Some people complain that books are too expensive. Well, you have to see what you're comparing it to. Chinese books cost about 30RMB on the average -- that's a pack of average quality cigarettes, a cup of coffee, a set meal, a cab ride, half of a cinema ticket, or a third of a pizza. Some people can afford to smoke, drink coffee, go to the cinema, but say they're too poor to read. It only goes to show they don't like reading enough. more ›

Literary badboy and rally driver Han Han (韩寒) is set to take anti-fraud crusader Fang Zhouzi (方舟子) to court for claiming online that some of his works were probably ghost-written. more ›

This weekend's chock full of exciting events of every variety! The gumboot dancers from Kliptown, South Africa are back at Cotton's for another big event, Red Light Revolution - "China's first sex shop comedy" - screens twice, G+ hosts a Singles Day Party, City Moments turns 3, and 100 professional salsa dancers will perform for the Chinese-Korean Salsa Festival! Read on for all the details, or check out our calendar for even more! more ›

An Amazon user named Xuemin Lin has gone ahead and helpfully provided a list of must-read China books, though that likely wasn't his intention. Including such banned-in-China favorites as Zhao Ziyang's Prisoner of the State, Richard Macgregor's The Party, and Jung Chang's massive Mao: The Unknown Story, Lin goes to some pains to stress the same classic governmental talking points ad nauseam. more ›

On Monday morning Peter Hessler, former New Yorker correspondent and author of a handful of books all considered "must reads" in the Sinosphere, was awarded a genius grant for long-form journalism from the MacArthur foundation to the tune of $500,000! Like most recipients of the award, it came as a total shock, and he told Denver Post that "When they called, I said this would be the first time in my life I'd had a regular income since I earned $125 a month in the Peace Corps." We'd like to say congratulations from Shanghaiist! The author of Oracle Bones, River Town, and Country Driving will soon be moving on to Cairo, and plans to examine the aftermath of the Arab Spring. more ›

Shanghai-born crime novelist Qiu Xiaolong (裘小龙) is the author of the celebrated Inspector Chen series that has a loyal following among readers not just in China, but also around the world. more ›

The last time we heard about Mark Ndesandjo, the China-based half-brother of US President Barack Obama, he was still busy raising funds for the orphans in Shenzhen. more ›

In Cafetique, Shanghaiist reviews coffee shop and cafes around Shanghai that provide the two things our writers need most in life: caffeine and wireless internet. How does your neighborhood hangout spot stack up? more ›

Dear Journalists, The National Office of Eliminating Pornography and Illegal Publications Working Committee will publicly destroy a large number of pirated and illegal publications on Friday, April 22, 2011. The main venue of the nationwide activity will be in Beijing. You are cordially invited to cover the event. Time: 10am, April 22, 2011 more ›

In case, like me, you completely screwed up your planning this weekend and missed the literary event of the year, City Weekend has helpfully put up its audio recordings. Listen to Sarah Brennan reading her Chinese calendar-inspired children's story , Thomas Keneally - author of the book that was turned into Schindler's List - talk about his life, and Pankaj Mishra and Ian Johnson talking about the resurgence of religion in India and China... and more! more ›

February is such a short month, we're already halfway through now and the Shanghai Litfest is peeking above the horizon. more ›

Since Amy Chua, author of the controversial book Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother, was last mentioned on this blog, she has inched up yet another notch to sit at #5 on the Amazon charts. In her latest interview with HLN's Joy Behar, she says that she's not backing down.
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Sure, it may seem weird to read a book about the Shanghai World Expo now that we've got a little over a month before it ends, but The China Beat insists that this one is worth it. Nick Land's Shanghai World Expo Guidebook 2010 has "more in common with the grand tradition of literary travel writing than it does with, say, an American Automobile Association treatment of an interstate highway tour. Like the Expo itself, its style is both substantive and sensual, nineteenth century in its way, yet thoroughly “modern” in its central theme of Shanghai’s shifting, baroque, and often unique interpretations of modernity." In fact, with the Expo ending, what better time to put it and all its craziness in context with the rest of Shanghai, and the world's, history? more ›

Once again it’s Friday and the end of the working week is nigh! If you embraced last weekend and followed our Weekendist guide, you would have been run ragged - get ready to do it again, because boy is Shanghai delivering! This weekend is serving up a rather eclectic mix of entertainment; drag queens, food fests and birthday parties - just to give you a rough idea. As always, use this ‘Hot List’ to supplement our Midweek Music Preview and to complement our calendar; here are the hottest picks for the coming weekend… more ›

The publishers of Lies My Teacher Told Me, aka <<老师的谎言>>, had originally planned on having an author preface to its Chinese language version. Unfortunately, what James W. Loewen had to say against sanitizing history didn't gel well with censors, and his preface was ultimately cut when the book hit Chinese shelves. We emailed Professor Loewen for the Chinese preface, and he was kind enough to send it to us right away. more ›

Last summer, we brought to your attention a movie called Building 173, which profiled the transformation of a certain Shanghai apartment block from high-society penthouses to middle class family homes and finally to tenements for the working poor. Highlighted, too, were the external factors - namely war and politics - which underlay and, in some cases, directly caused this metamorphosis, narrated in the most accurate and vivid way possible: directly from the people who lived in the building through it all. more ›

Sure the Shanghai International Literary Festival doesn't actually start until March, but books take quite a while to read (even if you're speed readers, like us). That's probably why the M Restaurant Group has wasted no time getting us the almost completely confirmed list of books and authors appearing at this years readings - stick your nose in any one of these 40+ tomes so you'll actually have something to discuss when one of your personal writing heroes (like say... Peter Hessler or Su Tong) come into town. more ›

