In terrible news for unmarried hussies nationwide, artificial hymens have been withdrawn from online sale after Chinese doctors warned the perfidious products could cause serious infections. more ›

Taobao has relented slightly in the ongoing e-fued between the massive online retailer and its small sellers, by agreeing to postpone their plans to increase their service fees by nine months and by offering financing of up to 180 million RMB to select shops. more ›

Thousands of small Taobao vendors are engaging in e-activism over a dramatic increase in annual service charges for sellers on the popular online market. more ›

Aw man, before some of us even realized we could purchase wall-jumping services on Taobao, the practice has now been banned! According to a statement by Taobao, they no longer allow the consumer-to-consumer sale of VPNs or IP proxies, or any other software/service designed to scale the Great Fire Wall. Here's a rough translation of their statement, via Penn Olson: "VPN software, or any service that helps to access overseas sites, to jump over the wall, is prohibited from sale on Taobao. Now banned products include VPNs - domestic or foreign (including games) - IP proxies, and VPN software. All those are covered in the new restrictions, so please remove the relevant VPN products from your stores. We encourage members to report all types of contraband/illegal goods. We will deal with your concerns promptly. Thank you for your support and cooperation of/with Taobao. Taobao is more exciting because of you!" And now your internet browsing is less exciting because of Taobao. more ›

These full face masks molded from silicon are now available all over Taobao for the low price of 800RMB! So if you've always dreamed of being a Chinese man, you are one step closer to that dream. more ›

Hey Sina Weibo users, you can now follow Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma! Alibaba is the internet giant behind eCommerce platform Taobao. Ma's inaugural post, tagged "Zen and the art of environmental conservation", has received over 2000 comments. Follow him and us! Not sure how to set up a Sina Weibo account? Lucky for you, the folks over at World of Chinese just wrote you a idiot'snon-Chinese-speaker's guide! And if that's not enough, Digicha's guide has lots of pictures. more ›

These are cool. PINLE's (品乐) Taobao store has loads of slightly contentious shirts, all priced at 45 to 55RMB, and all pretty cool. We particularly like the Iniernet Explorst error message shirt and the 拆 shirt (pronounced chāi, meaning "tear down", and made up of lots of other characters like "communism", "culture" and "serve the people!") more ›

We covered Gap's opening of the first China store right here in Shanghai and now the American retailer is making the news again for another opening, except this time it's a store that is online. more ›

Now this changes everything. Taobao has just launched its own online supermarket at http://chaoshi.taobao.com/ . Currently on trial in Shanghai, the service is expected to go live in Beijing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the upcoming weeks. more ›

In the event that you don't feel like forking over the money for a vpn to skip around the pesky censors, you may want to wrangle a Kindle 3G off a friend/kind stranger because a few giddy net users have discovered that Amazon's reading device is able to access banned sites in China without a problem. more ›

Sure, the World Expo has been auctioning off its parts for a while now, but I haven't paid much attention until this item went on sale: the U.K. Pavilion. You can now bid for a piece of it on Taobao, with all of the proceeds going to charity. more ›

Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant behind Taobao, launched a beta version of it's own search engine, called Etao, last Saturday. The move may be seen as a direct challenge to Baidu, who currently dominate 60% of the search market in China. Described as a "shopping search engine," Etao will also offer a comprehensive search option powered by Microsoft's Bing. With 40% of Alibaba owned by Yahoo, this could be seen as the first big move by foreign investment to fill the hole left by Google.cn's departure. more ›

Egads, who knew there was "terrorism" in the land of Taobao? Apparently, some sellers, mad at new rules that Taobao says makes it harder to fake reviews but they contend is biased against smaller stores, have taken to messing with the system. more ›

Hey all Taobao users! China has announced new regulations this week targeting online payment service providers and, according to Stan Abrams at Forbes, you shouldn't characterize this as just another Net regulation. "It isn't. This is a rule designed to bring online ment services into the banking regulatory framework, where it rightly belongs." Not sure what that means? Luckily, Forbes has published a handy guide explaining exactly how this could affect you - especially if you do business on everybody's favorite internet auction site. more ›

A Beijing divorce court has started allowing evidence other than sperm tests for divorce cases relating to infidelity. As the aforementioned physical evidence is rarely conclusive, most divorce courts' judicial criteria involve assessing the "emotional connection" of the couple. Needless to say, raunchy text messages are definitely a step up. [China Daily] more ›

"I think we're going to need to have chicken for Thanksgiving this year," our roommate told us, faces twisted in dismay. A Thanksgiving traditionalist, she had been adamant about cooking the meal at home for friends rather than head out to any of the many restaurant/take away options other people have outlined. more ›

