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03 Mar 09
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The real China redux I HAD the good fortune to recieve a childhood friend and his family in Shanghai over the festive period. Aside from the usual sight-seeing and knick-knack buying, the general feeling amongst the party was that they wanted to see "real China".... |
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03 Mar 09
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Rock the Kashgar AFTER A day and a half or so in the barely tolerable sub-zero temperatures of Urumqi, the time had come to take a 23-hour train to Kashgar, China’s westernmost city close to the frontiers of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. The train eases... |
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09 Jan 09
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Naturally selected THIS YEAR is going to be Charles Darwin's year. February 12 will mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, and despite the best efforts of fellow scientists, theologians or sociologists, nothing - I repeat, nothing - has... |
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09 Jan 09
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Yang Rui's Monologue THE EXECRABLE Yang Rui is the host of CCTV 9's Dialogue, but Monologue would be a more appropriate title as he fritters away yet another valuable half-hour of airtime to prove to the audience how large and throbbing his English vocabulary is. A few... |
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12 Dec 08
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The King is Dead THERE IS nothing like a good political scandal to get the journalistic juices flowing. As soon as state news agency Xinhua disclosed to the world that Shanghai Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu had been dismissed and d... |
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20 Aug 08
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Hua Guofeng (1921-2008) CHINA HAS been plunged into a state of unmitigated indifference on the news that Chairman Mao Zedong's last placeman and food tester, Hua Guofeng, has finally died at the age of 87.
While Deng Xiaoping is regarded as the father of modern China, Hua ... |
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12 Aug 08
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300 pieces of silver are not buried here THE AFFABLE BBC foreign affairs correspondent, Hugh Sykes, suggested in an item on Radio 4's Broadcasting House at the... |
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06 Aug 08
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Big Oil, is our cheque in the post? CLIMATE CHANGE catastrophists routinely accuse their opponents of being in the pay of Big Oil, but in at least a few c... |
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05 Aug 08
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Garbage and the Green Games IN ONE of Beijing's southern suburbs - where a multitude of tenements, industrial units and gated apartment complexes have been built over the last two decades to accommodate the city's ceaseless growth - the local government has been pleading with angry... |
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05 Aug 08
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Me Old China launches countdown clock WE ARE honoured to announce the formal launch of the Me Old China "End of the Olympics Countdown Clock" (TM) to celebrate the glorious day - August 25 - when the armed police officers of Hebei Province return to their day job harassi... |
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05 Aug 08
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21 May 08
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"They must have known" FIRST THE superstitions, and now the conspiracy theories. ... |
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29 Apr 08
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Anthropogenesis LAST WEEK Me Old China had the great pleasure of meeting the articulate and urbane Yvo de Boer, the head of the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who repeated the usual post-apoca... |
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27 Apr 08
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Seeking propaganda through facts GEORGE ORWELL once drew attention to a tendency among certain members of the intelligentsia to id... |
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20 Apr 08
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The whir of bicycle spokes SO, WE once again hear the whir of bicycle spokes as the Chinese government backpedals furiously away, terrified that the great "coming-out party" that is the 2008 Olympic Games might be spoiled by... |
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20 Apr 08
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Poverty and talking frogs THE PEOPLE of the Chinese countryside, like people in all countrysides, are a superstitious lot. Their lives haven't changed very much in centuries, and they are still dependent on a number of vague forces some distance beyond their control, whether it be... |
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20 Apr 08
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Learn to count with the Chinese Communist Party! One of these kids is doing his own thing...ONE"ONE CHINA": |
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18 Apr 08
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The jingoistic genie DESPITE what the government has told us about the unity of the Chinese people as they shudder beneath the waves of foreign hypocrisy and prejudice, dissenting voices do occasionally show through. Unfortu... |
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18 Apr 08
