Asia

Interesting chart of the Shanghai composite index over the last couple of years, courtesy of the good people of Yahoo! It’s worth remembering that, after being in the news last week for roller coasting up and down by as much as 8 percent (that’s the dip in the top righthand corner), the Shanghai index has resumed its steady (2 percent …

A post on the China Law blog makes a good point about an article I wrote recently for Time (the old media, paper one, that is). The story is about China’s dysfunctional legal system and focuses on one particularly egregious miscarriage of justice, which symbolizes the sorry state of the whole. But the China Law post points out (and yes, …

Word from Xiamen is that the authorities are now cracking down in the wake of the demonstrations last week protesting against the plan to build a chemical plant in the city. They say there are posters up in all neighborhood comittee walls and elsewhere are calling for anyone who was in the march to turn themselves in, with the incentive …

This week’s TIME Asia has a cover package on the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China. There are several stories, two photo essays and a roundtable discussion with a group of leading Hong Kong figures.

Ahead of next year’s election, here’s a look at the stances of Taiwan’s presidential candidates on cross-strait relations from TIME’s Taipei-based contributor Natalie Tso:

Taiwan’s presidential candidates are starting to tout their China policies. Opposition contender Ma Ying-jeou says he’ll start direct flights within a year, if …

I recently went to Zhengzhou, capital of central Henan province to see Gao Yaojie, the irrepressible, unthinkingly courageous AIDs campaigner. I’ll be writing a longer piece later but I thought I’d post to say she is in pretty good shape and reasonable spirits, considering. She also has been free from the direct house arrest she had …

No more Mr. Nice Guy

Back at the beginning of the year, I wrote piece in the magazine and several posts on this blog about the case of Xiang Xiang, the captive-bred panda who was returned to the wild as part of a supposed effort at reintroducing bears bred in captivity pandas into the wild. We talked to Zhang Hemin, director of the …

Last Friday, June 1, was “Children’s Day” in China, which means among other things that kids get to put on some kind of show for parents. The theme at my daughter’s school was an Olympic-y, one world, one dream kind of thing. (This is, as I’ve written before, a Chinese school, not an “international school” for ex pats.) …

Here’s a brief and very telling follow-up to the story about the advertisement in support of the Tiananmen Mothers that appeared in a Chengdu newspaper. The ad apparently made it through because the person who paid for it told the paper’s young advertising clerk that June 4 was the date of a “mining disaster,” the South China Morning …

That’s what we have been. Blocked. Great Fire Wall-ed. Or Net nanny-ized. Or, as some Chinese netizens say in reference to their President’s most famous slogan, “harmonized” (被和谐的), which has an authentically creepy Orwellian ring to it….or maybe it wounds more like “neuralized” from the Men in Black movie, which …

I mentioned in my previous post that Hong Kong is the only place in China that allows public ceremonies for the June 4, 1989 killings. But over the past couple days there have also been some memorials on the mainland. They are very small in scale, but given the obstacles that must be overcome to discuss the topic there they are all worth …

Mike Clarke / AFP / Getty Images

Hong Kongers, as they have every year since 1989, gathered tonight to recall the demonstrators who were killed in Beijing. The memorial is focused on the events of 18 years ago and yet remains symbol of the city’s larger relationship with China. This is the only place in the country where people can …

“The true warrior dares to stare the sadness of life in the face and to see the blood that drips there.”
Lu Xun, 1926 (as quoted by Perry Link and Andrew Nathan in “The Tiananmen Papers”)

In the early morning hours of April 18, 1989, thousands of students hung a white banner on the Monument to the People’s Heroes, in the …