A few links to start off your day: In Bloomberg, Adam Minter takes a look at the debate raging over anti-radiation maternity suits in China, and why the bizarrely popular trend is likely coming to an end. Check out the new Sinica Podcast about the Wukan uprisings, and the debate that Han Han has recently inflamed over liberalization in China. The Telegraph looks at the explosion of Chinese luxury shoppers arriving on English soil and how it impacts luxury retailers, who are quickly hiring Mandarin-speaking staff and being advised to avoid topics like “politics, Japan and communism”. more ›

I love it when memes cross borders! Some savvy Chinese netizens have uploaded a Downfall parody of one of the (many) weibo (China's Twitter) scandals rocking China lately. Earlier this month, a luddite official from Jiangsu, laboring under the misapprehension that microblogs are private, arranged for an extramarital affair with his mistress across the public forum. more ›

Nothing unexpected here, but it still feels somehow satisfying to see it confirmed. China Digital Times translates a leaked internal memo detailing the directives to China's 50 cent party (五毛党, wǔmáodǎng, or paid pro-government internet commentators) in their efforts to "circumscribe the influence of Taiwanese democracy": more ›

China Digital Times has done us all the favor again of translating directives from various governmental authorities and this week the main focus is unsurprisingly on the Jiaozhou Lu apartment block fire here in Shanghai. Among the missives: Don't put mourning activities in a prominent position on all media outlets and websites, and withdraw issues of a magazine that dared to write about who really was responsible. more ›

China's "middle class" has been touted as the country's best shot at a stable survival. But what does it even mean to be part of it? A People's Daily reporter goes in to find out and realizes that everything is about debt, debt and more debt. A mortgage takes up half your salary, you have a car you worry you can't afford to drive and, despite making ten times what you did ten years ago, it never seems enough. Interestingly enough, that sounds a lot like the American middle class. Helpfully translated by people over at China Digital Times. more ›

What's the best investment you could possibly have made with your money this year? We'll give you some hints: you probably like your broccoli sauteed in it, vampires can't stand it, and you should avoid eating it before a first date. Of course, we're talking about...garlic! Yep, the plant of the year in China has seen its value increase exponentially: one kilo of garlic is now worth over 6 yuan wholesale, up 286 percent since March. more ›

Recently, Tudou's Marc van der Chijs commented on how he knew the bubble in the Chinese stockmarket had to burst soon when he found out that his driver, too, had jumped headlong onto the stock bandwagon although he had zero understanding of how stockmarkets work. You will find an echo of that sentiment in Al-Jazeera's latest report on China's current stockmarket frenzy. Meanwhile, David Barboza of the New York Times says China wonders if its stock market boom is over. And as China Digital Times reports, the recent stock market crash caused a Beijing investor to attempt suicide in the Wangfujing shopping district. Video after the jump: more ›

- ESWN has translated the sad story of a 31 year old woman who left a goodbye note on her blog before commiting suicide because of her unfaithful husband, an employee at Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing. The story is now making the rounds big time in the local advertising scene and has also unleashed a manhunt which saw enraged citizens coming up to his apartment to seek revenge for the dead woman. More pictures here. more ›

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China Digital Times: Deal With Global Warming: Try Not to Divorce - China Youth Daily more ›

The Peking Duck: Is the rush to study Chinese a time-wasting fad? more ›

They say the Germans invented the art of bureaucracy but the Chinese perfected it. This may be true if a recently compiled list on Tianya forum is anything to go by — it contains over 3,000 permits/licences/fees a Chinese citizen may be subjected to through the course of his/her life. China Digital Times translates just a handful of them, and as they correctly pointed out, some sound reasonable while others just make you go huh:... more ›

People who made the news this week more ›

Pigs are back in the headlines once again, and with a vengeance. Here is an interesting juxtapose of three pig-related news stories found via the informative China Digital Times. more ›

This group of women in Guangxi Province's Nanning (南宁) have just completed their state-sponsored training and received their certification as trained maternity matrons (月嫂), who according to our favourite English-Chinese dictionary, are maids -- usually married women who already have their own kids -- that are hired to take care of mothers and their newborns ("Chinese women traditionally are confined indoors for a month after delivering a baby on the grounds that they are particularly susceptible to various gynecological diseases in this period."). Apparently even the recruiting companies have all come waiting like vultures at the certification ceremony, and are paying as much as RMB2,800 per month for a mid-level maternity matron and RMB4,800 for a senior-level maternity matron. That's more than some white collar workers get! more ›

Via China Digital Times: This 2 minute video clip from buggyrun creatively juxtaposes images of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing. more ›

While April is Alcohol Awareness Month in the States (some of you might be in the dark). If you are living in China, it might as well be Promoting the Gay Agenda Month Online Gay TV Awareness Month with news of the arrival of three online gay TV shows. Earlier this month, we reported about China's first online TV show about issues relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities within China. Aired... more ›

You likely know that access to the great China news resource China Digital Times is blocked in Mainland China. So, you may not know that on Monday they published an audio interview with Howard W. French, the New York Times bureau chief here in Shanghai. It's part of their ChinaCast series of podcasts, "short and informal conversations with journalists, business people, artists and others doing interesting work in China." more ›

• While we're just happy to have any kind of electricity, Shanghai residents can now ask for "clean power."
• China Digital Times blocked?
• Construction on the Shanghai-Beijing high-speed train line may begin this year.

Shanghaiist saw on the China Digital Times a post about the possibility that all Google.com traffic from China being routed to Google.cn, the censored evil twin of the famous search engine. This would mean that you would no longer get crappy Google.com service from within China, because it would no longer exist. CDT picked up this information from this report (in Chinese), which starts off with Google's license issues in China, but if you scroll down, you'll find the paragraph we're talking about. It says that a Google China official said privately to a reporter that the possibility of Google.cn taking over all Google.com directed traffic from within China was a distinct and even likely possibility. We shudder to think, but who's really surprised? Read more about it from Rebecca MacKinnon's website here. On a lighter note, we think Mark Fiore's animation about Western tech companies in China is pretty darn funny. more ›

From Reuters: more ›

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) recently decided to allow two Chinese regional papers, Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News (新民晚报 or Xin Min Wan Bao）and Guangzhou based Southern Metropolis (南方都市报 or Nan Fang Dou Shi Bao) to station journalists in Taiwan. more ›