Our favorite method of buying things online now has its own search engine, and is it just us or does it remind you of Google? As of yet, it only searches for things on Taobao, but apparently it'll include organic searches with "bid-ranked positions." The company said it created the search engine, and blocked search results to Baidu, Google and Yahoo in an attempt to eliminate fraud. Personally, we can't see how it's much different from just searching things on the regular site, but we're intrigued by the fact that it may be offered on mobile phones as well. Buying things on the go? Egads, that sounds dangerous... for our wallets. more ›

There are certain Western traditions that just don't quite translate - customs that the majority of Chinese people don't understand and indeed do not even try to understand because the tradition itself seems preposterous. One such ritual is Halloween. And yet that hasn't stopped the foreign population (and us!) from celebrating it. more ›

Taobao - the place where you can buy everything... even, it seems, babies. An anonymous seller put an infant up for sale on the online auction site yesterday for the low price of 1RMB. Of no surprise to anyone who's read of unwanted babies in China - this one was a girl. more ›

And several of the other GFW-themed shirts available at their store. more ›

Imagine this scenario: You're having a party and you realize the morning of that the one thing that would elevate your party from awesome to super duper fantabulous is... fake mustaches. So you go on Taobao to try and order some... only to realize that if you wanted it delivered today, you should've come up with this idea two days ago. more ›

• Online Market Flourishes in China [NYTimes] "Taobao fever has swept the school Mr. Yang attends, Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College, where administrators say that a quarter of the 8,800 students enrolled operate Taobao shops, often from dormitory rooms. And across China, millions of other ordinary people — recent college graduates, shopkeepers and retirees — are also using Taobao to sell clothes, mobile phones, toys and just about anything else they can find at neighborhood stores and wholesale markets or even smuggle out of factories."
• China turns back Xinjiang plane [BBC News] "An Afghan aircraft bound for Urumqi in China's restive Xinjiang region has been turned back, reports from both countries say. Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported first that the plane had been hijacked, then that it had been the subject of a bomb threat. An Afghan diplomat said the plane's operators had not been told about a threat, just ordered to turn it back. "
• 3,000 China mobsters sentenced since 2006 [UPI] "Chinese officials say more than 3,000 reputed gang members have been locked up or executed for organized crime activities since January 2006. The tally was announced Sunday by the Supreme People's Court and was part of a continuing effort to curb violent crimes and the organizations behind them, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported."

• Secret Meeting Between U.S. and China Broke New Ground on Climate Change [NYT] "Loy said the group was able to delve into the positions of both countries and gain better understandings about the political realities both countries face. Yet as to reaching a global deal in Copenhagen, Loy said, little progress was made."There were things that we learned, but it wasn't a totally radical or surprising conversation. We knew a great deal about China's views before," he said. The discussions were "more informal and occasionally more substantive and frank, but Mr. Xie is a cautious person"."
• Students protest in lead-up to June 4 Tiananmen anniversary [The Australian] "Thousands of students are reported to have protested in the streets of Nanjing, in central eastern China - one of the centres of protests in 1989 - following an incident on Monday night in which government security guards enforcing restrictions on peddlers allegedly attacked classmates who had set up footpath stalls."
• China's top legislator meets with Italian premier [Xinhua] "The Italian leaders expressed the willingness to expand cooperation with China in various fields, saying China's economic growth will hopefully provide new energy for the recovery and rally of world economy. Both sides agreed that the two countries should coordinate their stance on reform of the international financial system and work for an early recovery of global economy from the financial crisis."

Paying off bills here is as easy as going to a convenience store with some cash... but in case you thought even that was too much of a hassle, Shanghai's one of the few cities in China that also allows you to pay online. How? Taobao, of course. more ›

Sure, here in China there's legitimate download sites and there's mp3.baidu.com, but if you've ever wanted to straggle the fence between legality and piracy, there's a way to do that too. Taobao has long been harboring many iTunes store gift voucher hackers, selling $200 USD (1,368 RMB) gift cards for as little as 18RMB. more ›

Ever tried to check out Taobao, but couldn't make heads or tails of it? more ›

Recent actions by the Alibaba Group and Taobao to protect their market share may not be enough given the multi-front strategy taken by search engine juggernaut Baidu. With their profits up by 91% in the last quarter, Baidu seems to be using their financial success to attack other Chinese online markets. more ›

Well, you might want to check out these Chinese website search plugins for your browser. Some work for IE7, too. [Source] more ›

By Benjamin Cohen more ›