Because Chinese tourists have a terrible rap, the National Tourism Administration has issued a 64-page guidebook on appropriate behavior, featuring some reasonable advice ("keep quiet when waiting to board a plane"), some common-sense advice (be on time), and and some head-scratchers ("do not call Africans 'Negros' or 'black'"). "Don't pick your nose is on the list," too, as everyone seems to be pointing out. Read more »
Our friends at Koryo Tours made the above time-lapse. Especially noteworthy are the scenes from the Mass Games and of Kim Il-sung Square, which appears completely empty at almost all times. Read more »
We're going to borrow Alia of Offbeat China's word for the crowds during National Day holiday -- "tourpocalypse" -- because these pictures make us judder, indeed as if the ground will swallow us, no longer able to hold the weight of all this humanity. Read more »
These are the sort of National Day occurrences that will ruin your vacation. At the super popular tourist destination of Jiuzhaigou (Jiuzhai Valley National Park) in Sichuan province on Thursday, 4,000 tourists were stranded until after-hours as authorities scrambled to supply enough vehicles to take everyone to base. Read more »
This is the sort of thing we've grown accustomed to seeing from Chinese street entrepreneurs. In Wuhan, Hubei province, some peddlers got the bright idea to charge 1 yuan for letting pedestrians use their stepladder to scale a fence that divides the two sides of Huanle Expressway. Read more »
As the coils of economic development have tightened around the cities of Southern Xinjiang over the past dozen years, many Uyghur parents have increasingly found themselves without land, jobs, and stable futures. In many cases the strain of existential insecurity is most sharply expressed in the lives of children. Read more »
Despite the hoopla around China's new free-trade zone that opened on Sunday, details are sparse on exactly how the promise of economic liberalization will help boost the economy.
The 11-square-mile area in Shanghai will purportedly become a testbed where interest rates will be set by markets, foreign firms can freely trade the yuan, and outside investors can put money into previously off-limit state sectors. Read more »
The US government shut down on Tuesday as Congress failed to pass the necessary bills to keep it operational -- "it" being the government. If you want a quick-and-dirty primer on the situation, CNN has you covered, as does Washington Post, and James Fallows offers wise analysis as always over at his blog.
But what does China think? Read more »
