World

This is perilously close to boring your guests with your holiday snaps, but there you are. Taking a few days off in Yangshuo in the southern province of Guangxi, I was persuaded (reluctantly: I am a white knuckle flyer) by my wife to take a trip up in a hot air balloon. On first sight this contraption resembles a circus tent attached to …

On the pages of the Global Times, the nationalistic Beijing tabloid, there’s often a little gloating these days about the financial crisis in the U.S. Down in the trenches of China’s manufacturing sector, not everyone is so happy. They know how quickly economic problems in the West will lead to reduced consumer demand and weakening …

Last weekend in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin police beat to death a recent college graduate. The fight between six officers and 22-year-old victim Lin Songling and three of his friends apparently started over an argument about a parking space. The news has prompted outrage both in Harbin and on the Internet (there are …

The state media previews of the just-ended Communist Party plenum gave strong indications of a major reform in rural land policy. But as Simon noted last week, the devil is in the details. The four-day meeting ended Sunday with a statement that the Party wants to double farmers’ incomes by 2020. How they expect to do that is another …

From Jessie Jiang, a look at China’s new standards for melamine in milk:

Since the Chinese government announced its limits on dairy melamine Wednesday, it’s been gaining little but more embarrassment on the PR front.

At a press conference aimed at appeasing public anxiety, Health Ministry official Wang Xuening announced the levels of

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The release of 17 Chinese who have been held in Guantanamo since after 9/11 has been blocked by a federal appeals court. The government has ruled that the men, ethnic Uighurs from China’s Xinjiang region who were picked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are not enemy combatants. It doesn’t want to return them to China for fear they’ll be …

From my colleague Jessie Jiang:

Like the long-suffering supporters of the Chicago Cubs, China’s soccer fans know all about disappointment. But their steadfastness is being put to yet a new test, this time involving a fading star and the withdrawal of a top-tier domestic league club.

After a scuffle between two players in a Sept. 28

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On Tuesday a U.S. federal judge ordered the release of a group of Uighurs who have been held in Guantanamo since 2001. The 17 Chinese citizens were picked up in the months following the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. Three years ago the government determined that most of them were no longer enemy combatants, but has refused to …

Here are further indicatons of what might happen at the upcoming Third Communist Party Plenum regarding rural reform. Interesting that “radical reform” is now being presaged even though real radical reform would mean granting peasants full rights to buy and sell land, something that for reasons discussed below is highly unlikley. The …

In the “something you don’t see everyday in China” category, a new (to me at least) site called chinasmack (www.chinasmack.com) features pictures of a Nanjing traffic policeman stopping (gasp!) a car with military plates for running a red light (you can actually see the light is green in the other direction in the photos). The occupants …

Posting this recent study in relation to the air pollution posts below and the premature deaths figure I was a bit lazy about (“hundreds of thousands”). This is chillingly precise about the number:

Smoking, coal set to claim tens of millions of lives in China

PARIS (AFP) — Tobacco use and smoke from coal and wood are likely to

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The Communist Party’s big meeting (Third Plenum) for the year takes place in Beijing over the coming weekend. There have been strong hints that something will be done about land reform, a very hot issue for China’s 700 million peasants who have no right to sell their land and must depend on 30 year leases issued by the state. As we have …

Earlier this year we mentioned some serious questions raised about Beijing’s air pollution statistics. Steven Andrews’ argued in the Wall Street Journal that improvements in the city’s air quality statistics were the result of gaming the numbers, not actual reductions in pollution. Beijing environmental officials have denied Andrews’ …