I travel quite a lot in China, so it doesn’t take much to get me talking about hotels here. There are always curious things.

The last two nights are a case in point. Last night, I stayed at a hotel in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Autonomous Region. It’s a city of about a million people, tiny by Chinese standards.

My assistant made the reservation for the hotel. I didn’t recognize the name, something like Die-suh Business Hotel. To my surprise, it turns out to be a Days Inn Hotel, a well-known brand in the U.S.

Nice hotel. Big flat-screen TV. Free broadband internet. A pot to boil water for a morning coffee. But no heat.

When the plane landed at the airport, the announced temperature was 44 degrees Fahrenheit (8 degrees Celsius).

I got under the covers at that hotel last night, and I didn’t budge till the last possible moment this morning. It was freeezzinng. Brrr.

Presumably, the reason is that the government bars most buildings from turning the heat on until Nov. 15. The receptionist at the hotel said that’s when the hotel would heat its rooms.

Tonight, I am in a little city in Inner Mongolia. The hotel is a simple local hotel. But what happened is rather extraordinary, astounding really, given what would likely happen in my home country. Despite years of experience, I still have occasional glitches in my knowledge of my laptop. For some reason, I couldn’t get it to connect to the internet. Within a few minutes, a woman was up with the correct DNS numbers for the local server. Still no luck.

Within an hour, a crew of technicians was in my room tinkering with the network program on my laptop. They were working in a language foreign to them (English) and doing so with good humor. Soon, they set up a new connection for me.

Can you imagine calling for help with a laptop in most foreign countries? They would scoff. So here I sit, sipping a local Chunshengtai Beer (I kid you not) and surfing the internet from Wuda, Inner Mongolia. And the heat is on! 

Wine could be the next category of consumer product to face charges of major fakery.

A little more than a year ago, I wrote an article saying that Chinese vineyards commonly fib about the vintage of their labels, and even about whether what’s in the bottles is actually wine or sugar water with some food coloring, alcohol and grape juice thrown in.

I noted that Chinese vintners commonly mix foreign bulk wine with local wine, and consumers are misled about what they drink.

Here’s an excerpt from that article:

Still to be resolved is whether local winemakers can mix bulk wine imported from countries such as Spain, Chile, Australia and Argentina with their own wines without telling the consumer. Such bulk wine can sell for as little as 40 cents a liter.

Bulk wine imports to China climbed 121 percent last year, hitting nearly five times the volume of imported bottled wine. Industry experts say most of the bulk wine goes into the bottled wine of China’s three big vintners — Great Wall, Dynasty and Changyu which label their wines as products of China.

A purchasing executive with a foreign supermarket chain operating in China, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he doesn’t want to antagonize local vineyards, said of China’s homegrown wines: “I believe nothing on the label.”

Now along comes the heartsick chairmain of a vineyard in Hebei province who’s spilling the beans about what happens. A blog posting of the anonymous vintner is making the rounds on the internet, and a translation popped up on China Digital Times (unavailable behind the Chinese firewall).

Here’s what he says in part:

According to the internal source, “wine made from grapes grown in China occupies only 20 percent of the Chinese wine market, and the remaining 80 percent is imported junk wine.” “The market size is about 300,000 tons today in China; however, only 20 percent is produced locally and 80 percent or more is from imports. What are the imports? They are ‘junk wines, so called ‘garbage-rank imported wine,’ just like the second-hand suits imported from Japan and Korea in the past. The compositions of these junk wines are unknown, and the quality and quantity of each gradient is difficult to monitor. Most of them are not qualified for the aging process or were manufactured during bad years for wineries.”

The Chairman admitted honestly, “I have no idea what my colleagues will say about this situation. However, as an entrepreneur who is passionate about the wine industry and is dedicated to creating a gold label in Chinese wine, I feel very pained to see this happen. Why do our Chinese consumers have to drink the junk wine that the foreigners do not drink?! Remixed wine occupies about 70 percent market share of the wine that is sold for under 30 RMB, 40 percent for that under 60 RMB and 50 percent on average for wine under 200 RMB. In particular, the wine sold at nightclubs (entertainment places) is extremely poor quality. (The manufacturers) add food coloring to dry white wine to make dry red wine.

