We’ve written before about the rush of inquiries in China about adopting kids orphaned by the Wenchuan earthquake. For any of our readers personally interested in pursuing this, the China Daily has a story on a notice issued by the Sichuan provincial authorities outlining eligibility and procedures. Bottom line: relatives get …

Original team members from the 1971 ping pong diplomacy event will face-off again today at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in southern California. The event, which kicked off Tuesday with exhibitions and training sessions for students, will culminate in a rematch today between two of the original players: Tim Boggan, 77 (!!), and …

A heads up for our latest take on Tibet, which is actually an amplification with more reporting of an earlier blog post (see below). It really does seem like this is crunch time and if this opportunity is let slip by Beijing and things turn ugly again on the ground it could means years and years of misery. These things are always tricky …

I am probably a little flippy about this building, the roughly 800 million dollar extravaganza that is to be the headquarters of China Central Television. But having posted pics of its progress several times (last one here in November) on this blog, I thought I’d keep up the tradition. The first picture gives you some idea of where the …

Interesting AP report about a clash between Chinese officials concerned about security and foreign television executives trying to get their logistical ducks in a row for the Games. There’s a matching piece at the Guardian that also comments on the effects on the International Olympic Committee and the Games of what seems to be a growing …

Beijing announced yesterday that talks between representatives of the exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama and senior Chinese officials were to be postponed until later this month. It was a another bad omen in a situation that looks increasingly grim. Conditions on the ground are still very tense. Beijing also announced that it had …

More than 5,000 children have been orphaned by the earthquake in Sichuan, and with 18,000 people still unaccounted for, that number is sure to rise. For the last three weeks, phones have been ringing off the hook at Chinese Civil Affairs departments, the agencies that handle adoption in China. International adoption groups have also been …

One interesting exercise during the anniversary of the Tiananmen killings is to consider what people in Hong Kong think. On the mainland people don’t talk about June 4 that often, which is partly due to the fact that it has now been 19 years. But of course as Simon notes below the subject is banned from public discourse, so some of that …

Today, of course, is the anniversary of the bloody crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. The writer Ma Jian has written a screed in the London Times criticizing current Chinese writers for failing to speak out about the issue and generally being establishment (read Communist Party) lackeys. I am reading Ma’s latest novel, called …

The legendary China scholar Jonathan Spence of Yale is giving the BBC’s annual Reith lectures this year. You can listen or download the first talk, on Confucius, here. Spence is incapable of saying or writing anything dull on China and this first lecture of four is characteristically fascinating.

From the Associated Press comes a story today about police shutting down a protest by angry parents in Sichuan:

(DUJIANGYAN, China) — Chinese police dragged away more than 100 parents Tuesday while they were protesting the deaths of their children in poorly constructed schools that collapsed in last month’s earthquake.

The parents,

…

During my week in Sichuan after the quake one thing that I repeatedly encountered, especially once we began venturing towards the epicenter, were people that had covered incredible distances over mountains and shattered roads to find family members. Transportation in that region of China is difficult to begin with; landslides and bridge …