CNN's Eunice Yoon checks out Manzhouli, a little town in Inner Mongolia near the Russian border, and finds business booming there. more ›

CNN's veteran China correspondent Jaime FlorCruz who actually was acquainted with Bo Xilai from back in his university days decades ago tracks the rise and fall of the former Chongqing party secretary: more ›

CNN's Fareed Zakaria asks Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong a few questions about China in a recent interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Video and transcript after the jump... more ›

Martin Savidge of CNN reports on the story of Isabel, whose impoverished parents sold her and her baby sister to rich Taiwanese families when she was seven years old. Though Isabel speaks semi-fluent English (her owners eventually brought her to cook and clean for them in Southern California), she is still mostly illiterate and didn't understand how money worked when she first won her freedom, like a modern-day Kaspar Hauser. more ›

Over at Asia Society, former Shanghaiist editor Dan Washburn has an excellent interview with Mike Chinoy, who served as CNN's Beijing bureau chief from 1987 to 1995 and is currently a Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. In the interview, Chinoy looks back at the challenges that he and other China correspondents faced in getting their work done, and how that contrasts with the situation today. more ›

CNN's Eunice Yoon reports on the wave of independent candidates looking to participate in China's local elections this year. Popular author and social critic Li Chengpeng is one of them.
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Chinese and foreign journalists were treated by the railway ministry two days ago to a test drive of the brand new Beijing-Shanghai line, now the world's longest high speed railway. CNN managed to snag the following cockpit view which the rest of us hoi polloi will probably never be able to see:
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Once upon a time, the Dongting Lake, a flood-basin of the Yangtse River, was China's largest freshwater lake. Now it's in danger of drying up. Is the Three Gorges Dam to blame?
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A US stealth helicopter crash-landed in Pakistan during the commando raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, and there are now concerns that Pakistan may share the wreckage with its close ally, China, which may then be able to reverse engineer the technology that went into the stealth chopper. CNN's Brian Todd reports:
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CNN's Eunice Yoon speaks to top honchos of foreign carmakers at the ongoing Shanghai Auto Show and asks them why they're creating China-only brands.
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Internet entrepreneur Isaac Mao, who is one of China's very first bloggers, speaks to Kristie Lu Stout of CNN about the state of censorship in China today:
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Billionaire Donald Trump continues posturing for his potential 2012 presidential run by talking tough with China. “Nobody, other than OPEC, is ripping off the United States like China,” says Trump. “They’re making all our products, they’re taking all our jobs and then they loan the money back and we pay them interest. It’s an amazing phenomena.” Also, “China is an abuser. China is not our friend.” The solution to this situation, according to Trump, is to stop treating the Chinese president to a "beautiful five star state dinner" when he visits, and to impose a 25% tax on all Chinese products if China doesn't stop "manipulating" its currency. God help us all if this man becomes the president of the US.
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"Even though I've lost everything, it would be okay if she were still alive."
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34-year-old TV reporter Xuan Kejiong has covered just about every major disaster happening in Shanghai for the last ten years, so much so that locals are calling him the city's "face of tragedy". CNN follows him about on a normal work day and talks to him about how he's making a difference in China. Read more here.
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A few days ago, we met up with Ed Wang, the NFL's first player of full Chinese descent in Shanghai. He is now in Beijing to promote the game there by conducting clinics in schools. more ›

Reporters trying to visit Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist lawyer most famous for uncovering Shandong officials forcing women to get abortions, are attacked by plainclothes thugs. The reporters were trying to confirm allegations that Chen and his wife were beaten after the online release of a video detailing abuses they suffered under house arrest. more ›

CNN's Stan Grant visits an old woman in Beijing who has been abandoned by her family and says she has lost all her will to live anymore. Heartrending, and a sign of things to come in a rapidly ageing China:
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Stan Grant of CNN meets up with two Mohammeds living in Beijing -- one Egyptian and one Tunisian -- and asks them about their views on what's going on back home: more ›

