Asia

Here’s a link to a fascinating story (and a great scoop) by my former colleague and friend Adi Ignatius (he’s now helming the venerable Harvard Business Review) about the about-to-be-published memoirs of China’s former premier Zhao Ziyang. Zhao was dismissed and confined to house arrest after he refused to agree to Deng Xiaoping’s order …

Apologies. Mr. Hi-tech here managed to wipe out the transcript. Here it is for real this time after the jump (SE is me asking the questions, by the way):

As my colleague Ling mentions below, we have a story out to mark the anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake that focuses on the efforts of the artist Ai Weiwei to record an accurate toll of school children who died.

Though we have spoken to him again a few times since, the main interview was done in mid April. For those interested, it …

A slightly bizarre story here out of the United States about differing reactions to the news that China’s first swine flu victim is a graduate student at the University of Missouri. Here in Beijing, the health authorities have indeed gone into overdrive. I have received three sets of text messages asking anyone who was on board the …

Beijing’s official response to the latest confrontation between Chinese “fishing boats” and a U.S. navy surveillance vessel (see our post below) goes some way to confirming that this problem is going to be around for a while and could get ugly. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the ship was breaking international and Chinese law by …

During a press conference in Chengdu today the Sichuan provincial government announced that 5,335 students died or remain missing after last year’s devastating earthquake. The collapse of a large number of schoolhouses was one of the most significant and sensitive stories in last year’s quake. Many parents alleged that official …

Quarantine mania is abating in China. Most of the 71 Mexicans who were isolated after arriving in China for fear they could spread swine flu have flown back to Mexico City on a government-chartered plane. Likewise, a group of Canadian students in the northeastern Chinese city of Changchun has been released.

But like a wily virus, …

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China has troubling news today of three attacks on journalists in the Sichuan earthquake region. What reporters are facing there now in the days before the one-year anniversary of the May 12 disaster pales with what families seeking answers about why their children died in collapsed schools are dealing …

The level of distrust between China and the overseas Tibetan community is evident. You can see it in the plodding nature of talks between Dharamsala and Beijing, the sharp criticism coming from both corners, or even in the comments sections of this blog, where supporters of the two sides frequently spar. So it was refreshing to read an …

…and once again the U.S. ship is a submarine hunter. As I have said in the past these incidents not only signal an increasingly assertive Chinese stance, they also make me wonder about how much the People’s Liberation Army Navy is pushing things, given the much more aggressive comments made by senior naval officers about these clashes …

For TIME Asia’s recent Best of Asia issue, I wrote a short piece on the Nu River, which was subtitled the “Best Place to Visit Before It’s Gone.” When my mother visited last month, she said she wanted to visit a place off the tourist trail, so we went to northwest Yunnan province, near the Burmese border, to see the river.

By …