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Imagethief stumbled blearily to his computer this morning expecting a relaxed scan of the news but found the Chinese Twittersphere ablaze with the news of Google's bombshell blog post, which went up in the middle of the night early this morning our time. Titled ''A new approach to China'', the post, by Google's Senior Vice President for Corporate ...

With everyone else on the planet weighing in on Obama's visit to China last week, I didn't want to miss the party. I wrote a brief article for the website of the magazine Foreign Policy comparing Chinese and American press coverage of the visit. The title and blurb are theirs (the title is much better than mine, but I never used the phrase ...

To have one ethnic minority erupt in angry rioting looks like misfortune. To have two erupt in angry rioting suggests that a rethink of the overall approach might be a good idea. Urumqi has been in chaos for the last 72 hours, and reports suggest that at least for the moment things are not improving. Considering all the obsessive attention paid to ...

It turns out that the plan to have local officials prop up the cigarette market in Hubei has gone up up in smoke. Seems the people were  fuming. From China Daily:The order made headlines in major newspapers around the world after being made public, triggering waves of criticism that it was a complete waste of public money.Local officials ...

We have to hand it to the Gong'an county government in Hubei, which has hit upon a novel approach to expanding the tax base in these straitened times: Order local officials to smoke more cigarettes: Officials in a county in central China have been told to smoke nearly a quarter million packs of locally made cigarettes annually or risk being ...

After posting my thoughts about Jackie's controversial pronouncements at Bo'ao a couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Nick Mackie, the journalist who actually asked the question that kicked off the whole episode. As Nick points out, the question posed was in fact about show biz, but Jackie got into a bit of a stream of consciousness ...

One of the longest running soap operas involving foreign businesses in China is that of the foreign financial information service providers, Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, and such. These companies have been involved in an on-and-off regulatory battle for years involving whether or not they would be allowed to operate here and whether or not their ...

...how do you reply? A: Well, if you're a Chinese government spokesperson you probably rarely pass up an opportunity to bury your positive points under much more quotable anger. James Fallows notes the predictably pyrotechnic response from Chinese government spokespeople following suggestions that China might be the source of the A/H1N1 (nee ...

ESWN translates a good essay on proposed reforms of CCTV's ''Network News'', the nightly news broadcast that is something of a televised version of the People's Daily: A protocol driven recitation of government messages.Since inception, the ''Network News'' has been described as a three-part program: In the first ten minutes, the state leaders are ...

Imagethief sends his deepest sympathies to the organizers of the Bo'ao Forum for Asia, who's main contribution to the public discourse this year is a fierce debate on the meaning of what Jackie Chan said during a panel discussion he participated in. Personally, Imagethief feels that nothing that pop-culture celebrities say should be taken ...