From my colleague Lin Yang, here’s some footage and an account of the arduous ticket lines in Beijing today:

The final stage of Olympic ticket sales started at 9 a.m. Friday. I wanted to witness the moment of excitement when the ticket windows finally opened and people who had waited for two days got their tickets—if only I

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I was going to call it the dirty little secret of China’s Olympics, but it’s not so little and it’s not much of a secret. China is and has been a huge source of product for blood-doping, steroid-shooting athletes across the sporting spectrum. Now, ARD, the German television network, has done a terrific documentary on the subject, …

The character for pressure in Chinese is 壓力 . (That’s YA LI in pinyin). Think the Chinese hoop team is feeling any these days? This from 7 foot forward Yi Jianlian’s blog (Yi played for the Milwaukee Bucks this past year and was recently traded to the New Jersey Nets):

This morning Hu Jintao came to watch our practice. Even

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Some thoughts from our colleague Lin Yang:

Many of us joined the spontaneous carnival in the streets on a summer night seven years ago when Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics. But as the moment of glory finally arrives, the exultation is no longer shared by all.

I have noticed growing sentiment recently in Internet posts and daily

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And speaking of living in Beijing (my story about how great it is here), it can’t hurt to repeat just how gobsmacking the changes in the city continue to be, particularly for those of us who saw the place in the 90s. The video below is taken at a new shopping center on the north west corner of Chaoyang Park, Beijing’s largest. It is …

The Pew Research Center (which describes itself as “a nonpartisan ‘fact tank’ that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.) has just released a poll of attitudes in China. There’s a bunch of interesting stuff but one fact should warm the hearts of cadres in Communist Party headquarters in …

Lin Yang from TIME’s Beijing bureau has these thoughts about the city’s Olympic traffic plan:

Driving the four miles between my home and the office can take up to an hour, but with vehicle traffic drastically cut yesterday it took half that. Beijing’s drive to radically improve air quality for the Olympics means only private cars …

Literally, one gas mask.
I began using this headline for these postings months ago with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Now comes today’s Wall Street Journal with this hilarious piece about Olympic athletes who are LITERALLY planning to wear gas masks in Beijing.

U.S. triathlete Jarrod Shoemaker has a decision to make at the opening

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Jun Ma is one of the more accurate economic forecasters following China (he’s a at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong). His latest monthly missive states flatly that the inflation scare in China is over, and that he’s now worried about a significant slow down in growth. He’s marked down his 2008 growth forecast from 10.8 per cent to 10.2, and …

As a complement to my previous post, see here for our piece in the dead tree edition on China’s magical capital.

Spot the empty lane

In reference to my post below (Rainy Beijing) in which I wondered about the effect vehicle controls on Beijing’s long suffering commuters, please see here for a Reuters story which describes how the capital’s main subway line ground to a halt because of the crush of passengers. Today is the first working day of …

Two buses exploded in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming during the morning rush hour today, state media reported. The blasts, which occurred about an hour apart, killed two and injured 14 in the Yunnan provincial capital. A police official told the AFP that according to preliminary investigations the cause of the blasts was …