From time to time, mobile phone users in China receive a mass mailing text message that’s not the usual maddening spam (companies offering to supply illegal satellite dishes or equally illegal receipts for everything from airplane tickets to rent and of course offers for wonderful but amazingly cheap apartments). Mostly these non-spam …

This is not a shot of China’s latest space launch but the newly completed Guomao Phase II Tower lit up for the new year. Or possibly an SOS to an aliens who actually understand how our ailing economy works. There don’t seem to be many of us earthlings around who fall into that category these days. As President Elect Obama said in …

My colleague Lin Yang writes on the interet and corruption:

Chinese Netizens have seemingly scored another victory in the battle against corruption. An online campaign to expose the extravagant lifestyle of Zhou Jiugeng, head of a district real estate bureau in the city of Nanjing, led to his dismissal after someone posted a photo of

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Some corners of the world—Ireland and New Orleans come to mind—know how to turn a funeral into a celebration of the life of the deceased. To that list we should also add rural China, as Lin Yang reports:

I took a road trip last weekend to the ancient town of Fenghuang in Hunan province, a village that has existed since the 17th

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And here is our take –by my colleague Jessie Jiang– on whether the Chinese consumer is going to ride to the rescue of the country’s economy. (Hint: racking up huge personal debts isn’t a popular habit in China, to put it mildly, except maybe in gambling capital Macau, and even there things have quietened down a lot because of the crisis.)

Bao Tong was formerly a top adviser to Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese Communist Party secretary who was purged in 1989. After the Tiananmen crackdown Bao was sentenced to seven years in prison. He now lives under close scrutiny in an apartment on Beijing’s west side. I met him there for the first time last year and have gone back a couple …

Here’s my take on whether China is really facing social upheaval and possible political disintegration if the economic picture continues to darken.

Picture of the day, from a billboard in Beihai, China.

In Shanghai for Christmas I ate at Stiller’s, an excellent continental restaurant run by an affable German chef. It is located in a new development called “Cool Docks” (more prosaically “Old Docks” in Chinese, Lao Matou). Lot’s of new restaurants and trendy little boutiques selling fripperies and accessories. All more or less empty, …

From our colleague Natalie Tso in Taipei, a look at the pair of pandas Beijing sent to Taiwan this week and their significance in cross-strait relations.

A group of writers, scholars and Nobel laureates have signed an open letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao calling for the release of Liu Xiaobo, one of the authors and signers of the human rights manifesto Charter 08. Here’s my latest story on the government’s response to the document, which was issued earlier this month during several …

A blast of frigid air has enveloped Beijing from the north. Top temperature Saturday will be 15 F or -6 C. Happily, as you’ll see below, Beijingers are used to this sort of thing and make sure everyone who goes out doors–everyone–is dressed for the weather.