I’ve visited a couple of vineyards near Beijing, including the Taillan vineyard that is was built with French investment and the Bolongbao vineyard that produces a high end wine.

But we generally never, ever drink Chinese wine. And it just boils down to one thing: I don’t trust what’s on the label.

Electric cars and a medium-size automaker in China may soon get a big boost.

According to this article, China’s Geely Motors is in negotiations with British officials over the launch of electric taxis in London next year.

Geely is a co-owner of a company, Manganese Bronze, that describes itself as “the leading manufacturer of the distinctive London black taxi.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

"One of our ideas is to convert London taxis [to electric propulsion]," Li Shufu, the company's chairman, told the Financial Times. "We are doing research on this project."

Matthew Cheyne, Manganese Bronze's international development director, told BusinessGreen.com that a partnership between his company and electric vehicle specialist Tanfield Group, announced in April, is progressing and that the first electric black cabs could be on London’s roads early next year.

"We have given Tanfield some gliders [engineless taxis], basically vehicles that they can start doing some work on, but it is very much in the early stages, " said Cheyne.

According to information released in April the all-electric version of Manganese Bronze’s TX4 black cab – to be branded the TX4E – will have a top speed of 50mph and a range in excess of 100 miles on one battery charge.

Although there is not a specific date set yet for trials of the electric cabs, Cheyne confirmed that the companies were looking at early next year to introduce a fleet of ten prototype vehicles.

Given Geely's international reach the cabs may be deployed elsewhere in the world but London will offer a "good proving ground" for the technology, according to Cheyne, because of the intensity at which the fleet would be used and the potential infrastructure for recharging.   

Sometimes as I read the media in China, things jump out at me as possible ideas for stories to pursue. Further reporting then can lead to actual articles.

Then again, reporting can also lead to greater confusion – or the realization that maybe there isn’t a story there. After all, China is a huge country, so varied that you can stake out a position on what’s going on and find almost the exact opposite to hold true somewhere else. So caveat emptor.

Here’s what happened to me recently. I spied an item on danwei.org a couple of weeks ago that I found interesting. The headline: Screw the elderly, I’m keeping my bus seat.

The gist was that despite ancient traditions of filial piety and constant reminders aboard public buses for passengers to cede their seats to the elderly, the pregnant and the ailing, some young people are refusing to do so. It cited an article in the Yangtse Evening Post in Nanjing written by a reporter who observed a young person who declined to yield her seat.

One passenger asked the younger woman to give her seat to the older one. Unexpectedly, the young woman retorted with something really preposterous: "I would never give up my seat to anyone in a bus." To your correspondent, who tried to talk with her, she said, "Please give me a reason why I should give up my seat. I am a member of 'never give up your seat group.' Go and check it out on the Internet if you like." She said nothing else but sat there like a rock.

The reporter investigated on the Douban website and found the ‘never-give-up-your-seat’ club actually exists. Its reasoning and manifesto suggests that some elderly “are actually stronger and healthier than younger people” and “young people are shouldering the burden of the entire society, and deserve a few minutes' rest during their commutes.”

Hmm, I thought, there might be a trend story on increasing individualism in Chinese society here. So I zipped off an email to Daniel A. Bell, a renowned scholar at Tsinghua University (China’s MIT) on political theory and Confucianism, and hit the streets to ask some questions.

Almost immediately conflicting responses came up. People voiced deeply contrary views.  I certainly couldn’t determine any trend.

The first person I approached, Ma Dengshan, a 71-year-old retiree, said: “Sometimes the bus driver will shout out, ‘There are old people. Please give up your seat!’ It’s gotten better than before.”

A young person, who declined to give her name, said, “Most people give up their seat. I always give up my seat. … Here in Beijing, the propaganda about ‘lao, ruo, bing, can yun’ is very big.” (‘Lao, ruo, bing, can, yun’ means ‘old, weak, sick, disabled, pregnant.’)

One young fellow, Bao Jianan, 20, said he’d seen other young people ignore the appeals to help the elderly.

“They just sit there. They won’t get up,” he said.

