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If you follow China business news then you've probably heard or read about the arrest of Huang Guangyu, chairman of the huge Gome home appliance store chain and China's richest man. As Time's Austin Ramzy points out, being named on China's rich list is a widely known as an indicator of future misfortune. But particularly interesting in Huang's ...

Imagethief was interested to see that the ARJ-21, the Chinese regional commercial jet that is currently in development, had its maiden flight on Friday. China has big ambitions to grow its capabilities in commercial aviation, and there is much riding on the ARJ program. So I was not surprised at all to see that the pilots were complementary after ...

If you're interested in the specifics of how online censorship works --and doesn't work-- in China, especially with regard to blogging, check out Rebecca MacKinnon's post and presentation on her recent research into the topic. She and her students posted a range of potentially sensitive content onto a number of Chinese blog service providers and ...

Let's all take a moment to appreciate the Global Times, the nationalist tabloid cousin to the staid People's Daily, which has decided to get indignant about the new Guns'n'Roses album, ''Chinese Democracy''. It's not that the Chinese people don't have some cause to be angry. After all, the title is somewhat provocative, and the title track itself ...

My friend Chua Chin Hon, a journalist and photographer, has posted an excellent photo essay on the Three Gorges area, including photos he has taken over the past several years. Chin Hon has a good eye and has included some excellent notes on the photographs. Check it out.   Chin Hon's other photo collections and essays are here. He also has ...

Long time readers will remember that Imagethief started a blog for CNET on the China technology scene called ''Little Red Blog'' back in 2006, and ran it for about a year. My archived posts can be found under the ''CNET Asia'' tag in my tag cloud, at right. When I ran short of time I handed the blog over to the excellent Rick Martin, who improved ...

Wow. Have a listen. At what point does possibly legitimate advice becomes an abusive harangue? Discuss.

In a country where piracy is a way of life and the circumscription of art by government muddies its social value, the Chinese Ministry of Culture has demonstrated crackerjack legislative priorities by, wait for it, banning lip synching. This follows the well known lip-synch scandal at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and various other ...

Look at the expression on the pearl ox and then ask yourself, where is the girl's right hand?   Because an ox figurine made with 130,000 pearls that conspicuously invokes the Wall Street ''bull'' statue doesn't seem, you know, vulgar or anything on the eve of a walloping recession. (By the way, the recession will be a real test of China's ...

This is one of those unusual occasions on which I feel genuine sympathy for Microsoft, which has a hard time catching a break in China. It's true there was, during the Tim Chen era, a brief flowering during which Microsoft's government relations improved and the company appeared to make real progress licensing Windows to Chinese OEMs. Remember ...