Asia

Thanks to reader Richard Brubaker at the allroadsleadtochina blog for pointing us to a report (their website summary here along with links to pdf and power point versions of the report) by consultants A.T. Kearney that puts a number on the subject of my last post, what it will take to fix China’s regulatory system. “China’s food safety …

Joe Kahn of the New York Times has an interesting piece in today’s newspaper about the safety of Chinese products. He compares China today to the U.S. at the turn of the century, noting that the Food and Drug Administration was created in 1906 in response to a series of scandals over shoddy and dangerous products. The focus of the Made …

Xinhua News Agency

Our Beijing Bureau colleague Jodi Xu writes:

China’s National Tourism Administration published a list last week of the “most disgusting habits of Chinese tourists.” The list was compiled after an online poll, during which as many as 3 million Chinese visited the webpage and contributed their ideas. The result …

That the central government will ban driving during the Olympics next year in Beijing is not surprising. As this Journal story notes today, there will evidently be a dry run next month to see how much impact this has on air quality in the city. But what’s critical to note is the extraordinary pace at which cars are hitting the roads in …

The FT yesterday published an extraordinary story about the World Bank covering up–at the Chine government’s behest–part of a study it did estimating that 750,000 people annually die prematurely thanks to this country’s horrific environmental problems.
The government worried that the publication of this estimate might cause “social …

Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty

Two events last Friday worth mentioning. The the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, passed a new labor law whose aim, in part, was to improve conditions faced by the country’s 100 (or up to 150 depending on who’s counting) million migrant workers. roughly at the same time, a mob of hired …

Human Rights Watch China researcher Nicholas Bequelin writes, “Over the past two decades, China’s Communist Party has progressively embraced the rule of law as its principal method to rule the country.” But the effort, far from creating the stability the government so desperately craves, is sparking the opposite, Bequelin …

A scholar in Guangzhou recently told me that 30 years ago journalists went to Hong Kong to try to figure out what was happening in Beijing, now you go to Beijing to figure out what’s happening in Hong Kong. I moved to Beijing last week, and I can say that that statement is far from true. But it does point to some realities, like how much …

I don’t want to say I feel sorry for Yi Jiianlian, the Chinese basketball star who was just the sixth pick in the NBA draft–the guy after all will soon be a multi, multi millionaire–but he’s obviously depressed at the thought of playing in Milwaukee for the Bucks, the team that picked him. There are apparently just 27,500 Asian …

As the chart above shows, the Shanghai index has been gyrating particularly drunkely in the past few days, even by its own heavily inebriated standards. You know that something is fishy when a fall of 4 per cent becomes anodyne. Maybe that big shakeout will come earlier than I thought. The government is contemplating dropping an tax …