Worldcrunch
BEIJING – There was an interesting Chinese twist to last week’s ruling by an Egyptian court to sentence 529 members of the Muslim Brotherhood to death. While the decision was widely condemned in the West, it has also drawn criticism from an unusual source: China’s state-backed media. Xinhua News English edition featured a story entitled […]
One year after rising to power, Chinese President Xi Jinping shows no signs of turning back on major reforms…or sweeping purges.
Employees who toil long hours for low wages at the Chinese factories that assemble the iPhone are part of the dark side of the country’s rush to urbanization.
-Opinion- BEIJING — After trying it out for less than two months, China’s southeast city of Guangzhou has announced it will suspend the “safe baby hatch” program, which provided a secure place to leave abandoned babies to increase their chance for survival. Since Guangzhou’s Children’s Social Welfare Home launched the arrangement earlier this year, 262 […]
BEIJING — China is far from being a central character in the Ukrainian crisis drama. Still, it has the potential to become an important mediator on the global stage between Russia and the West. China’s influence in the past was limited to its vote in the UN Security Council, but since the Crimea crisis emerged, […]
TEL AVIV — Over the past few weeks, we have heard many members of Parliament calling on the government to block the sale of Israeli dairy company Tnuva to China’s Bright Food. Such a ban would be very bad news for Israel. We must first remember the basic principal that business decisions should be taken […]
A married man from the eastern Chinese province of Anhui was looking for some online hanky-panky. So the man, identified by the Market Star Daily as a forty-something named Mr. Zhang, reached for his mobile phone and clicked on “Shake”, a location-based social plug-in service provided by Weixin (Chinese for WeChat). Zhang began chatting, and […]
An orphanage in this southeastern city received more abandoned babies in a pilot “safe haven” program than anywhere else in the country.
I remember being mesmerized by Shanghai at night — maybe even more than by Las Vegas. Twenty years ago, the Chinese city also seemed to be at the vanguard of technology. That’s where I saw people using cell phones in the street for the first time.
KASHGAR — The Matang nut cake and skewered kawap (mutton), an ancient Kingdom reduced to ruins in a desert, and the simple imagery of folk singing and dancing: These are the stereotypes most Han Chinese have of the Uyghur people. It made sense for me to travel to find out more in their native land, […]
BEIJING — The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has sparked rumors and conspiracy theories, and generally obsessed people — around the world. But with most of the passengers on board being from China, the most speculation is swirling around Chinese society, both on official news sources and in social media — particularly Weibo, China’s […]
The massacre of 29 people in Kunming this month is related to Xinjiang, a province where the relations between the Han Chinese and Uyghur are more tense than ever.
HONG KONG — Rarely do Chinese names appear in news stories about people donating their art collections to museums. That is especially true in the realm of contemporary visual art. But prominent Chinese art collector Guan Yi recently made an exception by donating 37 pieces of his collection to Hong Kong’s M+ Museum, which is […]
Tensions between China’s majority Han population and various ethnic minorities tend to simmer just below the surface. But the issue is now stirring open debate following this month’s coordinated knife attack on a train station in the southern city of Kunming that killed 29. The attack has been blamed on separatist extremists of the Uyghur […]
BEIJING — McDonald’s is planning to expand franchising in China’s biggest cities, such as Shanghai and Shenzhen, for the first time since its entry into the country. Since its founding in 1955, McDonald’s has relied on its franchisees to play a major role in the company’s global success. Franchisees account for 80% of the 30,000 […]
BEIJING — The Tibetan mastiff is a breed of dog prized for its hardy build and exotic beauty. (photo: Pleple2000) Though now domesticated, it traces its origins to ancient times when it roamed the highlands of Central Asia. Here’s one in its native stomping ground on the Tibetan mountain of Gonggar. (photo: Dennis Jarvis) But […]
BEIJING — The continuous heavy haze over Beijing is an ever-present reminder of the country’s losing battle with pollution. But it may also have been the engine to jump start the Chinese government’s recent push to promote the sale of and use of electric vehicles. Beijing officials, who had instituted incentives for purchasing electric cars, […]
Outrage in China has followed the Kunming attack that killed 29, not just for the violence, but for the way the West has (and hasn’t) defined what happened. Making sense of the *T* word.
As Chinese Premier Li Keqiang rolled out the country’s new ‘war on pollution,’ Le Monde paid a visit to the city that has registered the dirtiest air in China.
