On Tuesday a U.S. federal judge ordered the release of a group of Uighurs who have been held in Guantanamo since 2001. The 17 Chinese citizens were picked up in the months following the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. Three years ago the government determined that most of them were no longer enemy combatants, but has refused to …

Here are further indicatons of what might happen at the upcoming Third Communist Party Plenum regarding rural reform. Interesting that “radical reform” is now being presaged even though real radical reform would mean granting peasants full rights to buy and sell land, something that for reasons discussed below is highly unlikley. The …

In the “something you don’t see everyday in China” category, a new (to me at least) site called chinasmack (www.chinasmack.com) features pictures of a Nanjing traffic policeman stopping (gasp!) a car with military plates for running a red light (you can actually see the light is green in the other direction in the photos). The occupants …

Posting this recent study in relation to the air pollution posts below and the premature deaths figure I was a bit lazy about (“hundreds of thousands”). This is chillingly precise about the number:

Smoking, coal set to claim tens of millions of lives in China

PARIS (AFP) — Tobacco use and smoke from coal and wood are likely to

…

The Communist Party’s big meeting (Third Plenum) for the year takes place in Beijing over the coming weekend. There have been strong hints that something will be done about land reform, a very hot issue for China’s 700 million peasants who have no right to sell their land and must depend on 30 year leases issued by the state. As we have …

Earlier this year we mentioned some serious questions raised about Beijing’s air pollution statistics. Steven Andrews’ argued in the Wall Street Journal that improvements in the city’s air quality statistics were the result of gaming the numbers, not actual reductions in pollution. Beijing environmental officials have denied Andrews’ …

A very interesting –and more to the point surprising– report by three professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who have devoted a great deal of time and energy to studying air pollution in China.
(Download the pfd file of the report here)

Money graf (I know I keep using this. It’s a habit I picked up from my former …

It is exactly six months ago today that dissident Hu Jia was sentenced to three years in jail. His case has received much internaional attention and there is even speculation that he could be in line to get a Nobel Peace Prize, as Austin wrote earlier here.

Sadly the reality is that even if he gets the prize, which will be announced in …

The ever excellent Rebecca McKinnon has a comprehensive blog post on Skype’s problems over the news that the Chinese government has been monitoring some of the free call service’s text messages in China. As I say, it’s pretty comprehensive and addresses the whole issue of large foreign companies and their problems resolving the …

Like everyone else, I am trying to figure out what the financial turmoil currently gripping the U.S. means, particularly for China. In speaking with economists there’s an underlying but consistent theme that seemed a tad counter-intuitive: this could be a good thing for China and also for the Communist Party. First off, the inevitable …

Beijing has announced a new set of restrictions on automobiles aimed at retaining some of the clean air the city enjoyed during the Olympics. My sense is that the benefits will be mild at best and that the exercise risks wasting the enthusiasm residents have for some sort of long-term solution to the pollution problem. The new rules, …

So the taikonauuts as some someone branded them (a bizarre formulation; hangtianyuan is the usual word) made it home safely yesterday. Watching China’s first space walk live on television the previous day was fascinating. It is a tremendous breakthrough, as President Hu Jintao told one of he astronauts, considerably more important in …

My headline will no doubt make the eyes of many of our readers glaze over. But for those of you interested in the inner workings of politics in the Communist Party–and after all what that comes down to is how China is run–there is an insightful look ahead to the Party’s imminent Plenum by veteran Zhongnanhai-ologist Willy Lam at the …