Police have arrested four men and one woman for trafficking in methamphetamine, or "ice" around the Fengxian District. While the nation's very first anti-drug radio programme aired here on Sunday, an increasing number of celebrities are getting caught for drug abuse. Zhang Yuan, one of China's most popular directors, was arrested two months ago on drug charges. And recently, singer Xie Dong, himself an anti-drug volunteer, was detained after testing positive for meth along with......

Shanghai doctors are urging the government to install defibrillators in public venues so as to provide people with emergency treatment if they suffer sudden cardiac arrest. The installation of defibrillators in busy high-traffic public areas such as airports has already been practiced in some western countries but for now, the only place in China where public defibrillators have been installed is Beijing.Authorities in Hongkou district are asking two Shiji Hualian supermarkets to have their signages......

Just three days after Straits Times journalist Ching Cheong regained his freedom, China has released yet another media man — Yu Huafeng (喻华峰), general manager and deputy editor of the Southern Metropolis News《南方都市报》, the Guangzhou-based paper that is one of China's boldest and most critical papers. According to AP, this is the Yu is the third journalist to be freed this month. Li Changqing (李长青), a former writer with Fuzhou Daily《福州日报》, was apparently released on......

People who made the news this week Kim Jong-Il, the President of North Korea, has met up with Wang Jiarui, the head of the international department at the Central Committee of China’s Communist Party, in Pyongyang on Wednesday. According to South Korea's Chosun Ilbo, when Wang voiced his explicit dissatisfaction with the DPRK's failure to meet its nuclear disarmament deadline, Kim said, “The present difficulties are temporary and can be conquered.” Kim also made a......

The Red Laowai (红老外) — yes, that shirtless dude in New York that's been singing communist propaganda songs such as “My China Heart"《我的中国心》, "Without the Communist Party, there is no New China"《没有共产党就没有新中国》and "Oriental Red"《东方红》and putting his videos online — has done it again. This time, he has put his shirt on, created a music video and he's singing Jay Chou and rapping. The song 止战之殇 (The Wound That Ends War) is an anti-war song in......

Workers clearing China landslide discover bus in the rubble; 29 believed dead [The Canadian Press] The bus was found three days after a landslide tore a 50-metre gash in a mountainside Tuesday heightening concern that the massive reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam, was wreaking ecological havoc in the region.US studios sue Chinese website for film piracy [AFP] 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios have filed a lawsuit against......

We didn't know whether to laugh or to cry when we saw this one — a shirtless white guy with a picture of Mao Zedong in the background singing patriotic songs such as “My China Heart"《我的中国心》, "Without the Communist Party, there is no New China"《没有共产党就没有新中国》and "Oriental Red"《东方红》which can be best described as a love song to Chairman Mao. He looks like he's got a chest that would make the ladies swoon and the guys......

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's meeting with the Dalai Lama [Reuters]:"It's gross interference in China's internal affairs. The Chinese side expresses its strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition... This disgusting conduct has seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and undermined Sino-Canadian relations... The Chinese side demands the Canadian side ... correct its mistaken conduct, immediately adopt effective measures to eliminate adverse impact (from the meeting) and stop winking......

Yu Zhengsheng replaces Xi Jinping as Party head in Shanghai [Xinhua] Xi Jinping no longer serves concurrently as the Party secretary of the Shanghai Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The post is now held by Yu Zhengsheng, according to the CPC Central Committee.Boom in China's coal industry draws increasing interest from American investors and business [IHT] As China's appetite for coal is booming, American investors and businesses are cashing in.India has......

Shanghai surprise as luxury goods addicts flash the cash in red China [The Telegraph] Luxury goods addicts seem to have added Shanghai to the list of must-visit cities if the shopping buzz is anything to go by, says Mark Kleinman.China sets up party leadership reshuffle [Financial Times] China’s Communist party has cleared the way for the appointment of a new senior leadership group following the retirement of vice-president Zeng Qinghong and two other members of......

