We seriously LOVE some of the things we hear about going on in our city. Yes, some of the people we meet here can be harsh and mean, but this story goes to show that humanity still exists in Shanghai. Two weeks ago, Rebekah Pothaar, an executive with Ctrip.com, found that her ayi's husband was in a serious motorbike collision. They went with her to the hospital and found that surgery was going to cost......

Shanghaiist's mailbox has been inundated by emails from all you naughty girls out there asking when the launch party to that Shanghai Hairy Crabs nude rugby calendar will be held. Well, gurls, mark your calendars and save the date! The action happens this Thursday at MAO from 8pm onwards! RMB200 gets you a Solid Vodka open bar, snacks, a goody bag, and yes a copy of that calendar (we know you've been waiting for it).......

Security guards in a Suzhou housing complex found a nude man lying dead on a platform on the second floor while on their regular walkabouts. Police found that the man, surnamed Geng, was a tenant on the 12th floor of the complex and was working in a sauna in the neighbourhood. The night before, a woman living on the 16th floor returned home at around 3am in the morning, only to discover there was an......

It's been about three days since the BBC apologised to the Queen for misrepresenting a sequence in a program in which she appeared to have lost her temper with celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz (the one who took the picture of John Lennon in the nude hugging Yoko Ono). But we find our dear China Daily still linking to the following story on its homepage about the BBC program, A Year with the Queen, which tells......

We're not sure Bai Ling's latest lady parts on display counts as news, given the fact that her private parts are more well-publicized than she is. But, combine the Bai-sexual actress' escapades with Zhang Ziyi's body double's web-search for love; add the biggest dick in China; and throw in a PRC plug for "sexy famous models... touching each other," and we'll take the bait. Bai Shows Her Bits If Bai Ling grosses you out and/or......

Worker beaten to death in strike for unpaid wages An unpaid migrant worker has been beaten to death at a building site in South China's Guangdong Province and hundreds of his workmates who were striking to get delayed salaries were bashed by thugs hired by the building owner. Beijing Olympic venue catches fire A fire broke out on Monday at the nearly completed table tennis venue for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but damage appeared limited......

Late last year, actress Zhang Yu made headlines for blowing the whistle on the widespread use of the "casting couch" in the Chinese film and TV industry. The above video reminded us of that, though in this case, the two men are attempting to get the woman, named Shi Mei, to do some kind of nude scene for her music video. They try to persuade her this way and that, while Shi replies that......

Pornography charges against a 36 year old woman arrested three years ago after taking off her clothes and chatting with other Internet users via webcam have been dropped in Beijing's Shijinshan district after prosecutors found that nude chat rooms were not defined in China's pornography laws. This case is understood to be the first of its kind in Beijing. The news comes amidst the announcement of a new six-month campaign to crack down on online......

These days, Shanghaiist is rarely surprised about anything that happens in China. However, we did think that this news story did come from a little out of left-field. A Henan-based investor group is constructing a 21-kilometre (13 mile) long metal Chinese dragon as a tourist attraction. The dragon's body forms a nine-metre (27-foot) high wall running along a ridge-line, with the dragon's head rising 10-metres (30-feet) above the surrounding land. This project plans to cover......

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists. We start with SFist which broke the -ist record for comments with nearly 500 comments on a post about our Mayor's girlfriend. She responded back on charges that she's not a "girl's girl" and, whoo boy-- the floodgates? They did......

Famed Singaporean photographer Leslie Kee has found himself in the centre of a controversy over the launch of his latest photobook and exhibition, SuperStars, featuring 300 top Asian celebrities — many of them almost nude — a project that has taken him two years to complete. The Straits Times reports that Aaron Kwok's manager, Siu May "accused Kee of releasing a picture that shows an apparently nude Kwok without approval". Apparently, Kwok had posed for......

A Fudan University student jumped to her death from a campus building earlier this week. She was the second Fudan student to commit suicide in a month. Both were female postgraduates.Only 24 kuai for an online nude performance -- but, sadly, the service, based in Changning District, got busted.Will we be forced to pack up our dogs and leave China like these Beijing residents? We sure hope not. But the fact that the thought has......

Last year, we told you about some self-obsessed Chinese netizens who became online celebrities. Just this last week, a few new additions to this Chinese pantheon of Internet idols have emerged that threaten to put Muzimei and Furong Jiejie to shame. We will introduce them to you over the next few days. Two days ago, Yangtse Evening Post broke the story of how a 29-year-old gym instructor at Jiangsu University unwittingly became an overnight internet......

Although the Olympics are still two years away, the Beijing Government has already released new regulations that deal with who will be staying in Beijing and who will be kicked out during the big event. According to this Netease report (in Chinese), different laws are going to be enacted according to migrant populations in different industries during the 2008 Games. There are estimated to be 1 million migrant workers in in construction industry, who will......

Another mugging in Shanghai. This time the victim was British boxer Ricky Hatton. The "gang of thugs" took his Rolex (a real one, apparently) and there was "a scuffle." No information was provided on the location of this encounter, but a friend of Shanghaiist did have her wallet, passport and phone stolen near Changle Lu and Xinle Lu yesterday.Reminiscent of the nude Pam Anderson PETA advertisement controversy here in Shanghai, a naked Britney Spears may......

