Xinhua: Foreign reporters enjoy greater freedom covering China's "two sessions":Andrew Kirillov, Beijing bureau chief of the Itar-Tass News Agency in Russia, appeared joyous when registering to cover China's upcoming "two sessions", not only because he was to witness the important political event again, but he would find it much easier to locate interviewees. "In the past, deputies to the National People's Congress were not easy to contact," recalled Kirillov, who first came to China in......

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......

A man on the inside sent us this Brand Republic story from late last week. If you've ever wondered why bloggers never link to the South China Morning Post or why you don't see any stories from them on Google News, here's why: HONG KONG – South China Morning Post’s online publisher Chris Axberg is departing his role, after failing to agree with SCMP management on the business model of its online platform. Axberg, who......

Some things you were never supposed to hear about ... so keep them to yourselves please! Shhhhh. Fons Tuinstra of China Herald shares a rumour that our former mayor might be sent to the gallows:"He is going to be executed for corruption," said a former colleague I met yesterday for lunch when the issue of Shanghai's former party secretary Chen Liangyu came up. "Of course, they have enough proof he is corrupt himself, not only......

Ching Cheong, the Hong Kong journalist who was chief China correspondent for the Singapore-based Straits Times, is ailing in prison somewhere in the Guangdong province right now. On 22 April 2005, Ching was apprehended by Chinese security agents in Guangzhou, where he was to meet a source who had promised to give him a copy of a politically sensitive manuscript on former premier Zhao Ziyang. It took one and a half years before he was......

New York Yankees sign on first Chinese players. The New York Yankees announced today that they have signed left-handed pitcher Kai Liu and catcher Zhenwang Zhang to minor league contracts, becoming the first Major League team to sign a player from the People's Republic of China with approval from the country's baseball association. China Fines Six Banks for Lending to Stock Purchases China's banking regulator fined six banks for making loans that were illegally......

Remember the Bus Uncle? Maybe we'll call this latest Hong Kong video star the Bus Nephew, or maybe just Bus Bitch. Tian emailed us with the story and a link to the video (embedded) entitled "巴士四眼仔欺負82歲老翁" or "Bus Four Eyes Bullies 82-yr-old Man." We don't understand Cantonese and there aren't any subtitles, but it's not too difficult to get the gist. Here's Tian's summary: It starts with a passenger asking the old man what is......

An unlinkable story from the South China Morning Post relays the chilling tale of Chongqing municipality's Wanzhou district, where the local government has ordered that all pet dogs be put to death because a resident died of rabies. Just when you think being a dog owner in China can't get any scarier ... The Wanzhou district government has issued a directive asking residents in the central city area to have their dogs put down before......

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......

CNET reports, via Reuters and the South China Morning Post, that a courts in a city in Shandong province have been using a computer program to help calculate sentences in more than 1,500 criminal cases: The software, tested for two years in a court in Zibo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Shandong, covered about 100 different crimes, including robbery, rape, murder and state security offenses, the South China Morning Post said, citing......

First up, we have a couple of high-profile political imprisonings. There's the New York Times researcher, Zhao Yan, who has been sentenced to three years in jail for correctly predicting former president Jiang Zemin's retirement, aka "fraud." Then there is blind activist, Chen Guangcheng, who has been jailed for 4 years for pissing off local officials in Yinan, Shandong, after exposing their use of forced abortion as birth control. Officially, he was jailed for "damaging......

Can it be? An AIDS vaccine?. A journalism professor wins a defamation lawsuit against a blog host, one of whose blogs hosted comments that were critical of the teacher's teaching abilities. He won 1000 yuan and a public apology. Winning shows "personal dignity outweighs freedom of speech," the professor, Chen Tangfa, was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency. Is it just us or does that sound like a moronic thing for a......

Shanghaiist was horrified to find another story in the unlinkable South China Morning Post about another planned mass-slaughter of dogs in another part of China: Officials from Jining city in central Shandong province on Thursday said they would kill all dogs within five kilometres of villages where rabies was found, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The measures come in response to the deaths of 16 people in the city from rabies in the past......

The thought of hopping into the Huangpu gives Shanghaiist the heebie-jeebies. Admittedly, this is partly due to the nature of our day job, but ever since the Songhua River chemical spill last year, we've probably had a little too much exposure to China's overwhelming pollution problems. Since then, the media can't get enough of the ickiness of China's pollution problems, and basically has the greenlight to go crazy on reporting on the issue as the......

The phrase “ends at 8” sends us back to that Goa party we ended up at once. Unfortunately that phrase also came up this past weekend in regards to the Female Flower Fest at YYT. Now, we understand that it’s a long and dark walk from that warehouse to the street, but we hadn’t even finished our brisket by 8 pm! We did receive stories of some laowai proposing (like, really -- not just a......

