By JFK Miller Of course! Xinhua has already called it for the home team (on Christmas Day, in fact): “China is widely expected to beat the United States and Russia to top the medal standings of the 2008 Olympic Games.”......

By JFK Miller Just 200 days away from the Olympics brings this piece of unbridled jingoism from China’s premier news source: “BEIJING, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) -- Just 200 days away, the Beijing Olympics is poised to be the most memorable Games in history.” Now that’s not what you call “managing expectations.” Most memorable? Don’t you think it’d be safer to downplay expectations just a teeny-weeny bit? What if the Olympics turn out to really not......

By JFK Miller The KMT, the party of Chiang Kai-shek, is back in power in Taiwan after a thumping victory over the DPP in last week’s national legislative elections. The elections were the first round of two major national polls, and the KMT also looks set to win the second round in March when the island votes to elect its president. So what does all this mean for cross-straits relations? Most pundits agree there’ll be......

By JFK Miller China Daily columnist Kang Bing thinks Beijing is being unfairly criticized by overseas media in the lead-up to the Games: “… some overseas media are demonizing Beijing's air pollution and traffic problems...” “… the Chinese capital would be lucky if criticism against it ended just there. Beijing has kept its promise to the IOC on press freedom, but some media seem to be asking the host to adopt freedom and democracy according......

Compiled by Shanghaiist Staff Shanghai Eye has gleefully reported the demise of News Views Reviews in a recent post:Rumour has it Shanghai’s NVR magazine, a rip off of the week, is no more. Most nodding dogs agree, this was likely to happen. Owner Thats Shanghai is looking pretty ropey too, and now comes with a "RMB 18" price sticker. Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei picked up the story and put the boot in:The idea of doing......

By JFK Miller So it’s Huckabee and Obama in Iowa. Clearly it’s early days, and neither candidate is a certainty for their respective parties’ nomination for the November presidential election. But it’s worth looking at what both candidates have had to say on the record about China. First Huck. Huck is a Baptist minister turned Republican politician who wrote a best-selling book about his fat-shedding experience entitled Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and......

By JFK Miller You may have heard by now the news that the latest World Bank estimates have China's economy as being about 40 percent smaller than previous WB estimates, ie., a mere US$6 trillion rather than US$10 trillion. So why is this important? Well, it probably won't mean a great deal to the average Chinese, even the extra 200 million who, because of the new figures, are now technically living below the poverty line......

Lost Laowai brings our attention to the following soundbyte of a conversation between an Air China pilot and the control tower of the JFK Airport in New York. In it, the pilot fails to understand anything that the traffic controller was saying and his English was so garbled that he might as well have been speaking in Esperanto -- a language that is deemed so important that China Radio International's website has a version in......

Didn’t take long for our first new year wish to get squashed. On Tuesday, United Airlines won preliminary approval from the US Department of Transportation to operate a daily non-stop flight between Washington, D.C. and Beijing starting this March, beating out proposals from fellow carriers Northwest (Detroit to Shanghai), American (Dallas to Beijing) and our favorite, Continental (Newark to Shanghai). The politician and lobbyist types are cheering the decision. "It means that I probably save......

Ever since Shanghaiist has been in Shanghai, we've liked to visit the Jifeng (季风) Bookstore in the Shaanxi Lu subway stop. There's a surprise waiting for us everytime we go there, and today, there were three interesting things we found:Lonely Planet travel guides published in Chinese: Germany, Europe on budget, and Australia. We didn't leaf through them and so cannot say if they were written by Chinese authors or are simply translations of the English......