Like everyone else, I am trying to figure out what the financial turmoil currently gripping the U.S. means, particularly for China. In speaking with economists there’s an underlying but consistent theme that seemed a tad counter-intuitive: this could be a good thing for China and also for the Communist Party. First off, the inevitable economic [...]

Beijing has announced a new set of restrictions on automobiles aimed at retaining some of the clean air the city enjoyed during the Olympics. My sense is that the benefits will be mild at best and that the exercise risks wasting the enthusiasm residents have for some sort of long-term solution to the pollution problem. [...]

So the taikonauuts as some someone branded them (a bizarre formulation; hangtianyuan is the usual word) made it home safely yesterday. Watching China’s first space walk live on television the previous day was fascinating. It is a tremendous breakthrough, as President Hu Jintao told one of he astronauts, considerably more important in terms of testifying [...]

My headline will no doubt make the eyes of many of our readers glaze over. But for those of you interested in the inner workings of politics in the Communist Party–and after all what that comes down to is how China is run–there is an insightful look ahead to the Party’s imminent Plenum by veteran [...]

Amidst all the depressing news surrounding us it is sometimes necessary to feature something, well, completely silly. I couldn’t call this only in China (see the previous post on these lines here) as people all over the world do stupid stuff and put it on the internet. Here’s a young Chinese guy who says he’s [...]

This is a spoof diary of a day in the life of an ordinary Chinese that has been circulating on the web recently (in Chinese here, for example). I have edited out large chunks as it gets pretty repetitive, though that of course is the point. The excellent translation is courtesy of Chris Hughes of [...]

Here’s our story on China’s upcoming Shenzhou VII mission and plans for the country’s first spacewalk.

Jailed Chinese activist Hu Jia and his wife, Zeng Jinyan, have made the early list of favorites for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. From the Associated Press: (OSLO, Norway) — The annual guessing game about who will get the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize focused this year on a possible human rights rebuke for China. Experts [...]