Asia

A troubling update to our earlier posts about Yuan Weijing, the wife of jailed blind activist Chen Guangcheng. When last we visited her in July, Yuan –who was effectively under house arrest in her home province of Shandong– had evaded her guards and traveled to Beijing where she and her two year old daughter put up at the apartment of …

A few weeks ago reports surfaced of an online game called “Incorruptible Warrior” (清廉战士) that had been released by a local government in central China. (This is the link to download the game but although you can download, the game doesn’t run, or at least I couldn’t get it to run). The game was set in ancient China (hence the …

天无情人有情共产党最有情

A picture in the South China Morning Post shows this slogan on a banner hanging over the mine in northeastern Shandong province where 172 miners were trapped by a flood last Friday. As the accompanying story points out, some of the hundreds of relatives of the miners waiting outside the gates of the …

Chinese papers are obviously very tightly controlled indeed but with the approach of the 5 yearly Party Congress—due in the next month or so—at which major and minor political changes are announced, the media is practically frozen in lockstep. Yesterday’s front pages of the People’s Daily to three other major organs were …

Back from vacation and on the fifth day we have blue skies and sunshine, as the intermittent Time Beijing BureauCam records. As Austin noted below, the four day banning of roughly half of the vehicles on Beijing’s roads didn’t seem to have made much impact yesterday. Today, with the aid of some helpful wind gusts in the morning, we …

Over the past few days, Beijing has seen an abundance of a very rare entity: happy cab drivers. Sure, I got a ride with one cranky driver who seemed preoccupied with not being confined to a single lane. But most were like Ma Kuishan, who was dangerously close to giddy as he drive through northeast Beijing on Friday evening. “Normally, …

Andy Lau is one of the most popular Chinese actors of the past 20 years, the singer of dozens of pop hits, the man that women in one survey most said they would like to father their child, a successful film producer and a pretty good bowler. Not that I’m jealous. In fact, in one way at least he’s is pretty average.

Lau, who is better …

An official from the China Toy Association told Reuters that the group knew about the problems with magnets in toys as far back as March, but could offer no explanation for why nothing was done about it. Before that quote came out it appeared that the blame for the toys with magnets was squarely on the shoulders of Mattel and U.S. …

Now it’s Batman and Barbie Playsets and Polly Pocket dolls– all apparently made in China. The CEO of Mattel, Robert Eckert, took out a full page ad in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today, which showed a picture of three children playing together.
”Fellow Parents” Eckert wrote. “Nothing is more important …

It’s hard to think of two more discordant images. Less than a week after Beijing kicked off the one-year countdown to the 2008 Summer Olympics, a new report emerges of even more people found working in slave-like conditions in central China. On one hand the plastered smiles of syncopated dancers and their Olympic dreams, on the other the …