Yao Ming came out and apologized to his team yesterday. So what it exactly did the big one do to merit such contrition? He will miss some pre-season training and a media day because of his obligations to the Special Olympics, which will be held next month in his hometown of Shanghai. Given the sort [...]

FREDERICK.J. BROWN / AFP / Getty Images Visiting China’s ancient capital of Xi’an for the first time I am reminded that however much you read and hear about a place the reality is always far different. Having spent quite a while researching a novel that was set in part in Chang’an, as the city was [...]

Survivor, one of the most popular TV shows in the U.S., has just kicked off its fifteenth season, this time in China. The show claims to be the first major American TV series to be filmed entirely in China. Here’s how the episode re-cap describes the show: “Transported back in time, 16 Americans from various [...]

While we are alerting you to more of our wonderful prose, be advised that my latest effusion on Beijing and the Olympics is here, there’s a nice accompanying photo essay about Beijing here.

Earlier this month Ling wrote here about an upcoming auction of a statue of a horse’s head looted from the Summer Palace. Now gambling tycoon Stanley Ho has purchased the head for $8.84 million and donated it to China. Our story is here. Also, Geoffrey Fowler has an interesting piece over at the Wall Street [...]

So Chi Yaoyun, a deputy director general of the Communist Party’s Discipline Inspection Commission, says corruption is declining. Taking reporters on a tour of the Commission’s new building in Beijing, the official who is one of those charged with keeping Party members in line and graft-free, apparently admitted there was a problem but said the [...]

Interesting to see that the folks over at Asia Weekly are celebrating their first six months of publication by announcing they have secured a publication agreement in Singapore. The magazine, based in Beijing and helmed by veteran journalist and respected China specialist Jasper Becker, is bucking the current online trend and the fact that both [...]

Our new colleague in Beijing Lin Yang writes: In China having connections can make all the difference. But when the first-stage ticket sales plan for the 2008 Olympics was announced earlier this year, the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympics –or the vaguely sinister-sounding BOCOG– vowed to give everyone an equal chance: tickets would be [...]

Evan Osnos of the Chicago Tribune, who normally works in the same building as Time’s Beijing crew, is off on a five-week trek across Sichuan. At first I was a bit jealous of his escape from capital city desk jockeying, but Evan’s trip doesn’t look easy. You can read his blog posts and stories as [...]