Foxconn is back in the news with a vengeance these past few weeks after workers protested and even threatened mass suicide. Watch Jon Stewart's take on the factory, which he struggles to differentiate from an actual prison. more ›

The current wave of strikes and demonstrations continued this week, as more than 100 workers blocking a Tesco store in the city of Jinhua in Zhejiang province. Shoppers were prevented from entering the shop by the staff, who boldly blocked and barricaded the entrances and exits, while holding up banners with messages, including ''We want to protect our rights...Return our blood and sweat money.'' more ›

Thousands of workers in Dongguan, Guangdong Province staged a massive strike against new regulations imposed by their factory management on Thursday. Thousands of workers besieged their factory in Dongguan's Huangjiang Township and blockaded the town's main road. At one point, protesters were said to have numbered over 10,000. Conflicts broke out between riot police and protesting workers as the police tried to prevent workers from approaching the government building. Dozens of workers reportedly suffered head wounds after they were beaten by riot police. more ›

As stipulated by the Shanghai government, employers must now pay their sweaty, toiling laborers a monthly subsidy of 200RMB when requiring them to work outside in temperatures over 35 degrees Celsius, or inside in temperatures over 33 degrees. It's all part of a big push to protect workers from the heat and reduce incidences of heatstroke. Sounds like a good policy. Only problem is, the workers will probably never know about it. more ›

Recently plagued by corruption scandals and constantly overshadowed by completion deadlines, it certainly is easy to forget about the living force propelling China's high-speed rail network forward. We are witnessing the second-largest public works program in history, after the interstate system in America, and the human aspect is all but lost when thinking in numbers like one trillion RMB and 120,000 km.Thanks to Youth Times (年青时报) photographer Wang Xinke, one part of this process, the Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed rail link completed in October of 2010, has been recorded for posterity. more ›

In this video Al Jazeera reports on two elderly Beijing residents who tried to organize protests against evictions in the capital. For these women, who are both in their 70s, this has had far reaching consequences. more ›

Dan Harris of China Law Blog brings us an interesting take on the new pay deal Wal-Mart struck on Friday with the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) in Quanzhou, Shenyang, and Shenzhen. As reported by Forbes, the U.S. retailer operates more than 100 of its namesake stores throughout China and employs 48,589 people. Its new agreement with its employees in Shenyang calls for an 8% pay increase in both 2008 and 2009. Harris remarks that a pay increase of the same amount next year sounds strange, since there's no telling what inflation will be a year from now: "Is this an admission by Wal-Mart that it wasn't paying enough?" he asks. The deal further marks Wal-Mart as "something of a poster child" for the Chinese government's drive to get all foreign-owned enterprises to recognize the ACFTU, Forbes writes, since it comes two years after Wal-Mart allowed the union to organize at its local outlets. "What happened to Wal-Mart is no surprise," Harris adds. He continues:

It is just another step in China's efforts to move away from being a destination for foreign companies seeking super low paid workers. Just as with so much else in China, we are seeing foreign companies getting out in front in terms of going along with what China wants to do with its economy. Domestic companies are and will continue to follow in terms of having to deal with unionized and higher paid employees... anybody who still thinks China will do anything for foreign investment is living in the past. Times have changed and China is getting more and more selective in terms of the foreign (and even domestic) companies it wants.

Way back in 1925, during the heyday of foreign imperialism in Shanghai, discontent was fomenting among the local populace over what were generally considered to be unfair privileges granted to foreigners and Chinese exclusion from the governing Shanghai Municipal Council. The deals the foreign powers had struck up with Manchu officials in the 19th century, suspect from the beginning, had little official legitimacy after the fall of the Qing more than ten years earlier. Tensions reached a boiling point when labor protests at a Japanese factory resulted in an assault and the death of a Chinese employee on May 15th. more ›

Here's an English news link:

CHINESE police have rescued 33 intellectually disabled people forced to work at a building site by slave labour merchants after the apparent suicide of a detainee alerted authorities.

Following up on yesterday's post about China's new holiday lineup for 2008, we now have the official official list of dates, so now everyone knows what Saturdays and Sundays they might be asked to work (and that nonsense starts soon). Here we go: more ›

Well, then: Oops. What last month we said was going to happen, this month was made official. China has scrapped May holiday, one of its three Golden Weeks, and turned three traditional festivals into national holidays. Here's how your official 2008 Chinese holiday schedule now looks: more ›

If you have never seen what a Chinese job fair looks like, you NEED to take a look at this clip. Recruitment fairs usually have more security guards for crowd control and police on standby than other fairs, but it looks like even the organisers of this most recent fair in Jiangxi were taken aback by the turnout. As captured on the clip, a stampede almost broke out but fortunately, it did not. The truth... more ›

