Last  night at about 8pm a fire broke out in the northern building of the new CCTV complex in Beijing (see photos on CNReviews or videos and updates on Danwei).  Huge fire.  Most fires burn from the bottom up, but this building was so flammable it actually burned from the top down.  It’s just another casualty from the Olympic building boom that has the iconic Bird’s Nest being turned into a shopping center.

Although drugs have most famously made their way into China through its southern ports, Xinjiang has never been immune to its terrible grasp, neither in its history or in the present. The most recent drug-related news to come from this area was the comic discovery of cannabis alongside ancient mummies, but I just ran across another article detailing a more modern discovery of drugs that I found even funnier…

File this under “Headlines You’ll Only See in Xinjiang”. From the China Daily:

“Police shot a rampaging bull on a middle school campus Thursday in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.”

While comfortably sitting in front of a computer screen in the Times Online London offices, columnist Michael Binyon has decided to inform me that my home here in Xinjiang, China is going to be “explosive” in 2009. 

Although once famous for its “Wandering Lake” mentioned by Marco Polo as his last stop before taking a year-long journey across the Gobi Desert, it has finally made the headlines again in a few very small newspapers here in China’s northwest as the world’s largest potash fertilizer producer.

“Everybody keep quiet.  Don’t move.  Let the leaders go first.”
This short phrase, uttered on December 8th, 1994 in Karamay, a small city on the northern edge of Xinjiang, China, still haunts the city.  As the years pass it gets buried further and further back in everyone’s memory in hopes that one day it may actually be forgotten but for now the memory lingers. 

A Xinjiang story involving a pregnant Uyghur woman has made its rounds through the international news community recently. The reason it garnered such attention was because…

Here is a man who, along with 6 of his good friends, went hunting in a somewhat remote part of the province like he had probably done before in the past, but this time something went wrong. They had already shot one boar and in the excitement of searching for another they accidentally shot an unfortunate couple.

From 2006 to 2010 – a mere four years – China’s railway system will have grown an astounding 17.5%! As if that weren’t enough, last weekend China’s State Council just approved 2 trillion yuan ($292 billion) to expand the rail system even more…all of this in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis. Thankfully, all this change is actually going to affect us here in Xinjiang.

Xinjiang, besides being a major producer of oil products for China, last year accounted for 36% of the country’s total cotton. So when the price of cotton begins to fall, just like the price of most everything else right now (rice, the stock market, etc.), it has major effects on Xinjiang’s cotton industry and its migrant workers.