The character for pressure in Chinese is 壓力 . (That’s YA LI in pinyin). Think the Chinese hoop team is feeling any these days? This from 7 foot forward Yi Jianlian’s blog (Yi played for the Milwaukee Bucks this past year and was recently traded to the New Jersey Nets):
This morning Hu Jintao came to watch our practice. Even
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Some thoughts from our colleague Lin Yang:
Many of us joined the spontaneous carnival in the streets on a summer night seven years ago when Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics. But as the moment of glory finally arrives, the exultation is no longer shared by all.
I have noticed growing sentiment recently in Internet posts and daily
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And speaking of living in Beijing (my story about how great it is here), it can’t hurt to repeat just how gobsmacking the changes in the city continue to be, particularly for those of us who saw the place in the 90s. The video below is taken at a new shopping center on the north west corner of Chaoyang Park, Beijing’s largest. It is …
The Pew Research Center (which describes itself as “a nonpartisan ‘fact tank’ that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.) has just released a poll of attitudes in China. There’s a bunch of interesting stuff but one fact should warm the hearts of cadres in Communist Party headquarters in …
Lin Yang from TIME’s Beijing bureau has these thoughts about the city’s Olympic traffic plan:
Driving the four miles between my home and the office can take up to an hour, but with vehicle traffic drastically cut yesterday it took half that. Beijing’s drive to radically improve air quality for the Olympics means only private cars …
Literally, one gas mask.
I began using this headline for these postings months ago with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Now comes today’s Wall Street Journal with this hilarious piece about Olympic athletes who are LITERALLY planning to wear gas masks in Beijing.
U.S. triathlete Jarrod Shoemaker has a decision to make at the opening
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The South China Morning Post has qualified its claim that Beijing authorities have ordered bar owners in the city’s popular Sanlitun drinking district to refuse service to black people during the Olympics. A report on Saturday quoted a police officer denying that such a ban was been ordered. The paper also suggested that “not all bars in …
Jun Ma is one of the more accurate economic forecasters following China (he’s a at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong). His latest monthly missive states flatly that the inflation scare in China is over, and that he’s now worried about a significant slow down in growth. He’s marked down his 2008 growth forecast from 10.8 per cent to 10.2, and …
As a complement to my previous post, see here for our piece in the dead tree edition on China’s magical capital.
Spot the empty lane
In reference to my post below (Rainy Beijing) in which I wondered about the effect vehicle controls on Beijing’s long suffering commuters, please see here for a Reuters story which describes how the capital’s main subway line ground to a halt because of the crush of passengers. Today is the first working day of …
Two buses exploded in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming during the morning rush hour today, state media reported. The blasts, which occurred about an hour apart, killed two and injured 14 in the Yunnan provincial capital. A police official told the AFP that according to preliminary investigations the cause of the blasts was …
The Beijing nail house mentioned here has been torn down. At the site earlier today there was nothing but workmen moving the last bits of rubble, planting flowers and painting the red wall behind where the Yu family store once stood. A person at a nearby store said the destruction work began at 3 a.m. on Friday. From an aesthetic …
Getty Images
Having just read Jurassic Park, I decided to mesh my interests in archaeology and China by penning a 20-page sci-fi adventure story about two American archaeologists poking around the tomb of Qin Shihuang, China’s first emperor, and the chaos that erupts when Qin’s vast terracotta army is disturbed from its slumber … …
