Yes, yes, we know everyone's tired of the meme already. But Shanghai laowais have finally made their own contribution to the meme and we thought it was a pretty good effort! more ›

Last week, we told you about the visa and financial problems that Shanghai Rego International School was reportedly experiencing. Things are just about to get worse for them because district authorities have refused to continue leasing land to it. This means the school will have to move elsewhere within the city when its current lease is up January 2013. more ›

Nicholas English of City Weekend posed as a parent and walked straight into a parent-teacher meeting Wednesday night at Shanghai Rego International School’s Minhang campus. Teachers at the school, he found, were not here on proper work visas, and the school was having trouble paying them on time: more ›

Shanghai police have begun investigating the case of Ryan Fedoruk, the Canadian scammer and fake landlord who sublet 30 apartments to 80 tenants before fleeing with RMB300,000, after Eva Gao, the local lawyer who is providing victims with legal aid, handed over statements by 45 people who say they have been swindled by Fedoruk. Shanghai PSB's economic crime investigation department said it would investigate the whereabouts of the man after they were done looking through the statements. more ›

Lots of foreign scammers milling about in Shanghai doing their thing these days, it seems. First there was Ryan Fedoruk, the Canadian fake landlord who sublet 30 apartments to 80 tenants before fleeing with RMB300,000. And then yesterday, a Nigerian man was charged at the Shanghai No.1 Intermediate People's Court.for concealing criminal income totaling more than US$265,000, according to the Shanghai Daily: more ›

A popular American English teacher has been helped out with her medical bills by her students and former colleauges at Xiamen University, after she made notice her struggle with Parkinson was financially and mentally engraving on her too heavily. more ›

It's been a couple of days since we told you about Ryan Fedoruk, the Canadian scammer and fake landlord who sublet 30 apartments to 80 tenants before fleeing with RMB300,000, and still, the man is nowhere to be found. Victims tell Shanghaiist they were told by police on their last check a couple of days ago that Fedoruk still hasn't left China. But who knows? Our friend could have walked over a bridge to Vietnam without his passport, or trekked over from Tibet to India, or walked over the frozen Yalu River to the DPRK. more ›

"I know Fedoruk. He is a scammer and he ran away, owing me tens of thousands yuan," said a landlord victim who refused to be named. "He rented the apartments, then he sublet them and disappeared with the money he owed to me and to the poor tenants, but I will find him." more ›

Information continues to trickle in ever-so-slowly on the so-called new social benefits system that China is rolling out for expatriates here. Now, they're saying some -- not all of us! -- will be allowed to retire and to withdraw our pensions here. But who will get it, and who won't? Nobody seems sure. more ›

The Shanghai police has sent out a reminder of its warning to foreigners without work visas not to look for employment in the city. If found out, you'll be fined and deported, they said. more ›

An expensive private kindergarten in Nanjing has been accused of hiring unqualified teachers from the Philippines who are allegedly mistreating kids and asking parents for more cash: more ›

Odd story of the day: A Singaporean man who has been overstaying in Beijing for six years escaped from a Chinese jail term by tampering with his passport so as to get repatriated. The story via the Straits Times: more ›

"For an explosion scene today, we laid over a kilometre of explosives and called up more than a thousand extras, as well as a Chinese aerial video company. The result was a catastrophe as they couldn't even maintain a steady hover height. This has taught me a lesson -- you may want to give domestic companies a platform, but they won't give you face, and eventually you'll still have to do a u-turn and get the laowais in. If you don't have the right techniques, you can practise, but what's frightening is that these guys will tell you they can do anything, and then mess it up when the big moment comes. Right, I'll just suck it up. Next time, I won't believe anyone again." more ›

Andrew Steven, an Englishman who claimed he was robbed in Shenzhen, had been begging around the Guangzhou's Zoo Metro station. The man, who appeared to be in his 40s, was seen sitting with his passport and a request letter at the parterre adjacent to a Subway station. more ›

Ghana's Citi News reports that Chinese women are being trafficked into Ghana to service expatriates working in the country, according to the Accra-based non-governmental organisation Enslavement Protection Alliance West Africa. more ›

The three laowai thieves who were caught on closed circuit television stealing Da Marco's reservation book may have returned the book to the restaurant, but one of them appears to be at it again! This time an Italian restaurant has fallen prey to the kleptomaniac, and they say 4,000 customer contact details have gone just like that. more ›

