Diving queen Guo Jingjing (郭晶晶) has been slammed left right and centre for her less than stellar behaviour at a press conference after taking home the silver for the women's 3m springboard final at the "Good Luck Beijing" FINA Diving World Cup where she was edged out by team mate Wu Minxia (吴敏霞). Guo was described by the media as highly "inattentive" at the press conference attended by over 100 local and foreign journalists, looking......

... but it's been found to be a photoshopped fake. From Southern Metropolis Daily [Translation by ESWN]: In November 2007, the 12th annual China International Photographic Arts Exposition was held. Ye Weitang's won a golden award in the Social Lives and Customs section. Beijing Times Photography Supervisor Luo Yonghong raised these doubts: In the photo titled , there were several spots in which digital alterations clearly occurred. A1 and A2 were clearly the same......

Just three days after Straits Times journalist Ching Cheong regained his freedom, China has released yet another media man — Yu Huafeng (喻华峰), general manager and deputy editor of the Southern Metropolis News《南方都市报》, the Guangzhou-based paper that is one of China's boldest and most critical papers. According to AP, this is the Yu is the third journalist to be freed this month. Li Changqing (李长青), a former writer with Fuzhou Daily《福州日报》, was apparently released on......

Shanghaiist has often wondered what China would look like if it had complete religious freedom, as in the freedom to organise and set up religious denominations and associations outside of the five "official religions", and to have all these religious groups enter the free-wheeling marketplace with their books, CDs, video programmes and what not. This weekend, we caught a glimpse of that when a woman claiming to be "Jesus' sister" was arrested in the Guangdong......

For those of you using Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds and wondering why you haven't been able to read any of your favourite blogs, it looks like it might have been GFW'ed. CNet Asia's Little Red Blog says the Feedburner block was only temporary, but we're still unable to access any of our feeds at http://feeds.feedburner.com. It also recommends that we check out FeedSky, which it says is China's number one RSS feed service,......

We told you about some Chinese journalists probing the Fenghuang (凤凰) bridge collapse getting harassed and beaten by local thugs, and EastSouthWestNorth has followed up with a translation of a fascinating first-hand account of the assault on People's Daily《人民日报》reporter Wang Kefei (王克非). He was accompanied by journalists from China Youth Daily《中国青年报》, the Southern Metropolis Daily《南方都市报》, the Economic Observer《经济观察报》 and Oriental Outlook 《瞭望东方周刊》, some of whom were also attacked. The attackers are allegedly men working for......

Oldest profession flourishes in China [Washington Post] No longer limited to well-known bars or a growing number of karaoke parlors, prostitutes are everywhere in China today, branching out onto college campuses, moving into private residential compounds and approaching customers on mobile phone networks. Mattel recalls 9 million toys made in China [NPR] Mattel issues a recall affecting more than 9 million toys made in China, citing magnets that could be swallowed and possible problems with......

We told you about the fake water, we told you about the fake buns, and if you've been reading this blog a while now, you'd have realised by now we told you about a gazillion other fake products as well. Just when we thought we'd reached the frontier, China Daily comes along to tell us that the Beijing Television report we showed you was - well you guessed it - fake! A temporary employee......

We mentioned in this earlier post that Prof. Li Yinhe, the noted sexologist, had just written on her blog that she was being pressured to keep her mouth shut, i.e. not talk about spouse-swapping and not submit proposals to officials about legalizing gay marriage in China. Then we read this opinion piece from Southern Metropolis entitled "A China This Big Cannot Tolerate Even One Li Yinhe?" (偌大的中国怎么就容不下一个李银河？） The piece is not just about Li......

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......

The Southern Metropolis Weekly's latest print edition had an interesting article about videos and movies online. The article profiled and compared some of the people working in this area and analyzed the business models and economics behind each. One of the people profiled was none other than Hu Ge, the Shanghainese man that caused a stir with his parody of The Promise, director-turned-hack Chen Kaige's latest attempt to waste several hours in the lives of......

From Reuters: Yang Bin, the editor-in-chief of the Beijing News -- a tabloid that has often reported on official missteps and misdeeds -- was removed on Wednesday, Chinese journalists and media experts said. Actually, in addition to editor-in-chief Yang Bin, two deputy-editors, Sun Xuedong and Li Duoyu have also been removed. Why did this happen? Feisty, daring and critical newspaper reports on things that the government doesn't want us to hear about, such as the......

Shanghaiist was (un)fortunate enough last December to go to Shangcai prefecture out in Henan, which is where the famed "AIDS village" (艾滋病村）is located. We were shown around the hospitals and schools, always under the supervision of officials. Even though we never paid for the sumptuous meals downed with numerous bottles of beer and rice wine, and were often pestered at night by the hotel staff wanting to know if we needed a "massage", we were......

Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) recently decided to allow two Chinese regional papers, Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News (新民晚报 or Xin Min Wan Bao）and Guangzhou based Southern Metropolis (南方都市报 or Nan Fang Dou Shi Bao) to station journalists in Taiwan. The Taipei Times reported that MAC Chairman Joseph Wu (吴钊燮) had made this announcement during a monthly meeting with reporters. However, this only means that the two regional papers have been invited to apply to send......