Well, not quite. But this being the Middle East, anything can happen. Obviously, the Chinese exporter should have said they were Florida orange. No, wait, that might not have worked either. Anyway, see here for the BBC take on a story you couldn’t make up involving Iran, China, Israel and fake “sweeeties.” Sweeties indeed.

Having fairly often given space to what might be deemed the gloomier outlook for China’s economy (see previous post), it seems only fair to allow the optimists some room. Here on two key issues is the take of the China economists at bankers research Merrill Lynch (a proud member of the Bank of America family), who, as they note, have …

Last week’s report that China’s first quarter GDP slowed to 6.1 per cent has been widely analysed. The one figure that struck me at the time and still seems amazing was bank lending, nearly 5 trillion RMB, which is the equivalent to bank lending for the whole of 2008. An astonishing figure and one that shows when Beijing cracks the whip, …

Reader Zhangshan gently points out that I didn’t read down to the comments when I linked to the Danwei post about the series of staged hotel room photos. Apologies and thanks for the catch. Interesting to compare the two series. The Chinese are far more convincing, to me at least. Scarier.

Might be a bit over-thinking this one, Simon.

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Earlier this week I took my mother to the Poly Art Museum in Beijing. The museum is connected to the Poly Group, an arms dealing, real estate and energy conglomerate that was born out of the Chinese military. In recent years the Poly Group has bought Chinese relics from overseas and displays many of them in its Beijing museum.

To my …

A series of photos supposedly from inside a hotel room is circulating on the next. The estimable folks at Danwei have posted the series. These are (deliberately of course) disturbing images. Some cheap shots (whips, boots etc), but the little mystery and the kidnap are gruesomely compelling and really do say something about how some …

As he’s clearly too modest a guy to do so himself, I’ll also note that you can read Bill Powell’s take on the threat (or not) represented by China’s growing Naval ambitions here. And also (no, not together) his take on China’s drive to produce electric cars here.

Here’s our take.

And the babies are out taking the air…..

One of the recurring themes from last year’s earthquake in Sichuan is official corruption and the extent it contributed to the collapse of substandard schools, killing a still unknown number of children. Another, less discussed issue, is the degree to which many local officials in the disaster zone were victims themselves.

In Beichuan, …