Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese authorities have detained 45 East Turkestan "terrorist" suspects, and foiled plots to carry out suicide bomb attacks and kidnap athletes to disrupt the Beijing Olympics, a police spokesman said on Thursday.

Uighur militants have been agitating to establish an independent East Turkestan in China's predominantly Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia.

During the Summer Olympics in August, the government lifted bans on some sites, such as the Chinese-language site of BBC News; it then reimposed the bans in recent weeks, affecting the BBC site and other sites such as the Chinese language versions of Voice of America and Asiaweek, before lifting them again last week.

James Fallows surveyed Internet users throughout China to confirm that China is now blocking the New York Times. Fallows discusses reasons why China might be doing this and how it will backfire.

This New York Times report shows how the demographics in China's most prosperous and populous city are quickly changing ... leaving a lot of retirees and not enough people to fill the gap in the cheap-labour workplace that's been the city's, and the country's, rise to glory.

News reports about a snap trial and summary execution of Uyghur terrorists in Kashgar have been making rounds recently - but did the trial and sentencing occur four days ago, or 8 months ago? The New Dominion raises an eyebrow at an old Chinese language report from last November.

Seventeen people were killed and 15 injured in the attack in Kashgar, Xinjiang on August 4, four days before the Beijing Olympics and two of the terrorist have now been sentenced to death by a local court.

NY Times asserts China is sucking "lost iPhones" from US market. Same analysis I did three weeks ago, with revenue impacts in US & UK markets.

By Radio Free Asia
29 March 2007

Chinese authorities in the northwestern Xinjiang region are forcing tens of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs into producing almonds for the county government without pay, local residents and one official say.

The labor recruiting drive began in Yarkand county near Kashgar on March 6, and it requires every Uyghur household to send one person and a donkey cart to help in a massive expansion of the region’s traditional almond industry.

An absolutely brilliantly formatted post that shows how a NYT piece on the Olympics was creatively edited into a rather sanitized bastardization of the original for the eyes of Beijingers in the Beijing Evening News.