Asia

The effect of public pressure on top-level athletes is tricky to judge. Earlier this month I mentioned Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang and what he’s facing these days. It seems like a serious burden to me, but of course my ideas of athletic pressure were formed in the crucible of the Des Moines metro league’s ’88-’89 season. For the …

One of the most amazing intellectual property rights stories out of China is the saga of an American adhesive manufacturer who accuses a Hunan-based company of ripping off their product line and their corporate identity. The Hunan company’s boss was arrested in London last fall. He faced extradition to the U.S. and was scheduled to …

Gentle Readers: this is to advise you that we are altering our commentary system. From now on those wishing to comment will have to register. This is because we have been suffering a concerted spam attacks for weeks that send out hundreds of messages that clog up the comments pages. The new system simply requires you to prove you are a …

We have written often about the rights activist Hu Jia, most recently here) after he was formally arrested in December. He’s been detained a number of times and was also under house arrest for a while but this time he’s been formally arrested and charged with “inciting the overthrow of the state” (煽动颠覆国家), which makes it all …

In a recent piece for TIME.com I mentioned how the Chinese government’s approach to elections in Taiwan is changing. In ’96 they fired missiles, but 12 years later Beijing is far more restrained. It’s clear that any aggressive moves by Beijing only energize supporters of Taiwan’s independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party.

The …

Following up on Bill’s post about the anti-Maglev train protests in the heart of Shanghai, we have noticed that not only can you see video on youtube but also within China’s Great Firewall at sina.com, which is a whole other kettle of fish. “Oppose Maglev, Defend our Homes!” they chant, a formulation that echoes down the centuries …

Here’s some footage, posted on YOUTUBE, of a January 6 demonstration against the MAGLEV in Shanghai. The site is Renmin (People’s) Park in central Shanghai. That big white building the demonstrators are standing and shouting in front of is home to the municipal government. Most of the time the demonstrators are simply shouting, …

Anyone who follows the news from China will be familiar with the huge number of eruptions of public disorder which even the government acknowledges amount to tens of thousands a year (though how exactly those incidents are defined remains the subject of much debate.) Human rights activists, academics and professors often have remarked to …

As green issues go plastic bags are fairly mundane, but the differing ways they are being handled in China says a lot about how environmental policy gets made. Plastic bags fill up landfills and require significant amounts of petroleum to produce. They are also convenient and have become an integral part of the Chinese shopping …

This is a follow up to Bill’s post below about Beijing air quality. I was going to post on this story– which confirms everything we cynical types always suspected and much more–but he beat me to it. Still, the story is behind a payserver so I am going to imitate my esteemed colleague and post the entire thing. The details are amazing, …

There is no shortage of candidates for the biggest issue facing China these days, but one Chinese magazine has named its choice: land ownership. In its latest issue China Newsweek writes (per translation by China Digital Times):

The most serious economic, social and even political issues nowadays are all, directly or indirectly,

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A good piece on the Op Ed page of the Wall Street Journal today, written by a guy who used to work in the Beijing office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most established environmental lobbying/research groups in the United States. Key takeaway sentence comes in the last paragraph.

In 2006, of the 84 major cities in

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China’s State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (widely known in English by its appropriately awful acronym: SARFT) recently issued new regulations that at first glance appear to be a pretty serious tightening of censorship over video and audio material, both on the airwaves and on the net. Coming as they do around the same …