More than half of the 27 journalists imprisoned in China are ethnic Tibetan or Uyghur, says the Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) in a report posted on its website. more ›

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Over at Asia Society, former Shanghaiist editor Dan Washburn has an excellent interview with Mike Chinoy, who served as CNN's Beijing bureau chief from 1987 to 1995 and is currently a Senior Fellow at the U.S.-China Institute at the University of Southern California. In the interview, Chinoy looks back at the challenges that he and other China correspondents faced in getting their work done, and how that contrasts with the situation today. more ›

If you think those pictures we just showed you earlier aren't crazy enough, here's more. A Chinese journalist gets soaked while reporting at the Qiantang River as a wave comes crashing on her . more ›

CNN correspondent John Vause (@vausecnn) tweets: "Been followed by police all day, now being kicked out of our hotel, local officials making it tough to report this school attack story." more ›

Those of you who have been in Shanghai for a while will remember food writer Jarrett Wrisley, who started out at That's Shanghai and later helmed SH Mag's food column (he also wrote for Shanghaiist -- very briefly). In his latest column over at the Atlantic, Wrisley writes about the existential crisis he experienced late last year when he realised that the "best job in the world" (food writing) wasn't a real job anymore because "[f]ood magazines were floundering", "[e]ditors backpedaling" and “I had more outstanding payments from publications than I had money in my bank account”. And with that, he decided to take the plunge and start a bar and restaurant in Bangkok, where he is now based. The bar will serve Thai food, "mostly the sort you'd eat on the street." From all of us at Shanghaiist, good luck, Jarrett! more ›

Coming hot on the heels of previous reports, more info has been released regarding the recent emails sent to journalists in China containing malware. It seems whoever is sending the emails has been targeting Chinese employees of major media organizations, hooking the reader’s interest by detailing a possible trip to China to research China’s role in the global economy. more ›

Wow. According to Thomas Crampton and the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents' Club, somebody out there is targeting journalists with emails containing malicious viruses. more ›

Three Uighur have been sentenced in the wake of the recent mysterious syringe attacks in Xinjiang, but their jail terms have not eased the tension between the Uighur minority and the Han Chinese majority or addressed the controversy surrounding the case in the first place. more ›

That's what the Washington Post reported. Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two jailed American journalists, were working on a story about the trafficking of North Korean women in the border area of China and North Korea when they were detained. As you've no doubt heard, the two journalists have been sentenced to 12 years in a N. Korean labor camp, while people and governments around the world try their best to secure their release. more ›

Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were detained by North Korean while filming along the China-DPRK border in March, are now set to face trial for their “crimes.” Pyongyang has said that after an investigation into the matter, the women have been charged with illegally crossing the border and could face up to five years in prison if convicted of espionage. Both women were working for Current TV, a Al Gore-funded “youth” cable news channel in the United States. Source: BBC more ›

North Korea has confirmed that it's detaining two journalists it may have nabbed before they had even crossed the border from Chinese territory. The two women, Chinese-American Laura Ling and Korean-American Euna Lee, were accused of ignoring warnings to stop filming across the Tumen river. more ›

Go here to listen to Terry Gross' interview with Beijing-based (and formerly Shanghai-based) writer James Fallows, The Atlantic's "man in China." Fallows discusses a variety of topics, including China's extensive investment in the United States (see his Atlantic story on the topic here), his new book of China essays (excerpt on Danwei), internet censorship and his recently deceased father. Around the 24-minute mark, Fallows makes some interesting statements about how he thinks Chinese people would have voted in the recent U.S. election — we're curious how his observations compare to what Shanghaiist readers saw and heard leading up to November 4. more ›

Manuela Parrino, an Italian woman who has lived in Beijing for the last 41/2 years said she was "fed up with all the visiting journalists talking negatively about China." She decided to prove China's commitment to free speech during the Olympic Games by applying to protest against pollution, with her 4 year old son, in one of the designated zones. After 9 hours, over 2 days, of officials trying to dissuade her cause, and parrying almost nonsensical questions from the local police officials, Manuela's application was unsuccessful because her son was deemed "too young". more ›

A small group of Tibet activists held a small demonstration at the entrance of the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park not far from the Olympic stadium yesterday around 12.30pm. According to Austin Ramzy of TIME Magazine who was there on site, the demonstration was "hardly a blockbuster". He described the protest as follows:

The first attempt at unfurling a banner on the overpass was apparently a diversionary tactic, so the other demonstrators could barricade themselves behind a row of bikes at the park's entrance. It was a pretty small affair, the sort of thing one would ignore on the streets of New York or London. But because this is Beijing during the Games the police took it pretty seriously. I will give them credit for at least giving the demonstrators a brief window to say their piece, though possibly that was because the cops were just deciding what to do. After about 10 minutes the protesters were all bundled away.

