Asia

The death of Chen Chi-li, leader of the Bamboo Union (竹聯幫), Taiwan’s biggest gang, drew more than 10,000 mourners to a grand funeral procession in Taipei last Thursday. Some 1,000 police were also on force to control the crowd of Bamboo Union members, members of other gangs, politicians and celebrities. (see the impressive …

Language jokes are tricky. Think of the number of dunderheads who have meaningless Chinese characters (or with meanings far at variance to what they imagined) tattooed onto themselves. Still, it can be amusing. And though we’ll never have the “Anus Hospital” anymore as it’s been changed to “Proctological Diseases Hospital” ahead of next …

I just wanted to point out that across the street from the CCTV tower is the new phase of the World Trade Center or Guomao, pretty much the first really big prestige project in Beijing after reform and opening started back in the 1980s. Here’s a picture:

How boring is that? The developer has gone for the maximum floor space the plot …

The NBA season has just kicked off, but for Chinese fans the big game is almost here. On Friday night (or Saturday morning if you’re watching in China) the country’s biggest basketball export, Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, will meet its newest star hope, Milwaukee Bucks forward Yi Jianlian. The game is expected to draw 200 million …

A surprisingly strong reaction the the CCTV tower shot. A number of people criticized it bitterly as a waste of taxpayers’ money. Mo was typical:

I wouldn’t say this thing is stupid, but I would say it is brainless. Specifically, it doesn’t have a smallest of slice of Chineseness or beauty. It’s a strange bastard of money and Western

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Walking past the Rem Koolhaas CCTV Tower the other day on a mundane mission to buy a water filter, I was struck again by the thought that it’s either extremely cool or a total gimmick. They’re now working on the bridge section that will connect the two leaning towers. Anyway, answering my own question, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a …

A few morsels of news, none good. Despite everything and in particular the horrible pollution during the Olympic Committee’s recent visit, Beijing authorities are showing absolutely no sign that they will address the root cause of the problem, too many cars. Seems amazingly muleheaded. More than a potentially polluted Olympics, it means …

Taiwan is pushing forward with its own system of romanized Mandarin Chinese–a move seen by many as another attempt to distance itself from mainland China. By the end of this year, the romanized spelling of places in Taiwan must be changed to Taiwan’s Tongyong Pinyin (通用拼音), instead of Hanyu Pinyin (汉语拼音), the mainland …

Time.com’s multimedia section has a new photo essay on blue jeans. Like many manufactured goods in the world today, jeans mean China. (OK, you can get them from elsewhere. The photos show American and Sri Lankan manufacturers, too.) The essay is worth checking out for the amazing photos from a factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong.

So PetroChina made its domestic debut today and according to Bloomberg , China’s biggest oil and gas company is now valued at double what Exxon Mobil trades for, becoming the first company in the world to be worth more than a trillion dollars, or more than the GDP of Russia, which has some oil and gas itself. That’s because at around 40 …

Well, it’s official, the Party Congress really is over. We know that as Youtube is back in the graces of the GFW (Great Firewall) after being blocked for weeks. Flickr is up, too. We’ll have to check and see if the situation eases up for dissidents, who have been having a pretty hard time of it. So far though, it doesn’t look as though …

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Beijing-based performance artist Zhao Bandi always seems to be walking a fine line between glorifying the new China and mocking it. Zhao can be seen, with his ever-present panda, photographed traveling the world, running marathons, sitting in traffic, visiting factories. On Sunday he held a premier for his Bandi Panda …

Well, the results are out. The names of the eight foreigners who are to participate in the Olympic Torch relay have been released. You may remember I encouraged people to vote for one of my predecessors as a Time reporter in Beijing, Jimmy Florcruz, and his daughter. Despite some fairly heroic efforts, Jimmy didn’t make it, garnering a …