Chinese regulators announced a ban yesterday on the use of a toxic chemical in toothpaste, and they deserve credit. Sure, they’re still standing by their belief that diethylene glycol, a solvent used in antifreeze, is safe in small doses. But it won’t be showing up in toothpaste here anymore, at least not legally.
At the same time, it’s …
Authorities in Beijing last week moved to close a publication that covers foreign aid and nongovernmental organizations, its founder said today. Nick Young, a British national who established the China Development Brief in 1996, says the newsletter’s Chinese-language edition was ordered to cease publishing and he faces possible …
Being Eurasian and therefore a member of an racial minority myself, I rejoiced to see an air-punching posse of my South Asian brothers at Hong Kong’s recent democracy protests, marching under the banner of the anti-racism group, Unison. But what’s more remarkable is how little racism there has been in this city since the end of …
Jodi Xu writes:
This morning, I heard the news that half of Beijing’s bottled water is counterfeit. I was horrified. It seems that illegal factories fill the used plastic bottles from the tap or with perfunctorily filtered water. The bottle tops and tape that they use to seal the bottle look identical to the genuine ones. The bottles …
Grim and stern as an old friend would say. The People’s Daily online just carried a story announcing that Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of China’s State Food and Drug Administration (see here for story on his crimes) ), was executed this morning. I thought Zheng’s appeal of the death sentence handed down on May 29th was still pending but …
A strange story is unfolding in Beijing. It involves dissidents, secret policemen, a jailed blind activist and a tense standoff which has security officials besieging an apartment in which an activist and her daughter are holed up and refusing to leave for fear of being kidnapped– by police.
Last Thursday, Yuan Weijing, the wife of …
Li Datong is the former editor of Freezing Point, a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily. Last year he famously posted a blistering letter on the newspaper’s computer system attacking the Communist Party’s propaganda czars and a plan by the paper’s editor in chief to dock reporters’ pay if their stories upset party officials. He …
Authorities in the coastal city of Xiamen have said they plan to require local bloggers to register with their real names. At the moment it is possible to use a pseudonym. This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the internet planned a huge role in the protests that roiled the city in early June when thousands of …
Thanks to reader Richard Brubaker at the allroadsleadtochina blog for pointing us to a report (their website summary here along with links to pdf and power point versions of the report) by consultants A.T. Kearney that puts a number on the subject of my last post, what it will take to fix China’s regulatory system. “China’s food safety …
Joe Kahn of the New York Times has an interesting piece in today’s newspaper about the safety of Chinese products. He compares China today to the U.S. at the turn of the century, noting that the Food and Drug Administration was created in 1906 in response to a series of scandals over shoddy and dangerous products. The focus of the Made …
Xinhua News Agency
Our Beijing Bureau colleague Jodi Xu writes:
China’s National Tourism Administration published a list last week of the “most disgusting habits of Chinese tourists.” The list was compiled after an online poll, during which as many as 3 million Chinese visited the webpage and contributed their ideas. The result …
We were sitting on a friend’s rooftop the other night, sipping wine and celebrating her 30th, when David, a fellow guest, and co-owner of a fabulous Hong Kong restaurant called Aqua, told me that he’d hired a chef who used to work at Tetsuya’s in Sydney. David seemed quite proud of this, but I didn’t know how to receive the news …
That the central government will ban driving during the Olympics next year in Beijing is not surprising. As this Journal story notes today, there will evidently be a dry run next month to see how much impact this has on air quality in the city. But what’s critical to note is the extraordinary pace at which cars are hitting the roads in …
