Hopes for warmer relations between China and the Dalai Lama have been raised by news that 200 Chinese nationals attended a prayer meeting in India with the exiled Tibetan ruler.

There is some amount of urgency in coming to some kind of agreement. 

China will not allow new cigarette factories, including joint ventures with foreign partners, as part of efforts to reduce smoking in a country that puffs its way through almost two trillion cigarettes a year.

Cynical as it might sound, I bet the government could curb smoking by increasing taxes (as an added benefit, taxing things like smoking is usually a great revenue source).  However, there would probably be more and other problems created by population increasing by another 1.2 million people a year.

This article about "the woman whose job is to convince Beijingers that common sights here — spitting, swearing, belching and cutting in line — are no way to welcome the world." has been linked in a few places that I've seen.  There are a few pretty funny quotes in it:

There is no guarantee Chinese spectators will applaud the performances of home-country athletes who don't win gold, he said. 

... Instruction in "civilized spitting" and distribution of millions of paper spit bags.

... Beijing students, already pressed to complete their studies, must take courses in Olympic knowledge.

An article about railway ticket scalping (and a campaign against it) in the L.A. times.

One thing I found interesting is: 

Many turned out to be pregnant women or those carrying babies, since under Chinese law these groups are exempt from arrest or fines.

If that's true, that would explain porn merchants carrying babies.

The monthly expenses of a migrant worker in China.

Total income: 770 yuan

Personal Expenses: 322 yuan

He has heard about the WTO, which he said is often in the news. But he does not understand politics or economics. The only thing he wants is to earn 10 Yuan more every day, so he will have more money for better medicines for his mother, his son’s living expenses and better clothes for his wife. He said he fears dying, because his whole family is relying on him.

Three Different Chinese Weddings

An Ecoonomist article discusses a map of the world that may have been created from the voyages of Zheng He, years before Columbus arrived in the Americas.

China beat Columbus to it, perhaps: An ancient map that strongly suggests Chinese seamen were first round the world

Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

Blah blah, PLA still the largest army in the world blah blah.

What I want to know is what happens to those 200,000 disgruntled militarily-trained types.  I guess when you do this kind of thing, you just have to make sure that they're laid off in small groups far away from each other, so that they don't get the chance to band together somehow.

I'd like to share my observations about buying a house or land in or around Xianggeilla.  The rules probably apply to some degree to other non-metropolitan areas in China, but I don't know for sure.  If anyone has any insights, I'd love to hear them, since I might be going about things all wrong.  =)  A post on Lonely Planet's forums inspired this.

Land in villages is still allocated at the level of the villages.  It's passed down from generation to generation, and there's no GPS to tell you were plot boundaries are, so people rely on things like rocks and trees as landmarks.  Disputes don't come up since everyone in the village knows where all the boundaries are.

New CCTV building planned for Beijing