There was a time when we took visitors requesting to eat traditional Peking duck to one of the many Duck King (鸭王) restaurants scattered about town, knowing that they'd be getting a decent and passable version of the dish that so famously belongs to our capitol in the north. We always tempered our expectations when it came to finding the crispy fowl fat here in Shanghai. Those days are now gone. After trying Xindalu, we......

The craze for Chinese language learning The Economist: False Eastern Promise: The craze for teaching Chinese may be a misguided fad Ken Carroll: The Economist at its misguided worst The Peking Duck: Is the rush to study Chinese a time-wasting fad? The Pudong petrol station blast Shanghai Scrap: China National Petroleum to Dead Workers: Blame Yourselves. Wang Jianshuo: Diesel shortage caused traffic jam The lifestyles of the rich and famous Sydney Morning Herald: Britney......

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, Recently some foreign correspondents have been detained, harassed and physically roughed up -- two incidents Tuesday alone. The FCCC board thought you'd want to hear about what happened. One of the journalists who experienced problems had not been......

You may remember (one of) 2006's big Chinese internet controversies regarding the alleged British male English teacher blogging about allegedly bonking Shanghai's finest, the enraged response from China's self-styled moral guardian Dr. Zhang Jiehai, and the subsequent online-witch hunt for the alleged perpetrators? Well, get ready for round two. Chinabounder's blog, Sex and Shanghai / 欲望上海, is back. In his first entry since the height of Chinabounder-gate, he's fired a broadside at the Chinese internet......

Shanghaiist has posted before about the controversy surrounding the new high school history textbooks in Shanghai, which were thrown under the media spotlight after an article in the New York Times by Joseph Kahn claimed that the new history books were a big departure from the old books and went so far as to nearly remove Mao from China's history. You can read what the folks over at the Peking Duck thought about it this......

Would you agree with the following descriptions of Shanghai? First this: Across the bar, a Belgian man with his forearm in plaster is talking about when the Armani boutique opened: "You should have seen all the rich Chinese with their pretty girlfriends buying leather jackets - but it's sad," he says, "Shanghai never used to be this hip, so hip it's starting to get annoying, you know what I mean?" Or how about this one:......

Shanghaiist was out in the neighborhood of the Nanpu Bridge taking some photos yesterday, and on our way back, we saw a crowd gathering in the parking lot across the street. We thought it was a fight or argument, and were surprised to see two men laying immobile on the ground. Considering the temperature outside we thought it might have been heat stroke, but judging from the fact that there were two men and that......

That's the headline of a recent post by Bingfeng, a Chinese guy who blogs in English about life in Shanghai, business, politics and lots of other stuff. Here's what he had to say: i took the metro last week and, for the first time, i saw shanghaiese lined up to enter the metro cars. interestingly, most of those who lined up neatly and quietly are young people and some middle-aged ones didn't get used to......

Via Peking Duck and Asiapundit we learned of this posting in the Shanghai Daily: The colorful fate of nearly 6,000 vehicles transporting construction garbage in Shanghai will be decided by an online vote at www.sh1111.gov.cn starting today. The vote will close on February 25, by 9am. The activity aims at changing the appearance of the vehicles, to better fit in with the city's image. The government will award 100 yuan (US$12.42) to 100 voters from......

We meant to write about this yesterday, but decided to play with our dog instead. Blame the pre-holiday malaise. Anyway, now many other blogs have made the same points we wanted to make, so we will summarize ... and then go play with our dog again. Knees have been jerking all over the place with reactions to Google's launch of google.cn, a search engine based in China with results that are -- and Google readily......

Anyone who has lived in Shanghai for more than a few months knows that nothing stays the same here for long. The city is constantly building and rebuilding (especially in Shanghaiist's soon-to-be-former apartment building ... PLEASE MAKE THE HAMMERING / DRILLING / SAWING STOP!). It's always scary saddening maddening neat to see before-and-after photos of city locations. Peking Duck recently made a post called "Shanghai then and now" which featured the reader-submitted photos you see......

If you've been following media reports about North Korea, then chances are you've also heard stories of North Koreans slipping over the borders to China, or trying to scale the walls of embassies in Beijing in order to get asylum. For most refugees, this means ending up South Korea, but don't think that just by making out of the "hermit kingdom" into China means getting to the promised land -- China is quite willing to......