Saturday Tidbits: Mont Blanc, one child policy and the ongoing Shi Tao saga

• If you guys have passed by CITIC Square on Nanjing Lu in the past month or two, you'd surely have seen that Mont Blanc has taken over the ground level store that used to be occupied by Starbucks, and apparently, they are building the world's largest Mont Blanc boutique right there. All Roads Leads to China reveals that Mont Blanc is paying US$11 per square metre per day, which works out to about US$250,000 per month. Nice.
• Fons Tuinstra, fresh from an interview with an Iranian TV station, ruminates on China's one child policy and comes to the conclusion that if the policy had not been in place, China would be looking a lot more like India today.
• Liaoning and Sichuan have joined Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Henan and Hebei in the club of trillion RMB economies in China. Beijing is poised to join the club later this year.
• Nearly 400,000 Taiwanese currently live on the Chinese mainland as of September this year and 270,000 cross-strait marriages have been recorded. Taiwanese made more than 45.83 million visits to the mainland, and mainlanders made more than 1.56 million visits to the island this year so far.
• Rebecca MacKinnon informs us that Yahoo! is now apologizing for not telling the full truth to Congress at the February 2006 hearing where Yahoo! was taken to task for its role in the conviction of Chinese journalist Shi Tao.

Photo of the Mont Blanc superstore on Nanjing Lu from All Roads Lead to China