On Tuesday, Moo Ko-suen (慕可舜) was finally deported back to Taiwan after being arrested in Miami on November 9th, 2005. Homeland Security agents found Moo attempting to purchase and export a variety of military parts on China's behalf, including a F-16 aircraft engine for the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, and also an AGM-129 cruise missile. more ›

Remember that secretive missile test that China had last week? Well, it didn't just catch the world by surprise: a lot of people in and around northwest China were pretty spooked by the sudden, unexplained explosion. Naturally, people notice when things in the air blow up: luckily for China's military, though, it seems like a lot of them just thought it was a UFO. more ›

China's been pretty upset at America for the past few days or so over the Patriot missiles that they sold to Taiwan last week. And to show it, China decided to test their new anti ballistic missile technology earlier today. Though it may look like a blatant reaction to US foreign policy, China's foreign ministry swears it wasn't. more ›

• China on Iran (Not the Party Line): Letter from China [The New Yorker] "The most interesting Chinese reaction to the events in Iran is never going to be found in the Chinese newspapers. (The state-run press is, not surprisingly, adhering to the principle that all politics is local, so it has been consistently arguing against any disruption of the prevailing political order. On Tuesday, that meant, for instance: “Iranian Exile Groups Want to Use the Chaos to Overturn the Ruling Government.”)"
• Why size is everything in China [FT] "Big eyes, big noses, big breasts and now humungous Hummers - China seems to be indulging an obsession with size, just when the rest of the world is learning the virtues of moderation. In Shanghai, for example, business is booming on eyelifts, noselifts, chestlifts and other surgery aimed at enlarging classically Asian narrow eyes, flat noses and unobtrusive mammary glands. At the Shanghai Time Plastic Surgery Hospital, Dr Liao Yuhua says business is up 40 per cent since the end of last year - not despite the global economic crisis, but because of it."
• Plywood Infernal [Shanghai Scrap] "I was more than happy when told that - as part of something else I was doing - I would have the opportunity to visit a very large plywood factory in a northern Chinese city that manufactures several types of wood products (for various reasons I won’t go into now, I can’t and won’t reveal the name or location of this factory). Over the years, I’ve visited facilities where safety and environmental conditions were abominable; but I can say, I’ve never left any of them feeling as physically and emotionally upended as I felt after exiting this plywood plant."