Hard-hitting journalism of the day, from where else but our favourite city newspaper? Shanghai Daily's Xu Chi has scored a major scoop meeting disgruntled donkey-sized laowais who have confided in her that they never seem to be able to find condoms of the right size in this city: more ›

Multiple sources have told Shanghaiist that the police have been going around bars -- of all places! -- asking foreigners if they've got anything to do with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Apparently, the powers that be are worried that intoxicated laowai's might start to Occupy Shanghai? more ›

The plainclothes "fake police" trying to "lure foreign kids into their cars" two days ago were actually legitimate police officers who simply had a miscommunication with the young students due to their poor spoken English. more ›

Last Saturday afternoon on Weining Road (威宁路) in Xi'an, a Caucasian woman lifted a man lying on the street, while using her limited Chinese skills to ask for help from passersby. After she helped the prone stranger get off his feet, she led him to rest inside a small shop, whereupon the owner of the store told her: more ›

Remember the woman who was stabbed by her own son at Pudong Airport earlier this year -- the one who was attended to by a foreigner when all the other bystanders were prepared to just gawk? Well, the case has finally made it to the courts. Shanghai Daily describes the scene at the courtroom as follows: more ›

"A German, identified as Christian, the sales director of a transport company, had been driving along Qilianshan Road in Baoshan District on the night of August 7. His car was in a collision with a pedestrian. A blood test recorded 3.13 milligrams of alcohol per millimeter, while the limit is 0.8mg/ml. A Greek named Santos, manager of a local plastic company, was found drunk driving without a driving license on Yan'an Road early on July 27. His blood alcohol content was above the limit. And South Korean Lee Chi-Young, a company representative in Suzhou, was stopped on May 21 on Yan'an Road. His blood alcohol content was 0.96mg/ml. Under an amendment to China's Criminal Law effective on May 1, drivers with alcohol levels at or above the legal limit are considered guilty of dangerous driving." more ›

Attention all parents, you'll want to take note of this one! Fake police officers have been caught trying to lure students of the Dulwich College Shanghai into their cars in broad daylight outside Carrefour Jinqiao. The following letter sent by the Deutsche Schule Shanghai and Dulwich College to parents (you'll find the English portion on page 2) was forwarded to us by a concerned reader. If you have kids attending school in Shanghai, make sure they know they should never ever talk to strangers, accept food from them, or enter their vehicles. more ›

"When she jumped into the lake, the drowning woman was about 20 meters away from the pavilion and was sinking. I could only see her hair," Liu said. "But the foreign lady swam quickly to her, held up her chin with one hand and used the other to swim back." more ›

We already know how many people live in Shanghai and how many foreigners live in China, but we've never had a very clear picture of how many foreigners live in Shanghai. Global Times breaks it down for us, with numbers from last year's Shanghai census, the first ever to count foreigners. Here are some of the more interesting figures: more ›

Russell Flanary, Shanghai bureau chief of Forbes magazine, weighs in on China's new "social benefits" for foreigners:

Rather than emphasize the higher costs and taxes, the state paper put a positive spin on the news in a headline saying: “Foreigners set for social benefits.” The “benefits” start on Oct. 15, it said. more ›

A new regulation from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security guarantees the 593,800 foreigners working in China the same social insurance benefits that are granted to Chinese nationals starting from Oct 15:

All expat workers will have the right to the five forms of social insurance: pensions, medical insurance, work injury insurance, unemployment insurance and maternity insurance. more ›

Shanghai-based market research man Shaun Rein says gone are the days when you can just hop on a plane and get a job in China even without speaking Mandarin or knowing anything about the Chinese culture. more ›

Why are the young and prominently cheek-boned of this world always unfairly singled out for punishment? Sigh. Five 20-ish models of eastern European extraction were deported after they were caught strutting runways without work permits in Shanghai's Xuhui district. The five foreign fashion femmes, all in Shanghai on tourist visas, began walking the runway at an "entertainment venue" on Yishan Road in July, in a bid to attract customers. The models reportedly also serviced worked other venues, club-hopping from place to place throughout the course of an evening. It's unconfirmed whether the incident is related to the 20-year-old Slovakian model who died in Xuhui early Tuesday morning, though police state the models were discovered during a random check last month. The models left the country after serving a detention lasting several days, and received a fine of less than 1000RMB. more ›

A reader pointed us to this hilarious video, which takes numerous clips of Hollywood actors trying their hardest to muddle through various Mandarin scripts. Some (Michael Jai White as Black Dynamite) do a lot better than others (Bruce Willis). But whether they're actually on point or completely unintelligible, it's all awesome. more ›