Actually, they usually only list ethnicity when the person is not Han, or gender when the person is female. I don't know why they listed his ethnicity there. I guess they're used to listing it for everyone in Yunnan.

"we looked at several places in Beijing and Shanghai and found that mixing creatives' office space with performance spaces and galleries made things too chaotic and often resulted in creatives moving out."

That's so true. 798 was first filled with artist studios, then the creative companies and galleries moved in. The bars, shops and cafes came last.

798 is very active now, with dozens of exhibitions opening every weekend, lots of music events and plenty of places to grab a bite to eat. But there are only a few artist studios left, and most of the creative companies are gone.

Laotou00, you're kind of off-topic there.

There are a lot of issues arising from Qiu He's moves, but the construction is going along rather smoothly, considering the scale.

As for the debt, you have it backwards. The government sets up local development corporations and gives them large parcels of land. They use this land as collateral to finance the infrastructure projects, and when the new infrastructure is built, that land, now highly valuable to developers, gets sold to pay off the debt. It's happening across the country. Almost all of the other bonds and funding mechanisms are sold domestically, so if something happens, it will be more manageable than, say, Argentina's international debt crisis of a few years back.

I don't care where FOTF folks go to church. I have no problem with teaching "good judgement, self control, integrity, healthy relationships, communication skills with parents, resisting peer pressure, and respecting yourself and others", but I am no fan of this organization.

Do you want to know what they're spending all that lobbying money on? It's on fighting to make abstinence only education the only form of sex education in American schools.

Do you know what else they spend it on? Convincing congressmen to cut off AIDS and reproductive health aid money to any country that allows abortions in public clinics.

I really don't care what people believe about God and the universe. But it offends my American sensibilities when people try to impose those views on others.

When the Ministry of Education finds out about this organization's religious agenda, not only will they kick them out, they'll impose a whole bunch of new rules making it harder for foreign education materials to be adopted in China, because they'll view all foreign education institutions as possible guerrilla fronts for religious insurgencies. Thanks a lot, guys.

The proliferation of illegal taxis has stemmed pressure on the city to revamp their woefully inadequate taxi system. Licensed cabbies have a lot of legitimate complaints, but their attitude and the shortcomings of the system are becoming untenable. Drivers frequently refuse to take people to places they deem too far or unprofitable, something which is illegal, and it seems every taxi in the city switches drivers at dinner time, which is when they're needed the most.

For now, people just shrug their shoulders and hop in a black cab. I hope that the crackdown will expose the deeper problems, and the local media will start to follow this story. When I came to Kunming 10 years ago, it had one of the best run taxi systems in the country. The problem is, it's still the same system today.