Chinese property tycoon buys "Shanghai Island" in Dubai [IHT] Hu Bin, a Chinese property tycoon said Wednesday he has paid US$28 million (€20 million) to buy an artificial 40,000 square meter island in Dubai — which he plans to call "Shanghai Island" — is part of a development called "The World" that includes 300 islands made from reclaimed land in the shape of a world map. China Summons U.S. Envoy to Protest Dalai Lama Medal......

The Chinese Communist Party, the world's largest political party with some 64 million members opened its 17th Party Congress yesterday. With over 2,200 delegates from all over the nation, the congress was opened by parliament chief Wu Bangguo with the national anthem, followed by a moment of silence marked for Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and other "martyrs of the revolution" before President Hu Jintao began addressing the......

Looks like we spoke too soon. Just when we told you that Chinese media were getting the hang of the art of spin, look what we found in today's Shanghai Daily. Not one, but two pieces of pure, unadulterated propaganda that would make any Xinhua editor blush. Oh wait a minute, they actually came from Xinhua. The first piece, entitled Multi-party systems far from perfect in delivering stability to people, started off: SOME people say......

Bottom line is China's new party line [AP] Christopher Bodeen of AP looks at Li Keqiang's chances of becoming the heir to President Hu Jintao.China's Communists to Elect New Leadership at 17th Congress [Bloomberg] China's Communist Party delegates will gather at their 17th Party Congress this week to amend a party charter, discuss political reforms and elect a new leadership. China plans vast national park in north west [AFP] China plans to establish its......

... and the rumor-mill is running in overdrive. Recent reports suggest that Shanghai Party Chief Xi Jinping's (习近平) recent entry into the race - apparently at senior leader Zeng Qinghong's (曾庆红) insistence - has shaken things up; forcing Hu Jintao to make some last-minute maneuvering. The Jiang Zemin and the Hu Jintao camps both want their own guy to take over the top-job in 2012, and each are doing their best to make it happen.......

2,000 sex-related ads dropped from Chinese television and radio [People's Daily] About 2,000 advertisements adjudged to be sexually suggestive have been dropped from television and radio broadcast across China over the past two weeks, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said on Wednesday. Work on Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail to start by end of 2007 [AFP] Work on a long-awaited high-speed rail linking Beijing and Shanghai is expected to start by late 2007,......

Shanghai is back in Beijing's good books. Or so an article published by the People's Daily two weeks ago indicates, claims the Associated Press. The article, titled "Glad to hear the new good tidings from Shanghai", lavished praise on Shanghai for it's recent successes. "A golden breeze refreshes Shanghai; one important, auspicious event after another" gushed the lead article. It is a sign, claims AP, that the fallout from last year's pension scandal has started......

How should a government combat runaway inflation? Most sensible economists would suggest a series of tightening monetary and fiscal policies to realign the aggregate supply demand picture. Well, China has raised interest rate four times this year, twice last month, to no avail. Prices, at both the producer and retail levels continue to bubble up, as do asset prices, such as the real estate and the equity market. So we get this, from AP’s news......

People who made the news this week Zhao Yan (赵岩), the Chinese journalist jailed in 2004 while working for the New York Times is expected to be freed this weekend. Zhao was charged for revealing state secrets after a Times report was published that correctly predicted the retirement of Jiang Zemin (江泽民) as president and Communist Party chief. He was also accused of fraud for taking RMB20,000 from a village official. Prior to joining the......

People who have made the news this week Zhang Huimin, 8, runs her way to the Olympics 2016 Little Zhang Huimin, who stands at just 1.25 meters tall and weighs a mere 20kg, has run from Sanya, Hainan all the way to Beijing, wearing out 20 pairs of shoes and covering a staggering 3,560 km in 55 days. That's an average of 1.5 marathons per day! Her goal is to win the marathon at the......

