Six months ago today I was sitting at my desk in Time’s Beijing bureau when the pictures on the walls began to slide eerily. The staff walked down 10 flights of stairs, thinking that even though the earthquake we felt had been mild, there was no sense risking the elevator. I walked to a nearby café, ordered a cup of coffee and asked

…

From Natalie Tso in Taipei, a look at the arrest yesterday of Taiwan’s former president Chen Shui-bian.

Back in the day, reporters in Beijing used to spend a fair chunk of time on the often frustrating task of trying to follow the Byzantine struggles over power and ideology in the Communist Party. This used to even more of a preoccupation when it was very difficult to get out into the field. Now, of course we are much freer. and, between …

Guiyang doesn’t usually appear on tourist itineraries, and when I arrived there late last month I began to see why. It felt like China of the 1990s, before Starbucks and McDonald’s and Louis Vuitton infiltrated every major city. I was traveling with two childhood friends—one who had lived in China, one who was visiting for the …

One thing I didn’t get into in the story mentioned in the previous post was the meaning of the 4 trillion renminbi the goverment says it will be spending. There seems be some confusion about whether this is all new money or an aggrgation of previous promised spending such as the earthquake relief funds. Merrill Lynch has an excellent,

…

A heads up for our take on the stimulus package. Just to underline how badly the package is needed, the Guangdong province government announced yesterday that the volume of deals at the annual Canton trade fair, China’s biggest and oldest, dropped by 17.9 per cent, the first time the number has declined since the SARs outbreak in 2003. …

Some more information has come out about the ninth eighth round of talks between the Dalai Lama’s representatives and Beijing officials, which finished late last week. According to wire service reports a paper proposing “genuine independence” was presented by the Tibetans along with some detailed proposals about removal of Chinese troops …

The state-run Xinhua News Service says Chinese President Hu Jintao and U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama spoke by phone on Saturday, their first reported conversation. The two stressed the importance of bilateral relations, discussed the seriousness of the financial crisis and touched on the Taiwan issue, but otherwise the piece was …

I wrote recently that some of the patterns established during China’s product quality scandals of 2007 have begun to re-emerge this year. For one, Beijing has started playing up cases of imported goods that haven’t met mainland standards. Earlier this week it was sauces from Japan, now it’s milk from Australia and South Korea. As Reuters

…

China’s President Hu Jintao is headed to Washington next week for a Nov. 15 summit of the world’s largest economies. It’s not clear yet if president-elect Barack Obama will participate in the meeting to discuss the global financial crisis, and the AP reports that Chinese officials were noncommittal about whether Hu and Obama would meet. …

Our colleague Natalie Tso in Taipei has a story today examining this week’s visit by a high-level Chinese envoy to Taiwan, the deals that were reached between the two sides and the protests surrounding the visit.

This from my colleague Jessie Jiang:

Pending final approval from the Chinese Supreme Court, Yang Jia is now officially on death row. The 28-year-old, who stabbed to death six policemen last summer in apparent revenge for being beaten while in detention for a minor infraction, was sentenced on October 20, when Shanghai high people’s

…