Asia

The state-run Xinhua News Service says Chinese President Hu Jintao and U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama spoke by phone on Saturday, their first reported conversation. The two stressed the importance of bilateral relations, discussed the seriousness of the financial crisis and touched on the Taiwan issue, but otherwise the piece was …

I wrote recently that some of the patterns established during China’s product quality scandals of 2007 have begun to re-emerge this year. For one, Beijing has started playing up cases of imported goods that haven’t met mainland standards. Earlier this week it was sauces from Japan, now it’s milk from Australia and South Korea. As Reuters

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China’s President Hu Jintao is headed to Washington next week for a Nov. 15 summit of the world’s largest economies. It’s not clear yet if president-elect Barack Obama will participate in the meeting to discuss the global financial crisis, and the AP reports that Chinese officials were noncommittal about whether Hu and Obama would meet. …

Our colleague Natalie Tso in Taipei has a story today examining this week’s visit by a high-level Chinese envoy to Taiwan, the deals that were reached between the two sides and the protests surrounding the visit.

This from my colleague Jessie Jiang:

Pending final approval from the Chinese Supreme Court, Yang Jia is now officially on death row. The 28-year-old, who stabbed to death six policemen last summer in apparent revenge for being beaten while in detention for a minor infraction, was sentenced on October 20, when Shanghai high people’s

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Thanks to China Digital Times for the photo; the Chinese reads: Forward!

With the election of Barrack Obama as president (nonpartisan moment: Hurray!), many diplomats, academics, journalists and other asorted ne’er-do-wells are attempting to figure out how U.S. policy will change under the next president and who will do the …

The conventional wisdom on Sino-U.S. relations is that Chinese leaders prefer Republican presidents who would be less inclined to start trade fights or needle over human rights issues. Of course the leadership never explicitly says this. And the tough China rhetoric of presidential candidates like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush evolved …

Here’s our latest look at the continuing food safety crisis in China.

Spare a thought for the punters on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The market was already down by around two thirds for the year when the financial tsunami hit. Now, as other markets are beginning to stabilize or in fact recover some ground, it continues to head for the bottom. Here’s a comparison of its performance over the last year with …

Forgot to do a shout out for our piece on what keeps China’s leaders awake at night, here. If this story is any indication, the police ae alrady gearing up for further unrest. One thing I didn’t get into was graduate unemployment, an issue that has been out there for some time. With graduates pouring out of the many new universities set …

Here.

Translating into Chinese is often as much of an art as a science and often produces some pretty whimsical results. That’s true of all translation of course, but because of the gulf between sound-conveying letters and Chinese ideographs, which convey meaning, have a sound attached to them and sometimes also hint at the sound. Names are …