Jailed Chinese activist Hu Jia and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, have made the early list of favorites for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. From the Associated Press:
(OSLO, Norway) — The annual guessing game about who will get the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize focused this year on a possible human rights rebuke for China.
Experts said the coveted
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Our take on milk powder and other recent disasters here.
Wenchuan neighbors smoking a cigarette. / Ni Qunyan
Lin Yang on an exhibition of post-earthquake photos from Sichuan:
A special section at the 2008 Pingyao International Photography Festival is dedicated to 50 residents of the quake-stricken town of Wenchuan. They recorded life after the quake with point-and-shoot cameras donated by …
The director of The Joy Luck Club revisits the theme of Chinese-American identity with two new films this fall. Click here to submit your questions for Wayne Wang, then look for the upcoming interview in TIME.
Chinese model Du Juan was the first Asian model to appear on the cover of French Vogue. / Getty Images
To find out why Asian models like Du Juan are finally getting a share of the spotlight, read TIME Style & Design’s story, Color Lines on the Catwalk, and watch the accompanying video here.
It’s probably one of the hoariest clichés in the book about China but in this case it keeps popping up because it has a core nugget of real insight. The word for crisis in Chinese is weiji, 危机, made up as the tale goes from two characters, one meaning ‘danger’ and the other ‘opportunity.’ Although it’s a bit of a stretch …
Coverage of the 85 billion-dollar AIG bailout by the Fed in the Chinese media has generally been fairly reserved. That’s partly because AIG owns around twenty per cent of the People’s Insurance Company of China, the country’s largest casualty insurer, and the government doesn’t want anyone getting worked up about a possible threat to its …
As Austin notes below, the Mayor and (more importantly) Deputy Communist Party Secretary of Shijiazhuang, the center of the storm over the tainted baby powder has been fired. The Chairwoman of the main company embroiled in the scandal, Sanlu, has also been relieved of her posts and is widely expected to be arrested soon. In other words, …
Good news, folks. “Most companies’ baby milk powder is safe,” China’s State Council says. I think that’s meant to be reassuring. But “most?” That’s the always-look-on-the-bright-side way to say the tainted milk powder scandal (here’s our story from yesterday) that started with one producer, Sanlu, has now expanded to 22. …
A little light relief from the poisoned babies, mudslides and collapsing banks. Apparrently, one of these guys even tried chewing on a piece of the rock to figure out what it was. The real questionis, who sold it to them?
Shoppers accidentally buy nuclear waste
Three residents of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region’s Aksu city
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The American Chamber of Commerce in China has published letters from the two U.S. presidential candidates on how they would approach relations with China. There are no huge surprises, though the McCain letter has a pretty hard edge, particularly when it comes to human rights. Obama’s as you might expect, is more considered and softer in …
China’s official Xinhua News Agency announced September 14 that the governor of Shanxi province, Meng Xuenong, had resigned from his post along with his deputy following the deaths of over 250 people in a mudlside. You can see more details on the mudslide here, but it’s pretty clear that it was caused by sloppy enforcement of mining …