Our corporate overlords have just announced a deal with Google to make more than 10 million images from the LIFE Photo Archive available via Google’s image search. For those of you interested in Chinese history this is worth checking out. The vast majority of the images have never been published. It will be a few months before they are …

We have two stories looking at the discussions that started Monday among Tibetan exiles in Dharmsala, one from a more China=oriented perspective here and one from Delhi with added detail about the personalities involved here.

The Communist Party’s most liberal, reform-minded publication is a modest monthly called Yanhuang Chunqiu (炎黄春秋 for you purists), usually translated as the Annals of the Yellow Emperor. As I remarked in a previous post, the magazine’s publisher, 85 year old Du Daozheng is a redoubtable, no-nonsense figure who won’t be intimidated

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From the current issue of Time, Jeffrey Kluger examines how several nations including China are pursuing ambitious plans for space exploration.

As regular China Blog readers know, we miss no opportunity to write about underpants, especially big underpants. So when Dan Washburn of Shanghaiist posted some photos of plus-sized men’s underwear on display at a Shanghai-area Wal-Mart, we had to chime in. Below is a photo I took last year of “Fatty” briefs from the Wanda Plaza Wal-Mart …

A reader objected that in his blog below about the CCTV tower’s unflattering names, Austin mistranlated the word that should be rendered as “shorts,” instead translating it as “underpants.” Well, in defence of Austin’s translating abilities, the word in question, 大裤衩, dakucha, actually does mean underpants. I guess occassionally …

The ever sensible (that sounds too dull: I mean it as in the sense of someone who casts a cool eye on conventional wisdom) Imagethief gives a balanced take on the supposed eruption of rage among chinese netizens that pneumatic actress Gong Li has traded in her Chinese passport for Singaporean version, presumably …

Following on from the previous post, here is the photograph referred to in the FT story that purports to show a healthy Kim Jong Il at a football match. As in a couple of other images released at the same time, his left arm is immobile, feeding speculation that he is recovering from a stroke. An earlier picture, released at the …

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From my colleague Lin Yang:

In September we blogged about a man in southern China named Mr. Li with a “king rat” that he was offering up to battle feline challengers. The “rat,” in fact, was a 14-inch-long nutria. I often wonder what happened to him. Did he defeat all his cat combatants and claim his champion title? Perhaps not if

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The numbers are beginning to turn distinctly unpleasant for China, perhaps harkening a deeper downturn than economists had anticipated. It’s early days yet and even by the “there are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics” standard, China’s official numbers are always suspect. But these latest figures may be the reason the …

Walking through my neighborhood last night I passed an old couple walking a large, shaggy chow. Another neighbor gave it a look, paused and asked, “What do you call it?”

“We call it, ‘big bear,’” one of the owners said.

“Oh, I was going to say, it looks just like a bear,” the neighbor replied.

Names, especially …

This is from our colleague Jessie Jiang, who is following the trials and tribulations of convicted cop killer and surprise internet hero, Yang Jia, a case that is producing fascinating insights not only into the Chinese justice system but the attitude of ordinary Chinese towards the police:

Looks like the stranger-than-fiction tale of

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