We Found Her, The Worst Mother-In-Law In China

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Ever the Quiet Burier of Ledes, Global Times published a news item Monday that surely qualifies for Hideous China Story of the Year (Relationships Edition)... although GT went for the more casual "Mom jailed for covert contraceptive." It's a Turducken of a tale...

Rock Off: Briefly memorializing Sanlitun’s best and only punk-rock dive bar

There was a restaurant? (Pic via Thats)
Up a rickety staircase, above a neglected sex shop, there they were: some of the laziest and most disinterested barkeeps in Beijing. But now they’ve disappeared, along with the rest of 3 Rock, a hole of a rock bar that encapsulated the punk spirit of Sanlitun’s “dirty bar street” – something best loved when it’s... Read more »

Forbes editor gets drunk, posts dreadful China article

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Strange to imagine there was once a time when Forbes had a Beijing correspondent. A time of dragons. “Ancient times.” Yesterday, an editor at the venerable in-flight magazine of Trump Airlines published an article by one of its many, many, many useless contributors entitled ‘China Expert: I’m Drunk,’ in which the author has a chin-stroker... Read more »

New Rules: How China’s Latest Laws For Foreign Media Affect Us And You

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As some readers may be aware, new measures restricting foreign content online in China (or “Administrative Regulations for Online Publishing Services”) are dropping March 10 – today. Over at China Law Blog, Steve Dickinson has answers to most of the major players and questions, but we felt obliged to follow up with Steve on a... Read more »

Ursula Gauthier Wrote A Bad Article, And In China That’s A Crime

Ursula Gauthier leaves China featured
Ursula Gauthier, erstwhile Beijing correspondent for the French newsweekly L’Obs, left China for good in the early hours of January 1. It was not, as they say, of her own volition. When the clock struck midnight on 2015, Gauthier’s press visa expired and was not up for renewal. According to official organs, she had offended the Chinese people with her November 18 article written in the aftermath of the November 13 terrorist attacks on Paris. Gauthier’s refusal to publicly apologize for remarks concerning China’s attempts to link Paris with its own problems in Xinjiang was taken as the final straw.

Sorry, We’re Closed: The Den Shuts It Down

A Russian man expresses his love of The Den
Since 1997 in Beijing, it’s been possible to answer “Where can I get a really nasty Old Fashioned and a 900-gram burger at 5am?” “Who’s showing the goat-wrestling qualifiers?” and “What happened to your phone?” with the same words: The Den. Last weekend, that all changed. According to the Beijinger magazine, quoting someone’s WeChat, the city’s only 24-hour all-in-one sports bar, restaurant, short-time hotel, crisis-counseling centre, divorced men’s networking club, Pattaya tribute venue and dipsomaniacal dog whistle is closing.

The Tianjin Blast and the Art of Disaster Management

An aerial picture of smoke rising at the site of the explosions is seen at the Binhai new district, Tianjin
“Thanks to the hyper-paranoid system, authorities are doing themselves further disservice by fighting another fire online, badly.” The Oriental Star ferry “disaster management” model, in which the goon squad manages to seize control of the information spigot early on and develops the subsequent narrative, is not the “new normal” in China that some may have... Read more »

Sorry, Xinhua: You’ve Been Out-Bullshitted By CEN

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If you’ve read a story about China in the last couple of years that sounded just too good to be true – that smelled, in fact, more like sweet, sweet horse manure – chances are it came from CEN, a European-based “news agency” whose bluff just got called in exhaustive length by BuzzFeed investigative reporters. Although their offices and staff are in Vienna, CEN’s scope is worldwide – Russia, Argentina, India, Macedonia and the PRC, where it regularly elbows Xinhua aside to publish the least likely version of events.