Shanghaiist heartily recommends you read this ESPN interview with Melinda Liu of Newsweek's Beijing bureau, Raymond Zhou of China Daily, Anna Sophie Loewenberg of Sexy Beijing and our very own Maggie Rauch, who's also the founding editor of China Sports Today. This quote by Raymond Zhou caught our attention:

"Personally, I only care about Liu Xiang because I feel Liu Xiang winning the gold medal is tantamount to Barack Obama winning the presidency in the United States. Because it's about more than sports. It's about shattering stereotypes that Asians are intrinsically not good at track and field."

Beijing's tightly scripted, carefully choreographed tour for a select group of 26 foreign journalists from 19 media organisations including the Associated Press, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the South China Morning Post, Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao, Taiwan’s Central News Agency, Al-Jazeera and Russian and Japanese media, was upstaged by 30 young Tibetan monks, some clearly emotional and weeping, who pushed their way into a news briefing at the J*kh*ng Temple, as you see in this video report by Al-Jazeera. more ›

Ching Cheong, the chief China correspondent of the Singapore-based Straits Times that was jailed in China for supposed espionage but freed recently, has made his first statements after his well-deserved rest. He lost more than 30 pounds (13.6 kilograms) during the more than 1,000 days that he was in prison. Here are Ching Cheong's quotes, compiled from various news sources quoted below: more ›

Just three days after Straits Times journalist Ching Cheong regained his freedom, China has released yet another media man — Yu Huafeng (喻华峰), general manager and deputy editor of the Southern Metropolis News《南方都市报》, the Guangzhou-based paper that is one of China's boldest and most critical papers. more ›

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... more ›

Looks like a high intensity lightning bolt hit someone at the China Daily recently that foreign journalists want to know the truth about China, so they decided to do an article to inform their readers, just in case they, erm, didn't already know. Here's an excerpt from the story:French journalist Caroline Puel wants to present the real China to her readers, who are eager to know more about the country with the Beijing Olympic Games... more ›

This is not news the government wants to hear in the run-up to the Olympics, but here's a statement that the Beijing-based Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) just sent out (h/t to the Peking Duck):

Dear Members, more ›

Even as UNAIDS is busy fighting allegations that it had inflated estimates for years in an alarmist effort to raise funds, Beijing has reported that HIV/AIDS cases are up more than 50% so far this year. Angela Sun of Current TV visits a village in Hebei Province (she did not say where exactly) where many of the residents contracted HIV through government-sponsored blood selling schemes. The plight of AIDS villages has been covered by many... more ›

Wondering what the Chinese media are saying about Lust, Caution? We found the following story from the Information Times (信息时报) entitled Survey: Fans rushing to imitate positions in Lust Caution 调查:影迷争相模仿《色,戒》经典床戏 dated 7 Nov on Xinhua — yes, the website everyone goes to for high-quality Chinese journalism. Shanghaiist was so inspired by the spirit of investigative journalism exhibited by this reporter that we decided we had to translate the whole story to share with you. As an aside, it's been said that Chinese journalists just can't seem to get over the full frontal nudity and the brutal sex scenes, and director Ang Lee was supposed to have ticked off a Chinese journalist who insisted on asking questions related to the sex scenes, "Can't you ask a better question?" more ›

So in the meanwhile, Youtube remains blocked. Shanghai blogger John Pasden of Sinosplice informs us that Youtube wasn't the only unlucky fella. Revver.com and Dailymotion.com also appear to be hit. And of course Google Video was never accessible in China to begin with, so that's a no-count. more ›

Even weirder stuff than the Youtube block seems to have been happening, though. Apparently, for a short while on the 17th, before the Youtube block occurred, blogsearch.google.com and live.com were both redirected to Baidu! Blogsearch.google.cn was totally inaccessible. This has been confirmed by Ken Wong (see screencaps on his blog) and other Chinese netizens. Google Blogoscoped reported that yet more exotic pages like search.ibm.com.cn were also being hijacked to Baidu. more ›

So, like we told you, the word "democracy" (民主) was mentioned 60 times in President Hu's report to the 17th Party Congress. The China Media Project fills us in on other top buzzwords. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” (中国特色社会主义) was mentioned 52 times, “scientific development” (科学发展) was a distant second at 38 times, “opening and reform” (改革开放) was mentioned 34 times, just edging out “harmony” (和谐) at 33. “Deng Xiaoping Theory” (邓小平理论) made 10 appearances and former President Jiang Zemin's pet phrase “Three Represents” (三个代表) racked up 9 appearances. See how the occurence of these phrases have risen/fallen over the past Party Congresses (totally useless information that you can try to use to impress your date with). more ›

Remember the little 8 year old girl Zhang Huimin whose father made her run from Sanya, Hainan all the way to Beijing, wearing out 20 pairs of shoes and covering a staggering 3,560 km in 55 days? This time, another girl, Huang Li (黄澧), 10 years old, had her hands and feet bound by her father before being thrown to swim in the chilly waters of the Xiangjiang River (湘江) for 3 hours. Apparently, her father is training her to swim across the English Channel. more ›

Has Cosette finally found a reason to smile in China? more ›