Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

A Chinese-Russian alliance is forming. The Chinese client state is North Korea; the Russian and Chinese trading partner is Iran. Like China, Russia is a capitalism-utilizing dictatorship with a history of Marxism and a belief in its eventual historical conquest. Like Russia, China is a Machiavellian political actor willing to play both sides of the Islamic-Western conflict against the middle. China and Russia are the global beneficiaries of the Islamic-Western clash of civilizations. They remain largely outside its purview while benefiting from its externalities.

Back in the late 1980s, when mocking the few remaining Communist believers had become a popular indoor sport in the former Soviet Union, one of my favourite gambits was to point out that Russia would have done far better economically if the Communist revolution of 1917 had never happened at all. No matter how pessimistic your assumptions about the way that a non-Communist Russia would have developed, it simply couldn't have done as badly as the Communists did.

BEIJING, China (Al'Reuters) -- China and Russia plan to launch a joint mission to Mars in 2009 to scoop up rocks from the red planet and one of its moons, a Chinese scientist said on Wednesday.

The shadowy hacker and malware hosting network that only recently fled Russia to set up operations in China has now pulled the plug there and vanished yet again, researchers said late Friday.

The Russian mistake was that they put so much into military expenditure and so little into civilian technology. So their economy collapsed. I believe the Chinese leadership have learnt: If you compete with America in armaments, you will lose. You will bankrupt yourself. So, avoid it, keep your head down, and smile, for 40 or 50 years.

China set two more ambitious goals for its space program this week, announcing it will launch an unmanned lunar orbiter in the second half of 2007 and a probe to Mars by 2009, according to reports from the Xinhua news agency.

The lunar orbiter, scheduled to launch later this year, will take 3-D images of the moon's surface. If successful, it will pave the way for a lunar landing mission, Xinhua quoted National Space Administration director Sun Laiyan as saying Sunday in a speech at Beijing Jiaotong University.

A Chinese destroyer and supply ship have gone on a European tour to Russia, Britain, France and Spain.

Helping grown-ups crap themselves in style is a booming business. Add this to the growling list of reasons to stay home during China's week-long holidays.

Coal-fired power plants account for some 70 to 80% of China’s total power generation. A group of MIT researchers have released a preliminary report on a comprehensive survey of China’s coal power plant industry revealing surprising conclusions that make the report a must-read for any China energy analyst.