Today marks the start of the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, the five-yearly affair at which the Party’s top cadres get together and, well, mostly approve what they are told to approve. As China President and not coincidentally the CPC’s Secretary General Hu Jintao put it in his speech opening the Congress this …

The first thing to understand is that my wife, a Shanghai native, looks nothing at all like Osama Bin Laden or your basic Islamo-facist, nutball suicide bomber. I think all of our friends would attest to that. But on September 11, 2007, at immigration at Kennedy Airport in New York, that didn’t matter. We were at the start of a long …

The U.S. Congress plans to give the Dalai Lama its highest award bestowed upon a civilian, and the Chinese government has condemned the move. Adding to the potential sources of ire for Beijing is the fact the U.S. President George W. Bush and his wife will be present when the honor is handed out at the Capitol next week. Given the …

Jonathan Ansfield, who runs one of Beijing’s most pleasant bars and also writes for a big American newsweekly that isn’t TIME, has a nice piece out this week about life as a foreigner in Beijing.

He writes about, among other things, the increasing vigilance with which the police are checking out foreigners’ visas. I had my own …

The 4th Hong Kong Asian Film Festival ends today. Luckily, I had the chance to see a couple films, including Umbrella, the latest from Chinese documentary filmmaker Du Haibin. The film just premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, where it screened alongside the documentary Useless, by Jia Zhangke (who won the Golden Lion last …

Sotheby’s auctioned off a collection of items linked to Qing dynasty palaces on Tuesday, and Chinese collectors paid sky high prices to snap them up. That follows Stanley Ho’s purchase last month of a sculpture that had been looted from Beijing’s old Summer Palace. The Macau gambling tycoon paid $8.84 million for a bronze horse’s head–a …

A quick snap of Beijing early this morning, an unusually bright and clear early Autumn day. The boring but conspicuous monolith on the right is the new China World Tower, which when completed will be the highest building in the capital but otherwise doesn’t have much to recommend it architecturally. The two drunken looking structures …

Jimi

Michelle

Jaime Florcruz, dean of foreign correspondents in China, now with CNN, formerly TIME Beijing bureau chief (the picture of him was taken in our office), is looking to be one of the 8 foreign torch bearers in the upcoming Olympic torch relay. He and his daughter are both seeking to carry the torch in a selection process …

(Warning: Inside Baseball on Chinese politics: those not interested should change channels now)

There is increasing speculation ahead of the opening of the 17th Communist Party National Conference on October 15th that the fierce factional struggle now going on behind the scenes may result in the elevation of the new Shanghai Party …

The Communist Party’s national congress is coming up later this month, which must be part of the reason why the word “harmonious” is ubiquitous in China. “Harmonious society” is the catch phrase for the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao policy to spread the wealth and eliminate some of the inequities of China’s raging capitalism. It’s a serious …

It’s common knowledge in Beijing that the police get very, very uptight before big political meetings. Every spring before the National People’s Congress, dissidents are harassed and hundreds of sad petitioners rounded up from their hovels and forcibly sent back to their home provinces. This is my first time in Beijing before the mother …