It's been a long year filled with trivial fun, the best of which involves the antics of celebrities, musicians, writers, and generally anyone involved in the creation of China's vibrant culture. From poetry to death hoaxes, we've garnered a lot of enjoyment from covering the diaspora of China's creative zeitgeist. And in honor of the multitudinous wonderful, scandalous and noteworthy things we've watched, experienced and digested over the past year, here's a short breakdown of our favorite gems of cultural news. more ›

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at University of California - Irvine, a co-founder of The China Beat, the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author, most recently, of Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009) and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (forthcoming in April). Today he writes on five books about China that you ought to take note of in 2010. more ›

Much like China's ongoing efforts against actual piracy, it seems that the government has been taking steps to curb piracy of the intellectual variety. Shifting from targeting individual sellers to wholesalers and manufacturers, Shanghai's "Cultural Inspection Team" has apparently confiscated over 20,000 pirated cds and 5,000 books in 246 "significant" busts in preparation for the Expo. If you do the math, though, that's about 100 cds/books per bust, which doesn't seem that significant to us. As it seems the goods aren't even made in Shanghai, we're not altogether too impressed. more ›

We've always marveled at the immense chasm between the Chinese book market and the rest of the world. Of course, issues of translation and appeal abroad have kept the market pretty domestic, but that seems to be changing slowly. Chinageeks makes a great point in response to the coverage of Frankfurt Book Fair: it seems that the only interest the west can muster towards Chinese literature is when the book or author carries some sort of scandal with it, leaving the vast majority of authors and books unnoticed. There's a lack of foreign awareness of books that split the difference between banned-in-China and sterilized-by-censorship that leaves a big old lacuna where books by talented Chinese authors should be. more ›

Clocking in at only 99 pages, Shanghai: High Lights Low Lights Tael Lights is an excellent appetizer for those of us who generally dine on heavier reading fare. The authors, Maurine Karns and Pat Patterson, make their purpose known early in the book: in the preface, titled “an explanation but not an apology,” Karns and Patterson state that they have written Tael Lights “with the hope of enjoying ourselves, of making a little money, and of not committing ourselves to anything for which we might be sorry” (xx). They proceed to describe, with delightful if decidedly un-PC irreverence, the Shanghai they saw before them when writing the book in 1936. more ›

• This is pretty damn cool: Two Iranians are reshuffling scenes from Persepolis, a black comedy cartoon by Iranian-French emigre Marjane Satrapi, into a story about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's disputed victory. Where are they working from? GOOD OLD SHANGHAI. Check out the comic here. [AFP]
• The average price of commercial residential houses in Shanghai reached 19,603 yuan per square meter last week. Anybody got a house to sell? Now seems like the time. [People's Daily]
• The Book Fair was wildly successful this week - about 240,000 people visited, buying 28 million yuan worth of books. [Shanghai Daily]

Yesterday afternoon we attended a talk at the JC Mandarin with Cherie Blair and guest speakers Jane Huang and Sha Sha. The Chinese version of Blair's autobiography Speaking for Myself was launched at the Shanghai Book Fair yesterday. more ›

• Why China Can't Create Brands [Newsweek] "China is famous as the factory to the world, but even its best companies enjoy little if any fame. That paradox has become a vexing problem for China's leaders. The nation is now too rich to continue growing at a double-digit pace by simply putting more peasants to work in factories, and then underselling its Western, Japanese, and South Korean competition. The job of making cheap clothes, toys, and electronics is moving on to even cheaper labor markets, like Vietnam. In a March report, Premier Wen Jiabao called for China to create companies that can innovate and churn out "brand-name export products"—meaning companies with reputations for quality, innovation, and service so strong that customers are willing to pay a premium for their products."
• Kazakh Uighurs hold mass protest [AP] " More than 5,000 ethnic Uighurs rallied in Kazakhstan's largest city on Sunday to protest China's use of deadly force to quash Uighur protests this month. The show of solidarity was the largest in any of the former Soviet republics — home to a half-million Uighurs — since the July 5 violence in Xinjang that authorities say claimed almost 200 lives."
• Caution urged in bids for US Big Three [China Daily] "As the ongoing financial crisis pressures Western automakers to consider selling some of their assets, Chinese vehicle producers are seeing more opportunities to enter the global market through overseas acquisitions. However, unlike the positive responses to purchases such as China's Lenovo acquiring IBM's PC business in 2004, bidding for assets from ailing Big Three automakers has attracted more criticism."

This week: Chill out with some live jazz, rock out with some funky beats at Shelter, then cheer on Shanghai Shenhua before eating some good ol' American grub at the Bulldog. more ›

Earnshaw Books, your favorite purveyor of China-related reading material, is pleased to announce that it will host an evening of conversation, books and live jazz to celebrate the release this month of two new tomes - Shanghai Story Walks by Yvette Ho Madany and I Sailed with Chinese Pirates by Aleko Lilius, featuring a new foreword by Paul French. more ›

Shanghai-based journalist Paul French's latest book is one that ought to excite all you ol' Shanghai history buffs (and press nostalgists as well) - an examination of the convulsive history of the China press corps between the 1820s and leading up to the revolution of 1949. more ›

Earnshaw Books will host an evening of conversation, books and live jazz featuring Graham Earnshaw to celebrate the release of Tales of Old Peking, authored by Shanghaiist contributor Derek Sandhaus! more ›

Anyone taking a stroll down Taojiang Lu towards Hengshan Lu is bound to spot the bright green shutters of 'The Cottage', a new coffee shop at number 25a. more ›