So it was all just a simple misunderstanding. Case closed, right? According to the wires, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told President Dubya at the White House Wednesday that the Kitty Hawk affair was just a mix up of some kind. No explanation of what that means or how the exact same “misunderstanding” happened a few days earlier. …
No Port in a Storm: Kitty Hawk II
The Kitty Hawk affair is getting murkier and murkier. Senior U.S. admirals now reportedly say that the flip flopping by Chinese authorities on letting the aircraft carrier dock in Hong Kong was the second such incident this month. Earlier, two minesweepers were refused permision to shelter from an approaching storm and refuel. That is …
One Estimate on Cleaning Up China
In his previous post, Simon notes that China will begin spending 1.35% of GDP on environmental protection and asks how much it will eventually cost to clean up China’s pollution mess. No one will really know the cost of course until it is actually cleaned up. (What would Donald Rumsfeld call that, a “known unknown?”) Wang Canfa, who runs …
Cleaning Up China: Some Numbers
A follow up to a previous post about the environment in China and the cost of a clean up. Well, here are some real numbers that show I may have been right and the government thinks it can throw money at the problem and solve it that way. The State Council announced Monday that it would spend about 1.35 pc of GDP annually for the next …
How to Handle Ex-Dissidents 101
The following is a fascinating translation (partly cut back by me) by the excellent folks at China Digital Times which I am posting as I don’t believe there’s too much overlap between their readers and ours. It provides wonderful insight into the mindset of the police, their insistence on pretending that they are “friends” concerned with …
The USS Kitty Hawk Kerfuffle and Trouble in the Strait
The kerfuffle over China’s back and forth over whether to allow the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk into Hong Kong last week so the sailors could celebrate Thanksgiving is dying down. There was lots of speculation about what could have sparked the change of mind by Beijing, which first gave permission, then withdrew it and then changed …
Straight Outta Inner Mongolia
Since we’re on the subject of crazy rap videos, here’s one that comes from the heart of China. Last week Chinese web portal sina.com posted a video of a man, apparently a farmer from Inner Mongolia, launching his hip hop debut. (China Digital Times has the story here.) The farmer talks about the funny walk of a chicken and how his gold …
Jack Ma’s New Pad
Three weeks after the online business-to-business giant Alibaba’s $1.7 billion IPO in Hong Kong, company founder and chairman Jack Ma (马云) has set another record by spending $38 million USD on a 7,000 sq. ft. penthouse (that’s about $5,400 per square foot) in Branksome Crest, a luxury apartment building in Hong Kong’s …
China’s Recycling Entrepreneurs
An interesting video podcast by an outfit calling itself China’s Green Beat (中国绿色脉搏) on rubbish recyclers in Beijing. It’s not entirely clear to me from their website who these guys are, although they do introduce themselves in the podcast and seem like personable, well-meaning young men. Amidst all the gloom about China’s …
Singapore, oh Singapore
Ok. This isn’t strictly speaking about China. It’s about Singapore in fact, which is a Chinese city, albeit quite a ways from the motherland (tho a lot closer than it looks on the map if Chinese claims to various tiny islands in the South China Sea are to be believed.) Anyway, the efforts of this extremely uptight government to get hip …
Dalai Lama in Retreat
FYI, Here’s our take on why the Dalai Lama says he may change the centuries old traditional Tibetan method of choosing his successor. Not because he wanted to, that’s for sure.
Don’t Try This at Home, Folks
PATRICK LIN / AFP / Getty Images
Ang Lee and his flexibile stars
A sex counselor in China writes on his blog that he got a call for help from a frantic young woman whose boyfriend had tried to copy the athletic (balletic? Kama Sutric?) sex scenes in director Ang Lee’s latest movie, the 1940s spy thriller Lust, Caution. She told him …
Red Mandarin Dress
Qiu Xiaolong, author of the “Inspector Chen” series of crime novels set in Shanghai, gave a talk here on Sunday in advance of the publication of the fifth in the series: Red Mandarin Dress, which comes out at the end of this month. The story this time is about a series of murders in which the victims are all young women wearing red …
