Asia

The following is a fascinating translation (partly cut back by me) by the excellent folks at China Digital Times which I am posting as I don’t believe there’s too much overlap between their readers and ours. It provides wonderful insight into the mindset of the police, their insistence on pretending that they are “friends” concerned with …

The kerfuffle over China’s back and forth over whether to allow the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk into Hong Kong last week so the sailors could celebrate Thanksgiving is dying down. There was lots of speculation about what could have sparked the change of mind by Beijing, which first gave permission, then withdrew it and then changed …

Since we’re on the subject of crazy rap videos, here’s one that comes from the heart of China. Last week Chinese web portal sina.com posted a video of a man, apparently a farmer from Inner Mongolia, launching his hip hop debut. (China Digital Times has the story here.) The farmer talks about the funny walk of a chicken and how his gold …

Three weeks after the online business-to-business giant Alibaba’s $1.7 billion IPO in Hong Kong, company founder and chairman Jack Ma (马云) has set another record by spending $38 million USD on a 7,000 sq. ft. penthouse (that’s about $5,400 per square foot) in Branksome Crest, a luxury apartment building in Hong Kong’s …

An interesting video podcast by an outfit calling itself China’s Green Beat (中国绿色脉搏) on rubbish recyclers in Beijing. It’s not entirely clear to me from their website who these guys are, although they do introduce themselves in the podcast and seem like personable, well-meaning young men. Amidst all the gloom about China’s …

Ok. This isn’t strictly speaking about China. It’s about Singapore in fact, which is a Chinese city, albeit quite a ways from the motherland (tho a lot closer than it looks on the map if Chinese claims to various tiny islands in the South China Sea are to be believed.) Anyway, the efforts of this extremely uptight government to get hip …

FYI, Here’s our take on why the Dalai Lama says he may change the centuries old traditional Tibetan method of choosing his successor. Not because he wanted to, that’s for sure.

PATRICK LIN / AFP / Getty Images

Ang Lee and his flexibile stars

A sex counselor in China writes on his blog that he got a call for help from a frantic young woman whose boyfriend had tried to copy the athletic (balletic? Kama Sutric?) sex scenes in director Ang Lee’s latest movie, the 1940s spy thriller Lust, Caution. She told him …

Qiu Xiaolong, author of the “Inspector Chen” series of crime novels set in Shanghai, gave a talk here on Sunday in advance of the publication of the fifth in the series: Red Mandarin Dress, which comes out at the end of this month. The story this time is about a series of murders in which the victims are all young women wearing red …

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Separated At Birth?

China’s Nelson Mandela. Does a name spring to mind when that phrase pops up? The exiled dissident Wei Jingsheng perhaps? Or possibly not a name but an image, that of an imprisoned dissident trudging through the snow in some remote “reform through labor” camp in the country’s far west. …

Always refreshing to have a truism that’s repeated parrotlike as a godgiven truth exploded and who better than the folk at Access Asia in Shanghai to do it. This week they address the issue of the stampede at a Carrefour in which three people were killed. Coming as it did right before some pretty unpleasant inflation figures (mostly food …

Good news indeed for the much put upon Hu Jia, about whom we have written regularly . He and his wife Zeng Jinyan had a healthy, 3.37 kilo baby girl yesterday morning. It hasn’t exactly been a model pregnancy. We saw them early on, when their apartment was a refuge of Yuan Weijing, the besieged wife of jailed blind activist Chen …