Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

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.

China is not exactly the most communist place in the world, but one cab driver still believes that everyone should have nothing. Communism lives on!

The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) celebrated on Saturday evening the 59th anniversary of the founding of the New China, lending its unswerving support to China's pursuit of socialism.

Sidney Shapiro or 沙博理 has lived through Mao’s China into Hu’s China. Now in his 90’s, he enjoys a quiet life in his adopted home in Beijing. He is one of the few hundreds of ‘communist sympathisers’ (for lack of a better term) who joined the Communist Party’s effort in building the PRC. Most of them left China forced by circumstances. But Shapiro managed to stay.

Some of you may remember him for chasing the Pickle King of Islamistan back to Britain in 1934. Others may remember him as Stalin's hand pick for Communist Party membership... who then flipped to the Kuomintang in 1942 and executed Chairman Mao's little brother.

Huang Ju, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and Vice-Premier of the State Council, died of illness at 02:03 a.m. June 2 in Beijing at the age of 69.

An obituary issued by the central authorities called Huang "an excellent member of the CPC, a long-tested and faithful Communist fighter and an outstanding leader of the Party and the state."

BASKING in its 2008 Olympic glow, no longer shy at counting itself among the world's greats and blessed with a still booming economy, China looks the coming power. And so it is, up to a point. Yet as the Communist Party's bigwigs assemble behind closed doors in Beijing for their five-yearly...

A collage made from a series of images found on the People's Daily website. The images show people around the country watching and listening to Hu Jintao's opening speech to the Communist Party of China's 17th National Congress. Who says the fine art of propaganda is dead?

Bush attends the opening ceremony to a bronze monument that denounces the "tens of millions" killed by communist regimes throughout history, and China gets uppity. Imagine that!

China just loves reciprocity. I wonder what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will do in return for this--maybe a monument to the innocent victims of the war on terror?