The free admission that began this week was such a great success at the Shanghai Museum that officials have now limited the maximum number of visitors to 5,000 at any time. The other three museums included in the trial also reported a spike in visitor numbers.Xunlei, the Chinese P2P service that is currently being sued by the Hollywood-based Motion Picture Association for US$1 million has said that the Shanghai court was not the appropriate place......

A BBC report (proxy needed) talks about the Confucian schools that are now thriving across China. And why are parents sending their kids to such schools?:"Traditional culture has many advantages that cannot be learned by modern education," says Yu Fang, the mother of a three-year-old pupil. "It emphasises virtues like kindness and self-discipline. It is very good for my son and very good for Chinese society as well." Another mother, Wang Ching, agrees: "This is......

In a recent blog entry, leading sexologist-sociologist Li Yinhe (李银河) has voiced her thoughts on recent porn crackdowns [h/t to Global Voices, translation by Shanghaiist]: 今天在中央12台看到打击淫秽网站的报道，不像看到破获谋杀、盗窃或性侵害的报道那样觉得毫无问题。 Today I saw reports on CCTV-12 related to the crackdown on porn sites. And unlike other reports on murder, theft, and sexual crimes, I thought there was a problem with these reports. 公安人员的侦破非常努力，法律部门的审判严肃认真，他们执法的依据也非常明确：刑法关于打击淫秽品的传播和禁止组织色情表演的条款。 The public security guys work very hard on the crackdown, and the justice department has issued......

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)......

Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) has released its fifth annual Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) which saw American universities take eight of the top ten spots. Harvard University emerged right on top, followed by Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley. Britain's Oxford and Cambridge -- the only two non-American universities to make it to the top ten -- secured the fourth and tenth positions respectively. The top university in Asia was the University of Tokyo,......

Have China Scholars All Been Bought? "Academics who study China, which includes the author, habitually please the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously. " Cartoon police to 'patrol' all Web sites in China "China plans to expand its use of animated police figures into a virtual force symbolizing the government's monitoring of all major Web sites and online forums, state media said Saturday." Eating Human Fetuses in China "The story was about......

With a title like that, who could resist? The Shanghai Daily report in question discusses the recent controversy surrounding noted professor Li Yinhe (李银河) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The article is an opinion piece written by Jiang Yunsheng and says that while he/she respects Li's research on sexuality ... I think some of her opinions on marriage and sex are ill-timed. In fact, the following viewpoints issued a challenge to the......

Shanghaiist went to Big Bamboo early this morning to watch a ref from Uruguay dominate the World Cup match between the U.S. and Italy. Shortly before the 3 a.m. match time, we plopped ourselves down on stools upstairs with a prime view of the bar's only big screen TV. That's when we were told that they were closing the upstairs part of the bar and asking everyone to watch the match downstairs, because they wanted......

Shanghaiist has barely scratched the surface of Virtual Shanghai, which appears to be an amazing resource for anyone interested in Shanghai, history, old photos ... or wasting time at the office. This site has thousands of old Shanghai photos and maps dating back to the late 19th century. The photo above is Fuzhou Lu in the 1920s or 30s. The Virtual Shanghai project is backed by a team of experts from Institut d'Asie Orientale and......

From the China Daily: Wang Jie, a researcher with Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, believes these extreme phenomena in job-hunting are accidental in a transiting society. "In a fast developing society, it is normal for companies to give priority to efficiency with due consideration to fairness. But as China is a country in transition, in the short term many appearance-disadvantaged graduates will suffer setbacks in competition," Wang was quoted as saying. Contrary to what you......

OK, not quite. But Shanghaiist discovered the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences is studying this problem. According to this report (in Chinese), the SASS has released the results of its research into that most profound of subjects -- human happiness (or the lack thereof). They began by interviewing 4,950 residents of Shanghai from all walks of life to find out what makes them happy. One of their astounding results is that professional success and income......

Sexual harassment, which apparently had been legal in China, is now on its way to becoming a crime, according to Xinhua: The draft amendment to China's Law on Women's Right Protection, with provisions to ban sexual harassment, was submitted to the nation's top legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), on Sunday for first deliberation. According to the draft amendment, no one shall be allowed to subject women to sexual harassment and......