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Shanghai protects environment shock IN 1805, seven of the most powerful pirate groups in China decided to form a federation, whereupon they carved up the coast between them. Eventually, the British Navy turned up, and using Hong Kong as their base to trade tea, silk and opium, they sought... |
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18 Apr 08
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Between the Devil and the Deep Red Sea Review of GENERALISSIMO: Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost by Jonathan Fenby
IT IS sometimes hard to imagine how brutal, desperate, and cruel life was in China in the post-Imperial era, dominated as it was by a gang of competing warlords and... |
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15 Apr 08
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Utopias, histories and lost horizons RIOTS erupt on the streets of Lhasa and dozens of Han Chinese citizens - including at least nine policemen - are killed in the violence. In response, the Chinese authorities send in the troops and blame the "Dalai clique&quo... |
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10 Mar 08
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NPC Special: Transparency, Obfuscation and the Dianchi Lake COVERING the latest session of the National People's Congress this week, your correspondent has been assailed and buttonholed and generally inconvenienced by countless Chinese journalists anxious to hear us confirm how "open and transparent" the... |
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24 Jan 08
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China abolishes 94 laws shock STATE MOUTHPIECE Xinhua said that 92 outdated laws have recently been revoked. We have obtained a list of those laws in full, so here are some of the highlights:
Foreigner Cit... |
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22 Jan 08
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Celebs against the one-child policy WHEN China's family planning tsar, Zhang Weiqing, said that the government is about to strike hard against local celebrities and bigwigs who violate the One... |
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20 Jan 08
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Shanghai Expo Mascot Scandal Shao Longtu, creator of the Shanghai 2010 World Expo mascot, has had a tough few weeks since the unveiling of his “Haibao” character in December. The blue animation was mocked, ridiculed and compared to every... |
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15 Jan 08
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Dam Nation CHINA'S HYDROPOWER sector seems to have given up on the Tiger Leaping Gorge, but its plans for the Nu River appear to be gathe... |
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27 Nov 07
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Three Gorges Damned BELEAGUERED OLD Wang Xiaofeng, the head of the State Council office in charge of the China's Three Gorges Project, has obviously had a very hard time of it of late. The Xinhua news agency cited Wang in |
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25 Oct 07
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Three Gorges: Look Before You Li Peng LAST MONTH, state mouthpiece Xinhua threw the foreign media a bone by suggesting that the Chinese government had finally acknowledged the v... |
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23 Oct 07
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Seventeenth Party Congress Special: China chooses top game show host SO, CHINA'S Seventeenth Party Congress is over, and the "fifth generation" of leaders have been incorporated into the highest political organization in the country.
Despite last-minute claims that neither Shanghai's Xi Jinping nor... |
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21 Oct 07
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Seventeenth Party Congress Special: Down With Confucius THE VICE-MINISTER of Education, Zhou Ji, said last week that China would endeavour to improve the "moral education" of the masses. Such comments are always to be regretted, because almost instantly, the foreign press starts going on about... |
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21 Oct 07
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Seventeenth Party Congress Special: China Opens Up to the Media AFTER watching two dozen reporters from Hong Kong and elsewhere barring the way as the People's Bank chairman, Zhou Xiaochuan, tries to leave a press conference held "on the sidelines" - as the newswires usually put it - of the Seventeenth... |
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17 Oct 07
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Seventeenth Party Congress Special: Who, why, what, where and how? SPECULATION is rife and the foreign media are contradicting themselves every moment. Who will win and who will lose in the current Party and government shake-up, and will we ever be able to tell? Which colossi will bestride the Chinese... |
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08 Oct 07
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Great Expectorations, or How the Olympics Will Change China ONE CAN'T help being impressed by Beijing's efforts to "improve the people" before the start of the Olympic Games next year. According to a superlative article about spit that ... |
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10 Sep 07
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Seeing only the darkness MEDIA BOTTOM-feeders like myself rarely get an opportunity to meet anyone with anything interesting to say. The role takes us to the sort of conferences and forums that our more illustrious colleagues in the foreign media prefer to ignore. ... |
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09 Sep 07
