With recent reports of China suspending fireworks factories' shipments stateside, American expats in the mood to celebrate July 4 with fireworks will be glad they're in Shanghai. This and four other reasons why it's good to be in this city. Wednesday July 2: Quiet Night at Arch 2 With noise pollution even worse than last year in Shanghai, you might feel like you have to search high and low for a little peace and quiet......

Wednesday, June 25 If you haven’t been yet, check out Curry Wednesday at O’Malley’s. Nothing like stuffing your face with Indian deliciousness to get you over the hump, we always say. 2 Taojiang Lu, Changning near Hengshan Lu, 桃江路42号 近衡山路, 地铁1号线衡山路站 Thursday, June 26 128 RMB buys you a free flow of tapas and sangria at Cantine Nouveau Bistro from 7-10. Once you’re satiated, skip over to the Bund to see French hip hop master......

The last installment of Al Jazeera's series on China in the program People and Power investigates the Lhasa Express, the 4000 km train line linking Beijing with Lhasa. Exclusive interviews with members of the Tibetan government in exile and recently escaped Tibetan prisoners echo the familiar refrain that the Chinese government is encouraging a massive influx of Han Chinese to Tibet, but zero coverage of the flip side. In other Tibet-related news: Bloomberg: Acting......

Photo by Vincent Yeh Shanghaiist wishes all its readers a端午节快乐！合家幸福！吉祥如意！Happy Dragon Boat Festival......

This self-orientalizing piece of crap has a few good moments. Since they are few and far between, we'll just tell you what they are. Li Bing Bing plays the white-haired witch, and has the best lines in the movie, like "all men are liars" (this line rendered in Chinese, as 天下男人都是騙子), and, as a retort to Liu Yifei's "I should have killed you, witch" Li Bingbing says something like "I'll kill you first, bitch!". We......

We saw this movie in the theater, in Paris, which it seems is one of the only places where this movie could be seen on the big screen other than at film festivals. The film is actually from a few years back, but was never shown in China, and while we think there are probably DVDs floating around, we can't say that we've seen any of them. The film is about a down and out......

Shanghai filmmaker Shu Haolun (舒浩仑） made a name for himself a few years back with his personal documentary Nostalgia 《乡愁》, an exploration of the nong tangs where he grew up and which are slated for destruction. He's just come out with a new film, a 20 minute fiction film called Young Blood 《少年血》, that also explores 1980s Shanghai life, telling the story of young teenage love. There was a screening last month (sorry to be......

Moroccan food, klezmer music, and dancing in Shanghai's oldest synagogue. It was so good a party the PLA couldn't even stay away. Photos by Simone Engelman......

The gory posters promoting driving safely are not for the squeamish and, although found in public places around China, they are not for children. The drive safety campaigns have chosen an aggressive "show", not "tell"approach here, not dissimilar from the anti-smoking campaigns in some countries, where real images of cancerous lungs, rotted teeth and fetal babies are put on cigarette packs as a warning to smokers. But this drive safety ad campaign, featuring real images......

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom This posting about the politics of pop concerts in Shanghai is mostly about an American duo (Jan and Dean), whose hits included “Surf City,” and the hard-to-categorize Icelandic songstress Bjork, who last week made headlines and drew the ire of the Chinese state by saying the words “Tibet, Tibet” after performing a song called “Declare Independence" (on the heels of which, there was apparent tinkering with Harry Connick Jr.'s song list at......

Fashion designers in Shanghai are a jiao a dozen. What is rare is a designer with an innovative concept — not copied, borrowed or recycled from a different era. Born in Guyana to Haitian parents and raised in Paris, emerging designer Sheilla Constance Sidney arrived in Shanghai one year ago. Living in China inspired her interest in integrating traditional African and Chinese fashion. Habesha, the name of her collection, means 'mixed' in Amharic, the language......

We know he's meant to be quite a bit more brilliant in concert than we saw the other night, but it seems as though a few things conspired to make Harry Connick's Shanghai show this past Sunday less great than it really should have been. For one, the role that the rest of the band played was way too small — it seems that we heard more from Bjork's brass section the week before! And......

It looks like the news embargo on Bjork's "Tibet" incident has finally been lifted and the fallout has begun. We have not found many traces of it, however, in the Chinese mainstream media. Two of the more notable reports we have found among the limited coverage is one by the China News Agency, the lesser known of China's two news agencies, entitled "比约克上海演出引不满 文化部：核实后依法处理" (Bjork's Shanghai performance stirs unhappines, Ministry of Culture to act in......

In the Murinae subfamily of the Rodentia order, there are whole heaps of squeekers that in English we name either (Harvest / grass / stink) mice or (water / whistling / bush) rats with no real logic. The Chinese on the other hand just say screw it; let's call them all 鼠 and see what they taste like. Taking full advantage of this linguistic ambiguity is the Disney corporation whose Year Of The Mouse campaign......

Worst. Wong Kar-wai movie. Ever. Wong Kar-wai movies used to be mini-events in our lives, so we were probably more disappointed than the average viewer. It's hard to believe that My Blueberry Nights (MBN) was made by the same guy who made a gem of a road movie about ten years ago, Happy Together (HT). Both are road movies about lonely souls and wayward lovers, so it's hard not compare the two, but unfortunately,......

