The last time an anchor from our favourite TV channel made it to the news, he created such a brouhaha that culminated in the eviction of one coffee company from the Forbidden City. In the news this time is New Zealand-born anchor Edwin Maher who for many years before arriving in China was a weatherman with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Los Angeles Times published a profile of Maher that started it all off. It......

Have you ever wondered what life must be like for someone who is watched everywhere she goes, whether she's eating, drinking, sleeping, shopping? It's the reason why Shanghai photographer Don Yap has tagged her "jailbird" in one of his recent portraits of her. Watch Paris eat xiaolongbao at Nanxiang and sip tea at Yuyuan, and go shopping at Lu Kun's (the greatest PR coup scored yet by any Shanghai-based designer!). The Shanghai municipal government......

The space station, the Olympic pigs and white-collar wages Shanghaiist scans thousands of China headlines every single day, and believe us, we do want to believe all the news we read here in China, but every now and then, we come across something that makes us remind ourselves to take EVERYTHING we read with a great pinch of salt, no matter how authoritative the source may sound. Just yesterday, for instance, China Daily reported that......

Li Yuchun (李宇春) — the "androgynous wonder from Sichuan" who was the first winner of Super Voice Girls (an American Idol-style talent show) — recently gave a concert in Nanjing, and she performed in *gasp* a skirt! Now if you have no clue what an earth-shattering revolution Super Voice Girls represented (for the very first time, viewers were allowed to vote for their favourite singer via SMS, causing some powers-that-be to quake with fear) and......

Back in the office and just can't concentrate on work? Here's a bunch of useless links we gathered that you can entertain yourself with (while pretending to look oh-so-busy)! The Opposite End of China pulls out more old China news from the New York Times archive. Eye-catching headlines include: "Moslems capture West China cities", "Sinkiang capital falls", "Mohammedans capture Urumchi, Nanking may send mediator", "New state is formed by Eastern Sinkiang", and "The Living Buddha......

Excitement is palpable among the crowd as China launched its first lunar orbiter, the Chang'e One satellite (named after the goddess of the moon 嫦娥), half a century after the Russians became the first to set out to space. Related links LA Times: China launches its first lunar orbiter Sydney Morning Herald: China joins Asian race to the moon Euronews: China launches lunar ambitions with moon shot Herald Sun: China sends first rocket to moon......

The Chinese Communist Party, the world's largest political party with some 64 million members opened its 17th Party Congress yesterday. With over 2,200 delegates from all over the nation, the congress was opened by parliament chief Wu Bangguo with the national anthem, followed by a moment of silence marked for Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun and other "martyrs of the revolution" before President Hu Jintao began addressing the......

The Shanghaiist Weather Center is 100 percent sure the answer will be yes (although is Shanghai Circuit really in Shanghai?). It's dry now in the French Concession, but the dark clouds above suggest it won't stay that way for long. Here's the latest weather update from the official Formula 1 website: Thus far Sunday has been dry with a little wind, but no sign of the edge of Typhoon Krosa, which is sweeping through the......

A few weeks ago, an American teenager made headlines by unlocking the American version of the iPhone, which is strictly limited to use on the AT&T mobile network in the U.S. The 17 year old published his work on his blog, forever cementing in place in the annals of nerdery. With the iPhone unlocked, iPhone users can use to phone on any GSM network, as used in Europe and Asia, free them from AT&T's......

Pigs are back in the headlines once again, and with a vengeance. Here is an interesting juxtapose of three pig-related news stories found via the informative China Digital Times. We first read on the Beijing News that a "Zero-Profit Pork Alliance" consisting of about 150 supermarkets in Chongqing that came together on Aug 10 in a bold move to slow down and reverse rising pork prices has all but collapsed: The participating stores did surprise......

Journey to the West: Chinese Tourists Do Europe -- in 14 Days [Spiegel Online] Chinese tourists have recently discovered Europe as a destination. SPIEGEL traveled with a group who covered 11 countries in 14 days by bus, snapping the sights and buying up brand names. A Glimpse of the World: A Chinese Century? Maybe It’s the Next One [NYT] China claims that its economy is growing at 10 to 11 percent a year, and......

The Chinese internet is currently abuzz with all sorts of reports and rumours of what went on at Yao Ming's wedding at Shanghai's Shangri-La Hotel on Monday. Earlier in the day, we called up our friend Sebastien Lathuile, who is floral meister at the hotel, thinking we could get some inside scoop or even pictures of the event. Unfortunately, all he could tell us was that he was not personally involved in the event and......

China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries. Behind the headlines of double digit growth and urban prosperity, two thirds of Chinese still live in the countryside and two hundred million people earn less than a dollar a day. Still, the Chinese government has not signed up to this project. The OLPC XO-1 laptops are......

It has been three weeks since Pope Benedict XVI issued his first letter to mainland Chinese Catholics which stirred up a wide range of sentiments, and since then observers have been eagerly watching for the first signs of Beijing's response to the letter. Well according to new reports that have come in, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Church has "quietly" nominated (note: not appointed) a new bishop for Beijing. In his 40s, Father Li Shan of......

