Proving that some things are possibly beyond satire, here’s a question: Was the headline and blurb below taken from a real English-language Chinese paper or from the Onion parody?

Lucky ethnic minorities let good times roll

The 55 ethnic minorities of China have been benefiting from decades of kindness and generosity by the ethnic

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Here’s a bit of trenchant analysis from today’s Global Times on this morning’s eclipse (all over now in case you were planning to catch it):

In ancient China, people thought a heavenly dog swallowed the sun or moon when an eclipse occurred. They believed the event bode misfortune.

Although many people today, especially youngsters,

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Readers point out that the website of the company that “bought” the onion is actually funnier than the Onion China spoof.

Thanks to the folks at China Digital Times (here, but blocked by GFW of course) for a heads up that the satirical online magazine The Onion has apparently been sold to a Chinese fish oil manufacturing company and is carrying a special issue devoted to China that bears a strange resemblance to, well, you have a look. Here’s the link …

Just to add to Austin’s post below, Teng Biao, who with Xu Zhiyong co-founded the Open Constitution Initiative , sent out a text message yesterday. In it he describes how the group (actually a registered company because, as he says, the laws restricting restablishment of NGOs are so tight they had no choice but to set up a private …

These are difficult times for Chinese lawyers. Several lawyers who handle difficult human rights causes have been unable to renew their licenses. Now the Beijing-based Open Constitution Initiative, a legal think tank that is involved in several sensitive cases, is under threat of closure due to $208,000 in tax penalties that landed this …

In my post on the recent shootings below, I posed a couple of big outstanding questions about what exactly has happened in Urumqi in the last week. After the jump I am posting an excellent AP story that has one of the most detailed accounts of the awful night of July 5th that I have seen and raises another major question. As the story …

An answer to some queries on the new design from our tech honchos in New York.

The RSS feed apparently is designed to only display a few lines and that won’t –and can’t because of the design of the reader itself– change. For the commenter who didn’t like clicking back and forth between posts, it seems the advantage of getting more …

Two Uighur men were shot dead by police yesterday in Urumqi. Unfortunately, as the South China Morning Post story reproduced here in full (it’s behind a paywall) after the jump lays out, the official account is at wide variance with what reporters and other witnesses saw. Having allowed reporters fairly open access to Urumqi in the …

The last link was somewhat belated and to yesterday’s piece. Here are today thoughts.