Long story short, the place is a zoo, but what'd you expect. Of course, things are made worse by the weather. Here are some pics from the last few days. From what we've been hearing both in the news and in our apartment elevator, the dastardly weather gods have caused big time cancellations and problems. Despite the crowds of cold people and the massive B.O. from the people waiting inside the subway station, things......

Not content with sinking its rabid fangs into our children, our metro system and our optometrists, it seems the sinister cabal behind the Hello Kitty brand now wants to ensnare 50 percent of YOU, dear readers. According to a strangely supine BBC report (proxy needed), a new "macho" Kitty is on its way. It's target: all you menfolk out there. Here's what fell out of the Hello Kitty PR litter tray: "Young men these days......

By Derek Sandhaus From time to time we are overcome by curiosity and decide to wander into private buildings uninvited. Sometimes this requires offering the doorman cigarettes. Other times it's as easy as someone leaving the door unlocked. This week fortune smiled in the form of a work team sloppily leaving the door of the Russian Orthodox Mission Church wide open. You may already be familiar with the Mission Church sometimes referred to as Our......

Above, dear reader, you will see an example par excellence of lazy journalism. The header to this post is about as hackneyed as they come, but then so is the approach of a new periodical we stumbled across this week, the rubbishly titled SLmagazine. Whereas Dickens spent 500 odd pages flitting between London and Paris, SL pompously sees its "visionary mission" as to provide a cultural link between Shanghai and London (SL - geddit?) in......

Migrant workers—let's face it, you either love 'em or hate 'em. There's just no in between. It seems that lately, they've been getting some love from the people, what with Chongqing's official Migrant Worker Day and now with the recent announcement by none other than Premiere Wen Jiabao himself that the popular "Migrant Worker Song" (or "Ode to the Migrant Worker" as we prefer to translate it when we're feeling poetic), a song written by......

Yesterday's copy of the Wall Street Journal has a very interesting observation: that few of China's top political and business leaders these days have white hair:It is possible that could have something to do with genes, but something else is involved, too. For aging men of influence here, the dye job appears to have become as commonplace as the Mao suit once was. Though they range in age from 52 to 67, the most senior......

Business and Economy WSJ: China Takes Additional Step To Cool Economy AFP: Underground money traders flourish on Hong Kong border Religion Xinhua: China-based Christian group prints 50 mln Bibles Reuters: Dalai Lama says sorry he can't meet Pope SCMP: Student leader finds meaning in life with God's will on campus [Subscription] AP: Dallas evangelical Christian seminary offers online courses in Chinese Miscellaneous AP: China Detains 33 in Deadly Mine Blast CNSNews: For China, Even......

Looks like a high intensity lightning bolt hit someone at the China Daily recently that foreign journalists want to know the truth about China, so they decided to do an article to inform their readers, just in case they, erm, didn't already know. Here's an excerpt from the story:French journalist Caroline Puel wants to present the real China to her readers, who are eager to know more about the country with the Beijing Olympic Games......

JinJiang Park, that wonderful wonderland that we saw a few days ago, is, as Swiss James of ISpyShanghai.com discovers, a "rich vein of badly translated English". Reading through this sign just made us go "OMFGOMFGOMFGOMFGOMFG..." The 3,541 members of the Facebook group Save Chinglish - China's disappearing culture (by the way, don't forget to join our group!) will be disappointed that Chinglish is not only not disappearing, it is alive and well! Pictures from ISpyShanghai.com......

Shanghaiist has a soft spot for John Cusack, and an even softer spot for Gong Li ( despite what those eejuts at CCTV might think), so we were mildly excited to read that the two are pairing up to film in Shanghai at some point next year. Okay, the odds of bumping into Ms Gong in our local Lian Hua may be slim, but as the movie is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just before Pearl......

This a rough translation of Fan Gui's response to Sun Liping's essay (which we wrote about here): 1. Regarding Sun's first point, I believe that he has ignored a very crucial fact—the growing gap between rich and poor. 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth, how can you say that such a status quo has "flexibility"? While Professor Sun divides the population into urban and rural, does he mean that the urban poor......

Two nights ago, Canada’s CBC aired a documentary titled China’s Sexual Revolution. It was shot in Shanghai and Beijing using hidden cameras and interviews with academics and pop culture figures. While we haven’t yet seen the thing, it apparently cobbles together AIDS, bar culture, and the manufacture of sex toys to look at how China is “a country that’s quickly becoming X-rated.” In the trailer, the camera pans a Shanghai disco as the narrator solemnly......

Sun Liping is a professor of sociology at Qinghua University, and we recently read a short article he wrote about why Chinese society is going to remain stable. There have been several writers who have written responses to Professor Sun's article, but before we get to those we'll try to translate the gist of Professor Sun's article as best we can. Sun's basic thesis is not that Chinese society is going to get ever more......

One of our favorite Chinese sites seems to have run afoul of the net nanny: vip.bokee.com has been on again off again, but perfectly viewable with a proxy. Using the proxy we saw an article about a list published in a Chengdu newspaper of the top-grossing authors in China, at least based on royalties from the sales of their books. At the top of the list was a Guo Jingming, a young author (born in......

Question: “Who are three people who’ve never been in my kitchen?” Or lately: "Name three people hating on the once mighty US dollar." On Tuesday, Cheng Siwei, the vice chairman of China’s National People’s Congress suggested that China’s foreign exchange regulators ought to consider shifting the country’s massive USD $1.4 trillion reserve into “stronger” currencies. The greenback has been on a downward spiral since 2003. Little did Cheng know that his remarks would trigger a......