When it comes to performance reviews, timing is important. So when Hong Kong’s chief executive spoke in Beijing today about Hong Kong residents “giving more importance to social harmony,” he wasn’t completely exaggerating. Things are now pretty smooth, especially when compared with the turbulence of 2003. That was the year Hong Kong was …

This is an interesting essay on the op ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal by Jerome Cohen, one of the US’s foremost experts on the Chinese legal system. It’s on the legacy of the vicious “anti-rightist” campaign in China which occurred 50 years ago. The themes of the so called “rightists” (academics, writers and other …

Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty

Wu Lihong at work

According to conventional wisdom, the approach of the Olympics was supposed to have been a time when conditions got easier for dissidents/activists in China as Beijing tried to show its best face to the world. But as Amnesty reports (here’s the link but forget it if you are in China), …

China’s National People’s Congress is debating a law that would regulate media coverage of emergencies. The debate (China Daily report here) over the law allows an intriguing glimpse of the struggle the Communist Party is going through as it tries to adapt to the change economic growth and opening have brought. A previous version of the …

A recently published piece from the Worldwatch Institute’s China Watch Report on global warming’s impact on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. A little tendentious (ie, pay no attention to that small underdeveloped country over in the corner that this year will become the world’s largest emitter of CO2 gases, it’s all the fault of the …

The 400 fathers hunting for their kidnapped children have written a second letter of appeal (here’s the China Daily story). You may recall that the first letter was posted on a popular internet forum and almost singlehanded served to spark the current crackdown, which has so far seen almost 600 workers freed and 160 people arrested. What …

For those interested, we have a piece here on the significance of the child labor/slavery furor.

China Photos / Getty

Fried or Braised?

This post is from Ross Bloom, an summer intern in the Time Beijing bureau. Ross, who is an undergraduate at Harvard studying Chinese among other things, was doing some research on the tiger parts trade:

China’s 5000 strong captive tiger population has gotten quite a bit of press this week.

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Folks– I reposted the link on the sexual slavery story below, and now it’s accessible, at least here in HK where I am at the moment. It’s possible that the site is blocked by the censors on the mainland–some stuff on this subject has been in the past. Sorry for the foul up.

Kato HIroshi runs a Japanese NGO that deals with North Korean refugees, and his group is active in trying aid those refugees here in CHina. He passed on the following story of a young girl sold into sexual slavery in Chia after getting out of North Korea. Note what he says about the pre Olympic crackdown, which jibes with reports from …

I made a visit a few days ago to the site of the latest gourmet extravaganza by American Chinese lawyer, restauranteur and bon vivant Handel Lee. Here he is on site looking spiffy in a panama hat.

Lee was the driving force behind the Three On The Bund project in Shanghai, a 1920s (actually 1916) vintage building on the Huangpu …

Last week I mentioned the previously underexplained cuts that China’s film board made to the Chinese pirate character played by Hong Kong star Chow Yun-fat in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Now the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television is giving some more reasoning for the censorship, which previously had been …

The furore over the “slaves” forced to work in brick kilns, small iron foundries and coal mines keeps growing and looks set to keep doing so for some time to come…unless the central government decides to shut it down. The police now say they’ve rescued a total of 468 people in China’s north east from forced labor in the last month, a …