A couple of reports out of Canada and the U.K. allege that a huge hacking ring that may or may not be based in China penetrated thousands of computers around the world. This story has been going on for a while and is routinely denied by the Chinese authorities. These reports don’t have any kind of a smoking gun tying the operation to …

Austin’s point about blocking youtube is well taken. I too pretty much ignored the videos as being hard to verify (though they look convincing). But in the last couple of days a bunch of people have asked me about the youtube blocking and what caused it, and if Austin hadn’t beaten me to it, I was going to post about. . For the record, …

From the blogs today, here are two posts about Beijing and history. One is poignant, the other whimsical. Evan Osnos writes at the New Yorker’s Letter from China blog about shuttering the Chicago Tribune‘s Beijing bureau, where he once worked:

As it happened, I was scheduled to meet this morning with a Chinese accountant who is handling

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Last weekend the Tibetan government-in-exile released a disturbing video of the aftermath of last year’s riots in Lhasa. It showed Chinese police clubbing handcuffed detainees and, more gruesomely, the infected wounds of a man who had been beaten and denied treatment. Watching the video left me feeling upset by the violence. But I was …

Our colleague Tim Padgett in Miami has a piece today on what appears to be another problematic export from China. Some U.S. residents are discovering their houses were built using tainted drywall. Tim writes:

It wasn’t until her repairman got fed up with fixing inexplicably corroded air-conditioner coils that Beck finally discovered what

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As some of our commenters have noted, the China Blog is now unblocked in China. We were censored last fall after the Great Time Blog Migration to WordPress. It looks like the mainland’s block on blogs hosted by WordPress has now been lifted. The reasons for such actions are never explained, but the end of the recent National People’s …

As China Blog readers may recall, last March I took a handful of Chinese brews across the Pacific to participate in the beer brackets, an unofficial companion to the annual NCAA men’s basketball tournament. There were a few surprising performances from the Middle Kingdom, but overall Chinese beers did not fare well in the competition. …

IN the comments on the Coke Huiyuan post one commenter has put up three extremely long articles that are completely unrelated to the topic, causing some of his fellow commenters to complain. Generally speaking, we try to leave the comments section untouched except in cases of profanity, racism, hate speech etc. However, I do agree with …

My post about Huiyuan and Coke was not meant to be fair and balanced, to use a poisoned phrase. Indeed, this is a blog and supposed to be provocative and sometimes downright unfair, right? However, occasionally commenters point out particularly egregious lapses as bcredux did in this case:

….the US has already set the tone by denying

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So the Finanace Ministry rejected Coca Cola’s $2.5 billion bid for China’s biggest juice maker, Huiyuan. The pruchase would have broken the new anti-monopoly law, apparently. There’s plenty of good balanced analysis out there from the likes of Bloomberg and others about why this happened. But over at the China Law Blog, we get a …

Congrats to David rr who correctly ID-ied the opening lines quoted below as from Earthly Powers (actually a a mere 649 pages in the Penguin paperback) by the prolific Anthony Burgess. For the record, and as a nod to Mr. Burgess, whose masterful touch with the 81st birthday I had forgotten, here’s the actual opening:

It was the afternoon

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