An Olympic ticket postscript. Having booked and paid for all my lovely women's hockey tickets online, I went to the Bank of China this morning to pick them up. I handed over my passport and it was duly photocopied and ...well... filed, I suppose. Where DO all the photocopies of passports go in … more »

Today was the scarily-named 'third phase', the day Olympic event tickets went on sale to the public. The first two phases were lotteries in which we failed to win a single ticket even though we thought we'd chosen two utterly unpopular sports, to whit synchronised swimming a… more »

Yesterday, May 1st, there were demonstrations outside the French supermarket chain Carrefour in several Chinese cities. I'm not sure whether anyone can quite remember what crime Carrefour committed, but in general terms the chain seems to be paying the price for comments made by the French… more »

Beijing feels like a city bracing itself for a season of utterly cheerless celebration and paranoid control freakery. Police are going door to door in housing compounds checking that foreign residents have registered their address with the police. This is because the authori… more »

Each night for the past few days, as I’ve made my way up the stairs to bed, I’ve had the strange urge to picture China’s leaders as they prepare for the hours ahead. They live just a few miles away from me, of course, another strange thought because they seem to belong to another w… more »

Another example (and they are multiplying) of pre-Olympic nerves on the part of the authorities. They want a squeaky clean city (although the numerous brothels around town show no sign of being closed down). Last Friday night, the police here launched a sudden raid on Sanlitun bar street, the most p… more »

We went to the Botanical Gardens yesterday (along with much of the population of Beijing), where an electronic countdown board alerted us to the fact that there were only 131 days left until the Olympics. In fact there was no danger of us forgetting. This morning there was traffic chaos because the … more »

James is back. He asked the authorities for permission to stay longer in Tibet but was (of course) refused. He is now decompressing... he describes the week as the most surreal experience of his life. Coming a week after a trip to North Korea, he's overdosing on surreal. So now there is very li… more »

James  had a visit today from the foreign affairs bureau of Lhasa and the police, and they insisted he move out of his hotel in the Tibetan quarter of Lhasa. The riots are over, the streets are filled with troops,  and the Chinese government says it hasn't used any lethal force to sup… more »

At last - and perhaps only temporarily - I've emerged from deadline fever. At the same time as staggering towards deadline day, I've been travelling and speaking at book festivals first in Beijing, where I live, then in Hong Kong, and then in Shanghai. Of course, because of the censor… more »