What Do You Know About China’s Politics?

By Ouyang Bin & Zhang Xiaoran on March 5, 2013

The Liang Hui or “Two Sessions”—the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC)—are the most crowded, most covered, and probably most hilarious annual political events in China. Every March, thousands of “peoples representatives” to the NPC and members of the CPPCC gather in Beijing, and this year the nationalist state-run newspaper Global Times sent its reporters into the streets to ask random foreigners living in Beijing about their basic knowledge of China’s politics.

‘Zombies’ and ‘Reincarnation’

Why It’s So Hard to Take a Census in Weibo Nation

on March 4, 2013

Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, announced on February 20 that it had surpassed half a billion users—more people than live in South America, and approximately the population of North America. Thickly-settled Europe edges out Weibo by about 230,000, but the micro-blogging platform blows away Australia in this regard. In any event, we are talking about a membership on the order of continents—a remarkable fact, given that, unlike Facebook, its usership is almost exclusively Chinese.

China’s Frills and Posh Market Springs a Leak

on March 4, 2013

Imagine a luxury goods shopper so confident and flush with cash that one day he walks into a Shanghai handbag shop, flashes 300,000 yuan, and waltzes out with almost every bag in stock.

That’s what happened last year at a Prada store where Benny Lu worked as a clerk. The customer “entered the shop and pointed to the shelves,” she recalls. “Then he said, ‘Except this one and that one, pack all the others.’”

This kind of price-is-no-object customer, however, is becoming increasingly rare at luxury retailers in Shanghai and across China.

China Criticized over Tiger Farms and Illegal Ivory

on March 2, 2013

China is under pressure to regulate its rampant trade in illegal ivory and tiger parts ahead of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), opening this weekend in Bangkok.

It has also been accused of quietly stimulating domestic markets for tiger skins and body parts, with more than 5,000 captive-bred tigers held in Chinese farms and zoos.