Asia

Yesterday I mentioned Justin Timberlake’s travails with a Chinese-language tattoo. But this afternoon I noticed something that reminded me it’s not just we foreigners who mess up Chinese characters. It was a promo for a television program that runs here every Saturday called More Than Words. It tracks down when and where characters are …

another thing to love about Beijing in winter.

China’s environment is, as most people who pay attention to world events are at least vaguely aware, a complete nightmare. Rivers are so polluted they turn strange chemical colors (see my colleague Susie Jakes’ post on this here), hundreds of thousands of Chinese die every year from respiratory diseases caused by the foul air, hundreds …

So. Things to love about Beijing in winter.

Part One: Hot Coke with Ginger, A Possibly Magical Elixir

Growing up, the only time soda was served in our house was when someone was sick. The soda was ginger ale. You had to be very sick to qualify for it. And as soon as you were better, any extra cans were returned not to a cabinet in the …

I just saw a photo of Justin Timberlake from the new film Alpha Dog, and noticed his left arm had a tattoo with Chinese characters you don’t usually see adorning human skin. So I checked the definitive source on faulty Chinese, the Hanzi Smatter blog. Perhaps Timberlake was thinking of winter activities in Beijing, because his tough guy …

When friends and relatives ask me what time of year to visit, mid-January isn’t usually on my list of suggestions. This isn’t because I particularly dislike winter, or because the kind of people who visit me are somehow wimpy. I don’t. They’re not. It’s just that winter is not such a flattering season for Beijing.

The city has all the …

Numbers in China can be, well, flexible. A revision of the way it calculates its GDP last year added over $300,000,000 to the figure for 2004, still a fair piece of change. Still, a few numbers published recently have been of particular interest.

1) China’s trade surplus hit 177.47 billion US dollars in 2006, the government said, up …

Corruption is a huge problem in China today. In 2001, an academic in Beijing estimated the cost to the Chinese economy was as much as 16% of gdp. But as staggering as that number is (and some have argued it’s too high), nothing points out the pervasiveness of graft in China better than the audacious scams that emerge with astounding …

Fly into Hong Kong and you land at an amazingly modern, $20 billion airport that’s less than a decade old. A 24-minute ride on the sleek Airport Express train takes you into the middle of downtown, where you are surrounded by bold, glittering edifices. At first glance, this city gives off the impression that the only thing old is the …

In an earlier post I wrote about the closure of a school for the children of migrant workers in Shanghai (an estimated…wait for it….SIX MILLION migrant workers live in Shanghai) one of China’s economic powerhouses. I concluded by wondering about the potential for violent protest. It’s no suprise then that a couple of days after the …

The China Daily reported today that the country had failed to meet targets in its efforts to save energy and curb pollution in 2006. Nationally, China was supposed to reduce its energy use per unit of GDP by 4% and pollution emissions by 2% last year. Instead, in most of the country, energy consumption and pollution went up. The State …

One of the things about having a blog (we at the China Blog have learned in our lengthy four-day stint as bloggers) is that you spend a lot of time wondering who–apart from your Mom and your editors–actually reads what you write. We’re still wondering. But we did get a partial answer this morning when news of our blog’s birth appeared …

If China’s boom has a group of unrecognized heroes it must surely be the 120 million or so migrant workers whose labor is the force that keeps the huge dynamo turning. Migrants do all the grunt work that no one else wants to take on, toiling in mines, constructions sites and factories, usually in unspeakable conditions and often facing …