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A brief history of concubinage RECENT ARTICLES in the foreign media have suggested that despite fifty years or so of Communism, odious traditions such as the concubine are making a comeback among China's corrupt politica... |
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05 Sep 07
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On being anti-Chinese HOW WOULD an average bulletin board visitor respond to a suggestion in the foreign media that the Chinese people, en masse, have no manners, and that they are running roughshod through the world's popular tourist sites, s... |
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05 Sep 07
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Literally false ONCE YOU make the (very justified) decision to reject the idea that the Bible is the literal word of God, then it takes a very strange intellectual contortion to then say that the Bible - shaped as it was by barely literate scribes and ambitious community... |
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05 Sep 07
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The Seventeenth Power Struggle THE ALL-IMPORTANT Seventeenth Communist Party Congress is soon to be upon us, and the ongoing power struggles and jockeying for places on the Politburo have created a tidal wave of speculation in the Hong Kong and overseas media. Things are starting... |
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05 Sep 07
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China is too big even for a big book (Review of THE CAMBRIDGE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF CHINA by Patricia Buckley-Ebrey, Cambridge University Press, first published by Running Dog in 2003)"THERE IS nothing inevitable about the results of... |
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05 Sep 07
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Sun Worship (Review of "THE 1896 KIDNAPPING OF DR SUN YAT SEN" by Vidya Sagar Anand, first published on Running Dog in 2004)WHEN SUN YATSEN'S exile from China took him to Britain in 1896, the Chinese revolutio... |
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05 Sep 07
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The Coup at the Beijing News (first published in Running Dog, January 2006)
WESTERN REPORTS have been describing The Beijing News as a courageous, crusading newspaper, cynically punished for taking corrupt officialdom and heavy-handed government brutality to task, but for the most... |
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05 Sep 07
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A game of Jenga played at gunpoint (first published on Running Dog, March 2006)
STUMBLING UP the steps of the Great Hall of the People, caked in sweat after wandering desperately around Tian'anmen Square on an unseasonably warm March morning as he searched for a gap in the police cordon,... |
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05 Sep 07
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Human resource brands for the socialist market-oriented economy AS WE try to hone our US-style journalism skills in the hope that we get recruited by the New York Times, we at Me Old China will now present a local human interest story that wi... |
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05 Sep 07
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We didn't do it on porpoise SO FAREWELL then, the baiji dolphin. "So long and thanks for all the chemical effluent." An international team of scientists sent to patrol the creature's only habitat - the cluttered and contaminated middle reaches of the Yang... |
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05 Sep 07
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The unvariable niceness of being Communist THE PEOPLE'S DAILY, citing President Hu Jintao, said in an editorial today that the fundamental tenets of the Chinese Communist Party have not changed, and that it continues to strive to mak... |
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05 Sep 07
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Wen Jiabao's umbrella MAYBE IT is because we are so underwhelmed by the boilerplate rhetoric about Marxist-Leninist ideology, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory and the Important Thinking of the Three Represents, but close observers of the Chinese political elite are... |
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18 Apr 07
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The China Century THAT VENERABLE old man of letters, Gore Vidal, was invited to Shanghai in March to give the city's culture-starved expats a few lessons in erudition. By the end of his long, improvised talk about American history, he was asked about his feelings... |
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21 Mar 07
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Journalist murder solved, say police JOURNALISM in China is known as the third most dangerous profession, behind coalmining and policing. Proving the point, public security officers in Shanxi Province announced recently that they have solved a case involving the murder of a local... |
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18 Mar 07
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China's TV time machine ONE OF the more curious features about Chinese television is its habit of showing months-old sports footage, often with "live" on-screen titles blazed across obviously not live action. It's all part of the country's rather laid-back attitude... |
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15 Mar 07
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Painting mountains green A CURIOUS story emerged recently, involving a team of workers in southwestern China's Yunnan Province who were ordered to paint a mountain green, presumably in an attempt to improve the area's fengshui. The mountain, in the county of Fumin,... |
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