The China Daily says:

SHANGHAI: Ever since the 37.5-km Shanghai subway line was opened two years ago, the only real problem commuters complain about is overcrowding.

So much so that subway stations have now started hiring people to shove passengers into coaches.

Read more at the link.

The American Thinker blog comments:

The blogsite IceCap includes a fascinating article by a Mr. Li Xing published in China Daily under the headline "Do three errors mean breaking point for IPCC?". 

Mr. Li recounts his attendance at the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.  He writes of attending a panel featuring various skeptics concerning work done by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He came away particularly impressed by a talk given by Dr Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist and founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service, who, as Li reports, "challenged the IPCC findings with his research data."

Li tells of meeting with IPCC chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri and others about skeptic views and seeing those views brushed aside without serious appraisal. 

Read more at the link.

Robert Kaplan writes in the Atlantic:

China is unnerving a lot of people. Its hackers have been launching cyber-attacks on companies, institutions, and web sites. It is refusing to be a responsible stakeholder in the international political system, cultivating, as it has been, good relations with some of the world’s most odious regimes. And, as I have been reporting for several years now, its military—particularly its navy—has been growing by leaps and bounds. Should we be worried about China?

We should be concerned, but not hysterical.

Read more at the link.

Richard Burbaker writes:

A lot of conversation over the last few weeks about what China is for many firms. and what it is not.

It is a conversation that, while recently catalyzed by Google’s announcement that they were looking at pulling the plug, is a conversation that I would say is had on a basis that is more frequent than many would like to admit to at time. Typically preceded by an event of some sort, commercial or political, and can be defensive, self defeating, or well analysed depending on the person, and one of the more interesting analysis I have seen lately comes from James McGregor in his recent piece in Time, The China Fix, where he writes the following:

Read more at the link.

FuturePundit says:

The planet is so small and Asian economic development so big that the north American west coast ozone surges from Asian pollution. Too many people industrializing and too much dirty energy technology.

Springtime ozone levels above western North America are rising primarily due to air flowing eastward from the Pacific Ocean, a trend that is largest when the air originates in Asia. These increases in ozone could make it more difficult for the United States to meet Clean Air Act standards for ozone pollution at ground level, according to a new international study. Published online Wednesday, Jan. 20, in the journal Nature, the study analyzed large sets of ozone data captured since 1984.

"In springtime, pollution from across the hemisphere, not nearby sources, contributes to the ozone increases above western North America," said lead author Owen R. Cooper, Ph.D., of the NOAA-funded Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "When air is transported from a broad region of south and east Asia, the trend is largest."

We'd be better off with more nuclear power. But coal electric is cheaper than nuclear. So China's continuing a massive coal electric build up. Expect a lot more pollution where that came from.

Read more at the link.  

The Shanghaiist says:

"I'd rather be outside the wall and free than inside it with the icy hand of the censor around my throat."

"我宁可站在墙外享受自由，也不愿在墙内活在刽子手的刀刃下。"

 

—Jeremy Goldkorn

 

In an opinion piece on The Guardian on his resignation to the fact that Danwei.org is now only accessible to people who are outside China or know how to get over the Great Firewall.

From the WSJ:

To many CEOs, China seems a land of immense opportunity. That's tempered, of course, by the many difficulties of actually doing business there—the regulatory strictures and caprice, corruption and the myriad quirks that come with operating in any developing economy. But do the benefits of being in China actually outweigh the costs? Two recent cases, one big and one small, suggest some businesses think well, maybe not.

The big one is Google, which announced Tuesday afternoon that it might leave entirely. The proximate cause is a mid-December cyber attack that allegedly included "theft of intellectual property" and attempts to hack email accounts of human rights-activists in China, the United States and Europe. Also, and perhaps not coincidentally, Google now says it's queasy over its 2006 deal with Beijing's mandarins to filter some search terms in exchange for permission to operate in the mainland. "We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn," chief legal officer David Drummond wrote on the company's blog.

Read more at the link.

The Shanghai Daily reports:

More than 6,040 couples applied to remarry after divorce last year, most of them aged between 50 and 60, according to the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau.

"Some of them just divorced to take advantage of the country's relocation policies," said Zhou Jixiang, director of the bureau's marriage-management division.

The government allows relocation compensation for each family, thus divorced couples receive a double dip as they become two families.

So the game plan is a quick divorce, pocket compensation payments and then remarry.

Zhou said that in Baoshan District, a couple divorced and remarried six times last year, a 2009 record.

Read more at the link.

China has greater pull in the US Congress. The Washington Post says:

"People in Congress are not stupid," said Minxin Pei, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. "A few years ago, China-bashing was costless. Now they will get phone calls from worried CEOs. China is creating jobs in their congressional districts."

Read more at the link.

Famed investor Jim Chanos says:

As most of the world bets on China to help lift the global economy out of recession, Mr. Chanos is warning that China’s hyperstimulated economy is headed for a crash, rather than the sustained boom that most economists predict. Its surging real estate sector, buoyed by a flood of speculative capital, looks like “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse,” he frets. He even suspects that Beijing is cooking its books, faking, among other things, its eye-popping growth rates of more than 8 percent.

Read more at the link.