On June 30, two adults at an auto repair shop in Xiajin county, Shandong province pressed a mechanical air pump agains the anus of a 13-year-old boy and nearly inflated him to popping. Literally. The crime was almost too ghastly to comprehend. But comprehend we did, and in the successive days, it was as if society awakened to its own monstrous potential and decided to redeem its collective self by donating ...

No one would confuse China Daily for a real newspaper -- the kind that doesn't write "A Friend's Departure" on its front page when North Korea's leader dies -- but the company undoubtedly has real journalists on staff, veteran reporters who quietly toil within China's noxious media environment to produce respectable work, and it's those journalists I currently feel for. In yesterday's edition of China Daily ...

[caption id="attachment_4021" align="alignnone" width="490" caption=""Ruins"?"][/caption] I remember, earlier this week, looking at Reuters's David Gray's photos of old Beijing Olympics venues and not thinking twice about them, because the headline on Atlantic Cities, where the pictures appeared, read "Beijing's Olympic Ruins." I could guess the nature of the misinformed captions that awaited, the ...

After physical and mental trauma, how else can one victimize the defenseless? Go after the family. That's what appears to have happened to the woman who was forced by local Family Planning officials to abort at seven months. By now surely you've seen the photo, and know that authorities have done diddly shit to punish the perpetrators except (we're told) strip them of their jobs (and I'm sure they remain un ...

Understated as always, Xinhua reports that the city government that employed the officials who were responsible for forcing 27-year-old Feng Jianmei to abort after seven months have "apologized." In person, I wonder? Via email? Text message? Fucking assholes. The city government of Ankang on Thursday evening apologized to a woman who underwent a forced abortion at a hospital in northwest China's Shanxi Prov ...

[caption id="attachment_3198" align="alignnone" width="440" caption="The supposed "riot" at Foxconn... heard around the offices of shitty journalists everywhere"][/caption] Eric Fish of Sinostand basically said all I wanted to in his post earlier today, "Foxconn: A Very Quiet Riot": Over the past day or so several foreign media outlets including Huffington Post, Business Insider and Bloomberg TV h ...

I make it a point to not talk about pollution because it's somewhat of a cliche, especially among expats. Those who live here yet complain about the air -- like, blog about it -- belong in a set that we can fairly label "whiny." And vapid. And irksome, too, if we're being completely honest. But this... Only the Chinese government is authorized to monitor and publish air quality information and data from oth ...

By TAR Nation When I was younger and had hope, “The Cask of Amontillado” was my favorite story, mainly because readers are never given a clue as to the offense committed by Fortunato to warrant such hatred. Similarly, I shall not mention the offense committed by Jonathan Kos-Read to merit the proceeding onslaught. However, I will endeavor to be as professional as possible. Now, here is a doctored photo of h ...

Last Friday, the State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China published a report called The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011. It was in response to the US State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011, which featured information on about 200 countries, China included. China's report, published on Xinhua, et al., was about 8,000 words. We read it ...

[caption id="attachment_2689" align="alignnone" width="380" caption="Will Evans, courtesy Liz Thomas, via MSNBC story"][/caption] MSNBC has a China blog called "Behind the Wall," and as the name might suggest, it targets an American audience that may not be as familiar with China as those of us here on the ground ("behind the wall" sounds a lot like "other side of the world," i.e. a throwaway cliche one scr ...

Foreign Policy, that award-winning online magazine devoted to "analyz[ing] the most significant international trends and events of our times, without regard to ideology or political bias," just gave an evangelical pastor 1,200 words to promulgate his religious propaganda. “Like most Chinese, I was educated an atheist," writes Bob Fu to begin his panegyric to God in a piece titled "Jesus Loves China, Too" -- ...

Plenty of people nurse a healthy loathing of the "expat in Asia," and in some instances, that antipathy is understandable, if not justified. (The image you want is of a mustachioed former mill owner, old and white, in Thailand. If you'd like to see some of these fellas here, try the bar Maggie's.) Yet I've always thought the expat community in Beijing was just fine, no Lost Generation by any means but not l ...

Pic via National Confidential There is, to be sure, an Eric Esch-sized body of evidence that Mitt Romney is a louse, but I think the scurvy wellspring of his suckiness can essentially be summed up as such: he is the archetypal American politician (no, I don't care that he's Mormon), and if you identified him as such, he'd take it as a compliment. What that means is he's willing to do and say anything to get ...

[caption id="attachment_2422" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Yesterday at the US Embassy; pictured (left to right): Harold Koh, Chen Guangcheng, Gary Locke (AP Photo/US Embassy Beijing Press Office, HO)"][/caption] 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 event ...

I used to write the blog Heart of Beijing from behind the Great Firewall. Every sporadically, we'll take a blast to the past. The following was first published on January 4, 2012. This latest from the New York Times is about President Hu Jintao's comments regarding soft culture. Apparently China is losing the battle to the U.S. (This is where you put on your best "Gee, really?" quizzical face. Do you raise ...

[caption id="attachment_2114" align="alignnone" width="387" caption="Associated Press reporter Greg Risling"][/caption] Let's get the facts straight to start. The USC students who were shot and killed last Wednesday were not in a "new 3-series BMW," as was originally reported. The AP's Greg Risling, who has been assigned this beat, can be commended for reporting in a follow-up story: Some Chinese students a ...

Let's play a guessing game. What kind of website would host a series of pictures such as the above? Cracked.com? (Too classy, probably.) Bro Bible? Frat House Sports? Slingshot? Surely one of those sites with features like "The 50 Bustiest Girls on Facebook" and pop-up video ads. One of those sites in which a new tab opens with every click, leading you on a Möbius strip where dozens of pretty faces beg for ...

[caption id="attachment_2038" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="If you're offended by Kate Winslet's nipple, you should not watch Heavenly Creatures, Jude, Titanic, Hideous Kinky, Holy Smoke, Quills, Iris, Little Children, or The Reader"][/caption] Earlier this week I came across a story on Offbeat China about Kate Winslet's breasts being censored in the Chinese theatrical release of Titanic 3D ...

We mean "Western Internet," of course, but considering 10 of the top 12 sites on Alexa are based in the West, it's fair to wonder -- as RFH did just now -- "what the damage is economically by turning yourself into North Korea, Internet-wise." Check out the image above, a very short list of websites I tried to access just now without my VPN (I should note that my normal VPN connection failed earlier this mor ...

Here's how shitty China's Ministry of Censorship is: instead of doing its one job -- which is shitting over everything popular and good in the world, smearing puppies and daffodils with the excrement of its values, and shit -- it outsources this one responsibility to private companies, and when said private companies fail to shit on their own clients to a sufficient degree -- as judged by the Ministry of Ce ...