By RFH Confounding even the most grounded of numerologists, the movements on today’s Shanghai Stock Exchange have caused a minor stir. The index opened at: Open: 2,346.98 Day Range: 2,308.23 – 2,348.20 Year To Date: +4.96% Previous Close: 2,373.44 52-Week Range: 2,132.63 – 2,826.96 1-Year: -15.38% That’s 2,346.98 as in 23 years since 4/6, which... Read more »
By RFH Will the UK media be waiting at the airport to greet the British “attempted rapist” (or molester, drunk lecher or whatever you believe) – or will he slip away into obscurity? That’s what we’re left wondering as the book closes on one of the ugliest chapters in foreigner-China relations in recent months, which... Read more »
The Briton currently in police custody over allegations of sexual assault may be in plenty trouble – the Beijing Morning Post says he faces a “trial” in China, and his sorry story has even been reported by Reuters, in the New York Daily News and Kotaku – but so too may be the chaps who assailed him... Read more »
An update of the story earlier today of the man accused of sexually assaulting a Chinese girl in Beijing: There’s scant information that’s verifiable. For example, a photograph has been offered up on Weibo (above) that purports to show the same man – or at least a man wearing the same trousers and shoes –... Read more »
By RFH WTF moments are frequent in China; they can happen just reading a newspaper. Today’s chin-scratcher occurred on page five of the Global Times, where, sandwiched between an only mildly splenetic front-page story about Chen Guangcheng (Chen will not have “any problems as long as he obeys the law and expresses his demands lawfully,”... Read more »
By RFH When is a book not a book? When it is written in the mind, perhaps, or when it is written by a politician. My proposed book about modern China has been somewhat taken over by events, but it had all the makings of good satire. The location: in a country dedicated to GDP growth,... Read more »
By RFH With all the stuff going around about Bo, Bogu, Guagua, Gu and, of course, Neil and Nick Heywood, it’s getting hard for even the most Burroughs of media junkies to keep up. Every time I tell myself I’m done with it, Malcolm Moore at the Telegraph or Jeremy Page of Wall Street Journal turn up offering another... Read more »
[Editor’s note: what follows is the first in a series of diplomatic cables, purporting to be the dispatches of Sir Charles Dashwood, a British attaché in present-day Beijing, decrypted and translated by BJC senior editor RFH] Bang! I’d only been in the Imperial Capital a few days and already my musk had attracted the bullets... Read more »
Via China’s Forbidden News (NTDTV.com) By RFH When Hu Yaobang, the reformist Party General Secretary whose death two year laters would spark the Tiananmen demonstrations, was purged for the second time in 1987, it was Bo Yibo who drew up the official charges. The only Politburo member who backed Hu was Xi Zhongshun, a member of the Standing... Read more »
I first learned of Sunday’s Ferrari crash in Beijing two nights ago and didn’t think much of it until The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote about the incident earlier today. My only question had been: Who drives fast enough on a completely deserted ring road at 4 am and crashes? The answer: probably someone very rich... Read more »
