Asia

Austin Ramzy has a new story on Time.com about the increasingly bizarre atmosphere in Beijing as the Games draw near. Bottom line: jogging and pillow fights verbotten! meanwhile, Ishaan Tharoor, a Time reporter in Hong Kong, has a related story about the range of restrictions being imposed on foreigners trying to get visas to come into …

An interesting piece in today’s South China Morning Post laying out why the Tibet talks are almost certainly destined to go nowhere. I have mentioned some of the obstacles the talks face in previous posts, particularly the “greater Tibet” issue. This article goes into detail on the other huge impediment to progress, the extent of the …

Dressed in red, patriots outnumbered protesters when the Olympic torch came through Hong Kong last Friday. Click here to see TIME’s video report of the Hong Kong relay.

So, as predicted in my previous post, the talks between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and Beijing are happening today in Shenzhen. Expectations on both sides seem low, to put it mildly. President Hu Jintao, who is in Tokyo, (oops. he was talking to Japanese reporters in Beijing; goes to Japan Tuesday. Sorry about that. I must have …

Negotiations about where to hold the resumed talks between Beijing and representatives of the Dalai Lama (or more accurately, talks about resuming the meetings that were held from 2002 until 2007 when Beijing canceled after the DL was awarded the Gold Medal by the U.S. Congress) have been going on in recent days with the aim of getting …

A fresh perspective, as ever, from Access Asia and a timely reminder of the puzzle of why France was singled out rather than Britain or the U.S. Anyway, it’s clear now that as expected a firm hold has been placed on protests by the government, as well as other nationalist activity, especially yesterday when protests in front of various …

Here’s another take on the issue by our colleague at the Beijing Bureau, Lin Yang:

With the overwhelming patriotic propaganda on the Olympic torch’s “harmonious world tour” in the local press for the past month, I thought I could no longer be surprised by anything. But I was wrong. The torch’s Seoul leg took Chinese nationalist

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Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty Images

100 days to go and Beijing put on some celebrations that included a run past the newly opened Olympic Stadium, aka the Bird’s Nest. As you’ll see from the photo, some of the runners took precautions against ingesting too much of the city’s notoriously rank air. Todays’ API reading was 155 …

Over the past few weeks over-the-top protests during the Olympic torch’s global relay have helped spur anti-foreign sentiment in China, particularly against the French. Now, after the flame’s passage through Seoul, something of the opposite is happening. The fervent and at times violent defense of the torch by Chinese students in Seoul …

Copies of The New Yorker arrive in our Beijing bureau at the speed of a steamship. Since I usually wait to read it in print form I just today saw the Jonathan Franzen article about golf club covers, manufacturing, environmentalism and birdwatching in the Yangtze delta. It’s a wonderful, bizarre tale. Unfortunately the story isn’t …

The latest edition of TIME Asia carries the magazine’s annual Best of Asia guide. There are a couple entries from China, including Liam writing about Jimmy’s Kitchen in Hong Kong and another paean from me to Inner Mongolian beer.