Is it just us or does the just-released design of the Olympic Torch look amazingly like…..

Numbers in China, as has been noted elsewhere in this blog, are squishy, too put it mildly. With the Health Ministry numbers I referred to below, I cite them as they indicate a trend rather than thinking they represent an exact statistical number. Allegories for the reader’s edification like Biblical stories, and for both, having [...]

The horrors of health care (or lack of it) in China are a constant topics in the Chinese media, where tales of fraudulent doctors (and even fraudulent hospitals), blatant overcharging, over-prescription and deadly mis-diagnosis and so on are common. The Ministry of Health yesterday released statistics for last year that show these are more than [...]

Another example of the sort of Olympics-related protests we have mentioned will be increasingly common. This one was at the base camp for Mount Everest and about Tibet. See the story here unless you are in China (in which case you should have figured out how to slip around the Great Firewall by proxy anyway). [...]

The current New Yorker has a fascinating piece by Jianying Zha about her brother, democracy activist Zha Jianguo, who was convicted of “subverting the state” for his role in helping create the banned China Democracy Party and is serving a 9-year prison sentence. The article tells of the author’s complicated feelings towards her brother and [...]

I was watching TV in a Hong Kong cafe last night when a jarring image at the end of a commercial caught my eye. It was this symbol: It designates a product as one of China’s top brands. I couldn’t help but think of a similar symbol, that of Nazi Germany’s Schutzstaffel (SS), a brutal [...]

I went to an energy and environment conference here in Shanghai recently in which one of the foreign participants—gripped apparently by the sort of irrational exuberance that afflicts a lot of foreigners peddling wares (or, in this guy’s case, services…) here—said something to the effect that China could and would leap-frog the west in terms [...]

A few weeks ago the China Blog marked the death of Nina Wang, Asia’s richest woman. As expected, Wang’s passing is hardly the end of her dramatic story. After her husband was declared dead in 1999, Wang and her father-in-law battled over the estate, which was then estimated at $3 billion. That clash centered around [...]

This from our colleague Jodi Xu: A 23-episode TV series featuring a young Mao Zedong, the founder of People’s Republic of China, has received an unexpectedly favorable reception from young Chinese. The show, QiaTongxue Shaonian (恰同学少年) or “Those Student Days” (it sounds better in Chinese, being a phrase from one of Mao’s poems), is set [...]