One of the more under-reported stories in China is the discontent that many students at second tier universities feel. Over the past couple of years, there have been several cases of unrest over issues that speak to the economic insecurity that many of China’s young people feel—particularly if they don’t go to elite universities like [...]

So apparently President Bush and the White House China experts who advise him misundersood the Chinese Foreign Minister, who actually did not say there was a “misunderstanding” over the Kitty Hawk visit. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said yesterday that “This kind of report does not conform to facts.” So, the White House was [...]

Trend spotting in China is often a perilous exercise. The country is so big that you can easily pick a few cases to make one argument, then find a few more to make the opposite point. That’s especially true when considering political reform, where so much of the action is out of the public eye. [...]

So it was all just a simple misunderstanding. Case closed, right? According to the wires, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi told President Dubya at the White House Wednesday that the Kitty Hawk affair was just a mix up of some kind. No explanation of what that means or how the exact same “misunderstanding” happened a [...]

The Kitty Hawk affair is getting murkier and murkier. Senior U.S. admirals now reportedly say that the flip flopping by Chinese authorities on letting the aircraft carrier dock in Hong Kong was the second such incident this month. Earlier, two minesweepers were refused permision to shelter from an approaching storm and refuel. That is very [...]

In his previous post, Simon notes that China will begin spending 1.35% of GDP on environmental protection and asks how much it will eventually cost to clean up China’s pollution mess. No one will really know the cost of course until it is actually cleaned up. (What would Donald Rumsfeld call that, a “known unknown?”) [...]

A follow up to a previous post about the environment in China and the cost of a clean up. Well, here are some real numbers that show I may have been right and the government thinks it can throw money at the problem and solve it that way. The State Council announced Monday that it [...]

The following is a fascinating translation (partly cut back by me) by the excellent folks at China Digital Times which I am posting as I don’t believe there’s too much overlap between their readers and ours. It provides wonderful insight into the mindset of the police, their insistence on pretending that they are “friends” concerned [...]