Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

Aaron Newman, Founder and Managing Partner of Urban Core International talks to us about the company's experience in sustainable development projects worldwide and its expansion into China's green sector in 2008.

An excellent description of the 'hard seat' experience in China.

The boss of a toy company commits suicide after his company's toys are recalled.

"Lee Der made 967,000 toys recalled earlier this month by Mattel Inc. because they were made with paint found to have excessive amounts of lead. The plastic preschool toys, sold under the Fisher-Price brand in the U.S., included the popular Big Bird, Elmo, Dora and Diego characters.

Having tried to 'passively' learn Chinese for quite some time now, I'm starting to realize that there are all sorts of tricky cultural conflicts that are working hard to stomp out any hopes of mastery. Here's one... well, two actually...

Police have rescued 31 people forced to work for a year as slaves - given only bread and water and no pay - at a brickworks run by the son of a local Communist Party official, China's state media reported today.

Eight of the workers were so traumatised that all they could remember was their names, the Beijing News said, citing a report in the Shanxi Evening Post.

One labourer was beaten to death with a hammer for not working hard enough, before police raided the factory to set the others free, the newspaper said.

Sidney Shapiro or 沙博理 has lived through Mao’s China into Hu’s China. Now in his 90’s, he enjoys a quiet life in his adopted home in Beijing. He is one of the few hundreds of ‘communist sympathisers’ (for lack of a better term) who joined the Communist Party’s effort in building the PRC. Most of them left China forced by circumstances. But Shapiro managed to stay.

Because of the recall of made-in-china toys by US toy giant, a HK businessman, whose factory manufactures bulks of these recalled toys, could not foot the bill and committed suicide in his factory in Foshan, Guangdong province, China. The toys are found to contain toxic lead paint.

Xiao Nao is a single university graduate working as an ad copywriter in Shanghai. She has a year of work experience and could probably go elsewhere and live better, but she stays, and survives, on 1,000 RMB per month.

Shanghaiist translates here story.

I recently asked my Chinese friends how they thought Chairman Mao would react if he was suddenly brought back to life in the 21st century. “Not happy” and “Disappointed” were the most common answers that I received; I was not surprised by such responses. After all, it is difficult to find very many reasons to label China as communist these days. The ruling party in China still calls itself communist. The international media still likes to refer to China as a communist giant. But where is communism still manifested in China today?