The sniping between the US and China over the various quality scandals plaguing Chinese exports is getting more intense—and in some cases, other-worldly. Li Changjiang, China’s quality czar (and what a job THAT must be these days…) fired back at the foreign press recently, saying it should be responsible and report the …

A footnote in a 60+ year old book got me thinking about an important question for today’s China: what are the benefits of being open to criticism and inspection? It was something that former TIME correspondents Teddy White and Annalee Jacoby considered in Thunder Out of China, a study of the country during World War II:

Nonpartisan

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It turns out that the cardboard bun scandal–the sensational story that’s had people talking (and cracking jokes, ie “I always thought those lamb skewers tasted a little funny”) over the last few weeks–was an elaborate hoax concocted by a freelance TV reporter in Beijing.

This AP story says that an investigation determined that the …

A story in yesterday’s South China Morning Post says that the foreman of one of the notorious Shanxi brick kilns where children and mentally handicapped workers were kept as slaves under appalling conditions has been sentenced to death. He beat one of the workers to death with a shovel. Twenty eight others received terms ranging from …

I suppose it was inevitable that as a result of the various quality scandals—toothpaste, seafood, Thomas the Tank Engine et al– there’d be commentary that says, see, China really isn’t a manufacturing super power. The money quote in this piece, published on the OP ED page of today’s Wall Street Journal, is this:

Polls show a

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Austin Ramzy / Time

This is a follow up on my previous post about the travails of the blind activist Chen Guangcheng and his wife, Yuan Weijing. You may recall that Yuan fled her home in rural Shandong Province to travel to Beijing. She hoped to meet a U.S. embassy official and international journalists in an attempt to publicize her …

The economic influence of the world’s rising power grows by the day, its trade surplus climbing month after month– never, it appears, to be reversed. It carries in its pocket almost $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves—the cold hard cash that is the very essence of influence in a post cold war world. Meanwhile its direct …

A variety of reports (including this from the Seattle Times , which presumably ought to know as Starbucks is headquartered there) bring the news that, after six years serving expensive, frothy coffee to tourists in the Forbidden City, the Starbucks branch will close. Having written about this a couple of times before here (including this …

My friend and former classmate Wang Feng has a nice piece on toxic toothpaste over at the Washington Post’s PostGlobal. He writes: “I admit it may be an exaggeration to say that only a major international loss of face will make Beijing clean up its act. But as both a journalist and a consumer in a country where the public almost never …

Peking University kicked off a design contest last week, asking its students to come up with a traditional Chinese graduation gown to replace the western robes students wear every July. Like the newfound popularity of Confucianism and the proliferation of old-style teahouses, the contest is part of a revival of traditional culture in …

Anyone living in China gets used to the scary food/products stories and learns to dismiss them (along with scary air pollution, 200 people dying a day on the roads etc) as beyond control and therefore not worth bothering about. Or we did. In recent weeks, as readers may have noticed, the number of stories on the subject has skyrocketed. …