A long and very well written article from Harpers about China talks about China stereotypes, a bit of the reality of the sweatshops and factories that supply Walmart and IKEA, the migration to the cities, the water supply, power generation, and gives an interesting comparison with the United States.

Some quotes: 

Pile all the rocks in one place and you'd have the pyramids.

On the one hand, [China] must keep growing fast enough to absorb all that restless labor - the newspapers are already full of reports about college graduates unable to find jobs, and then there are those people pushed out of work in the vast and useless state heavy industries. And on the other hand, it must keep resource and energy use enough in check that China doesn't simply crash and burn. 

I started to look at Reuters Year in Photos.  Wow.

Our friend in the bar down the street has a computer, that he got from his friend, who got it from his brother, who is a policeman.  Apparently, the police station decided that these computers were no good because they were generic (as opposed to say Lenovo, the company that recently bought IBM's personal computer business).  So a bunch of police just took their old generic computers home with them. 

Jellyfish 6ft wide and 450lb (200kg) are disrupting fishing in the sea of Japan.

In the meantime locals are making the best of it — rather than just complaining about jellyfish they are eating them.

Jellyfish are an unusual ingredient of Japanese cuisine but are much more prized in China. Coastal communities are doing their best to promote jellyfish as a novelty food, sold dried and salted. 

You've probably already seen engrish.com, dedicated to manglings of the English language on shirts, signs, and products.  There's now a site dedicated to the manglings of chinese characters which happens on tattoos.  Probably most humorous to those that know what the characters were supposed to look like.

 http://www.hanzismatter.com/

How you going to spend your Christmas this year?

Just thinking about my own personal transportation convenience, a railway from Kunming all the way to Singapore sure would be nice.

link

this CNN story and this Guardian story both report a Taiwanese scientist bringing up questions about whether the Taipei 101 building is causing more earthquakes due to its weight putting pressure on the soft rocks beneath it.  It would be mighty ironic if the building one day caused the earthquake that caused it to collapse.

The "oily liquid" in these no flush urinals that prevents smells from coming from the sewers back into the restroom would sure make a welcome addition in a lot of Chinese bathrooms, if there were some way to incorporate it.

 http://www.waterless.com/