Then Dr. Bell’s response came in. In part, it read:

I did read the article, and found it quite surprising but I'm not sure if it reflects broader changes of society. In Beijing, anyway, it seems to me that the young are more likely to give up seats to the elderly. I often travel with my Chinese in-laws -- father is 83 and mother is 73 -- and younger people do usually give up seats for them. In education, the value of filial piety is taught to children -- my kid was graded according to his willingness to uphold filial piety when he went to the primary school attached to Tsinghua University. And today, many teachers and intellectuals who want to revive Confucianism also stress the value of filial piety. In Confucianism, filial piety not only means care and respect for the elderly, it is also a key mechanism for learning morality and care towards others more generally, including other elderly people.

So why do we have this kind of internet group? It could be regional differences: the Southern Chinese, especially city folk, may be more individualistic than the Northerners. But these are crude stereotypes. The likely explanation is that it's just a few unusual individuals who use the internet to publicize their cause.

He later emailed a follow-up that noted “teenage rebellion against filial piety shows the continuing importance of that value in society (otherwise, why bother?).”

So I decided on preliminary investigation that this might not be a trend at all. Any readers in China want to comment?

Here is black humor about the financial crisis, courtesy of the South China Morning Post.

Q: What is the definition of optimism?
A: An investment banker ironing five shirts on a Sunday evening.

Q: Why are all MBAs going back to school?
A: To ask for their money back.

I went to the ATM this morning and it said, “insufficient funds.”

I’m wondering: Is it them or is it me?

The Post also has an interesting blurb about the fall in value of the big U.S.-headquartered gaming companies with operations in Macao. A year ago, it seemed these companies could do no wrong. But a global financial crisis has severely humbled them.

My research on Yahoo! shows the following on their share prices on U.S. exchanges:

Las Vegas Sands, which operates the huge Venetian resort in Macau closed last Friday at $13.06, less than a tenth of its last year high of $148.76.

Wynn Resorts, which also operates a gleaming high-rise casino and hotel in Macau, traded Friday at $57.52, down from its year-long high of $176.14.

MGM Mirage, which is a joint venture partner in Macau with the daughter of Macau tycoon Stanley Ho, traded at $15, down from its high of $95.66.

They’ve been dealt some rotten hands.

Old habits die hard. And one of those old habits for me is adopting a particular plan of action when it looks like I might get detained in China while covering a story.

I was in a factory district of Dongguan city in southern China on Friday morning, snapping photos of workers pouring into an electronics factory.

It took me all of about five minutes to realize I was headed for trouble. Private security guards stared at me fixedly. One disappeared into a stall to make a phone call. I was on a sidewalk of a public street.

Frankly, I was simply trying to get generic photos for a story about changes in the Pearl River Delta region.

I use getting “detained,” by the way, in a broad sense. In China, a private company or factory could as well waylay a reporter as the police.

So as soon as I got the photos I needed, in about seven minutes, I walked away from the scene quickly. No need to tempt fate. Then I returned to my hotel to download the photos and put them in a folder that is not obvious.

I’ve never had anybody forcibly delete my digital photos but many, many journalists have had that experience.

I bring this up because I suspect that things are slowly getting better in China. The latest good news came at about midnight Friday when the Foreign Ministry announced that press freedoms instituted this year for foreign reporters during the Olympics were being extended indefinitely. That means we don’t have to apply with the Foreign Ministry to leave our home base (Beijing, in my case) and we can interview anyone who agrees to the interview.

On paper, this sounds wonderful. In reality, it codifies standard practice worldwide but the implementation often leaves much to be desired. Click here to see a BBC story about how reporters say the press freedoms have changed their work lives.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) welcomed the news. "If properly implemented, we believe this will mark a step forward in the opening of China's media environment," said club president Jonathan Watts.  "We urge the government to ensure that police and local officials respect the spirit as well as the letter of the new rules.”

A statement added: "The FCCC urges China to take further steps including the enactment of legislation protecting news sources, the abolition of rules obliging hotels to report to police when a foreign journalist checks in, and the opening of restricted areas, such as Tibet. We will continue to monitor cases of reporting interference and we remain willing to work with the authorities to improve working conditions for journalists in China."