You know how people are always saying Shanghaii isn't representative of China? Here's an interesting juxtaposition of newspaper headlines: China Daily: 131 Killed in South China Floods, 99,000 houses collapsed, 1.2 million evacuated from Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Hubei, Sichuan, Chongqing and Shaanxi. (Where on earth are all those people going? That's a pretty sizable chunk of China right there.) Shanghai Daily: City Waits as Floods Leave Ayis Stranded Immobility in Anhui and Jiangsu are......

China's west swelters under record high temperatures. Westernmost China's Xinjiang region was under a blistering heatwave Sunday, with the mercury hitting as high as 44.8 degrees Celsius (112.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in Turpan city, a local official said. Analysts warn China vulnerable to a Japan-style debt meltdown. Today, China could be ripe for a crisis of its own that might resemble the collapse of Japan's "Bubble Economy" in the early 1990's and have enormous global impact,......

Late last year, actress Zhang Yu made headlines for blowing the whistle on the widespread use of the "casting couch" in the Chinese film and TV industry. The above video reminded us of that, though in this case, the two men are attempting to get the woman, named Shi Mei, to do some kind of nude scene for her music video. They try to persuade her this way and that, while Shi replies that......

It was reported this weekend that the much ballyhooed 25-minutes-from-Shanghai-to-Hangzhou maglev train, which was supposed to be fully operational around 2010, has been delayed. Indefinitely. Which makes us ask, how much longer are we going to have to wait to be ushered into the sci-fi utopia of the 21st century that we spent most of the 20th century dreaming about? Speculation abounds as to what happened. China Herald that the purported concerns of people affected......

For most of the day yesterday, we here at Shanghaiist were wondering if we should post anything about the horrific mass shooting at Virginia Tech, a university in the United States. On the surface, the answer should have been an easy "no" — Blacksburg, Virginia, is nowhere near Shanghai. But news started to trickle in about the suspected killer: He was Asian, possibly Chinese. And then, yesterday morning, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed posted a......

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick......

After conducting a worldwide search for a bride, the world's tallest man, 56 year old Bao Xishun (2.36m tall), has finally found his other half in his native region of Inner Mongolia. He will marry 1.68m tall Xia Shujun who, as you can see in the picture on the right, comes up to just his elbow. Last year, Bao hit world headlines when he used his 1.06m long arms to help save some dolphins who......

What have we, what have we, what have we done to deserve this? While glancing at the headlines on the Shanghaiist Forum yesterday, one headline jumped out at us: Pet Shop Boys. We have to say we were mildly interested: One, Pet Shop Boys are past their prime enough to make a show in Shanghai seem realistic; Two, we are not ashamed to admit that 20 years ago we spent a fair amount of time......

Shanghaiist loves lists. We've embraced the love of lists ever since we picked up Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity. So when browsing the morning news yesterday, our honed powers of list detection and surveillance led us to discover that Shanghai has been included in yet another list. Not just any pokey little list might we add, but The Economist magazine's 2007 Worldwide Cost of Living Survey (WCOL) for expatriate workers. So let's get to the......

Before we get started, Shanghaiist would first like to wish you a happy Chinese new year—may you get rich and get laid in 4705!After being placed under house arrest for two weeks, China is allowing aging AIDS activist Gao Yaojie to travel to the US to pick up an award.Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin has been picked to make the sculpture of Martin Luther King that will be placed in the King Memorial, which will be......

Over a year ago, a Chinese billionaire businessman made headlines when he published a seeking marriage ad in the newspaper where one of the requirements of the woman be that she is a virgin at the time of marriage. This set off a debate about the ethics of such an ad, and the status of women, love, and marriage in a rapidly changing society. You can read the New York Times article for a......

Even though we've long put our public relations days behind us, we can't help but think what a day in the life of a PR executive at Starbucks must be like. They must all have been working overtime lately with the Seattle-based coffee company hitting the headlines like crazy lately. First it was the landmark victory against Shanghai Xingbake, then there was the trans fat issue. This week, little known CCTV-9 news anchor Rui Chenggang......

We were checking something on Alexa's traffic ranking page today and we noticed a collection of country links. We hadn't seen this before so we decided to check out the most popular websites in China. Alexa says, "This list refers to the most popular sites among users in the country, not sites hosted in the country," but it's important to note that Alexa's traffic ranking, while widely used, are definitely not without controversy. According to......

While Beijing's controversial (and halted?) "one dog policy" has been grabbing headlines of late, other dog-related news has been happening out in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. It turns out they've had a dog/rabies problem, and as of December 11 started to kick their campaign into high gear by rounding up all animals deemed in violation of their dog laws. This included killing 30 dogs during the first day, which was accomplished with clubs,......

The Yangtze crocodile is no longer in danger of extinction -- so let's chop off their heads and eat them! Saw this on the China Daily website. Thought we'd share. Bon appetite! More possible headlines here.......

When in China, don't do as the Romans would do ... or something like that. China is preparing to install another bishop without the Vatican's consent. The ceremony consecrating Wang Renlei, vicar general of the Xuzhou Diocese in Jiangsuu, could take palce as soon as Thursday.Are Shanghainese becoming more accepting of people from other province? Accepting enough to marry them.Top 8 models at Beijing Auto Show.This is scary. Another person was electrocuted while taking a......