Nick Holdstock

Toxic smog in Beijing, 16,000 dead pigs in the tributaries of the Shanghai river, birth defects from pollution, no safe drinking water in any Chinese city: Premier Li Keqiang has promised to respond to China’s environmental problems with an ‘iron fist and firm resolution’.

The people behind Game The News describe themselves as ‘the world’s first news correspondents who cover global events as games’. In Endgame: Syria, for example, you guide the political and military actions of ‘the rebels in their struggle’.

On 13 February a documentary entitled Immoral Holiday was broadcast on state TV in Uzbekistan. The problem with Valentine's Day, apparently, isn't the crass commercialism or anodyne sentimentality – how could it be, when president Karimov's daughter makes pop videos like these – but that it promotes terrorism. Olloyor Bobonov, the head of the Uzbek Republican Spirituality and Enlightenment Centre, said that the aim of Valentine’s Day is to make young people 'slaves of their sexual pleasures', which makes their minds easy to control. 'In just one day they can easily be taken to central squares to topple governments. Their acts of terrorism or extremism are terrifying.

On 9 December, Wanchen Kyi, a 16-year-old Tibetan schoolgirl, set fire to herself in Dokar Mo township in Qinghai. More than ninety Tibetans have done so since March 2011. Their last words have included calls for the return of the Dalai Lama, the release of the Panchen Lama and other political prisoners, protests against the Chinese government’s policies in the region (phasing the Tibetan language out of education; encouraging non-Tibetan settlers from inner China), and calls for Tibetan independence.

Between 1999 and 2001 I lived in Shaoyang, a small city in Hunan province known throughout China for being dirty. This wasn’t just the prejudice of outsiders; many of its residents complained about the ‘poor conditions’. Rubbish bobbed on the milky green surface of the Shao Shui river, spread along its banks and choked the dam upstream. The street that led to the college where I taught was lined with food stalls, rubbish heaped around them. During the day people would pick through the piles looking for glass, plastic or metal they could resell; at night the rubbish was set on fire. People wiped their chairs in restaurants before sitting down, or carried newspapers to sit on on the bus, but didn’t think twice about throwing cans and tissues out of car windows.