News

Bone marrow match found for adopted Chinese girl: The family of a 6-year-old adopted Chinese girl who desperately needs a bone marrow transplant believes they have found a match in China. Kailee Wells suffers from severe aplastic anemia, which prevents bone marrow from producing new blood cells. (Also see the webpage for Kailee!)

Chinese shoppers happy to spend: China's October retail sales rose at their fastest pace in two years as the week-long National Day holiday gave consumers their first chance to flex their spending muscles since the SARS outbreak.

BBC to launch first ever Chinese comedy: Forget the ancient stereotypes about stale prawn crackers, kung fu, Chinese laundries and 19th-century opium dens. The BBC is planning to emulate the success of the award-winning Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me with Britain's first ever all-Oriental comedy series.

In China, It's Easier to Get Lost in the Crowd: These days, China has one currency, the renminbi, but hawking is still a national pastime, as evidenced by easy availability of the latest movies on DVD. Vendors will mutter "DVD?" to anyone who looks remotely foreign. During my recent time in Beijing, I was approached but much less frequently than I was 10 years ago, and mostly, I suspect, because the 15-minute walk between my hotel and the office, along Jian Guo Men Wai Avenue, is chockablock with hotels, embassies, imported-goods stores and even two Starbucks coffee shops.