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Holden Caulfield, call your office. I have discovered the promised land of phoniness. During Friday's opening ceremonies in Beijing, a 9-year-old girl named Lin Miaoke sang a ballad to a packed stadium and a billion TV viewers. But the voice coming out of our TV sets wasn't hers. It belonged to a 7-year-old girl named Yang Peiyi. The Communist Party decided Peiyi had the better voice, but Miaoke was better looking -- so they created a phony hybrid of the two. "The reason was for the national interest," said Chen Qigang, general music designer of the opening ceremonies. "The child...

Why Every American Should Care About China The Emerging Superpower Is Forging Relationships Where the U.S. Isn't   By BOB WOODRUFF, GABRIELLE TENENBAUM, SUSAN SCHAEFER and MEENA HARTENSTEINAug. 6, 2008   When the Olympics begin Friday in Beijing it will be a "coming out" party of sorts for China. Beijing hopes this will be a bright spot in what has otherwise been a tough year -- the country was hit by a devastating earthquake and rocked by scandals over tainted food and medicine and toxic toys. There have been protests, both within China and in other countries, about its...

Beijing was finally experiencing clear skies today after city authorities apparently used seeding technology to disperse the smog. The report came as a strong 6.0 magnitude earthquake rocked the western Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Gansu today, near the site of May's devastating quake that killed at least 70,000 people, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Beijing's struggle to deal with foreign journalists covering the Olympics reached a new low Friday. As 30,000 people queued for the last Olympics ticket sales, fist-fights broke out. Police and soldiers tried to keep journalists from recording the mayhem. A photojournalist for Hong Kong's South China Morning Post was detained for six hours. Two from Hong Kong's Now TV channel were detained, and the station reports that police asked them to delete their footage. All the journalists were from Hong Kong, suggesting police may have been particularly forceful with ethnically Chinese reporters. Meanwhile, the government continues to block news Web...

Christian Dior, the French fashion brand, has become the latest global company to learn a hard lesson about the danger of offending Chinese sensitivities. Facing the possibility of a boycott of its products, the luxury company said Thursday that it had dropped the American actress Sharon Stone from its advertising in China after she suggested last week that the recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for Beijing’s treatment of Tibet.

Tibetans have a strong case against Beijing. But mixing it in with the Olympics and Darfur is a red rag to a wounded young bull. Nationalism is more often aroused by setbacks than success, so the Tibet problems and the possible threats to a triumphal Olympics are stirring it in China. On the horizon is the possibility that these will combine with high inflation, stagnating exports and trade tensions with the United States to create a perfect nationalistic storm. The Chinese leadership faces a difficult balancing act. As its legitimacy is now based on national achievement, not communist ideology, it...

Tibetan monks shouting pro-independence slogans caught Chinese officials by surprise Thursday during a highly scripted tour for Western journalists in Lhasa’s central Buddhist temple, disrupting China’s effort to portray the recent Tibetan rioting as the work of violent criminal thugs and separatists. “Tibet is not free! Tibet is not free!” yelled one young Buddhist monk, who then started crying, according to an Associated Press correspondent in the tour. Government handlers shouted for the journalists to leave and tried to pull them away during the 15-minute protest by about 30 monks at the Jokhang Monastery in central Lhasa. It was unclear...

Nearly six decades of struggle against the might of China has taught the Tibetans one thing: Ask the world for little, expect less. As Tibetans rose up in recent weeks against China's harsh rule over the Himalayan region and China sent forces to quell the protests, Tibet's government-in exile-sent its envoys to far-flung capitals with appeals for help. But guided by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, they kept their requests modest. They know few countries have the appetite to cross China, particularly at a time the world is counting on the emerging superpower to keep the global economy...

China on Saturday vowed to “resolutely crush” the “Tibet independence forces” even as the Dalai Lama, Buddhist spiritual leader, warned that the younger generation may launch more vigorous and violent struggle against Beijing after his death. Updating its earlier toll of 13 in the unrest in Lhasa, which started on March 10 coinciding with the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Communist rule in Tibet, Chinese authorities said the violence claimed the lives of 18 civilians and a police officer. “[We must] resolutely crush the ‘Tibet independence’ forces’ conspiracy and sabotaging activities,” The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the...

English language experts say that, with the 2008 Olympics less than 500 days away, there is still a long way to go before standard English translations of the names of dishes and drinks sold in Beijing restaurants can be finalized. Garbled and misleading English signs in tourist spots have long confused English speakers in Beijing. Problems range from obscure abbreviations, word-for-word translations of Chinese characters into English, improper omissions and misspellings. But what confuses them even more are English menus in Beijing restaurants. However, not everyone agrees with the need to standardize everything. "Weird and wonderful English on Beijing menus...