Gordon Chang, the China skeptic famed for his apocalyptic pronouncements on the People's Republic, begins his latest essay, "China's Unstoppable Billion", with the following anecdote: more ›

Yo dude. I saw that thing you weib'd the other day. What was that about 'let's shave the characters for "Justice" into our back hair and walk around naked down Nanjing Road'? Yeah, that wasn't a good idea, broseph. They're going to find you now - better move to Berlin! I hear they have great medical care and they're not that into non-Germans, but I think they'll make an exception if you have art/literary festival street cred. They're way chill dude, and everyone cool is moving there! more ›

In a country where freedoms are carefully chosen, China's internet has remained one of the few places where individuals can freely operate. Well, sort of: a good analogy would liken the internet here to the wild west, a place where disorder and unbridled individual liberty is always being chased by the law in one way or another. But China's net police seem to have taken a pretty drastic step in their ongoing efforts to tightly regulate the internet. more ›

Remember when text messaging wasn't that big of a deal? Way back before touch screens and T9, when your elders had barely gotten used to having a cellular phone on them? Well, the halcyon days of instant communication technology are long gone - if you're one of the "after 90" generation, you've grown up in constant contact with friends, family and the rest of the world. more ›

There's a lot to protest about in China: ethnic tension in Xinjiang, forced eviction and resettlement, and even gay rights. Now you can add video games to that list as well. more ›

Kung fu movie-star Jackie Chan stirred up international outrage and accusations of racism Saturday with his comment that the Chinese people can't handle too much freedom. more ›

More photos on the Shanghaiist Contribute page. To see your photos on our Contribute page, use Flickr and tag your photos “shanghaiist”. Or you can email your photos to photos@shanghaiist.com and they will automatically appear on our site (and here). more ›

Yesterday we heard that authorities in Sichuan were offering hush money to parents who lost children in the May earthquake. The story has been circulating widely, and more details about the government’s attempts to placate parents have come to the fore. Not only are officials apparently going door to door offering pay outs of around 60,000 RMB, they’re sweetening the deal by adding more incentives to keep up the harmonious front. The list includes pensions, free life insurance and relaxing the one child policy to allow parents of children disabled by collapsing schools to have another baby. more ›

Great stuff from Beijing history lecturer Yuan Tengfei (袁腾飞). [Subtitles by Chris Pereira, h/t to Danwei] more ›

Hong Kong is known to produce some of the most gung-ho reporters and cameramen around. When these guys cross over to the mainland and come face-to-face with Chinese police, interesting things happen. more ›

It won’t just be athletes and tourists descending on Beijing for the Olympics — an estimated 25,000 foreign journalists will be coming to the city to provide coverage for the event. We’ve already mentioned some of the tools being offered to the reporters, but a new report by New York organization Human Rights Watch released yesterday makes it clear how badly those resources may be needed. The report alleges that the Chinese government has violated its promises that media would have "complete freedom to report” during the games, instead treating foreign correspondents to close observation, intimidation and even violence. Authorities, the report says, have also expanded “forbidden zones” off-limits to journalists, which include Tibet, Gansu, Yunnan, Qinghai and, at times, Sichuan, provinces. Several who have chosen to ignore the boundaries have suffered imprisonment, death threats and beatings. Censorship isn’t limited to professionals — Chinese sources have also been the subject of harassment at the hands of authorities. And netizens may be the next victims of the pre-Olympic media clean-up — the Beijing Communications Authority has issued its first set of warnings, reprinted after the jump. more ›

To help foreign media confront the challenges posed by covering the Beijing Olympics, the International Federation of Journalists has teamed up with Play the Game, a non-profit democracy advocacy organization working in global athletic coverage, to produce a series of helpful tools for reporters on a new website — Play the Game for Open Journalism. The aids include an online discussion forum and a series of background and tips for reporting in China. Most impressive, Play the Game will staff a helpline with experienced Sino-journalists this summer, providing advice on everything from how to get access to events to legal rights and harassment support. Play the Game for Open Journalism states that Olympic coverage is a golden opportunity both for the world to get a comprehensive look at the PRC, and for the PRC to learn to open its own media channels:

For foreign journalists, the Beijing Olympics will be a chance to demonstrate the true standards and social value of the profession they pursue and play a part in the long term progression of Chinese news media. In support of their Chinese colleagues, who do not enjoy the same full media freedom rights, journalists from abroad must strive to maintain journalistic principles of fairness, independence, honesty and responsibility.

In this week's edition of Opinionist, we present to you an excerpt of the speech made by Hong Kong journalist Ching Cheong made at the Society of Publishers in Asia's awards dinner on the 19th anniversary of the June 4 incident. The senior writer of the Singapore-based Straits Times was detained by Chinese authorities in April 2005 for over 1,000 days on charges of spying for Taiwan. In this speech, Ching Cheong spoke at length about press freedom, Hong Kong's core values and his optimism for positive changes in China. For the full speech, please click here. more ›

Xinhua has an interesting opinion piece about the recent unbanning on mobile phones and computers in Cuba. First, the title of the article: 从免于匮乏的自由开始 meaning "Starting with the freedom from want". The political significance of the phrase "freedom from want" comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union address, and comes, as we say nowadays, bundled with three other freedoms: speech and expression, religion, and fear. more ›

They did it last month, and they did it again this time. A second trip organised by Beijing for a closed group of journalists (from Reuters, ABC News, and France's Le Point, among others) to Xiahe, Gansu, has been disrupted by a group of between 15 and 30 young monks who burst out of a building at the L*br*ng Monastery, demanding for human rights, freedom and the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet. From The Guardian:

"The Dalai Lama has to come back to Tibet. We are not asking for Tibetan independence, we are just asking for human rights, we have no human rights now," one monk told the reporters in Chinese. more ›

Cyber dissident Wang Dejia was arrested for "subverting state secrets" (what else?), which means penning too many articles critical of the government. Some of those critical essays pertained to the upcoming summer Olympics:

In recent months, Wang also gave an interview to the Epoch Times, a media group backed by the banned sect F@lun G0ng, in which he claimed the Olympics would exacerbate the sufferings of Chinese people and leave them "living like dogs and pigs." more ›