“Peking Opera” bears little resemblance to the works of Verdi and Wagner. Though this traditional Chinese art form does feature music and singing, it combines them with dance, acrobatics, and mime. As you can see, it is a very lively and colorful performance, which draws from deep within the country’s myths and folklore – and […]
Pressing news, random facts and other summings up of recent events in the world that counts.
BEIJING — There is a career crisis in China’s judiciary, and it’s especially acute here in the capital. First the numbers. According to statistics obtained by Li Yuanfang, a National People’s Congress member, of the 2,053 judges recruited in Beijing between 2008 and 2012, 348 have since resigned. That’s 16.9% of new recruits leaving their […]
BEIJING — China’s central government has imposed new requirements to severely limit the population in the country’s “mega-cities.” In the booming capital, whose population has topped 20 million, the focus has been on using economic regulations to stem the rising number of inhabitants. “Controlling the population by controlling business categories” is one of the key […]
China has its fashionista culture, and it is increasingly original rather than a knock-off of someone else’s city chic.
JERUSALEM — Three hundred kilometers by high-speed rail between the cities of Eilat and Ashdod, connecting the Red Sea coast to the Mediterranean: They call it the “Red-Med” Project. Financed by Beijing and launched from Jerusalem, China has revealed its strategy for “West Asia” — the term that the China Shipping Container Lines company uses […]
A bit of a mystery, this one: The pond, with its water lilies, looks nothing like a rice paddy field — which is what you would expect in southern China. So what are they all looking for, bent over like that? My back hurts just looking at this picture.
BEIJING — Chen Dongsheng has amassed a fortune with attention to both the mundane of insurance and the glamour of fine art. He is the founder of three completely divergent enterprises — China Guardian Auctions, the first Chinese auction company to specialize in the sale of Chinese artwork; Kangtai Life, one of China’s largest life […]
BEIJING — Wang Jianlin, chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, calmly states that he has set a goal of $99 billion (600 billion RMB) in revenue by 2020 for his real estate development company. Just as calmly, he then adds that he’ll retire that year to write his memoirs. In mid-December, in front of dozens of […]
Pure happiness was radiating from this old man, whom we met during a trip in southern China. I don’t remember why he was so cheerful — but we learned a Chinese proverb somewhere in our travels: “If you are not a fish, how can you know if the fish are happy?”
HANGZHOU — It’s well known that nobody in Wahaha, China’s biggest beverage empire, dares challenge the word of Zong Qinghou. But the cult of personality surrounding the group’s founder, dubbed the “beverage king,” goes much further: There are reports of how employees at a Wahaha dealers’ meeting shout Viva Wahaha! Viva Zong Qinghou!, and the […]
After building Beijing’s Olympic Park for the 2008 Games, a Chinese-American urban planner and Israeli architect continue to help develop green cities in a largely polluted China.
-Commentary- BEIJING — Reports about rich Chinese men snapping up French chateaux for big bucks have been prolific lately. Many Chinese are astonished that these French cultural relics are available to private buyers at all, much less foreign ones. But I believe this represents not so much how open France is but rather how closed […]
The 45-year-old founder of Baidu, dubbed the “Google of China,” says technology offers great opportunity for success – but also means failure can arrive at any moment.
BEIJING — It was 30 years ago at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics that a 20-year-old Chinese gymnast named Li Ning captured three gold medals, two silvers and one bronze with an array of never-before-seen flips and twists that he had invented himself. Li, now 50, became China’s most decorated athlete and won the […]
President Obama used his State of the Union address to declare his determination to raise the U.S. minimum wage above 10 dollars. Wage policy in the rest of the world may surprise you.
China tries to come to terms with its not-so-distant past.
BEIJING — When he was 17, Zhao Bowen was a bored student who made an audacious decision. In a country where the cult of diplomas knows no boundaries, he quit school and decided not to take the exam that would have allowed him university entry. “All that fuss just to learn things that you can […]
China’s notorious re-education-through-labor system, abbreviated as laojiao in Chinese, has come into the spotlight with the recent reform announcement by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. The system was born out of the “Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries” and the “Anti-Rightist Movement” of the Mao era. It was designed to eradicate opposition elements after […]
A new study says some 90 percent of investments by China’s businesses in American operations don’t succeed. Chinese experts explain.
Sometimes photo slides don’t age too well, colors can fade a bit — but in this shot, taken less than 20 years ago, that is all pollution, as smog fills the Yangtze River Delta.