Go Ask a Weatherman

A recent study by German scientists partly attributing the collapse of the T’ang Dynasty to shifting weather patterns between AD700 and AD900 has been rubbished by Chinese meteorologists.
The erudite findings, by the University of Potsdam’s Institute for Geosciences, posited that strong winter monsoons and decreased rainfall during …

Angry Students on Campus…

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 …

Kitty Hawk IV: Understand This!

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 …

Rights Group: Political Arrests Up In China

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. Some new numbers on political arrests in …

Kitty Hawk III: It Was All Just a “Misunderstanding”

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 few days earlier. …

No Port in a Storm: Kitty Hawk II

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 …

Cleaning Up China: Some Numbers

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 would spend about 1.35 pc of GDP annually for the next …

How to Handle Ex-Dissidents 101

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 with …

The USS Kitty Hawk Kerfuffle and Trouble in the Strait

The kerfuffle over China’s back and forth over whether to allow the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk into Hong Kong last week so the sailors could celebrate Thanksgiving is dying down. There was lots of speculation about what could have sparked the change of mind by Beijing, which first gave permission, then withdrew it and then changed …

Jack Ma’s New Pad

Three weeks after the online business-to-business giant Alibaba’s $1.7 billion IPO in Hong Kong, company founder and chairman Jack Ma (马云) has set another record by spending $38 million USD on a 7,000 sq. ft. penthouse (that’s about $5,400 per square foot) in Branksome Crest, a luxury apartment building in Hong Kong’s …

China’s Recycling Entrepreneurs

An interesting video podcast by an outfit calling itself China’s Green Beat (中国绿色脉搏) on rubbish recyclers in Beijing. It’s not entirely clear to me from their website who these guys are, although they do introduce themselves in the podcast and seem like personable, well-meaning young men. Amidst all the gloom about China’s …

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