Asia

A variety of reports (including this from the Seattle Times , which presumably ought to know as Starbucks is headquartered there) bring the news that, after six years serving expensive, frothy coffee to tourists in the Forbidden City, the Starbucks branch will close. Having written about this a couple of times before here (including this …

My friend and former classmate Wang Feng has a nice piece on toxic toothpaste over at the Washington Post’s PostGlobal. He writes: “I admit it may be an exaggeration to say that only a major international loss of face will make Beijing clean up its act. But as both a journalist and a consumer in a country where the public almost never …

Peking University kicked off a design contest last week, asking its students to come up with a traditional Chinese graduation gown to replace the western robes students wear every July. Like the newfound popularity of Confucianism and the proliferation of old-style teahouses, the contest is part of a revival of traditional culture in …

Anyone living in China gets used to the scary food/products stories and learns to dismiss them (along with scary air pollution, 200 people dying a day on the roads etc) as beyond control and therefore not worth bothering about. Or we did. In recent weeks, as readers may have noticed, the number of stories on the subject has skyrocketed. …

Chinese regulators announced a ban yesterday on the use of a toxic chemical in toothpaste, and they deserve credit. Sure, they’re still standing by their belief that diethylene glycol, a solvent used in antifreeze, is safe in small doses. But it won’t be showing up in toothpaste here anymore, at least not legally.

At the same time, it’s …

Authorities in Beijing last week moved to close a publication that covers foreign aid and nongovernmental organizations, its founder said today. Nick Young, a British national who established the China Development Brief in 1996, says the newsletter’s Chinese-language edition was ordered to cease publishing and he faces possible …

Jodi Xu writes:

This morning, I heard the news that half of Beijing’s bottled water is counterfeit. I was horrified. It seems that illegal factories fill the used plastic bottles from the tap or with perfunctorily filtered water. The bottle tops and tape that they use to seal the bottle look identical to the genuine ones. The bottles …

Grim and stern as an old friend would say. The People’s Daily online just carried a story announcing that Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of China’s State Food and Drug Administration (see here for story on his crimes) ), was executed this morning. I thought Zheng’s appeal of the death sentence handed down on May 29th was still pending but …

A strange story is unfolding in Beijing. It involves dissidents, secret policemen, a jailed blind activist and a tense standoff which has security officials besieging an apartment in which an activist and her daughter are holed up and refusing to leave for fear of being kidnapped– by police.

Last Thursday, Yuan Weijing, the wife of …

Li Datong is the former editor of Freezing Point, a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily. Last year he famously posted a blistering letter on the newspaper’s computer system attacking the Communist Party’s propaganda czars and a plan by the paper’s editor in chief to dock reporters’ pay if their stories upset party officials. He …

Authorities in the coastal city of Xiamen have said they plan to require local bloggers to register with their real names. At the moment it is possible to use a pseudonym. This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the internet planned a huge role in the protests that roiled the city in early June when thousands of …