China is a Democracy, But Not Copy of the West, by Zhu Jing of the Chinese Embassy in Nairobi for the East African Standard, [via A Glimpse of the World]:China practises a unique democratic experience, which is beneficial, reasonable and fruitful because it suits the country and has stood the test of time. The political party system that China adopts is consultative under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which is different......

Income disparity getting worse: Report [China Daily] China's Gini coefficient, a standard measure of a country's overall income inequality, rose to 0.473 in 2004 from 0.4 in 1993. Dream of high-speed rail may prove Shanghai politician's final nightmare [IHT] "I have a dream," Chen Liangyu, Shanghai's Communist Party secretary - since disgraced and removed from office - was fond of intoning before his aides, consciously echoing the words of Martin Luther King Jr. And as......

World's hairiest man / pop-star bids to join Beijing Olympic torch relay Would you believe it? The world's hairiest man is a Chinese, and he is a rock-and-roll singer! Yu Zhenhuan, who has an average 41 hairs on every .4 square inch of his skin, and is now just recovering in Shanghai from an ear operation, says he wants to be part of the torch relay for next year's Beijing Summer Olympic Games. The......

With heads still rolling from this year's tainted exports scandal and the downfall of Shanghai's ex-party-leader Chen Liangyu (he of bribe-taking and sexual-favoring-seeking fame) reaching completion, China's public enemy du jour appears to be corrupt government officials. We hate 'em so much, we're inventing fictive versions in cyberspace just so we can blow their 1337 brainzorz outz!!1! EastSouthWestNorth reports that online game Incorruptible Warrior «清廉战士», a game originally designed for about 500 users, logged 100,000......

In just three hours ago from a Reuters report:Three underground priests - Liang Aijun, Wang Zhong and Gao Jinbao - who have been unwilling to join China's Catholic Patriotic Church have been detained by plain clothes police in Inner Mongolia, having fled there from neighboring Hebei province, a Catholic stronghold. From the article: [Joseph Kung of the Cardinal Kung Foundation] said he did not know if the men have been charged. Another underground priest, Cui......

95 officials punished for brickwork slavery China has punished dozens of officials for allowing slave-like exploitation of workers in brick kilns, and announced criminal investigations against six. China's economy set to overtake Germany China's economy grew so rapidly in the first half of 2007 that it is likely to overtake Germany as the world's third-largest by the end of this year, analysts say. China may float yuan after Games: analyst China may allow the yuan......

Imagethief: Are Chinese journalists too credulous at press conferences? : Journalists everywhere have been guilty of occasional credulity. Nevertheless, it seems to me that China's media is at a rather different state of overall development than Western media. It also carries with it the legacy of having grown quite recently from filling a much different social role than Western media. This is not meant to be a comparative criticism, or a judgment on whether Chinese......

Students top pregnancy hotline list Nearly half the women calling the city's first hotline for unexpected pregnancies are students. Hotline officials released the figures yesterday in a move to promote young people's sexual awareness ahead of World Population Day on Wednesday. Prostate awareness drive goes national Ten Chinese hospitals will kick off the nation's first coordinated research into chronic prostatitis, or inflammation of the prostate gland. Beijing opens first counseling clinic for prisoners A special......

Chinese Communist Party turns 86 China's ruling Communist Party turned 86 on Sunday vowing to make itself stronger, cleaner and more responsive in order to take on fresh challenges and meet the people's new expectations. The party, which boasts 73 million members, needs to enhance "self-construction" in the face of "unprecedented opportunities and challenges" facing China's development, said an editorial in a Chinese newspaper, the People's Daily. China adopts new drinking-water standard China's new national......

FDA: Throw away toothpaste made in China This is in the US. In China, remember not to drink Evian. Two Die, 70 Hurt In Chinese Earthquake At least two, including a five-year-old boy, were dead and about 70 injured when an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.4 on the Richter scale hit Yunnan, a south-western Chinese province, late Saturday. Report: Chinese vice premier dies at 68 - CNN.com Vice Premier Huang Ju, a key......