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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 ...

Have a read of this post from the Wall Street Journal's China Journal blog on some of the communciation issues Coke is having around its attempted takeover of the Huiyuan juice company in China:More damaging may be the allegations that Coke is trying to silence critics of the deal in China, which were published in this Chinese language article ...

Two or three weeks ago the New Yorker carried a good article by Evan Osnos on the phenomenon of China's ''angry youth'' (fenqing). Much of the article was a profile of one young man in particular. In truth, he sounds more passionate than angry. It's worth reading the whole thing, but there was one section I found particularly interesting:When ...

Beijing residents may know that a few weeks ago there was something of a rough spell for local English language magazines. The local version of entertainment magazine Time Out was shut down at least temporarily for mysterious reasons. Also, the publishers of That's Beijing yanked the trademark away from True Run Media, who had actually managed the ...

And yet another NPC symptom: bureaucrats are saying ridiculous things. From Xinhua. Read the whole thing before I get stuck in:Regulator: China not to implement film rating for the momentBEIJING, March 4 (Xinhua) -- China won't adopt a film rating system for the moment, the publications watchdog said.Liu Binjie, General Administration of Press and ...

Despite years as a college radio DJ, Imagethief has never had much time for Bjork. I find her pretentious to a degree not entirely compensated for by talent. But, then, I think the future of pop music died when Led Zep broke up, so you may want to control for my tastes. Despite my inclination to be dismissive of all things Bjorkish, I was ...

There is no such thing as a dull year in China. 2008 is well underway and already looks like another whopper. We're only a month in and we've already had the biggest storms in half a century. The Olympics, the mother of all China events, is now a scant seven months off. God only knows what will happen in between. But before we get too far into ...

I knew it was a mistake to go on vacation in the run-up to the upcoming Party Congress. I was bound to miss a few interesting developments as the government busily harmonized the country in preparation for the event. This didn't stop me from going, of course, but it didn't take long for the consequences to emerge, in the form of a 4:30 AM phone ...

Imagethief was intrigued to read in an AP article a week or two ago that Han Sanping, Chairman of the government-backed China Film Group, has called for more patriotism in Chinese movies. Han minced no words, saying:''The reality of this country's economic reforms is that the country, the race, is prospering. This must be extolled. It can only ...