Xinhua News Agency columnist Li Hongmei has done it again with yet another eye-popping commentary, entitled "India's undue worry about China results from inferiority complex". Here are a few gems from the article: more ›

Xinhua News Agency recently blew big money on ads in New York City's Time Square, but apparently people still have no idea what it is they sell. more ›

• WSJ's Japan Real Time Report covers why Japan's new Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, is boring at home and controversial abroad, especially in regards to the touchy subject of Japanese war criminals. Also amusing is the seeming list of demands issued by Xinhua in English at the new leadership.
• WSJ goes over a paper by Harvard University's Dani Rodrik explaining why despite anxiety over the issue, he believes developing countries like China aren't going to overtake the US and Europe any time soon. Rodrik argues that they must first overcome the "convergence gap”, or the gap in productivity levels often determined by their ability to absorb new technologies.
• Andy Hoffman writes a fascinating 5-page portrait in The Globe and Mail of Andrew Dawrant, the Canadian largely considered to be the top English-Chinese interpreter in China today. He is the only Native English speaker ever to be accepted as a Chinese language interpreter in the UN. He started learning at age 8 on his own volition, and by 15 he was couch crashing his way through Hong Kong. What a badass.
more ›

Xinhua News Agency (in English here) says a first ever joint action by Chinese and US police has led to the arrest of a 26-year-old Fujian man, Wang Yong, who it said is the founder of "Sunshine Entertainment Alliance", the world's largest Chinese-language porn ring. more ›

Xinhua News Agency has refuted earlier reports by Hong Kong broadcaster ATV and other foreign news outlets that former paramount leader Jiang Zemin (江泽民) has died. more ›

Yes, we know reporters from Caijing get beat up and writers for Southern Weekend sometimes tend to disappear, but even newspeople from government mouthpiece Xinhua can't seem to get their legal rights protected. In an article on Global Times, Liu Meng writes about reporters who were investigating a case of illegal land use. more ›

Hopefully none of you were planning a trip to Tibet in the next few weeks, because China says you can't go. Next week marks the third anniversary of anti-government riots, and travel agents confirmed Monday that they are not allowed to bring foreign tourists to Tibet during March. No word yet whether they will open it back up in April. According to Chinese authorities, the restrictions are to prevent overcrowding during religious festivals, and because Tibet is probably far, far too cold for tourists at the moment. In their standard, bumbling PR, Xinhua insists "Local authorities do not hope there is something wrong with foreign tourists..." more ›

Shanghaiist's favourite news agency has done it again. Just half a year ago, they were caught red-handed running a gallery of pictures of blackface on Hollywood celebrities, which they were forced to remove after the pictures made international news. Well, apparently they haven't learnt much from that episode. This time they've published a picture of a Chinese student in blackface, standing rather awkwardly behind a flag of South Africa. This was snuck in as the last of a series of pictures taken during the Guizhou-Ireland Youth Culture Week. Maybe they were just hoping nobody would see the picture? Sneaky, Xinhua! Sneaky! more ›

The state dinner held in honor of Hu Jintao has just wrapped up in Washington and loyal Twitterers the world over didn't disappoint. #FakeXinhuaReporter made an appearance, as did Barbra Streisand (see a full guest list here). Here's a few of our favorite tweets from the last few hours: more ›

This must be the biggest shocker of the year. "A lack of state-level legislation, ineffective administration, low-priced cigarettes and deep-rooted tobacco culture have prevented China from meeting its deadline today for a total nationwide smoking ban in all public places, Xinhua News Agency reports." No, no, not the fact that Chinese people smoke like chimneys and the smoking ban did absolutely nothing to change that, I'm referring to Xinhua telling it like it is for once. No word on what the government is going to do next about the utter disregard for the regulation. more ›

State run news agency, Xinhua, and American media giant, NBC, have just agreed to start broadcasting TV services together. Xinhua's TV arm, named China Xinhua News Network Corporation (CNC) was launched last year and already has a presence in many parts of the globe, compiling approximately 800 minutes of bilingual English and Chinese news daily. Both sides have released some boring glowy PR rhetoric about how this joint cooperation will be so very wonderful for viewers across the world but what we want to know is whether it will mean more featherbrained directives? more ›

Less than a week since take-off, China's second lunar probe, Chang'e 2, has hit a spot of bother. Parts of the unmanned carrier fell on to two villages in Jiangxi province, though no casualties have been reported. more ›

The Chinese government yesterday released a white paper on human rights in the country in 2009, highlighting economic, social and judicial improvements, as well as the role of the Internet in helping to safeguard citizens' civil and political rights. more ›

Newsweek seems to think it might be. While their ability to produce impartial news about China is incredibly suspect, they win against Western media by being cheap, cheap and... non-Western. Oh yeah, did we mention cheap? The heavily subsidized service doesn't have the paycheck problems of the AFP, Reuters or AP and, when they're not talking about China, they're actually kind of good. Go figure. Wouldn't it be funny if, in the future, we turned to Xinhua for every piece of news not about China? more ›

