The actress Mia Farrow has got herself into the news by calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics (she called them the “Genocide Olympics”) because of China’s support for the government of Sudan, which is widely accused of involvement in the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region. This isn’t the first time there has [...]

Last night Chinese state television aired a piece about President Hu Jintao teaching a Mandarin nursery rhyme to a class at a Moscow elementary. It probably wasn’t his biggest priority in Russia this week. During his visit, businesses from the two countries signed $4 billion in deals. And China is still pushing for more access [...]

March 27th saw yet another of those milestones being hailed far and wide as a sign of China’s rise. Nanjing Auto said it was beginning production of two car models under the once-iconic British brand MG, having bought rights to the name and what was left of MG Rover’s production facilities in 2006. Once upon [...]

So said Henry Kissinger, then President Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser, when it became clear to him that Nixon was serious about his idea of an opening to China, the subject of a new book from Margaret MacMillan, author of the prize winning “Paris 1919 Six Months that Changed the World.” “Nixon and Mao, the [...]

My colleague in the Time Beijing bureau Jodi Xu writes: the media frenzy over the Chongqing “nail house” has highlighted similar cases in other parts of China, and may ultimately encourage other homeowners to also dig in their heels. A similar case in Shanghai (see picture below) ended a week ago after two years of [...]

The “nail house” that Simon posted on recently has gotten extensive coverage in English-language media. (China Digital Times has a roundup here.) For a single property dispute, it’s a pretty amazing level of attention. It’s even inspired, as CDT notes, a music video. As Simon points out below, the reason for such a heated focus [...]

The Chongqing city government stepped in to the “Nail House” issue yesterday. The South China Morning Post reports that Mayor Wang Hongju said “the government would try to solve the standoff between the villa owner and the developer ‘appropriately’ but would not tolerate an exorbitant price or unreasonable demands.” This doesn’t bode very well for [...]

Regarding the post below, a kind reader had pointed out that the State Council (which is an administrative body) couldn’t announce the new party chief in Shanghai. That one line notification came from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, of course. Another equally kind reader (calling me an “ignorant babbling poltroon” seems a [...]

As Austin notes below, Donald Tsang’s “election” as Hong Kong’s chief executive was a foregone conclusion in which the electors were all carefully selected by Beijing. That didn’t stop the Beijing-published English-language China Daily from hailing his “landslide win.” And yet, although the attempt to make the selection of the city’s new chief seem democratic [...]