Provocative Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was freed Wednesday after nearly three months in custody, the Associated Press reports.  The AP, citing China's official Xinhua News Agency, said Ai confessed to tax evasion while in custody. Ai's supporters and his family have claimed those charges are false; they say the Chinese government wanted to punish Ai for criticizing the Communist party and speaking out about social issues in China. According to ......

Mayor Edwin M. Lee announced Tuesday that a Chinese solar energy company is expanding its North American headquarters in San Francisco. The U.S. subsidiary of GCL Solar Energy is tripling its space in the city to approximately 15,000 square feet, reports AsianWeek. The company’s new North American headquarters will now occupy a full floor at 1 Market St. The company opened in San Francisco in 2009 after being recruited by ChinaSF, a program that works to ......

The kind of uprisings that led to the resignation of Egypt’s president wouldn’t succeed in China. That was the message of Ling-Chi Wang, professor emeritus in UC Berkeley’s ethnic studies department, in an interview with the Sing Tao Daily. According to Wang, there are several critical differences between the conditions in the two countries that would make Egypt-style uprisings unsuccessful in China. The unemployment problem in China, he said, isn’t bad enough to prompt large-scale protests, ......

A Fremont woman was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Oakland to more than three years in prison for enslaving a Chinese woman as her housekeeper. Fang Ping Ding, 62, pleaded guilty to confiscating the woman’s passport and visa, physically and verbally abusing her in order to force her to work as an unpaid servant, according to federal prosecutors. Ding’s daughter Wei Wei Liang, 36, and her son-in-law, Bo Shen, ......

Franz Schurmann, a scholar and author on China and co-founder of Pacific News Service in 1969 died at his San Francisco home on Friday at 84 after a long illness. His books included The Foreign Politics of Richard Nixon: The Grand Design and Imperial China: The Decline of the Last Dynasty and the Origins of Modern China. Schurmann taught at UC Berkeley for nearly four decades and led its Center ......