Archives for March 2007

It’s travelling season again.  I’m getting ready to take the night train to Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia.  Up over the mountains and across the grasslands to the edge of the Gobi Desert.  It’s one of the few major cities in China that I have not been to, so I’m really looking forward to […]

Like an evil being, a thick, toxic, acidic, brown fog has enveloped this city since last Sunday.  Each morning I wake up thinking it will have lifted, but each morning I am disappointed.  What’s made it all the more maddening is that each evening I would check the local weather forecast and the forcast for […]

There’s another crackdown.  This time against language errors in the media and publishing industries. The government agency that oversees press and publications has declared that 2007 will be the Year for Quality Control in Publications.  Apparantly they are alarmed at the increasing number of "grammatical and logical errors" that abound because "people are using popular […]

Yesterday in China we celebrated our second "Queue Day," which the government has decreed now falls on the 11th of each month.  It’s a bid to get people to line up for busses, subways, trains, and other venues that spontaneously turn into mob scenes.  To help things along, one of the government-run websites posted some […]

In China’s "crackdown-of-the-month" culture, we seem to have hit upon something that cannot be cracked down against:  smoking. A government official  recently proclaimed his fear that too many restrictions on smoking could lead to serious social instability.  The basis of his fear is that a shortage of cigarettes, or too many restrictions on when/where people […]

With the opening of the Olympics a little over 500 days away, the locals are in a never-ending search to make the city more tourist-friendly.  There are more "schticks" than you can shake a stick at. (Say that fast 5 times.  I dare you!).  Sometimes it’s just hard to keep up.  Fortunately, the "journalists" at […]