On May 20, 2015, Xiaoxing Xi, a physics professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, gave a lecture at an Irish pub before picking up his wife from the airport and trying out a new Korean fried chicken restaurant with his two daughters.

The next morning before 7 o’clock, Xi and his family woke up to urgent knocking at their door. Xi was shocked to find FBI agents, some armed and others holding a battering ram, standing at his doorway. One agent announced Xi’s arrest and handcuffed him, and other officers brought Xi’s wife and daughters out of their bedrooms at gunpoint.

After a month of skirmishes over their disputed border, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought hand-to-hand and with rudimentary weapons on June 15 high in the Himalayan Mountains at Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh. The deadliest conflict between the two countries in 45 years, the clash—gunless due to a previous agreement—left 20 Indians dead along with an unknown number of Chinese casualties (Indian sources estimate 40 Chinese soldiers were severely injured or killed).

Teachers, students, and parents staged rare protests earlier this month in Inner Mongolia as the government began requiring schools to teach key subjects in Mandarin rather than the Mongolian language. Students will begin taking Chinese language classes one grade earlier and must use new Chinese textbooks for language and literature, morality and law, and history classes. 

China has had an eventful 2020. It stoked the world’s ire with its initial cover-up of the coronavirus. It reneged on its promise to grant Hong Kong autonomy. It aggressively combated any international inquiry into its detention of more than a million Uighurs in reeducation camps. Economic espionage, intellectual property theft, and territorial claims in the South China Sea have tanked U.S.-China relations.

On Monday, the last two credentialed Australian journalists in China boarded a flight to Sydney after a five-day diplomatic standoff. The expulsion occurred as relations between Australia and China have deteriorated and the Chinese government continues its crusade to rid the country of foreign reporters.

Outside the popular Hunan chain Chuiyan Fried Beef in Changsha, restaurant owners set up two scales and asked patrons to weigh themselves before entering. After entering their weight and personal information into an app, the customers received the restaurant’s suggested menu items: for women weighing under 88 pounds, a beef dish and fish head; for a man weighing more than 175 pounds, braised pork belly, according to CNN.

Two hundred police officers in face masks barged into Hong Kong’s Apple Daily newsroom Monday, hours after police arrested the pro-democracy newspaper’s publisher, Jimmy Lai, on charges of “colluding with foreign forces” under the new national security law. The arrest and raid make up the highest-profile attack on the free press in Hong Kong since the law went into effect on June 30.