Asia

Having written before about what I believe are bogus notions of “intra-party democracy” it’s probably worth mentioning again that despite a great deal of talk, the idea that democracy outside the party is making any headway is even more fallacious. That despite the fact that President Hu Jintao mentioned the word democracy no less than …

Driving back from a hike near the Great Wall on Sunday we passed the rail line that comes from Datong in Shanxi province. Shanxi is the coal mining capital of China (about whose appalling conditions I’ve written previously) and this line appeared to be dedicated solely to coal transport. We watched in amazement as four locomotives pulled …

I was in Hong Kong over the weekend and thus subjected to repeat viewings of Donald Tsang’s controversial remarks from Friday. If you missed it, the Bowtied One declared that China’s Cultural Revolution was an example of the dangers of democracy. When the interviewer challenged him on that point, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive dug in and …

In response to my post on the police in Beijing taking a close look at the registration of foreign residents, Josh Gartner at the China Expat blog points out his entry from last month about the attentions he’s received from the Public Security Bureau.

He also asks how, as a journalist, I could not be registered. When I came to Beijing …

Yes indeed, top Chinese leaders are now saying what everyone else has been pointing out for decades: the $150 billion Three Gorges dam was a seriously bad idea. My colleague Lin Yang has a story on the Time.Com website.

Today marks the start of the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the five-yearly affair at which the Party’s top cadres get together and, well, mostly approve what they are told to approve. As China President and not coincidentally the CPC’s Secretary General Hu Jintao put it in his speech opening the Congress this …

The first thing to understand is that my wife, a Shanghai native, looks nothing at all like Osama Bin Laden or your basic Islamo-facist, nutball suicide bomber. I think all of our friends would attest to that. But on September 11, 2007, at immigration at Kennedy Airport in New York, that didn’t matter. We were at the start of a long …

The U.S. Congress plans to give the Dalai Lama its highest award bestowed upon a civilian, and the Chinese government has condemned the move. Adding to the potential sources of ire for Beijing is the fact the U.S. President George W. Bush and his wife will be present when the honor is handed out at the Capitol next week. Given the …

Jonathan Ansfield, who runs one of Beijing’s most pleasant bars and also writes for a big American newsweekly that isn’t TIME, has a nice piece out this week about life as a foreigner in Beijing.

He writes about, among other things, the increasing vigilance with which the police are checking out foreigners’ visas. I had my own …

The 4th Hong Kong Asian Film Festival ends today. Luckily, I had the chance to see a couple films, including Umbrella, the latest from Chinese documentary filmmaker Du Haibin. The film just premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, where it screened alongside the documentary Useless, by Jia Zhangke (who won the Golden Lion last …

Sotheby’s auctioned off a collection of items linked to Qing dynasty palaces on Tuesday, and Chinese collectors paid sky high prices to snap them up. That follows Stanley Ho’s purchase last month of a sculpture that had been looted from Beijing’s old Summer Palace. The Macau gambling tycoon paid $8.84 million for a bronze horse’s head–a …

A quick snap of Beijing early this morning, an unusually bright and clear early Autumn day. The boring but conspicuous monolith on the right is the new China World Tower, which when completed will be the highest building in the capital but otherwise doesn’t have much to recommend it architecturally. The two drunken looking structures …