Yao Ming came out and apologized to his team yesterday. So what it exactly did the big one do to merit such contrition? He will miss some pre-season training and a media day because of his obligations to the Special Olympics, which will be held next month in his hometown of Shanghai. Given the sort of behavior that usually leads to an …

FREDERICK.J. BROWN / AFP / Getty Images

Visiting China’s ancient capital of Xi’an for the first time I am reminded that however much you read and hear about a place the reality is always far different. Having spent quite a while researching a novel that was set in part in Chang’an, as the city was called in the Tang dynasty, I …

Survivor, one of the most popular TV shows in the U.S., has just kicked off its fifteenth season, this time in China. The show claims to be the first major American TV series to be filmed entirely in China. Here’s how the episode re-cap describes the show: “Transported back in time, 16 Americans from various walks of life begin the …

While we are alerting you to more of our wonderful prose, be advised that my latest effusion on Beijing and the Olympics is here, there’s a nice accompanying photo essay about Beijing here.

Earlier this month Ling wrote here about an upcoming auction of a statue of a horse’s head looted from the Summer Palace. Now gambling tycoon Stanley Ho has purchased the head for $8.84 million and donated it to China. Our story is here. Also, Geoffrey Fowler has an interesting piece over at the Wall Street Journal on gaming moguls and …

So Chi Yaoyun, a deputy director general of the Communist Party’s Discipline Inspection Commission, says corruption is declining. Taking reporters on a tour of the Commission’s new building in Beijing, the official who is one of those charged with keeping Party members in line and graft-free, apparently admitted there was a problem but …

Interesting to see that the folks over at Asia Weekly are celebrating their first six months of publication by announcing they have secured a publication agreement in Singapore. The magazine, based in Beijing and helmed by veteran journalist and respected China specialist Jasper Becker, is bucking the current online trend and the fact …

Our new colleague in Beijing Lin Yang writes:

In China having connections can make all the difference. But when the first-stage ticket sales plan for the 2008 Olympics was announced earlier this year, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympics –or the vaguely sinister-sounding BOCOG– vowed to give everyone an equal chance: …

Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune, who normally works in the same building as Time’s Beijing crew, is off on a five-week trek across Sichuan. At first I was a bit jealous of his escape from capital city desk jockeying, but Evan’s trip doesn’t look easy. You can read his blog posts and stories as well as photos and video from Tribune …

Statistics are pretty fungible in most countries but China’s numbers (as I have remarked in the past) always seem particularly squishy. As well as getting your numbers right, releasing them at the right moment is also critical, it seems. Hot on the heels (or trotters) of the scary news late last week that meat prices vaulted 50 per cent …

It’s open season for spying–or spying allegations–in top flight sports. In the U.S., New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000, and his team $250,000, after a staffer was found apparently videotaping signals during the season opener Sunday against the New York Jets. In Formula One, the McLaren team was stripped of …

I see from comments that some of our readers are skeptical about the threat of inflation and point out that other countries run at 6.5 per cent quite happily. That’s true but first of all, other countries aren’t in China’s unique, indeed, never-before-seen-in-the-history-of-the-planet–stage of economic development. The strains and …