Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

A great post from The Granite Studio about etiquette in China. I had assumed all had been said about this often-blogged topic, but J adds a wonderful historical perspective and some great contemporary ideas to it.

Sarcastic but true story about Beijing's attempt at controlling the manners of its citizens.

Josh of peer-see once again tackles the tasteless (to most) topic of eating babies. A must read for anyone that is worried this might be served at their next round-table banquet in China.

Ryan announces a group writing project over at Lost Laowai, aimed at the Chinese Blogosphere. The topic?

If I knew then what I knew now.

What do you know now that you wish you knew before you arrived in China? Write a post, and contribute to what will likely be a great guide for Laowai-to-be coming to China.

In Wuhan, China, government officials spend 2 million RMB building the luxury public toilets. Chinese netizens say it is a waste and the money could be used for other more important things. Some ask if China is still a poor country.

The LA Times documents the rising tide of unrest in the Middle Kingdom. According to the story, "there were 39,000 cases of 'public order disruptions' in the first half of the year.
"The Ministry of Public Security said that represented a 2.5% decrease in the number of protests from the same period in 2005, though it offered no explanation of how it had come up with the figures."

Philip J. Cunningham at Informed Comment Global Affairs has a great post about Chinese State TV and their Dialogue commentary program. I’m just going to excerpt the funny and historical bit below the fold, but the rest of the discussion, hopeful and realistic, is quite worthwhile. The focus is actually on the collaboration/mutual exploitation relationship between CCTV and Japan’s NHK.

This Reuters article gives the run-down on what the government is doing to educate Chinese tourists on how to act while on holiday. The etiquette campaign was announced as the country hit the two-year-out mark from the Beijing 2008 Olympics. It is feared that domestic tourists' bad manners may give people the wrong opinion about China.

In my opinion, writing Chinese words with the Latin character set and neglecting tone marks is the equivalent of writing English words with dots in place of the vowels. Yes, it’s possible to guess the missing information from context, but it’s not a very complete writing system.