A dissident rights group with headquarters in New York City, Human Rights in China, also welcomed the rules.

Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, said in a statement that the country "should respect its own constitution which guarantees press freedom, a right that many Chinese journalists and writers have paid—and are paying—a great price to exercise."

The group added: “The recent public health disaster resulting from tainted milk power is a devastating example of the consequence of suppressing press freedom. The authorities caused many more deaths by forbidding reporting of the story in July because they wanted to preserve a ‘harmonious’ atmosphere for the Olympic Games.”

What this means on the ground is hard to say.

Barely a month ago, I was in Sichuan province reporting a story about how relatives are clinging to children left orphaned by the May earthquake, unwilling to give them up for adoption. I was with my colleague Richard Spencer of the Daily Telegraph. We were in a hamlet speaking to an elderly couple whose grandson had been put up for adoption. As soon as I felt I had enough information, I felt it was time to get out of there. So I bolted early. Richard sent me a text message a little later on that the village chief had show up and was holding him for several hours.

Is this a detention? Well, who knows what you want to call it. But it is a risk still all over China. And unless reporters have a lot of time to spare, interviews in rural areas are often terse, with reporters looking over their shoulders. The time to move on comes quickly.

I’ve spent much of the week in Guangdong province in the Pearl River Delta region of China, and here is a short travel recommendation.

The high-speed rail service between Shenzhen (the port entry from Hong Kong) and Guangzhou is very efficient, fast and easy to use. Rail stations on both cities connect to the local subways, so it is also convenient.

I’ve taken the rail service three times in the past three days. The trains leave about every 15 minutes, so you are never long from the next departure. Rail travel takes about one hour and 20 minutes each way.

As you can see from the photos, the trains are quite modern. Top speed, far as I could tell, was around 180 kilometers per hour.

Subways in both cities are quite modern, although more costly than Beijing. A token yesterday in Guangzhou cost 4 kuai, or about 60 cents.

The only negative experience was last night in a Shenzhen hotel. We’d been at a Holiday Inn Express hotel in Shenzhen for two nights (about 50 bucks per room per night, a real steal) but they were booked up for the third night. So we went to a local hotel, the HongFeng, suggested by the travel company CTrip. The internet service sucked royally. Every five minutes, the signal would be cut and the hotel would ask me to sign on again. Moreover, barely half an hour from free Hong Kong, the internet controls were severe.

The next morning, when I went for breakfast at 8:30, they had no more service. They coughed up a few greasy things. No coffee. Ugh. I went back to the room to watch some of the Obama-McCain debate on the internet (no CNN in the hotel), the signal kept cutting off.

Some Chinese have a dry and witty sense of humor at the financial turmoil roiling the world, and China to a lesser extent. This ditty is making the rounds on the internet.

Some of it is inside baseball, thus the footnotes and explanations at the end. It begins with an explanation why securities regulators advise Chinese against jumping into the stock market now. Otherwise, they say, investors will:

Enter with a BMW and leave on a bicycle

Enter in a western suit and leave in a bikini

Enter as management and leave as labor

Enter with a PhD and leave as a dimwit

Enter as Yao Ming and leave as Pan Changjiang (1)

Enter as a crocodile and leave as a gecko

Enter as a python and leave as an earthworm

Enter as a tiger and leave as a housecat

Enter holding a dog leash and leave on a dog leash

Enter standing up and leave on a stretcher

Enter as the Brazilian soccer team and leave as the Chinese soccer team

Enter as a man and leave as a eunuch

Enter as Huang Shiren and leave as Yang Bailao(2)

Enter as Edison Chen(3) and leave as a photograph

Enter as Liu Xiang(4) and leave as Fan Paopao(5)

In summation, you will enter as the planet and leave as a ping-pong ball

1.  Famous comedian known for his short stature

2. Real estate mogul whose company's stock price plummeted when he publicly advised his employees not to donate more than 10 yuan to the Sichuan earthquake survivors. He was forced to issue a public apology and then his company, Vanke, donated 100 million yuan to rebuilding shelters in the earthquake area. Oops! As several alert readers point out, this should say that Huang Shiren is an evil landlord and Yang Bailao is a poor peasant who had to sell his daughter to pay off a debt to Huang.

