Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

This smart and witty post at peer-see gives some great background links for the whole myth about Chinese people eating late-term fetuses. It also delves into a rather funny belief out of Korea about death if you leave your fan on all night.

Back in the late 1980s, when mocking the few remaining Communist believers had become a popular indoor sport in the former Soviet Union, one of my favourite gambits was to point out that Russia would have done far better economically if the Communist revolution of 1917 had never happened at all. No matter how pessimistic your assumptions about the way that a non-Communist Russia would have developed, it simply couldn't have done as badly as the Communists did.

A fresh take on Chinese factories

Matt debunks the myth that Chinese characters keep China's literacy rate down.

A powerful typhoon headed toward the eastern Chinese coast on Monday forcing over 200,000 people to seek higher ground, state media said, after it battered Taiwan over the weekend.

An interesting self criticism of medias in Taiwan made by a taiwanese journalist!

How open are the Chinese and Taiwanese towards the Free Hugs campaign? first videos, photos and news reports from the Free Hugs campaign in China and Taiwan.

An interesting Bloomberg column by William Pesek discusses the recent 20% purchase of Africa's largest bank, Standard Bank Group, by the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC).

Pesek does a good job if illustrating how this might be a changing point in China's otherwise dim history of investment in the continent. He also does well to show how it differs from the usual Western "white knight" investments:

A Taiwanese fishing vessel was grounded off the Solomon Islands when transporting a medical team to help with tsunami relief. The Solomon Islands is one of the few countries that officially recognise Taiwan.