China Rises - McClatchy Newspapers

Everybody knows Sherpas are hardy people. After all, they are the ones who serve as porters for most expeditions to climb Himalayan peaks. They can climb with 40 or 50 kilograms on their backs.

Should Olympic athletes be gagged from commenting on politics during the Beijing Summer Games?

I’ve traveled from Pakistan to Nepal, the final leg of a month-long journey before returning to China. And before you congratulate me on finagling a work-related trip to Kathmandu, let me describe the situation here.

Remember Adam Gadahn, the American who became an Al Qaeda operative and occasionally appears on videos calling for the destruction of the United States?

A citizen is hauled away by security forces one day. His family grows desperate. The state won’t say where he is being held – or even if he is being held.

If you want to see just how difficult the situation is outside rail stations with the storms that have lashed China, watch this video. It’s eight minutes long. But you’ll see scenes you won’t see on the television news.

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian made a surprise visit this weekend to one of the disputed Spratly Islands in key shipping lanes in the South China Sea.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure – Dr. Jekyll abroad and Mr. Hyde for many countrymen back home.

I told some journalist friends this morning that I had been up to the house of A.Q. Khan. A.Q. Khan, you may remember, is the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program. He’s revered in Pakistan for bringing it the bomb. And he’s reviled in the West because he traded nuclear secrets with North Korea, Libya and Iran in the process. He was a one-man “Nukes ‘R Us.”

Throughout the world, people use humor to deal with trying times. Pakistan is no different.

In case you missed it, a New York Times article says U.S. Olympic athletes may be given masks while in Beijing to help them deal with the smog.

They say that the most widely spoken language on Earth is English, or to be more precise English spoken by nonnative speakers.

The world may be growing more ‘wired’ all the time. China, for one, now has 210 million internet users, just shy of the 215 million in the United States.

After several days of gloomy, drizzly weather in Islamabad, a brilliant sunny morning arrived with the sort of azure skies that we never get in Beijing. So I took an outing.

All of China is on the same time zone. That might not seem like a big deal. But China is as big as the United States (including Alaska), which has four times zones in the continental part.

Here is a newspaper ad in Spain that has created a stir. When French automaker Citroen took out this ad in Madrid, showing a computer-generated Mao Zedong with a scowl before a hatchback car, some Chinese residents in Spain took offense.

It isn’t easy being an authoritarian leader in China today, especially when you want to make decisions that anger the middle class.

I went to a press event yesterday to show off the young ladies who may become hostesses at the Olympic Games this summer. Click here to see the story I wrote.

Some stowaways came aboard United Airlines flight 897 from Washington Dulles to Beijing last Sunday – eight mice, to be precise.

Anyone who doubts that China can overcome its severe — even dire — environmental problems should take a look at its new policy to ban the use of some plastic shopping bags.

China’s mobile phone owners are the world’s most avid senders of short text messages.

My daughters and I stopped in the Tiffany & Co. store at the Oriental Plaza shopping center in Beijing yesterday.

Some random musings post-vacation about northern Thailand:

In many countries, senior officials don’t just vanish upon retirement.

There are always rich ironies when Chinese and Westerners officials get together to talk about piracy, counterfeit goods and intellectual property rights.

What do Chinese internet users look for on the internet, and how does it differ from the English speaking world?

Steve Sark, a resident of Kunming in southern China's Yunnan Province, kindly sent in the above photo.

If all politics is local, as the venerable politician Tip O’Neill once said, then one can understand why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending this week gallivanting about China.