We don't feel right doing many concert reviews, mainly because of our relationships with the bands, and the realization after years of live shows that the quality depends as much on the venue, backline, PA, sound guy, etc...as it does the band. Plus we don't like to judge people who are capable of doing things we can't (clarification: we don't like judging people we think are cool, we have no problem judging all you uncool... more ›

Despite the fact that Kevin Rudd - the fluent Mandarin speaking leader of the Australian Labor Party - is widely predicted to romp it in at the Australian Federal election this coming Saturday, it seems he's not taking any chances. The latest salvo in Rudd's "earnestness offensive" according to the Sydney Morning Herald, takes form in a seven-metre billboard of The Great Rudd (see right) that has been suspended above Cameron Road in Hong... more ›

The guys behind CLB, Dan Harris and Steve Dickinson run their own law firm and according to them, they've been working with many of their clients to get into compliance quickly as hungry Chinese lawyers out there already have plaintiffs all lined up and ready to sue. So much for your harmonious society, eh? more ›

This a rough translation of Fan Gui's response to Sun Liping's essay (which we wrote about here): 1. Regarding Sun's first point, I believe that he has ignored a very crucial fact—the growing gap between rich and poor. 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth, how can you say that such a status quo has "flexibility"? While Professor Sun divides the population into urban and rural, does he mean that the urban poor... more ›

Sun Liping is a professor of sociology at Qinghua University, and we recently read a short article he wrote about why Chinese society is going to remain stable. There have been several writers who have written responses to Professor Sun's article, but before we get to those we'll try to translate the gist of Professor Sun's article as best we can. more ›

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences recently published a report about how much income you need in order to be classified as white-collar in various Chinese cities. At the top of the list was Hong Kong, where you needed to make at least 18,500 RMB. As for some of the other cities:The benchmarks in some major cities at the upper end are: 8,900 yuan ($1,194) in Macao, 5,350 yuan ($717) in Shanghai, 5,280 yuan ($708)... more ›

The video includes two images of Kevin Rudd cleverly photoshopped into old communist propaganda posters (yes, the type that you'd find in the Dongtai Lu antique market), and classic lines among the subtitles (which are supposed to the translation for the rubbish Chinese voiceovers) include "Rudd impress and frighten Australian person with his earnestness offensive," and "He unnerve decrepit Howard by deploying clever principle of 'similar difference'. Leader Rudd declares swift and violent Education Revolution." Ingenious. And as the Sydney Morning Herald notes, political parties with their multi-million dollar advertising budgets have a thing or two to learn from guerilla tactics such as these. more ›

There isn't a live music update this week, but it's art shows galore TONIGHT. Three picks that aren't in your conventional Moganshan Lu / Taikang Lu destinations. more ›

Food for thought this Sunday. From Jiang Xueqin & Brian Keeley's "The Unseen China" shot in 2003 (h/t to China Crossroads): more ›

With the dust now settled on last week's APEC summit in Australia, we came on a juicy tidbit of news that either didn't get much mileage in the Chinese press or escaped the news that we read. Shanghaiist reader Fergus Ryan filled us in: more ›

If you haven't noticed (perhaps you are a human ice cube?) it's hot out. Really hot. Today's forecast features a 36C high, which is 97F to the Americans in the audience, plus another 10-13 degrees for the heat index. Yesterday the mercury hit 39.6C, making it the hottest Shanghai day in 63 years. more ›

CNN's John Vause says he's lost 10 pounds in recent weeks as reports of tainted food have come out in China. more ›

Update: EastSouthWestNorth translates a story from Southern Metropolis Daily tracing how the story of the bogus buns was found to be fake, and says kudos to the netizens who raised the following doubts from the beginning: more ›

While in America a non-delivery Chinese restaurant is an oxymoron, in China the most famous restaurants choose not to serve the lazy. However, everything is about to change! more ›

The recent hoopla over poisonous, tainted, and otherwise malignant Chinese exports — toothpaste, toys, and pet food, oh my! — has left us with an unpleasant taste in our mouths (and not just the minty-fresh kind). Industrial malfeasance has become the bane of Chinese commerce, and we have no intention of downplaying the unique brand of terror experienced by a parent who realizes he just gave his kid a lead-addled plaything. more ›

• 3 in US accused of enslaving Chinese acrobats
  Three men enslaved more than 20 Chinese acrobats, feeding and paying them little to work, and confiscating their passports and visas.


• 'Mass incidents' on rise as environment deteriorates
  Chinese people's refusal to accept an ever deteriorating environmental situation has resulted in a rising number of "mass incidents", the country's chief environment official said on Wednesday.


• Becoming Bill Gates' right-hand man
  Showing signs of genius even as a young boy, it was not surprising that Dr Zhang Yaqin would rise to become a right-hand man of the world's most powerful billionaire.

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