Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

A Chinese investment fund manager won the chance to have lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett by bidding $2.1 million in the most expensive charity auction ever held on eBay.

Zhao Danyang of the Hong Kong-based Pureheart China Growth Investment Fund won the auction, which ended Friday evening with a bid of $2,110,100.

China has announced that it will auction off special licences that will allow tourists to hunt wolves, yaks and other wild animals - including some endangered species.

Photographer Ed Burtynsky talks about sustainable development at the TedTalks conference, and presents an amazing slide-show of his photos - the majority of which were taken in China.

A series of photographs of the sugar beet harvest in Xinjiang. One of the photos shows Chinese prisoners loading a sugar beet truck under the watchful eye of an armed guard.

ESWN posts an alleged list of banned terms in Xinhua's news reporting. The first three sections of the list seem pretty routine, outlining who can be named, what terms to use for disabled people, etc.

It's when it gets to the forth section that controversy rears its head. Lots of quoted use of Taiwan governmental bodies, rules about never using the term "president" in relation to Taiwan and a load of other interesting nuggets.

None of it is surprising, but it is an interesting read regardless.

As more and more students vie for the thinning number of post-grad employment opportunities, an ever-increasing number of "learning mills" are popping up to take advantage of those most in need. Under the promise of "undergraduate programs" students are lured into paying tuition fees and making the, often long, trips to the campus - only to find out the whole thing is a scam and they'll be lucky to get a piece of paper worth the pulp its printed on.
Check out this excellent ESWN post for the whole story and loads of photos of what happens when the students fight back.

Photo-journalist Tom Carter's China photos. Includes a lot of great photos of the recent snowstorm in northeast China, including a great shot of "Bag-head."

This post from ESWN sheds some light on two interesting things. The first relating to the title of the post, which was taken from an article by the same name whereby a father killed his infant son because he couldn't get him a hukou (residency permit). The second is a comment on how media is changing in the way it can relay the process to the end user.

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: