Forbes' Gady Epstein has written up a hilarious satire (complete with pictures!) calling into question what would happen if the devastating BP oil spill off the U.S.' gulf coast had actually happened in China. Would BP CEO Tony Hayworth have been executed for his role in this "atypical ocean event"? Hint: kind of. more ›

• Okay, so this woman’s experience ends up sounding a bit silly, but if you can get past the melodramatic writing there is a lesson to be learned: if you’re uncomfortable eating sharks fin, don’t. Even if you fear you’re being rude to your Chinese hosts about ignoring the delicacy, chances are if you politely explain your qualms about it, they’ll understand and it’ll even make for some interesting dinner conversation. [BBC]
• A Chinese teen has become a folk hero for assassinating a corrupt official everyone in the area hated. [Washington Post]
• Looks like the U.S. isn’t the only one worried about what this Google mess will do to relations. China is also trying to “contain tensions.” [Reuters]

• The best way to show how hot the earth will be (thanks to global warming)? Strip off your pants in public. 20 people did just that in Guangdong. [Treehugger]
• Xinjiang is continuing to lift communications restrictions, including on international calls and *gasp* the internet? [Xinhua]
• Exactly how much have officials swindled out of China? It's hard to say, but a 2004 study places it at $50 billion USD. And this is before the stimulus. No wonder Beijing keeps on holding corruption conferences. [China Media Project]

• Black is White, White is Black [Asia Sentinel] "“Even now I still cannot calm down. Only rage, rage and rage. Only extreme (expletive) rage! I can never imagine how a government, a great nation, which has more or less squeezed itself in on the international stage, and which has earned a bit of status in the international community, can be so shameless, knavish, lawless, unable to tell right from wrong, black from white, turning a victim into an accused, twisting facts and twisting truths - how can such a nation and motherland be so thick-skinned as to tell Hong Kong people to be patriotic?"
• China unveils high-speed railways [BBC] "China has announced plans to build 42 new high-speed railway lines over the next three years. In a breakthrough, China has developed trains that can run on both high-speed and normal lines, said railway official Zhang Shuguang. A 500km/h train will be tested by the end of next year, Mr Zhang said. China will have added 13,000km of high-speed lines by 2012, shortening journey times considerably for the expected seven billion annual passengers."
• Thomas Friedman Demands Communist Revolution [Gawker] "Flat-earther Times columnist Thomas Friedman thinks we should probably "outsource" our form of government to China, where they have streamlined the whole process by eliminating the bit where idiots "vote." No, seriously, he is outright saying that the autocratic one-party Chinese government is superior to our own. There is no equivocation in this line: "There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today." And why are things better in China? Because the current "reasonably enlightened group of people" in charge of China, at the moment, can just impose "politically difficult but critically important policies" like raising gas prices to encourage clean power investment and so on."
• China tip-off 'sparked' fighting [Al Jazeera] "A senior Myanmar official has said that last month's clashes in the northeast of the country were sparked after a Beijing tipped them off about the location of an illegal arms factory. Up to 30,000 people fled across the border from Kokang into northern China during the fighting which followed the raid on the arms factory in the mainly ethnic Chinese region."

About 100 Chinese teachers are expected to arrive at state schools in the United Kingdom (yes, that haven of foreign language education) by next year, but schools which have already employed some of those teachers in their classrooms (which they described as "lovely") have already found problems, such as the following:

"Their lack of familiarity with the English system of discipline, target setting etc is a problem."

"They also tend to have different, perhaps unrealistic, expectations of pupils."

"Concerns are expressed about Chinese teachers' abilities to manage pupils, particularly whole classes or where there is a tendency for students to be disruptive."

The emergence of China as a commercial superpower is, by some way, the most important economic phenomenon of our time. In the last few years, analysts of the global economy have had to rewrite their computer models and recalibrate their slide rules to cope with the People's Republic. more ›

It was in high spirits that Shanghaiist joined BookCrossing last week. After all, we love to read, we dig the ra-ra-sharing spirit of the movement, and we have participated (happily and successfully) in other yay-serendipity collectives. more ›

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