The Chinese prison where Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo is held has suspended visits by his family members and his wife remains under house arrest, a week after the award ceremony, a human rights group said today.

An explosion caused by stored chemicals has killed six people and injured 37 at an internet cafe in southwest China.

THE wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo met her jailed husband yesterday, activists said, apparently to inform him he had won the prestigious award amid a media blackout in China.

The general manager of a steelworks was beaten to death as 30,000 Chinese workers clashed with police in protest over plans to merge their mill with another company, a human rights monitor said today.

The death toll after a torrent of sludge, mud and mining waste ploughed into buildings in northern China has risen to at least 34 people, with hundreds more feared trapped in the rubble, state media reported today.

A retired Chinese teacher who criticised building standards of schools that collapsed in last month’s earthquake has been arrested.

Some 2,000 people mobbed a hospital in south-west China and clashed with police after a young boy died at the facility because his family didn't have enough money for treatment.

A pregnant Chinese woman fell to her death at a hospital while trying to flee an attempt by local officials to force her to abort twins, a human rights monitoring centre said.

Chinese activists have been forced to leave their homes and placed under watch by authorities two days before the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, a human rights group said today.

Chinese police have detained a pair of dissident intellectuals ahead of this week’s anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, a human rights monitoring group said today.

Four Chinese academics and two other people convicted of using the internet to spread material from the banned Falun Gong movement have been jailed for terms of up to 12 years, a human rights organisation says.

China today expelled a US-based Chinese sociologist convicted of spying for Taiwan, a US official said.