The President of China Investment Corp, Gao Xiqing, has made his way to the U.S. with Wei Christianson, CEO and Managing Director of Morgan Stanley China, sparking rumours that the Chinese sovereign wealth fund may buy up to 49% of the beleaguered investment bank. Gao has been scheduled to meet Morgan Stanley executives in San Francisco after the New York-based company plunged 42% after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch sold itself to......

Look what we received in the mail today! It seems that Shanghai authorities are taking a creative step forward in helping residents to consume less salt with this nifty package. Encased is a small plastic spoon that holds 2 grams of salt (as seen inverted at the top of the handle) and on the package, it advises residents to consume only 3 spoonfuls of salt a day to prevent high blood pressure. On the flip......

The World Expo Tunnel, which stretches beneath the Huangpu River, connecting Pudong and Puxi reached its full length on August the 20th: it's 2.67 kilometers long, and located 1.117 kilometers below the river.The soccer World Cup qualifier match between North and South Korea has been moved from Pyongyang to Shanghai, because the North had refused to play the anthem or fly the flag of its opponent (technically the two Koreas are still at war). The......

Yin Guoguan, former deputy director of the Shanghai Housing, Land and Resources Administration Bureau was sentenced to death for taking bribes in return for real estate approvals. His sentence will be suspended for two years. The IHT reports that usually these sentences are commuted to life imprisonment. His wife also got seven years imprisonment for her role in the corruption. Photo by norsenut......

An interesting inside look at how China's state-run spin machine operates from the Sydney Morning Herald. Wonder how they got their hands on this.......

The Shanghai municipal government has flat-out denied that F visa applications have been suspended as earlier reports in foreign media suggested, saying that "the reports did not conform to the truth". While admitting that "some related authorities adjusted the procedures of visa applications ahead of the Beijing Olympics in order to forestall possible security threats", a spokesperson has said that over 500 applications per day have been processed in the first half of this year,......

We know — the on-again-off-again Disney Shanghai deal is getting kinda bawwwrrrriiiing — but latest news has it that the deal could include a major media component that would leave other media companies salivating and give Disney unrivalled access to the highly sought-after Chinese market: The joint venture agreement would give Disney a huge advantage over U.S. media rivals by allowing it to bypass foreign film import quotas and summer and holiday blackout periods, as......

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,......

China Digital Times points us to these two videos of forced evictions by the local government in Jilin Province's Ji'an City (集安市) that are quickly spreading throughout the Chinese internets. The videos, dated May 29, 4am, were found on Sina but subsequently copied by a journalist from Boxun.com (a dissident site) and posted up to foreign video hosting sites since they would soon be censored from the Chinese internet for being too unharmonious. One protest......

In an attempt to prevent any kind of market fluctuations and “sell offs” leading up to the Beijing Olympics, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), China’s securities watchdog, distributed a notice to fund managers, including Sino-foreign joint ventures, warning fund employees not to say anything publicly that could harm the stability of the market. "We (CSRC) found some companies and employees have made improper and inaccurate comments to the media recently, which has negatively affected......

Local officials are still trying to strike the proper balance between transparency and the traditional Chinese methods of information dissemination (or lack thereof) which we have all become so familiar with — namely, "monitoring," "controlling" and "blocking." If the government had been open about the details of the "unusual death" of the girl in Weng'an on June 22nd, could it have prevented the destructive mass protests nearly a week later? That is the question......

The China Digital Times leads us to a story in Jianghua, in Hunan Province, where local party officials are hanging signs throughout the city claiming that some forms of petitioning the government are illegal. The signs declare, "If you petition illegally, the penalty is imprisonment," or "Attack those who don’t petition legally," or “Wage a war for standard, orderly petitioning." The Digital Times suggests that this is the local government's response to a central government......

As usual, Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth is on top of the incident, busy piecing together all the information he can find. He informs us that Weng'an is now a sensitive word, the uncle of the female student is still alive, and the body of the student is still resting in a refrigerated coffin awaiting autopsy despite this popularly-believed story. Soong also observes that the Xinhua story (which all Chinese media are made to carry) opens......

Several thousand rioters have gathered in Guizhou's Weng'an County, torched a police station, ransacked government buildings and overturned police cars, after allegations of a cover-up over a 15 year old girl's death blew up. Ming Pao reports the son of the county's vice-deputy mayor had raped and murdered the girl along with another youth and tossed her body into the Ximen River. Police only detained the suspects for five hours and released them without charge.......

Among driving rain, rough winds and other remnants of yesterday’s tropical storm, the streets of Hong Kong are teeming today with the usual bustle of high-powered businessmen and equally serious shoppers. But there’s something new on the streets of the island metropolis: Chinese patriotism. According to a recent survey by the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong, a 58% of Hong Kongers of Chinese descent now identify themselves as Chinese or Chinese......

Jesus seems to be making a comeback in the PRC. Since the introduction of Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox missionaries to China, many of them to Shanghai, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, Christianity has been a popular minority religion. While practice abated during Mao’s hay day, China has experienced a resurgence in past years. Just two weeks ago, we reported that Orthodox priests were allowed to lead a service in Shanghai for the first time......

