Below is part of a story from the Financial Times. North Korea has disappeared from the headlines somewhat, what with all the attention paid to the world financial (soon to be economic) crisis. But it’s still there in all its pesky, endlessly-collapsing, quasi-nuclear-armed glory and Beijing is still very concerned, as the article
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From my colleague Lin Yang:
In September we blogged about a man in southern China named Mr. Li with a “king rat” that he was offering up to battle feline challengers. The “rat,” in fact, was a 14-inch-long nutria. I often wonder what happened to him. Did he defeat all his cat combatants and claim his champion title? Perhaps not if
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The numbers are beginning to turn distinctly unpleasant for China, perhaps harkening a deeper downturn than economists had anticipated. It’s early days yet and even by the “there are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics” standard, China’s official numbers are always suspect. But these latest figures may be the reason the …
Walking through my neighborhood last night I passed an old couple walking a large, shaggy chow. Another neighbor gave it a look, paused and asked, “What do you call it?”
“We call it, ‘big bear,’” one of the owners said.
“Oh, I was going to say, it looks just like a bear,” the neighbor replied.
Names, especially …
This is from our colleague Jessie Jiang, who is following the trials and tribulations of convicted cop killer and surprise internet hero, Yang Jia, a case that is producing fascinating insights not only into the Chinese justice system but the attitude of ordinary Chinese towards the police:
Looks like the stranger-than-fiction tale of
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Like Austin and Lin Yang, I too have been in the earthquake-affected part of Sichuan. I went on Tuesday and for the first time. A couple of hours drive from the shopping malls, broad roads and middleclass apartments of Chengdu and there it is. At first, you notice things like the odd collapsed wall, or an occasional gap in the rows of …
Six months ago today I was sitting at my desk in Time’s Beijing bureau when the pictures on the walls began to slide eerily. The staff walked down 10 flights of stairs, thinking that even though the earthquake we felt had been mild, there was no sense risking the elevator. I walked to a nearby café, ordered a cup of coffee and asked
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From Natalie Tso in Taipei, a look at the arrest yesterday of Taiwan’s former president Chen Shui-bian.
Back in the day, reporters in Beijing used to spend a fair chunk of time on the often frustrating task of trying to follow the Byzantine struggles over power and ideology in the Communist Party. This used to even more of a preoccupation when it was very difficult to get out into the field. Now, of course we are much freer. and, between …
Guiyang doesn’t usually appear on tourist itineraries, and when I arrived there late last month I began to see why. It felt like China of the 1990s, before Starbucks and McDonald’s and Louis Vuitton infiltrated every major city. I was traveling with two childhood friends—one who had lived in China, one who was visiting for the …
One thing I didn’t get into in the story mentioned in the previous post was the meaning of the 4 trillion renminbi the goverment says it will be spending. There seems be some confusion about whether this is all new money or an aggrgation of previous promised spending such as the earthquake relief funds. Merrill Lynch has an excellent,
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A heads up for our take on the stimulus package. Just to underline how badly the package is needed, the Guangdong province government announced yesterday that the volume of deals at the annual Canton trade fair, China’s biggest and oldest, dropped by 17.9 per cent, the first time the number has declined since the SARs outbreak in 2003. …
Some more information has come out about the ninth eighth round of talks between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and Beijing officials, which finished late last week. According to wire service reports a paper proposing “genuine independence” was presented by the Tibetans along with some detailed proposals about removal of Chinese troops …
