It looks like China’s getting a sugar rush: this month, chocolate is hitting Beijing in the form of an extravagant three-month-long dedicated theme park, while Shanghai hosts a slightly more modest three-day chocolate exhibition. more ›

• Gosh they're getting them while they're young - elementary school students in Shaoxing now have a chance to join the Chengguan Youth Special Forces and enact justice on street vendors. [Chinasmack]
• Daniel Gross, eat your heart out. Lawrence L. Allen, who worked for both Hershey and Nestlé in China, talks about the chocolate market's rise in China. [Danwei]
• Perhaps they misinterpreted what the public meant when they said they wanted officials with a more "beautiful image"; nearly one-fourth of one plastic surgeon's clients are male officials and their wives. [China.org.cn]

So it seems that Daniel Gross of Slate has finally acknowledged that you can find a chocolate bar in China… well, sort of. The title of his piece is “Chinese Chocolate Mystery Solved!” and the entire intro implies that Gross had been looking for his elusive sweet thing (a, he specified this time, “Hershey’s bar or Chinese equivalent”) in backwoods places, instead of say… Wal-Mart. Only, oh wait, he kind of mentioned that there was a Wal-Mart where he was located. more ›

Daniel Gross of Slate has been over here reporting on the controversial Three Gorges Dam project. And while we can't say anything too bad about his coverage of that - which, while it reads more like a disgruntled travel piece than actual hardhitting journalism, is generally close enough to what little facts we know about the dam that it makes it impossible for us to nitpick - we were surprised by one of his pronouncements: more ›