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 country’s progress in safeguarding intellectual property. [...]

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 [...]

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 electoral [...]

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 can give them [...]

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 members of the Communist Party, for [...]

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 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 criminals are memorialized. [...]

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 individually wrapped in a cute little [...]

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 [...]