There's not much I can add to these pictures except... Holy hell! So I guess turning any celebrity black means widening their nose and lips and giving them a spray on tan? Is this part of your strategy to get legitimized in the eyes of Western media, Xinhua? Stay classy. more ›

It's a problem that never troubled Kim Philby but if it had, it would perhaps have saved MI-5 a lot of embarrassment. Online rumors circulating yesterday claimed that Wan Wuyi, the 58-year-old head of domestic news at Xinhua, may have switched teams after going AWOL following a training course at Oxford University. But Wan has apparently surfaced to refute this, saying he’s actually holed up in London with a bad back. more ›

This week in The New York Times' "Room for Debate" section is a question of whether China can gain journalistic credibility, especially in the light of Xinhua's attempt to introduce a 24-hour news channel. Journalism professor Ying Chan, TV journalist Jim Laurie and Caixin Media editor Hu Shuli share their opinions, which range from "not in this lifetime" to "it's really tough to be a journalist in China." more ›

As part of it's ongoing global media push, Xinhua has launched its version of the BBC and CNN. It's called CNC World (no idea what the CNC stands for). Despite its ambitions, the channel's launch shows it still needs work. As Tania Branigan of the Guardian stated, " CNC World looked dreary beside its domestic rival CCTV, let alone CNN or al-Jazeera. Anchors were efficient but packages lacklustre; many images appeared to be stock footage. Scripts were plodding and voxpops and interviews sparse, with reporters often reading out quotes instead. Even the credits looked dated." Yikes, growing pains, I guess. more ›

A top official at Xinhua news agency has given a rare talk at Tianjin Foreign Students University detailing the cover-up techniques used by state media to manipulate news stories. more ›

We usually dedicate our coverage of Chinese news coverage to China Daily, which tends to have the most excitingly daffy and/or in-your-face-propaganda titles we've come across. But perhaps we just don't look enough at official CCP mouthpiece Xinhua; today's find was quite a doozy. more ›

"Our country's Internet situation is unique. Compared to all kinds of restrictions in foreign countries, China has the most open Internet in the world." «我国互联网形态有特殊性。相对于国外的各种限制，中国的互联网是全世界最开放的。» more ›

Alright, we don't really have anything to say about this, we just love the picture. How can you not? It's one of the most beautiful places in China, and certainly one of the most haunting in the world (though, like Obama's trip, it's been hollowed out and stripped of any sort of deep significance, turning it into a mere symbol). Plus, the press has been following Obama around like lost fauns, waiting for him to make the right face or hand motion that will perfectly capture the essence of the president, in relation to his surroundings in China. It seems that the best thing that can come out of this trip for Obama is a bunch of good photo ops. more ›

We've always marveled at the immense chasm between the Chinese book market and the rest of the world. Of course, issues of translation and appeal abroad have kept the market pretty domestic, but that seems to be changing slowly. Chinageeks makes a great point in response to the coverage of Frankfurt Book Fair: it seems that the only interest the west can muster towards Chinese literature is when the book or author carries some sort of scandal with it, leaving the vast majority of authors and books unnoticed. There's a lack of foreign awareness of books that split the difference between banned-in-China and sterilized-by-censorship that leaves a big old lacuna where books by talented Chinese authors should be. more ›

File this under "Things to take with a grain of salt": Rebiya Kadeer's family in China has apparently written a letter (in the Uyghur language) to the separatist leader, which was then translated into Chinese and English by Xinhua. The letter starts out thusly: "You once were the richest person in Xinjiang just because you were granted a lot of business opportunities and convenience by the Communist Party of China and the Government. But, despite repeated leniency of the Party and the Government, you ended up in prison under other people's enticement. You were allowed to go to the United States thanks to, once again, our government's leniency. You pledged to our government not to participate in any separatist activity before you departed for the United States. You broke your words anyway." If that caught your fancy, read the rest of it here. more ›

A Wenzhou businessman has bought out Yorkshire-based not-for-profit satellite television channel Propeller and will soon begin using the channel to broadcast programs promoting China and Chinese culture in Europe, according to China Daily. more ›

Shoppers in supermarkets across Europe will soon get the rare "treat" of watching short broadcasts from Xinhua while picking out their groceries. more ›

So the Shanghai World Expo organizers have set another date for when they will finally say “No way, no how, you're too late to build your pavilion now”: June 30. more ›

The Boston Globe? Hanging on by a thread. more ›

Those pesky Somali pirates are having a tough couple of days. One day after three of them got picked off by U.S. Navy Seals, another pirate raid was thwarted by a different type of amphibious mammal. more ›

According to Xinhua, a group of journalists and officials were on a Southern Airlines flight to Nanjing in late February when one of them noticed a unusual luminous object traveling alongside their vessel. more ›