When we first heard stories of people burning paper condoms at funerals for their dead relatives, we were a little creeped out. OK, maybe more than a little. But, just when things couldn’t seem to get any weirder, they did. Burning paper condoms? Fuggedaboutit! How about some hot, live striptease action at the service? Cyndi, Bambi and Randi (or whatever their Chinese equivalents are) gyrating their young, supple flesh over grandpa Zhang’s cold, dead body.......

From our friends at Danwei.org, we learned of yet another nifty website, search.adsotrans.com. What is it? In a post titled "Cheat sheet for foreign journalists and PR people," this is how Danwei described it: Foreign hacks who don't read Chinese: your life just got a whole lot easier. The beta version of China Search Robot by Adsotrans has launched. It's a bilingual search engine that allows you to search Chinese language sources with English keywords.......

August 13 set a record as the hottest day all summer: 38.6 degrees.Beijing University's EMBA program is so popular and profitable that they're bringing the show to Chongqing. Aimed at execs and entreprenuers in that region, the cost comes out to about 1,250 RMB per day. However, since one of the conditions of enrollment is that your business has to have a net worth in excess of 50 million RMB, these are people that can......

A new traffic website and hotline is going to help drivers avoid the places where traffic is snarled up. Yet 10,000 more cars hit the road every month.Liu Xiang could probably have run the distance from our home to our dinner appointment in less time than it takes for us to get there by bus or taxi. He just set a new world record in the 110 meter hurdles at 12.88.Rental rates at the top......

The China Daily reports that more middle-class Chinese are concerned with image than ever before, giving birth to a small but growing corpus of image consultants: For 2,600 yuan (325 dollars) -- at least three months' salary to most blue collar workers in Beijing -- the image center advises clients on what colors and style of clothes look good on them, how to apply makeup and what hair style suits their face. Style savants can......

San Francisco is proud host of a new reality show called How to Get the Guy that's unfortunately not a descendant of Will and Grace, Queer Eye, The L Word, American Idol etc. Also a biodefence lab is coming to the East Bay and SFist teaches wine pairing. Getting on the wrong train sucks. Getting on the wrong train and becoming the victim of what will later be described as a "stabbing spree" really sucks.......

Miss World, Miss USA, Miss Hong Kong, and now here comes Miss Blogger PRC! Earlier this month, BlogChina, a poupular -- you guessed it -- Chinese blog site held a nationwide beauty contest for female bloggers. Both the public and a panel of celebrity judges took part in deciding the outcome. In addition to the usual “hotness” factor, contestants’ writing/blogging talent also played a significant role, supposedly. One look at the final awards had us......

This Reuters article is strangely titled "Noel Coward's Shanghai Hotel defaced" -- what they are talking about is the "illegal" daubing of Chinese characters with red paint on the walls and windows of the Peace Hotel by the film crew of Ye Shanghai. The film crew claim that they did this with the full knowledge and cooperation of the hotel, especially since the hotel was paid for this.We might not have found this article on......

A couple stories that you may have seen on Shanghaiist recently have ended up in the mainstream media. Earlier this month, tipped by Danwei, we told you of some backward policies involving ayis and buses found on the Shanghai Racquet Club's website. Reuters today picked up on the story some 11 days after it first appeared on Danwei and Shanghaiist. Apparently the Beijing News recently ran a story on the situation -- which has since......

Seattlest saw a house party get senselessly attacked with a shotgun and end in seven dead. A local senator is debated and their version of the big dig is investigated. To truly get to the bottom of it they interview the writer Jonathan Raban. Bostonist has its first birthday party and investigates how to attach more gambling dollars to the Red Sox. Benjamin Franklin is celebrated and Johnny Damon is not. Image by Ethan Bagley......

UPDATE: Chinese government: Sister Hibiscus "must be disappeared"! Some of this is old news, but China Radio International, on its "Chinastic" web page, features several of China's current "online celebrities." These mini profiles include many photos, external links and sometimes audio and video interviews (sadly, none of the AV features worked for Shanghaiist, likely because we use Apple's Safari web browser). Following are intoductions to the blogger celebs, as penned by China Radio International: Furong......

We’re not exactly loath to do some nude swimming here at Shanghaiist. In fact, there are plenty of places we’d go skinny-dipping. You know the pool where Elle Macpherson swims around naked in the film Sirens? That’s one of them. There are, however, locations we’d avoid. These include Amity Island, the Amazon (those piranhas -- ouch!) and anywhere in the northeast of China in winter (shrinkage factor). But it is these very northeasterners (dong bei......

From ChinaTechNews.com: China Unicom announced that it has stopped accepting content from its service provider (SP) Shanghai Huiyang Technology Company because Huiyang was providing pornographic content to mobile phone users. According to Zhou Xiaoping, deputy general manager of the Value-Added Services Department of China Unicom, the management at China Unicom is very concerned with pornography issues and has ordered concerned departments to seriously deal with the matter. Huiyang's alleged pornographic content was included in a......

With forecasts calling for temps reaching 38 degrees -- that's 101 for you Fahrenheit folks ... and damn hot for everyone else -- Shanghai dwellers will be looking for ways to keep cool this coming week. If you don't want to beat the heat in a large air-conditioned shopping mall, it's time to find a good place to swim. But what if your apartment doesn't have a swimming pool? Shanghai's municipal swimming pools tend to......