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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

Getty Images

Getty Images

Separated At Birth?

China’s Nelson Mandela. Does a name spring to mind when that phrase pops up? The exiled dissident Wei Jingsheng perhaps? Or possibly not a name but an image, that of an imprisoned dissident trudging through the snow in some remote “reform through labor” camp in the country’s far west. …

Always refreshing to have a truism that’s repeated parrotlike as a godgiven truth exploded and who better than the folk at Access Asia in Shanghai to do it. This week they address the issue of the stampede at a Carrefour in which three people were killed. Coming as it did right before some pretty unpleasant inflation figures (mostly food …

Good news indeed for the much put upon Hu Jia, about whom we have written regularly . He and his wife Zeng Jinyan had a healthy, 3.37 kilo baby girl yesterday morning. It hasn’t exactly been a model pregnancy. We saw them early on, when their apartment was a refuge of Yuan Weijing, the besieged wife of jailed blind activist Chen …

The death of Chen Chi-li, leader of the Bamboo Union (竹聯幫), Taiwan’s biggest gang, drew more than 10,000 mourners to a grand funeral procession in Taipei last Thursday. Some 1,000 police were also on force to control the crowd of Bamboo Union members, members of other gangs, politicians and celebrities. (see the impressive …

Language jokes are tricky. Think of the number of dunderheads who have meaningless Chinese characters (or with meanings far at variance to what they imagined) tattooed onto themselves. Still, it can be amusing. And though we’ll never have the “Anus Hospital” anymore as it’s been changed to “Proctological Diseases Hospital” ahead of next …

I just wanted to point out that across the street from the CCTV tower is the new phase of the World Trade Center or Guomao, pretty much the first really big prestige project in Beijing after reform and opening started back in the 1980s. Here’s a picture:

How boring is that? The developer has gone for the maximum floor space the plot …

The NBA season has just kicked off, but for Chinese fans the big game is almost here. On Friday night (or Saturday morning if you’re watching in China) the country’s biggest basketball export, Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, will meet its newest star hope, Milwaukee Bucks forward Yi Jianlian. The game is expected to draw 200 million …

A surprisingly strong reaction the the CCTV tower shot. A number of people criticized it bitterly as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Mo was typical:

I wouldn’t say this thing is stupid, but I would say it is brainless. Specifically, it doesn’t have a smallest of slice of Chineseness or beauty. It’s a strange bastard of money and Western

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