Hong Kong has officially entitled itself as most developed financial market in the world after it jumped from fourth position to first on the World Economic Forum index of financial market development. Beating out the established UK and US leaders, it has become the first Asian financial center ever to top the index. more ›

Attention Londoners, Mancunians, Liverpudlians, Oxonians and Cambridgians: The chance to chase your dreams is here! Auditions for China's Got Talent are taking place in the UK, with regional winners getting to compete in a grand final in London. Five lucky acts will then fly to Shanghai to participate in the next China's Got Talent competition beginning in November. more ›

@AlexSTaggart "Cameron's sidestep of LXB in China shall forever be known as 'the Beijing duck'." more ›

Despite coming under fire from the Chinese government, a LGBT organization managed to overcome all odds and sponsor an actual LGBT Expo event at the U.K. Pavilion yesterday. more ›

Every day I wake up and find that Vimeo is here is a good day. Here's a video put up by the Shanghai Expo Timelapse Machine about the stunning The UK Pavilion, made all the more stunning by the music and thoughtfully curated scenes. more ›

Oops! It looks like somebody at Downing Street is about to get fired. At a trade agreement signing ceremony between Premier Wen Jiabao, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.K. Trade Secretary Lord Mandelson, the Union Jack was flown upside down. more ›

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."

Gosh. With the third allegation of hacking by the Chinese military into government computers in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom surfacing within two weeks, the guys at the Foreign Ministry have been kept busy! Fons Tuinstra points to past cases of bored teenagers who have successfully hacked into other governments and surmised that the German government could not have said that they had an issue with millions of bored Chinese teenagers! Richard Spencer made the erudite argument that if the "US and other western governments are busy infiltrating the computer systems of foreign governments... it is disingenuous to complain too vigorously when those same foreign governments become good at doing it back". Hmm... more ›

Colleague: Haha, I understand. I'm not a very good CCP member, and not a very bad one either, but you probably can't say I'm a member anymore. I have not been paying my party membership fees for three years now, and haven't been keeping up with the meetings, so they probably struck my name off the list. more ›

It is now official: The Great Wall has been chosen as one of the new Seven Wonders of the World in an unprecedented global vote that drew nearly 100 million internet and telephone voters. In fact it received the most votes among the 21 finalist sites (not very surprising as China has one of the biggest internet populations?). Other sites that have been recognised as new wonders include: more ›

That's the way it was back in the 1930s and 40s. They even had a board game to that effect -- it was called "Shanghai Millionaire" (pictured). We learned about this Monopoly clone via the weekly newsletter of market intelligence firm Access Asia. You can read the current newsletter here, but be warned that it will switch to the next newsletter at the end of the week (how about an archive, guys?). more ›