Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

With a media blackout on reporting about the "Nail House" - a piece of property that refuses to surrender to developers, and has been surrounded by a massive development pit - it's tough to know if it's still standing.

One Chinese blogger has dared to find out...

Zola, a Chinese blogger who professes himself to be an "Untypical Angry Youth" has set out from Hunan to see if what has quickly become Chongqing's most famous landmark still stands. Keep posted at Ya, I Yee.

From Global Voices: Out of what Zola says is a ’sensitivity to news’ and desire for fame, on Monday afternoon he hopped on the train, arriving in Chongqing two days later. Armed with a Lenovo cellphone and one thousand RMB, Zola is determined to cover the nailhouse story where domestic media currently cannot.

Imagethief discusses the problems facing the relationships between China's State-controlled media and foreign media. Good read. Check it out.

The uproar over the Starbucks in Beijing's Forbidden City isn't really about the power of bloggers and citizen media in China, argues Rebecca MacKinnon. What's it really about? Well, that's more complicated. Best to just read the whole thing.

This article, via Imagethief shows dark skies in the distance for everyones favorite search engine - no, no, the other one. Yahoo is facing a possible class-action lawsuit in the US for its involvement in disclosing information to the PRC resulting in an arrest of a journalist there.

An excellent, excellent post by Imagethief on how the Chinese authorities recently made a huge Beijing boo-boo by detaining Olympic protesters one year before the games begin.

[Zola] reports that he is home safe in Changsha after being detained in Shenyang, interrogated, made to write detailed reports on everybody he met and everything since arriving in Shenyang to blog about the Yilishen "ant-farmer" protests, had his ID confiscated, punched around the head and neck.

Thomas Crampton interviews ex-CNN Beijing bureau chief and the driving force behind Global Voices Online, Rebecca MacKinnon, about advice she has for journalists coming to China during the Beijing Olympics. Her advice echos loudly for other visitors or long-term residents as well.

Asian media sucks. Imagethief raps about just why that is.