Many American private universities have huge endowments, which are something like a trust fund, or more colloquially a "nest egg," sometimes worth billions of dollars that the universities use for whatever purposes they see fit. The size of the endowment (stop snickering now) is in no small way related to the reputation of the university. For example, Harvard University's is worth a whopping $22.6 billion (second only to the Gates foundation in net worth among......

After seeing this story on the Chinese legislative body, the National People's Congress Standing Committee, deciding not to criminalize sex-selective abortion, Shanghaiist was admittedly surprised that this practice had not actually already been outlawed. Turns out that currently, selective abortion is only in violation of much less stringent family planning regulations which have no clear provisions for any sort of punishment. These regulations do have a significant effect on clinics practicing selective abortion, but still......

A couple items of interest from the ever-unlinkable South China Morning Post's online Mainland news rundown. These are quick hits that often leave many facts open to interpretation: Shanghai Evening News: Sand from Hainan provides ‘golden beach’ for Shanghai The metropolis’ first “golden beach” will open at the end of this month, to be filled with refined sand shipped from Hainan province. Construction of the 1.3 square kilometre artificial beach, which began in October last......

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......

Which should at least ensure that our Friday nights out are slap-free. From the North Korea Times, a piece about censorship: China has launched a crackdown on unhealthy postings on the Internet, targeting sites that feature user-generated content and are popular among young people. The campaign aims to clean up blogs, photos, and audio and video clips that contradict social morality and Chinese traditional virtues, the South China Morning Post reported Wednesday. ... Beijing site......

Have you ever heard of Henrik Stenson? He's a very good golfer, but not exactly a household name (unless, of course, you are from Sweden). He is, however, the highest ranked golfer participating in this week's BMW Asian Open in Shanghai. Ernie Els, Luke Donald and David Howell all pulled out of the tournament, citing one ailment or another. It's leading some to wonder: Are the world's top athletes allergic to Shanghai? You may remember......

The Guardian today reports on another riot in rural China: Thousands of Chinese villagers have clashed with police over access to irrigation water, leading to at least one death and five injuries, the local media reported yesterday. Amid a rise in violent rural unrest, the authorities used water cannon and tear gas to break up an angry protest in the village of Bomei the southern province of Guangdong. According to the South China Morning Post,......

If you wear Adidas Y1 HUF (Fong) shoes, there are a growing number of people who would say, "Yes." CSR Asia's Stephen Frost has been on the story for a while now: More than three weeks ago, I posted a small story about the design on the tongue of the adidas Y1 HUF (Fong) sports shoe. And then a week ago, I noted several thoughtful pieces from US bloggers, but still concluded that the issue......

After reports of 121 skulls being found in a remote ravine on the border of Qinghai and Gansu provinces, western China was already starting to look a little creepy, even if the skulls may have actually been a part of a Tibetan Buddhist ritual, as the unlinkable South China Morning Post reports: Buddhism researcher Zhao Min said some practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism used craniums to "destroy desire and remind us thatlife is unpredictable". Mr Zhao......

And here's the kicker: The tops of their skulls were sawed off. Forensics experts are now trying to determine whether they are human or monkey skulls, but the unlinkable South China Morning Post story makes it seem like there is little doubt that these skulls are human, and that these humans died not too long ago. A source from Gansu's Public Security Department's criminal investigation division said if the skulls are indeed proven to be......

Unfortunately, Shanghaiist was not quite through with lunch when we decided it was a good idea to read a South China Morning Post (subscription only, and therefore unlinkable) story entitled "Woman decapitated by husband". Of course a story like this is expected to be gruesome by any account. But, there are a few key words in this particular story that bump up the queasiness factor: A man decapitated his wife with a meat cleaver yesterday......

Shanghaiist is sick of bird flu. But we're dedicated to weeding out the most interesting and useful stories amid the media hysteria surrounding the whole issue. (And we also have to keep up with it for work ... but that doesn't negate our dedication to our readers.) In no particular order of importance, a quick run through of some of the information floating around this week. Through an interesting feat of logic, China first decided......

China has finally announced its long-awaited (and in Shanghaiist’s opinion very long overdue) first human case of bird flu. While the CNN story does not confirm the flu strain, the unlinkable subscription-only South China Morning Post (which has some of the best, most up-to-date information on bird flu) reports that the boy in Hunan province tested positive for the H5N1 strain. While the boy has successfully recovered after falling ill at the end of October......

We have no idea, but it's happening, according the subscription-only South China Morning Post (via the World Business Council for Sustainable Development): Paying scant attention to the lessons learned by European cities during the past 50 years, China is hurtling with speed and single-mindedness into the car era, favouring it over bicycles and motorbikes. It wants to become a car superpower, like the US and Japan, and sees a booming domestic market as key to......

Hurry, Shanghai! It's almost time to meet the person of your dreams person of the opposite sex who happens to be standing in the closest proximity to you! UPI (via the SCMP) reports: Shanghai will host China's biggest matchmaking event next month when 8,000 singles gather in a park to meet one another ... The event is restricted to young professionals, who will have five hours to search for true love during a dinner and......