UPDATE: CCTV building in Beijing caught fire last night. No time to write about this in more detail, check Shanghaiist, ChinaSMACK, CNReviews, and Youku Buzz. The cause is unclear but looks to be stray fireworks from the holiday last night. China Daily has a story here indicating it was a hotel… It probably bodes...
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Northeastern China is suffering from what even the Chinese media are calling “the most severe drought for decades.” Affecting nearly 5 million people to date, the drought also threatens future harvests and has drawn a number of government responses including diverting water from the Yangzi and Yellow Rivers, inducing rain artificially, providing over US...
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According to ESWN, lots of Chinese people apparently would. Lu Jiali, reportedly the mistress of some of Shanghai’s highest officials (many of whom are now embroiled in a scandal), is an attractive woman (88% of netizens polled agree!). Photos of her (after the jump) have been circulating the internet recently, which led to an...
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The New York Times thinks maybe: (h/t James Fallows) Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s geological fault line. A...
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If you’re reading this post right now, chances are this isn’t the first thing you’ve read about China in English. And if this isn’t the first thing you’ve read about China in English, you’ve probably read about a Chinese government “crackdown” before. But what, exactly, does it mean when the Chinese government cracks down?...
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We didn’t want to write about the shoe thing, but here we are, writing about the shoe thing. Everybody knows that a month and a half ago, someone chucked a shoe at former (!) President Bush during a press conference in Iraq. Much merriment was shared by all, and the Chinese netizens, as one...
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Any formal student of Chinese language who’s made it past the second year has likely gotten to the point where each chapter of his or her textbook takes the form of “: is it good or bad?” One of the most common social issues is 同居, or “cohabitation”, specifically, the cohabitation of men...
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As anyone reading this blog is probably aware, there are a ton of valuable China related sites out there. Here’s a list of the ones we read regularly, or at least, most of them. This page will be edited regularly to add new blogs as we find them. General China Blogs Danwei.org - Chinese...
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Is the Spring Festival tradition of making things explode more or less at random over the course of the festival really compatible with an increasingly urban China? Having heard reports of accidents and even deaths, we decided to investigate.
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As far as so-called paranormal phenomena go, the sighting of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) is one of the oldest and most common in the West. Is it common in China, too? We weren't sure, so we took to the internet to find out, using extremely informal methods.
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