Asia

Last night Chinese state television aired a piece about President Hu Jintao teaching a Mandarin nursery rhyme to a class at a Moscow elementary. It probably wasn’t his biggest priority in Russia this week. During his visit, businesses from the two countries signed $4 billion in deals. And China is still pushing for more access to …

March 27th saw yet another of those milestones being hailed far and wide as a sign of China’s rise. Nanjing Auto said it was beginning production of two car models under the once-iconic British brand MG, having bought rights to the name and what was left of MG Rover’s production facilities in 2006. Once upon a time, an MG was the …

So said Henry Kissinger, then President Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, when it became clear to him that Nixon was serious about his idea of an opening to China, the subject of a new book from Margaret MacMillan, author of the prize winning “Paris 1919 Six Months that Changed the World.”
“Nixon and Mao, the Week that …

My colleague in the Time Beijing bureau Jodi Xu writes: the media frenzy over the Chongqing “nail house” has highlighted similar cases in other parts of China, and may ultimately encourage other homeowners to also dig in their heels. A similar case in Shanghai (see picture below) ended a week ago after two years of negotiations when …

The “nail house” that Simon posted on recently has gotten extensive coverage in English-language media. (China Digital Times has a roundup here.) For a single property dispute, it’s a pretty amazing level of attention. It’s even inspired, as CDT notes, a music video. As Simon points out below, the reason for such a heated focus has got …

The Chongqing city government stepped in to the “Nail House” issue yesterday. The South China Morning Post reports that Mayor Wang Hongju said “the government would try to solve the standoff between the villa owner and the developer ‘appropriately’ but would not tolerate an exorbitant price or unreasonable demands.” This doesn’t bode …

Regarding the post below, a kind reader had pointed out that the State Council (which is an administrative body) couldn’t announce the new party chief in Shanghai. That one line notification came from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, of course. Another equally kind reader (calling me an “ignorant babbling poltroon” …

As Austin notes below, Donald Tsang’s “election” as Hong Kong’s chief executive was a foregone conclusion in which the electors were all carefully selected by Beijing. That didn’t stop the Beijing-published English-language China Daily from hailing his “landslide win.” And yet, although the attempt to make the selection of the …

No need to pick up the papers today. The news was already called months ago. As expected, Donald Tsang was re-elected Chief Executive of Hong Kong, the territory’s highest political office. The only drama Sunday was whether Tsang’s final vote count would be less than the 641 nominations he received last month. It wasn’t. In the final …

This is the type of disturbance that occurs with increasing frequency in China, if not every day, then pretty close to it: one dead, ten injured in the aftermath of a land grab in a small Pearl River Delta village. But since the all-wise, all-knowing authorities believe government officials (not to mention citizens) are best treated …

I was going to say file this under the “Only in China” category but reflected that disputes between developers and stubborn residents are pretty common. Still, there’s something about this one, which is currently underway in the Sichuan city of Chongqing that is particularly dramatic, not to mention emblematic of the tide of destruction …

For the past several years most every story about Hong Kong’s poor air quality has put a hefty amount of the blame on neighboring Guangdong province. It is, after all, a global manufacturing center with a power supply problem that has often forced manufacturers to rely on diesel generators. A survey released by the Hong Kong government’s …

A group of enterprising Chinese reporters on the corruption and sloth in the health care system here, something that’s been a spur to civil disturbances in the past in various places throughout the country, and no doubt will be again. (Those of you who are tea drinkers may want to pass on this item…)

BEIJING, (Reuters) March 21-

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