Despite earlier protests, there will be a new maglev line between Shanghai and Hangzhou. This week, the local government announced that the construction of this line will start in 2010, three years later than planned. It is supposed to be finished in 2015, when we will be able to go to Hangzhou in just 30 minutes.Things are looking dark on the Shanghai stock market: This Monday the Shanghai Composite Index ended down 5.34 percent, at......

Or, at least, out of the sh*tter. Nearly three years after we first wrote about a toilet-themed restaurant in Taiwan, looks like they're expanding on their growing poopularity (ouch!). Shenzhen has one that's a couple of years old, and the same group responsible for Taiwan's Toilet Restaurant has now opened one in Hangzhou, with more to come. We're hoping they skip our fair city, lest we find ourselves having to review the dump (ooooh, not......

By Benjamin Cohen Everyone's been talking about Moganshan lately, but it was only last weekend that we joined up with a few friends for a jaunt through its bamboo forests. This historic expat retreat, three hours from Shanghai, has enough cool mountain air and shimmering lakes to revive any weary urbanite. While Moganshan has plenty of hotels, we opted for a newly refurbished, carbon conscious cabin by Naked Retreats (and no, it was not that......

A summary of some of the Shanghai public-transportation-related stories making the news lately:The longest ocean-crossing bridge in the world is set to open near Shanghai on May 1. According to the Shanghai Daily, "the Hangzhou Bay Bridge, which starts in southern Shanghai and ends in Ningbo, will shorten the trip between the two cities by more than 120 kilometers". Construction on the bridge began in 2003. Nanjing will soon join Beijing in banning foldable bicycles......

Thanks to the commenters on that last post, especially the one that alerted us to videos of the protests/marches that were on the Taiwan Youtube site. There were two that we found, embedded below. The first one is just a short clip of people walking around during the day. The second is from Xujiahui in the evening, with more chanting, from the evening of January 6. Oh yeah, and to the commenter who mentioned that......

From Boxun.com (you need a proxy) we discovered that there was a maglev-related protest on January 6th. It first started around 11am, around the Xinzhuang/Minhang area, and was dispersed, only to form again sometime around 3pm, this time in the busy Xujiahui CBD. It managed to, in some form, last until 11pm. Protesters carried signs saying "out for a walk" (散步), while other chanted slogans about protecting their homes. The proposed maglev was to link......