When friends and relatives ask me what time of year to visit, mid-January isn’t usually on my list of suggestions. This isn’t because I particularly dislike winter, or because the kind of people who visit me are somehow wimpy. I don’t. They’re not. It’s just that winter is not such a flattering season for Beijing.

The city has all the …

Numbers in China can be, well, flexible. A revision of the way it calculates its GDP last year added over $300,000,000 to the figure for 2004, still a fair piece of change. Still, a few numbers published recently have been of particular interest.

1) China’s trade surplus hit 177.47 billion US dollars in 2006, the government said, up …

Corruption is a huge problem in China today. In 2001, an academic in Beijing estimated the cost to the Chinese economy was as much as 16% of gdp. But as staggering as that number is (and some have argued it’s too high), nothing points out the pervasiveness of graft in China better than the audacious scams that emerge with astounding …

Fly into Hong Kong and you land at an amazingly modern, $20 billion airport that’s less than a decade old. A 24-minute ride on the sleek Airport Express train takes you into the middle of downtown, where you are surrounded by bold, glittering edifices. At first glance, this city gives off the impression that the only thing old is the …

In an earlier post I wrote about the closure of a school for the children of migrant workers in Shanghai (an estimated…wait for it….SIX MILLION migrant workers live in Shanghai) one of China’s economic powerhouses. I concluded by wondering about the potential for violent protest. It’s no suprise then that a couple of days after the …

The China Daily reported today that the country had failed to meet targets in its efforts to save energy and curb pollution in 2006. Nationally, China was supposed to reduce its energy use per unit of GDP by 4% and pollution emissions by 2% last year. Instead, in most of the country, energy consumption and pollution went up. The State …

One of the things about having a blog (we at the China Blog have learned in our lengthy four-day stint as bloggers) is that you spend a lot of time wondering who–apart from your Mom and your editors–actually reads what you write. We’re still wondering. But we did get a partial answer this morning when news of our blog’s birth appeared …

If China’s boom has a group of unrecognized heroes it must surely be the 120 million or so migrant workers whose labor is the force that keeps the huge dynamo turning. Migrants do all the grunt work that no one else wants to take on, toiling in mines, constructions sites and factories, usually in unspeakable conditions and often facing …

Yesterday I wrote about the lone hair salon left standing after the block opposite our bureau was torn down. Well today I thought I’d show you what it looked like. No dice. This is what I found instead. The mortar between those red bricks was still wet.
Susan Jakes

My wife and I just bought a house in suburban Shanghai, about 45 minutes out of the city, and the move out here has only reinforced one nagging question I’ve had about life in 21st century China: if this is the People’s Republic, why is there no place for the people to play?

Particularly the little people, aka, children. When we lived …

Avian influenza has returned to Hong Kong, but hardly anyone here seems panicked. In late 2005 and early 2006, when the disease killed 13 people on the mainland and more than a dozen infected birds were found in Hong Kong, people followed the news with dread. Now it barely inspires a murmur. I think I’ve heard just one concerned comment …

To be fair to Beijing–and to disspell any notion that we live in a permanent cloud of coal dust and carbon monoxide–I am posting another view out of the Bureau window, this time on a beautiful, clear day. Although it is largely the result of a couple of gusty days that have swept the skies clear, it is worth noting that on days like …

I arrived back in New York last month for the holidays to find the diner on my corner gone. The vinyl upholstery and rotating cake stands that had been accumulating grease since long before my family moved to the block 30 years ago had vanished. So had the line of taxicabs that used the place as a pit stop, and the neon sign that …