First, there was Glenn Beck. Then, there was Rush Limbaugh. Now, an angry Donald Trump speaks with Wolf Blitzer of CNN and tells him that "[the Chinese] are not our friends. These are our enemies. These are not people that understand niceness." He also reveals that he's "giving very serious thought" to running as president of the United States. Lovely days ahead for Sino-American relations if he does ever get the top job. For more crazy things he says in the interview, check out the full transcript here.
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Timed just right to coincide with President Hu's visit to Washington, this new CNN report says foreigners, and in particular, Americans, are "falling" for a "rising Shanghai". Bringing back the neon are places like cabaret club Chinatown and people like Spencer Dodington, a 42-year-old restorer of Art Deco homes from Texas, and Kelley Lee, a young Chinese-American woman from South California who owns a mini empire of restaurants that will be familiar to most Shanghaiist readers -- including Cantina Agave, Boxing Cat and the Alchemist.
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Shanghai blogger daredevil Han Han talks to CNN about censorship, knowing what not to say and how he feels about being on TIME's list of People of the Year. [h/t to Danwei] more ›

CNN correspondent John Vause (@vausecnn) tweets: "Been followed by police all day, now being kicked out of our hotel, local officials making it tough to report this school attack story." more ›

Today's video of the day is about pyramid schemes: of course, pyramid schemes are creepy all around the world, but in China they've got a je ne sais quoi that makes them creepy in a Waco sort of way. Scarier is the fact that an estimated ten million people are involved in get-rich-quick schemes around the country: judging from the poor conditions and confinement of the "members", we think it would be more advantageous if the pyramid scheme just switched to treating internet addiction. Or better yet, a pyramid scheme treatment camp that was itself a pyramid scheme. more ›

CNN's new web-based travel experiment, CNN Go has collected 50 reasons why Shanghai is the greatest city in the world. Yeah, we too like brunch and Mao memorabilia and outdoor ballroom dancing (though we're not sure how unique they are to Shanghai, exactly), but we noticed at least one thing missing from the list: awesome city blogs and their adorable editors. *ahem* Check out the rest of the list here. more ›

Perhaps Umbrella Men will become the newest internet meme out of China! Today, Black and White Cat compiled the footage we'd featured on our site into one neat lil' video! For some reason, watching the Umbrella Men's campaign against foreign camera people looks even sillier when its shown back to back to hilarious old timey Umbrella Man music. more ›

Earlier today, CNN anchor and Beijing correspondent John Vause was filming in Tiananmen Square, Beijing when he suddenly encountered a man holding an umbrella who won't step away from his cameraman's lens. Maybe it's the matching umbrella and pants, but this goes down in our book as the silliest censorship effort ever.

UPDATE: Video footage of the "umbrella incident" here: more ›

• The Tiananmen Protestors, Then and Now [China Beat] "China Beat sent out a note to a few scholars and journalists who have carefully watched and written about the events of 1989, asking them to send in short commentaries detailing what they wish more people knew, associated with, or remembered about that spring. We ran the first piece in this limited series, by John Gittings, last week. This is the second piece."
• CNN's Kristie Lu Stout on media and technology [Danwei] "Kristie Lu Stout presents the CNN Today program from Hong Kong on mornings. Prior to that Stout was CNN’s technology correspondent and host of the daily Tech Watch... Danwei talked to the popular anchor about using Twitter live on her show, and her view of technology's use in the media."
• China and Taiwan boost financial ties [Financial Times] "China and Taiwan signed a new set of agreements on Sunday, taking a big step towards opening up their financial services industries to each other and allowing direct investment in Taiwan from mainland China. Negotiators from both sides of the Taiwan Strait met in the Chinese city of Nanjing over the weekend for formal talks aimed at normalising relations between the two former civil war rivals who, before last year, had not held talks for more than a decade."

Remember that incredibly entertaining (if somewhat morbid) story about a woman who lost a best mistress contest and then drove her lover and his four other mistresses off a cliff? Well, apparently it might have been complete fiction! Damn it! more ›

Luckily for us here in Shanghai, U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama's inauguration happens at around the midnight hour. That means, basically, that it's completely acceptable to drink to this historical event more ›

Just in case you missed it. Via CNN, everyone's favorite cable news network. more ›