"...The more important thing is that during the past ten years, China's legal system has gradually caught up with the rest of the world's, and the Chinese market has been applying international regulations to control itself." more ›

The shiny shitter is currently on display at the 11th World Toilet Summit and Expo that began yesterday in the Hainan provincial capital of Haikou. more ›

Citing WTO rules on trade issues, the United States has issued a formal request asking China to hand over details of how and why it censors websites. more ›

It has been a year and a half since the WTO ruled China's restriction of U.S. books, music and film to be in violation of free-trade laws. Now, at long last, the ruling's implementation this March could possibly see an expansion of the foreign film quota, which is currently set at a flexible 20 per year. The operative word here is 'could.' more ›

While big business helped push America and Europe into accepting China into the WTO, now, rankled by China's increasingly unfriendly economic policies, its withdrawing its support. At least that's what it looks like, according to Daniel W. Drezner at Foreign Policy. China's grown strong, but is now using its strength while "frittering away its geopolitical advantages," and the rest of the world, especially its businesses, are taking note. more ›

• A regional newspaper photoshopped out the label “路政巡查” [Road Administration Patrol] from a vehicle that had hit and killed a 16-year-old in order to distance the accident from the government. People were pretty displeased when they found out. [Chinasmack]
• China has pretty darn good coverage even in its rural areas. Estimates hold that 99.86% of the country's administrative villages have telephone service, 91.5% have internet. [Xinhua]
• In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000, according to Robert Fogel. [Foreign Policy]

Nearly six months after its first detection in Mexico, the H1/N1 virus has only now claimed one of China's own. The victim was an 18-year-old woman in Lhasa, the capital of the far western Tibet Autonomous Region. Admitted to the Maizhokunggar county hospital on Saturday with a cough, sore throat, and stiff muscles, she was pronounced dead at around 3:20AM on Sunday, says WSJ. more ›

• China party scholar hints at Xi Jinping promotion [Washington Post] "A Chinese Communist official on Tuesday held out the possibility that Vice President Xi Jinping could still be promoted to a military position, in a step toward ultimately taking over the nation's top leadership post. Some media had speculated that Xi, who is expected to succeed President Hu Jintao in 2013, would be anointed vice chairman of the Central Military Commission at a party plenum last week, reinforcing his succession claim. However, the plenum closed last Friday with no word of any personnel changes."
• China opens media center for coverage of 60th National Day celebrations [Xinhua] "A media center was opened Tuesday for journalists covering celebrations commemorating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China on Oct. 1. The center, in the Media Center Hotel, will operate until Oct. 2 and will be responsible for providing reception and services for media personnel, such as issuing press passes and organizing interviews. Zhu Shouchen, deputy director of the center, said they had so far received applications from more than 4,500 journalists in and outside the Chinese mainland."
• What China's Hu Would Really Like to Tell Obama [Time] "Summit meetings, in particular those with 20 heads of state in attendance, are usually scripted, staid affairs. That's especially true when these get-togethers involve Chinese President Hu Jintao, whose private persona varies little from his public style. As befits someone who is running the world's most populous country, he is intensely disciplined and extremely cautious. On Tuesday, he will meet one on one with U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City before heading off to Pittsburgh, Pa., for the G-20 summit on Sept. 24-25. This is what a more relaxed Hu might say to Obama, whose first major decision on trade was to slap a 35% tariff on tires produced in China — an action that generated a flurry of stories in the media about the possibility of a U.S.-China trade war..."

• Rape and beatings in a Beijing “black jail” hotel [Black and White Cat] "Last week’s edition of Southern Weekly (Aug. 6) carried an extraordinarily rare article on a subject that is usually off-limits for the mainstream media in China: the “black jails” that operate outside of the law in Beijing, detaining people who have committed no crime and have simply come to the capital to exercise their legal right to petition the central government. The report avoids the term “black jail” and does not discuss the widespread use of these illegal places of detention. Nevertheless, it gives a graphic account of life inside one of them. The spark for this article was the rape of a girl from Anhui province in the middle of the night, six hours after she arrived, by one of the thugs employed by a Henan local official to guard the petitioners in storeroom in the Juyuan Hotel near Beijing South Station."
• U.S. Helicopters to Join Taiwan Typhoon Relief Effort [Bloomberg] "Four U.S. helicopters that can airlift earth-moving equipment may help with relief efforts from tomorrow in Taiwan, where hundreds of people are believed buried under mudslides caused by Typhoon Morakot. A U.S. team is due in Taiwan today with two CH53 heavy-lift helicopters and two SH60 medium-lift models en route, said Chris Kavanagh, a spokesman for the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. embassy in Taipei."
• China Halts Steel-Firm Sale Amid Worker Protest [WSJ] " Protesting steelworkers in China have forced the government to abandon privatization plans for the second time in a month, in a sign of increasing labor activism. Officials in Henan province on Sunday called off the sale of state-owned Linzhou Iron & Steel Co. after some 3,000 workers, demonstrating since Tuesday, briefly blocked a government mediator from leaving the plant, according to the state-controlled Xinhua news agency."