned off for hours at a time, leaving restaurant and bar customers stranded overnight. Bomb-sniffing dogs stand guard on busy corners. Teams of hawk-eyed retirees sporting red armbands patrol the sidewalks as part of volunteer neighborhood watch committees, ready to report the smallest sign of a challenge to public security.

Gold-domed mosques and gleaming minarets once broke the monotony of the Ningxia region's vast scrubland every few miles. This countryside here is home to some of China's 10.5 million Hui Muslims, who have practiced Sunni or Sufi forms of Islam within tight-knit communities for centuries, mainly in the northwest and central plains. Concentrated in the Ningxia region, the Hui are China's third-largest ethnic minority.