One artist, 90 minutes, 5196 children, 9000 backpacks, 81 days in prison and 40 cats, one of them can open the door. “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” is a short documentary, but it covers many different aspects of the famous Chinese artist-and-dissident’s life and work.
A graft investigation into former railways minister Liu Zhijun that started in February 2011 has concluded with the ministry issuing a document on August 3 that lists six disciplinary violations Liu committed. The internal ministry notice sheds light on the complicated network of graft that functioned in China's Ministry of Railways. The charges against Liu include corruption and sexual misconduct.
When Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, needed something done in China, he often turned to his company’s “chief Beijing representative,” a mysterious businessman named Yang Saixin. Mr. Yang arranged meetings for Mr. Adelson with senior Chinese officials; acted as a frontman on several ambitious projects for Mr. Adelson’s company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation; and intervened on the Sands’s behalf with Chinese regulators. Mr. Yang even had his daughter take Mr. Adelson’s wife, Miriam, shopping when she was in Beijing.
Traveling through modern Chinese cities at times feels a blur, the view from a bus or taxi window seemingly untethered from any past or even particularities of place. In one sense, everything everywhere looks the same; it's easy to feel a little numb. Another Sinopec gas station. Another KFC. Another new high-rise apartment block, curiously and often enough, in "Tuscan" or "Neoclassical" style. Another new airport. Another Carrefour. But this sense of déjà vu is misleading.
Beijing, as most Chinese know it, was a neglected relic after the Japanese occupation of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. In 1949, when the victorious communists moved the capital back there from Nanjing, it was a bankrupt town of 1.4 million people; almost nothing of any consequence was made or manufactured there. But the path to the shining communist future lay through industry, at least according to the Soviets, who had already put a quarter of Muscovites to work in new factories, and from the rostrum in Tiananmen Square, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong called for an "ocean of smokestacks" to rise over Beijing's traditional skyline of one-story courtyards.
Will it be clear or gray skies today? Increasingly, the answer in China may be decided by the government.
The Chinese have been seeding clouds for decades. Airplanes equipped with rocket-launchers and chemicals for inducing rainfall are based in thousands of counties across the country.
An unofficial report of proceedings in the Gu Kailai trial has surfaced. I can't vouch for its authenticity, but have done a quick and dirty, and not entirely literal, translation anyway. Comments, corrections, and suggestions welcome.
The probes jump off from Sands' disclosure last year that the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission were investigating it for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, following allegations made in a wrongful-termination lawsuit by the ousted head of its Macau operations. The probes go beyond the allegations in that suit, which is pending.
Ten years after his elevation to General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Hu Jintao remains almost as much of an enigma now as he was on first taking power. What do we know about the man beyond his reputation as a somewhat robotic consensus-seeker, and how will history look back at his time in power?
