Asia

Here’s our time.com piece on the quarantine of Mexicans arriving in China following the first reported case of swine flu here.

In recent weeks it has appeared that China’s deadly experience with SARS has helped ready the country for the arrival of swine flu. Last week A/H1N1 arrived on Chinese soil. After failing to diagnose the 25-year-old Mexican man who carried the virus upon his arrival in Shanghai, health inspectors finally diagnosed him after a flight to …

This year’s TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people includes two Chinese leaders, vice president Xi Jinping and vice premier Wang Qishan. Wang’s profile was written by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who says:

I know Vice Premier Wang, 60, to be decisive and inquisitive. He is an avid historian, enjoys philosophical

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Here’s my latest story on why China’s economic recovery efforts are helping state-owned enterprises at the expense of the private sector. From Hong Kong, Michael Schuman has a look at the latest trade numbers, which offer Asia’s exporters their first cause for optimism in months. And from Lin Yang, here’s a piece on why the downturn is …

Here are a couple of stories on time.com that should be of interest to China Blog readers. From Hong Kong, at look at what advice the region hit by the last major killer contagion—SARS—can offer to countries faced with the spread of swine flu. And from Brussels, our take on the likelihood of a trade war over Chinese steel.

Well, not quite. But this being the Middle East, anything can happen. Obviously, the Chinese exporter should have said they were Florida orange. No, wait, that might not have worked either. Anyway, see here for the BBC take on a story you couldn’t make up involving Iran, China, Israel and fake “sweeeties.” Sweeties indeed.

Having fairly often given space to what might be deemed the gloomier outlook for China’s economy (see previous post), it seems only fair to allow the optimists some room. Here on two key issues is the take of the China economists at bankers research Merrill Lynch (a proud member of the Bank of America family), who, as they note, have …

Last week’s report that China’s first quarter GDP slowed to 6.1 per cent has been widely analysed. The one figure that struck me at the time and still seems amazing was bank lending, nearly 5 trillion RMB, which is the equivalent to bank lending for the whole of 2008. An astonishing figure and one that shows when Beijing cracks the whip, …

Reader Zhangshan gently points out that I didn’t read down to the comments when I linked to the Danwei post about the series of staged hotel room photos. Apologies and thanks for the catch. Interesting to compare the two series. The Chinese are far more convincing, to me at least. Scarier.

Might be a bit over-thinking this one, Simon.

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Earlier this week I took my mother to the Poly Art Museum in Beijing. The museum is connected to the Poly Group, an arms dealing, real estate and energy conglomerate that was born out of the Chinese military. In recent years the Poly Group has bought Chinese relics from overseas and displays many of them in its Beijing museum.

To my …

A series of photos supposedly from inside a hotel room is circulating on the next. The estimable folks at Danwei have posted the series. These are (deliberately of course) disturbing images. Some cheap shots (whips, boots etc), but the little mystery and the kidnap are gruesomely compelling and really do say something about how some …

As he’s clearly too modest a guy to do so himself, I’ll also note that you can read Bill Powell’s take on the threat (or not) represented by China’s growing Naval ambitions here. And also (no, not together) his take on China’s drive to produce electric cars here.