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There is nothing so terrible as birdsong when you crawl home after a Friday night, wearing your liver on your hip and reeking of secondhand smoke. Nothing like a few sparrows to drive home the fact that morning, most awfully, has broken. I mention this because tonight is Friday night, but my anticipation at the [...]
As the chart above shows, the Shanghai index has been gyrating particularly drunkely in the past few days, even by its own heavily inebriated standards. You know that something is fishy when a fall of 4 per cent becomes anodyne. Maybe that big shakeout will come earlier than I thought. The government is contemplating dropping [...]
A reminder of Beijing’s reluctance to deal with China’s recent past…and how shopping can be dangerous for you. Actress Cameron Diaz (famous in part using for peculiar hair gel in There’s something About Mary) had to apologize to Peruvians after she was spotted at the famous Machu Picchu ruins carrying a army-style olivegreen handbag emblazoned [...]
I will, in all likelihood, grab and shake hard by the shoulders the next person who refers to themselves as being out here. I mean, Hong Kong is one of the world’s largest financial centers, and a densely packed city in what is probably the most populous province of the most populous nation on earth, [...]
Last night I was catching up on some old episodes of “The Wire,” the fabulous HBO drama about a sprawling drug investigation in New York Baltimore. One reminded me so much of the latest news on food safety in China that it seemed worth pointing out. Yesterday the official China Daily ran a story about [...]
If you want an idea of the success with which the Communist Party is inspiring a sense of Chinese nationalism, speak to my mother, who is ethnically Chinese but holds British, Irish and Australian passports. “I love the Communists,” she declared over a glass of rosé last Saturday night. “The Chinese were despised by everyone. [...]
The latest Pew Global Attitudes survey is out, and it has some interesting numbers on China. The perception of China is still mostly positive, but the high support the country has enjoyed in recent years is softening. While majorities in most of the nations surveyed still say China’s economic influence is positive, there are doubts [...]
When it comes to performance reviews, timing is important. So when Hong Kong’s chief executive spoke in Beijing today about Hong Kong residents “giving more importance to social harmony,” he wasn’t completely exaggerating. Things are now pretty smooth, especially when compared with the turbulence of 2003. That was the year Hong Kong was rocked by [...]
This is an interesting essay on the op ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal by Jerome Cohen, one of the US’s foremost experts on the Chinese legal system. It’s on the legacy of the vicious “anti-rightist” campaign in China which occurred 50 years ago. The themes of the so called “rightists” (academics, writers and [...]
Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Wu Lihong at work According to conventional wisdom, the approach of the Olympics was supposed to have been a time when conditions got easier for dissidents/activists in China as Beijing tried to show its best face to the world. But as Amnesty reports (here’s the link but forget it [...]