For those with little money and fewer scruples, a new business is taking off in town — wedding venue scalping. With this being the popular marriage year of the Olympics and lucky number 8, demand for reception spaces has been at an unprecedented high throughout the city, forcing many to contact the new wedding banquet resale moguls who reserve spaces in advance and charge desperate couples a fee to use them.A Hong-Kong based human......

With the upcoming Olympics and the subsequent global attention, the government obviously wants the nation to look its best, which in China sometimes translates to quashing dissent. Two European-based human rights groups working together as the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders recently published a report declaring that the government has stepped up attempts to quiet dissidents, citing four people arrested for Olympic Games protests, including Hu Jia, who was sentenced to three......

Olympics China Rises: Restricting the foreign press Reuters: China urged to curb executions ahead of Olympics China Herald: Another Olympic mishap: problems in getting tickets Channel NewsAsia: Hong Kong toughens rhetoric to avoid Olympic Games protests ABC News: Athletes banned from Beijing opening ceremony China and the U.S. Blogging For China: America opens its doors, slightly, to Chinese tourists People’s Daily: First Chinese leisure travelers to U.S. greeted by music, hospitality Washington Post: In......

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......

... was when Ali Khameini was elected the new supreme spiritual leader of Iran right after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, but it was also part of a significant event in Chinese history that for now still remains too taboo to talk about. Here are a collection of stories from around the internet which are well worth a read:Blogging for China has translated an amazing set of first-person accounts of the incident: here, here and......

Scene of devastation at Juyuan Middle School (聚源中学) in Dujiangyan (都江堰) The government has announced the start of a massive probe to find out why close to 7,000 schools classrooms have been destroyed and promised that anyone found responsible for shoddy construction will be severely punished. A great many of the casualties we've seen so far are students and teachers who were still in class when the quake struck. From AFP:"If quality problems do......

In the days following the earthquake a number of stories have started surfacing about Sichuan's enormous migrant labor force and their concerns for loved ones back home. Out of the many laborers that have moved into China's rapidly developing urban areas, more come from Sichuan than any other province. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal tells us:According to official figures, eight million migrant workers come from Sichuan. But the official figures exclude many......

Photo by Sabershadezero After a long and sometimes chaotic winter, the recent heatwave has been much celebrated around the city. Outdoor dining is back, the windows are open, and the locals are sporting this season's hottest pajama fashion. But with all the good weather there's a silver lining or, perhaps more accurately, a poisonous death haze. This is that magical time of year where all the tiny particles in the air heat up and......

This just in from the AP:The Chinese government plans to meet with a private representative of the Dalai Lama in the coming days, state-run media reported, after weeks of pressure from world leaders. The official Xinhua News Agency said it had learned of the development "from official sources." It quoted an unnamed official as saying there had been requests repeatedly made by "the Dalai side for resuming talks." The BBC said that the Dalai Lama's......

Ang Lee, in a recent trip to Vancouver BC, talks with the mayor and Vancouverites about a proposed bill that would deny tax money to filmmakers whose content does not reflect Canadian values. On a recent trip to LA, Lee was asked about how new "President" Ma Yingjiu (馬英九）of that province which has been, is, and always will be part of China, will affect the movie bidness there, to which he replied that this is......

We found on the Foreign Ministry website a question that was posed to Jiang Yu regarding Jack Cafferty's China remarks at a Tuesday press briefing and her response:Q: In covering the Beijing Olympic Torch Relay in San Francisco recently, CNN's commentator Jack Cafferty attacked China, saying that Imported Chinese products are "junk", Chinese people are "basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." How do you comment on......

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/microsoft/L_China_Nationalists_on_MSN_Messenger_heart_China'; Like Wang Jianshuo and Eric Hu, we were pretty surprised to see that this is what our MSN messenger looks like at the moment. Says Eric:Over half of my Chinese-Chinese friends on MSN have put the badge on their contact names, in defiance of all the anti-China bullying that they’re undoubtedly reading about in the Chinese newspapers, watching on the Chinese news, and scouring over on the hundreds of blogs and......

Chen Liangyu (陈良宇), the former Mayor of Shanghai and member of China's Politburo, was sentenced to 18 years in prison after being found guilty on taking bribes and abusing power. During the course of the trial in Tianjin, it was revealed that amount of money stolen of Shanghai's pension fund, $480 million USD was 10 times worse than initially believed, somewhere in the neighborhood of 33.9 billion RMB ($4.8 billion USD). If you remember, back......

UPDATE, Friday 9:45 am: The show will go on ... at Windows Tembo. UPDATE, 5:27 pm: This just in via email from the promoter: PRESS RELEASE Dandi Wind will NOT play Shanghai’s Shelter this Friday, April 4. Due to the heightened sensitivities around live music in Shanghai at the moment, Dandi Wind will not play the Shelter this Friday. However, she remains committed to performing in Shanghai if at all possible. For further updates, people......