Shortly after returning home from a visit to the jail cell of her husband, Liu Xia was detained in a de facto house arrest. The wife of Nobel Peace Prize winner and political reform advocate Liu Xiaobo, made the trip to his northeast prison to visit him under police supervision. While she was not the first to inform him (we have the prison guards to thank for that) she did email The Times with a statement from Liu in which he dedicates the award to the victims of the 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. more ›

There are a record 237 candidates in the running for this year's Nobel Peace Prize, amongst them: the internet (god, that's lame). Even more interesting than the inclusion of an inanimate intangible thing though, at least for us China news hounds, is the amount of Chinese dissidents on the list. more ›

• When will scientists in China win the Nobel Prize? [UPI Asia] "Chen Ning Yang, the Chinese-American Nobel laureate in physics in 1957, remarked during a symposium at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000 that Nobel prize-winning achievement will emerge from the Chinese mainland in 20 years time. I would like to pour cold water on Chen’s crystal ball gazing. Not only has China not accomplished anything close to a Nobel Prize, but also the time horizon for bagging it could be longer, if the country’s education and science and technology system continues to operate at its current standard."
• A North Korea that's hard to get to know [Danwei] "Premier Wen Jiabao was recently in North Korea to broker deals about North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Chinese media was there during the Premier's trip, and included in the entourage was Rose Luqiu Luwei (闾丘露薇), who is an executive news editor for Hong Kong's Phoenix Satellite Television. Rose Luqiu Luwei's series of blog posts came up on the liberal blog aggregator that she set up, my1510.cn, and her own Phoenix TV blog."
• It's tricky for wikis and online encyclopedias in China [CNN] "When Jimmy Wales visited the headquarters of Hudong.com last month, he had one question for its founder: is it possible for Wikipedia to be the number one online encyclopedia in China? "Absolutely not," was the response of Pan Haidong, head of Hudong.com, the world's largest Chinese encyclopedia website."

Not being very interested in physics beyond oohing and aahing at the Large Hadron Collider, there's not much we can say about this that hasn't already been said, so we'll keep our congratulations to Charles K. Kao for sharing a win for the 2009 Nobel Prize short. Kao may hold American and British citizenship, but as we've been told by numerous people in this country, you never stop being Chinese no matter where you go/where you're born. In this case, Kao was born in Shanghai. Which means that he won it for us. more ›

Georgia Popplewell of Global Voices Online has offered a great summary of reactions from the international blogosphere to Friday's announcement that former US vice president Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have won this year's Nobel Peace Prize. more ›

Back in April we did a post on the top ten books favored by the users of Douban.com, a book review and recommendation site. Since that time, tastes have changed and new books have been released so it's about time to take a new look at the site's top ten: more ›

• Officials in Beijing deny ing rumors that 1 million migrants would be expelled from the capital during the Olympics. However, as we mentioned earlier, 50 of the 239 schools for migrant workers have been closed down recently -- in some cases by the police, en masse. On the brighter side, those that get to remain in Beijing will have a spiffy new light-rail system by 2008 to whisk them around from place to place!
• The 8th Yunnan province Minority Games has been kinda of a mess: male athletes using wigs to dress up as women, people fighting, and athletes that only speak with donbei (northeastern) accents.
• After a recent BBC undercover investigation into illegal organ transplants in a Tianjin hospital, Chinese officials replied by sayingthere was no such thing happening.

This story tells us that Shanghai's Madam Tussauds museum will open May 1 and feature 21 wax figures of "celebrities like Jackie Chan." And we always though Jackie was one of a kind. What other celebrities are like Jackie Chan, you ask? Here's a sampling: more ›

People who read Shanghaiist's posts on a regular basis must by now have a pretty good sense of the tongue-in-cheek manner in which most subject matter is approached. Every once in a blue moon, something will come along that is so immediately affecting and amazing that our usual sarcasm-laced tone just seems petty and small-minded. The LifeStraw is one of those things. more ›