This is somewhat counterintutitve but clever. A group in Hong Kong have developed a Firefox addon that let’s you experience what it’s like to surf the net inside China’s Great Firewall. The folks at Chinachanel.com apparently feel that it’s important for outsiders to find out just how carefully controlled the Chinese web experience is. …

It’s a pretty firm rule of doing business in China that you don’t want to get on the bad side of those people who regulate your industry. Like bureaucrats in other areas (think sports here), they tend to take the attitude that anybody openly defying them should be immediately squished as an example to others. But when you are trying to …

Further thoughts on the seemingly hopeless situation in Tibet here.

A surely unique perspective. God knows what it all means, but you can “watch” the extremely static video and listen to the song on youtube here. Lyrics below, courtesy of Prof. Don Clarke. Don’t think they’ll be performing at the National Center for the Performing Arts anytime soon.

CHINESE DEMOCRACY
It don’t really matter
You’ll …

Asian and European leaders met in Beijing over the weekend and winds, as you can see were very strong. That gave us beautiful clear days in the capital. The final communique from the meeting was pretty windy too despite being loaded down with platitudes and truisms. The one interesting aspect was the pressure the Europeans and …

TIME’s blog server cratered over the weekend and we migrated to a new host. We’ll have an automatic redicrect up soon but meanwhile please click here to go to the new site at: http://china.blogs.time.com/

It is always hard to tell what is for show and what is real in the long, drawn out tragedy of Sino-Tibet relations but the Dalai Lama’s announcement that he has had enough (see here) and is giving up on talks with China is an important moment, even if it is partially symbolic. It has also lead to renewed speculation about whether he …

….finally. There seem to have been a lot of bugs in the transition (which normally takes a lot longer than a day or two, so there’s no surprise there) and i have just managed to get into the administrator mode to post late Sunday in Beijing. anyway, please bear with us. We will try to get a bunch of posts up that have piling up asap.

Faithful TIME.com blog-readers may have noticed something odd today: the blogs kind of disappeared. Long story short, we’ve had major server problems, and as a result we’ve had to re-launch all of our blogs on WordPress. The upside is a faster, better, more stable platform. The downside is we’ll need a few days to get our archives back …

So Hu Jia did win the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize (see previous post). As I said, it’s at least as likely that this will make his life worse rather than better, at least in the short term. A major Europe-China Summit is coincidentally taking place right now in Beijing, supposedly the largest ever. This should make for some …

Dissident Hu Jia, recently tipped as a leading contender for the Nobel Peace Prize (which he didn’t get), is now one of three names being considered for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, also handed out for human rights work. According to a story by the AP, Beijing has already sent a letter to the President of the EU Assembly …

Larry Yung Chi-kin, an iconic figure in China’s transformation over the past three decades, is in the process of becoming the latest casualty of the financial crisis. One of China’s richest men with a fortune estimated at more than 2 billion dollars (432 on the Forbes list of the world’s richest) Yung (Rong Zhijian in pinyin) has an …