Society

A total of 180,000 Chinese soldiers were killed while they fought with North Korea against US aggression in the early 1950s, a Chinese major general said ahead of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War, which fell last Friday.

More than 110,000 members of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army died in combat in the war that involved 18 countries, Major General Xu Yan, who is also a professor with the Chinese People's Liberation Army's National Defense University, wrote in an article in the latest issue of WenShi Cankao, a periodical under the People's Daily.

Before China's reform and opening up in the early 1980s, the casualty figures of Chinese troops in the Korean War had not been released.

In the 1980s, an increasingly transparent China said a total of 360,000 soldiers were killed or injured, but the number of deaths remained a mystery.

A woman in southwest China has been executed after being convicted of forcing 22 schoolchildren into prostitution, state press said Monday.

Zhao Qingmei was put to death in Guizhou province "in recent days" after her final appeal was rejected, the Guizhou Daily reported.

Zhao was convicted with six others of forcing the 22 pupils, some of whom may have been as young as six, and an older girl into prostitution in the impoverished mountainous province from March to June 2006, the paper said.

Zhao was also convicted of aiding her husband in the rape of a child, it added.

Nanning Police take operation on prostitution after Beijing and Chongqing.

22nd, Jun. 2010, at Jinfuying Hotel, dozens of prostitutes caught by local police. In the same time, 30 prostitutes' clients.

The Beijing police operation is dubbed “Operation 4.11″ and began in April, reasoning that driving out an estimated 200,000 xiaojie (mistresses) would increase the vacancy rate. The result would be a flood of new residences on the market that would decrease property prices.

The idea was recently supported by the Beijing Evening News — considered a mouthpiece for the Communist government — in a May 14 editorial titled Turning point will come when all mistresses are driven out of Beijing.

The editorial argues the crackdown could drive out Beijing’s prostitutes in a mere three months. Lofty aspirations.

A counter editorial in Asia Times however questions the reasoning of driving out prostitutes to correct inflated housing prices.

Prostitution is illegal in China, but the police crackdowns recently launched across the country indicate that the "world's oldest profession" is doing as well as ever. In Beijing, there are reportedly so many xiaojie (mistresses) that state media claim their numbers have driven up housing prices.

After efforts to "physically and spiritually" cleanse Beijing for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, prostitution has made a big comeback, so much so that municipal police launched a citywide "strike hard" vice crackdown in April entitled "Operation 4.11".