The best part of this video is definitely when the Swedish man, a tourist visiting China for the first time, jumps into the water to save a drowning woman. But if we had to pick a second best part, it would have to be the heavily accented voices of the locals saying, "And it's a laowai!" The shock of what they just witnessed, we're sure, could have made their heads explode. The townsfolk have begun calling ...

Longtime China resident Cam MacMurchy, who ran the well-respected Zhongnanhai blog for several years before co-founding The Nanfang earlier this year, is nothing if not a reasonable and fair writer. We've watched from afar as The Nanfang, a community-driven website covering the Pearl River Delta, has steadily grown, expanding its listings every week while continuing to produce interesting content on its blo ...

On Sunday in Yantai, Shandong province's Golden Sands beach, a young man surnamed Ji swam a bit too far into the sea and went under. As Tencent Online tells it via 365jia (pictures from there), an Australian named Jason relaxing a few hundred meters away saw this and sprung to action. After Ji was pulled from the waters with help from an inflatable raft, Jason performed CPR on the man and was able to resusc ...

The heavy rains found their way inside Fourth Ring Round around 1 pm today, and it's been sporadically pouring ever since: some deity simply dumping bucket after bucket of water over the city. I was outside around 1:30 pm to witness the sky and everything underneath it go eerily dark; 10 minutes later, a dazzling white mist rose out of nowhere, like the ash of a mythical sky creature. It was unbelievable. I ...

An email has been going around among Shanghai expats, and it's worth a look for those who aren't already too cynical. The full thing is over at Shanghaiist, but here's the money graf: I am sharing this story in detail hoping that you will take the same route from apathy to empathy. We are all hardened and busy in this crazy city, and isolated in a bubble of expat privileges, that rarely cracks open for a br ...

Youku video for those in China after the jump. UPDATE, 6/28: Thanks to China Daily, we now know the man is Martin Mellish, 61, an American high school teacher in Chengdu. See after jump for more. Tuesday in Chengdu. At first, we have no idea what's happening in the above video. Why is a foreigner pushing cars backwards? Is he angry? Why is he darting around with crazy hands, seemingly directing traffic? Why ...

Holding the party in the open air of Sanlitun Soho and suggesting “beachwear” as a dress code was clearly pivotal: the signal for Beijing’s really quite impressively large douchebag population to give full vent to their oeuvre of tics and mores. “Dress code? Dude… I was wearing this Hawaiian shirt with oversized aviators, four days’ beard growth and a jaunty pork-pie hat when I woke up!” We arrive just afte ...