CCTV9 ran a feature this morning claiming that belly dancing is very popular in China. The classes looked a lot like an aerobics class in session. According to china.org.cn, belly dancing has a devoted new group of followers you might not expect - young urban Chinese. Apparently, belly dance schools have been opening all over Beijing.

china.org.cn

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So its me, travelling since 10 years all over China, and now wanting to see this Gfsc on the Russian border.

Anyone has been there ???

Tell me where to stay cheap cheap clean clean....

cheers Rc 

How do you bring the Internet to countries like Mali, where more than 70 percent of the population is illiterate and the telecommunications infrastructure barely exists?

You use the radio.

Geekcorps (a U.S. non-profit) sounds like a very cool project.

If a villager wants to get a note to a friend in another part of the country, he or she comes to the radio station and dictates an e-mail to the DJ, who then sends the message off to another station closer to the recipient's location. The DJ who receives the e-mail then issues a broadcast: Muhammad Kanoute, come to the station and I will read your e-mail message to you.

A thread has been started over at:

CLICK HERE TO READ

The guys at Asia-ExpatsForum
want some trolls to play with.

If you want to try your luck /
skill, then beware that they
are very open-minded & do not
shock easily ...

Hi, I would like to remove my information from your database that I am no longer to use this site this time with my requested. Thank you. Sorry for an inconvience.

One thing I always used to wonder was why I saw Xi'an spelled with the apostrophe when other cities in China were not.

Xi'an, written in Chinese, has 2 characters.  The first (西), meaning West, is pronounced "xi" and the second (安) meaning "peace" is pronounced "an." 

However, by itself, that doesn't necessitate an apostrophe.  After all other cities (北京: Beijing, 上海: Shanghai) have two characters but no apostrophe.

The issue is that in Chinese, there's another group of characters (现, 先, 线, 显, ...) which are pronounced and romanized as "xian" (a single syllable).  The Chinese romanization system already has enough trouble with the same romanized spelling meaning many different characters and tones, that when there's a potential ambiguity like this one, apostrophes are used to make it clear where the splits between characters are.

Do yo know the french : José Bové in China ?

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.