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Best leaders lend an ear

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-9-17

WOULD you promote someone who shamed you in public with good reason? Few people would do that, but that was how China's former Premier Zhu Rongji treated those whom he called "capable opponents." "I will...

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Despite China 'miracle,' pupils still buy their own school desks

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-9-8

CHINA is a land of miracles, but it is also a land of contrasts. A series of pictures taken on August 31 in Huanggang, Hubei Province, shows children, parents or grandparents plodding to school, carrying standard...

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Culture vultures, merchants scour countryside for relics

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-9-1

IN recent years there has been a growing number of scandals involving museums. This May a thief broke into the high-security Palace Museum in Beijing and made off with a few gem-studded, modern luxury items on...

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Proposed legal changes a return to humane Chinese values

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-8-29

CHINA'S National People's Congress is considering some changes to the current Criminal Procedure Law, 15 years after the first revision in 1996. Among the proposed changes are a suspect's right to remain silent...

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Justice can't be reduced to just paying fines and fees

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-8-27

FOR my septuagenarian landlady, this is a year of revelrous cheers and remorseful tears. The source of her erratic changes from cheers to tears and vice versa lies at the other side of a dilapidated wall separating...

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Funny man-turned-billionaire destroys relics for fancy club

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-8-25

A COUPLE of years ago I wrote an apology for Zhao Benshan, a rustic comedian accused of low taste and obscenity. I pointed to the need for tolerance of an uneducated performer's eagerness to entertain China's...

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Girls and moms want share of husband's wedding house

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-8-22

GUESS who are the biggest public enemies of young Chinese women these days. Some will say it's those molesters on crowded Metro trains and buses. To be sure, this is a season when molesters are on the prowl, preying...

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How good credit trumps thrift as all-American virtue

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-8-13

FERNANDO Bensuaski wonders in his article "America loses despite debt deal" (Shanghai Daily August 6) "When did it become fashionable to be a loser? When did it become fashionable to be a debtor?" I have been wondering...

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Illegal golf courses slurp up scarce water

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-8-12

GENERALLY speaking, "the grass is greener on the other side" expresses admiration, envy and self-deprecation. Yet many of China's farmers discover it's also a grotesque description of their life on land abutting...

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China's car culture spreads like prairie fire as traffic worsens

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-8-3

RECENTLY I had lunch with two Western friends on two separate occasions, and as we talked, there was brief mention of cars. One friend believed car ownership is an indicator of Chinese middle class. I argued...

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Bullet train on wrong track loses touch with reality

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-7-20

LAST Saturday my sister came to Shanghai from Beijing for a business trip, traveling on the newly christened gaotie, the latest bullet train. Like dongche, another kind of bullet train, this much-hyped gaotie is...

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Banking on buying into bubbles

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-7-19

A POSSIBLE banking crisis in China lurks less in real estate bubbles than in the political economy of local governments. Though I am a victim of astronomically high housing prices, I don't see an imminent danger...

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High price for made-in-China 'bargains'

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-7-16

LOW wages, long work hours, squalid dorms. Compound these conditions with polluted lands and lungs, and you'll arrive at a price for many if not most Made-in-Chinas. In her 2008 book "The China Price: The...

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On the demise of real reading and bookstores

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-7-13

ON Saturday a courier delivered to my home a package of seven books I ordered online a few days before. When I opened the package I did not find the books in the best of conditions: an oversized copybook for calligraphy...

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Pursuit of GDP turns kids' summer camp into relentless study hell

Opinion | Shanghai Daily columnists
2011-7-7

"AS the two-month-long summer vacation begins, this should have been the most anticipated, the happiest time for middle and elementary school students" - thus commented Shao Ning in the Xinmin Evening News on Tuesday. ...