(REUTERS) 27 April 2007:

China can appear a very different place, as the proposed Women’s Town in Chongqing shows. This is traditionally an area of the country where women rule the roost, and they’ve decided to create a tourist city which works to the local rules. The motto of the town is “Women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women’s requests.” The allure of the place as a town to visit will be that women get to call all the shots, for example, on where to shop or where to eat.

Men would be punished for not obeying.

(REUTERS) 26 January 2007:

While China is growing rapidly and is soon set to become the world’s largest economy, it’s worth remembering that parts of the country are still very poor. So poor, in fact, that age old practices like the selling of a woman into an arranged marriage for as little as $1,500 still take place.

There also persists in some areas the idea that if a young man dies unmarried, then he should be married after death to a woman who has also died: to provide a wife in the next world.

The two customs seem to have met, when a farmer bought such a bride then murdered her to sell as a “ghost” bride. China still has a long way to go when a young woman is worth more dead than alive.

(REUTERS) 06 December 2006:

Metrosexuality can be difficult to define: it seems to be the idea that certain men get more fully in touch with their feminine side and begin to take care of their appearance. Dressing well, using face creams and moisturizers, caring about hair conditioner and so on. It’s also sometimes assumed to be something confined to the urban centers of Blue America.

That last appears to be untrue as a recent report from China shows. Men from Beijing are spending as much as $15 a month (a fortune in Chinese terms) on cosmetics but they are beaten by their compatriots in Shanghai who spend nearly 20 minutes a day staring at themselves in the mirror.

Vanity, thy name is…dude?

(REUTERS) 1 October 2006:

Sports participation teaches respect for others, the importance of rules, and the ”It isn’t whether you win or lose, but how you play the game” philosophy.  Big sporting events, like the Olympic Games, are also a way to show the uniting of nations, that we are all humans together.

At a recent games for the ethnic minorities in China (China has some 55 such, they are not all the Han of our imaginations), too much effort was put into the winning part. One disputed wrestling final turned into a brawl with sticks and blades, something usually reserved for the martial arts section. The women’s Dragon Boat racing was marred by accusations of ‘big women with Adam’s Apples’ who turned out to be men wearing wigs.

(REUTERS) 29 September 2006:

Economists have this odd habit of insisting that people’s behavior must be regarded as a reaction to the incentives they face. Change incentives and you will change people’s behavior, but perhaps not in quite the way you expected or in a way you would want.

Officials in Dandong in China needed to cut the number of teachers they employed. Fair enough, and thinking themselves enlightened they decided that single parents (whether from divorce or death of a partner) should keep their jobs while others lose theirs. The result? More teachers got divorced in a week than the number of divorces the whole town had had the previous year.

As economists keep saying, incentives matter, even in marriage.

(REUTERS) 20 September 2006:

In a move sure to delight self conscious males everywhere, doctors in China have reported the partial success of the world’s first penis transplant. Nerves and blood vessels all joined up and the man, whose original was severly damaged in an accident, was able to urinate normally for the first time in 8 months. Nor was there any sign of the organ being rejected.

However, only partial success for after two weeks surgeons had to remove it again following the extreme psychological distress of both the man and his wife. Exact reasons are unknown but perhaps, given the extremely intimate uses to which it might be put, not knowing exactly where it had been was a problem?

(REUTERS) 1 September 2006:

It’s long been accepted that marriage brings with it not just responsibilities but rights. One of these is that in return for limiting one’s sexual adventures one does in fact get to have sexual adventures with the person one has married. This concept is sometimes referred to as ”conjugal rights.” This is so embedded in the western concepts of marriage that if, say, either husband or wife is injured in a way that makes either or both unable to enjoy said right, compensation is due from those who caused the injury.

China however is rather different, a court having thrown out a claim by Wei Suying after her husband’s injury left him impotent. He was compensated, she was not. Looks like China still has some way to go yet.

(REUTERS) 24 July 2006 :

The idea of dating and sites on the Internet is nothing new, even in China. Combine the rapid spread of the net there with the Confucian ideal of marriage and children (Confucious himself described being childless as the “height of filial impiety” for bringing the ancestral line to an end.) and up has popped a new site called “Marriage For Asexuals.”

Some 60% of the site’s members are people who cannot have sex, either for genetic or accidental injury reasons and the rest are “comrades”, the nickname for homosexuals, driven by those social pressures to look for an opposite sex partner: one not interested in sex.

(REUTERS) 08 June 2006

Police raided a nightclub in Beijing yesterday with the suspicion that there were illegal activities going on. China is a great deal less relaxed than many other parts of the world concerning such things as strippers and escorts. However, police were astonished to find a female clientele taking advantage of more than 90 male strippers and escorts.

The concept of female escorts they understood, even though the practice is illegal, but the idea that women might also enjoy male company in such a way was completely beyond them.

What would probably be more of a surprise to a westerner was the nature of the female party crowd. While there were a few female businesswomen from “out of town,” the majority of the customers were themselves female escorts from the more traditional neighborhood establishments.