The craze for Chinese language learning The Economist: False Eastern Promise: The craze for teaching Chinese may be a misguided fad Ken Carroll: The Economist at its misguided worst The Peking Duck: Is the rush to study Chinese a time-wasting fad? The Pudong petrol station blast Shanghai Scrap: China National Petroleum to Dead Workers: Blame Yourselves. Wang Jianshuo: Diesel shortage caused traffic jam The lifestyles of the rich and famous Sydney Morning Herald: Britney......

Some news about everyone's favorite internet giants:Yahoo! China to become a community based portal: "I’m changing Yahoo! China from a full portal of self-generated content to user-generated content," said Jack Ma, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, speaking at a conference in Singapore. We're not quite sure what this means -- we think it means more stuff like Yahoo! answers, but what we're worried about what there is going to be less of --......

Rumors have it that Yiqu (China's eBay) is no longer a contender and may soon quit the China market. At least Jack Ma, who helped create Taobao, one of China's own C2C e-commerce sites, seems to think so -- and it seems this might be more than just trash talking, since Shanghai based iResearch's new report shows that Taobao has a 60 percent market share. Strangely, it seems that last year the numbers were reversed,......