A footnote to Simon’s piece on the Silk Market: Protecting intellectual property requires the use of all kinds of different tactics, some obvious–like telling vendors they can’t sell exact replicas of brand name products–and some more subtle. The People’s Daily‘s English-language site has a whole special section elaborating the …

Last fall Chinese border guards opened fire on a group of Tibetan refugees who were climbing a Himalayan pass that linked their homeland to Nepal. At least one young woman was killed. Several Tibetans fled, while the guards captured several others. The incident was witnessed by dozens of climbers from around the world who were camped …

Alan Leong, a Hong Kong lawyer and politician, announced this afternoon he has secured enough nominations to participate in Hong Kong’s Chief Executive race. That means the territory will have its first contested election for the top political office since the handover 10 years ago. Of course, as I wrote previously, under the current …

Beijing has many charms for visitors: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, weird and wonderful new architecture, a slew of museums celebrating China’s millennia of culture and history. The list is long. But I’ve noticed that even the most academically-inclined out of town visitor invariably ends up asking –somewhat sheepishly– whether I …

Over the weekend, Xinhua reported the latest in the Shanghai corruption scandal which was responsible for the dismissal of the city’s Communist Party Secretary Chen Liangyu. Chen was removed from his post last September and put under “joint regulations,” a special kind of extra-judicial disciplinary regime reserved for high-ranking …

It’s been interesting to see the reaction to the post about Zhang Ziyi and her supposed new western boyfriend. There have of course been the usual number of silly and abusive comments, but on the whole it seems to me for a discussion about something as emotive as racism, it remained remarkably civilized. I think the subject was pretty …

The past few months have been a relatively bright period for China-Japan relations. That’s of course in comparison with the abyss that immediately preceded it. The causes of the past strains included Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where millions of Japanese war dead and 14 top-level war …

I always thought Ronaldo made an odd shill for Chinese cough drops. About three years ago, around the time–coincidentally enough–when Real Madrid came to Beijing for an exhibition game, the Brazillian striker started appearing in ads for Jinsangzi or “Golden Throat” a popular mentholated lozenge. The honey-colored pastilles come …

There’s no doubt that China suffers from some horrible food adulteration problems because of lax control. My colleague Jodi Xu notes that in the last few months there have been a slew of stomach turning cases. In November, for example, the Shanghai authorities issued a warning about buying farmed Turbot after the local health bureau …

On my previous Food Fears post, Mimi and Wildgame commented that if Hong Kongers are worried about what they eat, maybe they should look farther afield and get their food from somewhere else. I’m not sure that’s the solution. For starters, it’s much more expensive. You can see that clearly in some of the high-end grocery stores here that …

Further on the subject of what piques the interest of the evolving Chinese blogosphere, my colleague in the Time bureau Nicole Qu points out that what REALLY gets netiziens stirred up is actually exactly the same as what seems to preoccupy most webheads in the U.S. and elsewhere: which movie star/celebrity is doing what with whom. In …

The China Digital Times has an interview with Wang Keqin by Jonathan Ansfield.
For those of you who are in the mainland and can’t access the site, Wang basically says he doesn’t think that Lan’s case should be discussed in the context of watchdog journalism or “media supervision” as I did yetserday. He argues that the fake journalists …

A few of you have rightly commented that I shouldn’t have called Lan a “rookie reporter” when he really was a “fake” reporter in the sense of deliberately trying to extort money from the mine bosses. You’re right. Special thanks to Ginger, who wrote in:

In this case, maybe you should also include in your argument the fact that Lan was

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