3. The scandal involving actor Edison Chen involved the illegal distribution over the Internet of intimate photos of the Hong Kong actor with various women, including actresses Gillian Chung, Bobo Chan, and Cecilia Cheung. The scandal shook the Hong Kong entertainment industry in early 2008.

4.  Liu Xiang is China's world-record holding 110-meter hurdler who dropped out of the Beijing Olympics due to injury. He is China's first gold medalist and world record holder in a men's track and field event.

5. Fan Paopao's real name is Fan Meizhong, a teacher who became infamous for rationalizing saving his own life rather than helping his students during the Sichuan earthquake.

Our older daughter rolls her eyes whenever I bring up the subject of saving anything – energy, leftover food, etc. She’s lived in an era of abundance. I, on the other hand, am the son of parents who lived through the Great Depression. We were told to eat everything on our plates.

This small clash of values goes on in Chinese homes all the time.

Only it can seem more extreme because the changes have come much more quickly and dramatically. This came to mind after reading a blog post from another Westerner, this one living in Shanghai. He talked about a conflict with his live-in partner’s parents over – get this! – toilet paper. Apparently there are a lot of people in China with no appreciation for soft toilet paper. He starts by talking about the end of an evening’s outing:

The parents live in a slightly remote part of Shanghai, only accessible by bus or taxi, and they always refuse to take a taxi because its too expensive (even if I offer to pay).  I told JJ to tell them to just stay the night at our house, that made the most sense and it was totally fine by me (and of course by JJ).  We do have an extra room and I did buy this couch bed for this very reason.  So it only made sense for them to stay, especially since it was holiday and JJ was not working.

Here comes the kicker.  They were at first totally against it.  Why, you might ask?  Well it was not for the normal reasons you might imagine, such as ‘we don’t want to intrude’, ‘we have plans tomorrow morning’, we simply want to get home’, ‘we don’t like the couch bed’.  None of these things mattered to them.  Instead, the issue at hand was literally:

We don’t know if we want to stay because the toilet paper I buy is too soft for them and they really don’t like using it.

Now lets get the facts straight.  I am not a freak or anything.  I buy what I consider to be normal toilet paper, you know the middle-of-the-road priced roll you buy in packs at the store.  I don’t even go top of the line (because I’m too cheap).  So what in the world could be wrong with my toilet paper?

Well, it turns out they really cannot use the ‘Western’ style toilet paper.  They only use the toilet paper sheets that are a darker shade of brown, more rough and stacked on top of each other.  A good comparison would be the toilet paper you’d find at a public restroom in a gas station, you know, the ones that require a key and have the toiler paper dispenser that spits out paper that resembles paper towels more than toiler paper.

So not only do they prefer to use this kind of toilet paper, but they went to the extreme of this opinion and considered traveling an hour on a bus all the way back home at 10:30pm to avoid using my ’soft’, more expensive toilet paper, if, heaven forbid, they needed to take a trip to the WC.  Fortunately, they are not just totally insane (I say that with the best intentions).  They decided that if they could find a local convenient store that sold their ‘favorite’ style toilet paper, they would agree to spend the night.  And what do you know, they found such a store, purchased a little travel pack and was ready to go.

So there you have it. Mr. Whipple would be out of business in China. (For non-Americans, Mr. Whipple was the character in U.S. television ads a generation ago who warned customers not to squeeze the irresistably soft Charmin toilet paper.)

China hit an interesting turning point earlier this year, and hardly anybody noticed.

Maybe you’ll consider this turning point arbitrary, but I think it bears some meaning in the way that modern China should be understood.

The key date occurred in late December 1978. That is nearly three decades after the founding of the modern People’s Republic of China. Mao Zedong ruled during most of those decades, steering China through vast change, restoring national pride but forcing the citizenry through some rather catastrophic social experiments, like the Cultural Revolution, in which faction battled faction and kids turned on their parents and teachers.

On that late date in 1978, two years after Mao’s death, Deng Xiaoping consolidated his power at the famous third plenum of the 11th National Party Congress, opening the door to the “reform and opening up” era that has ushered in China’s extraordinary economic rise.

From modern China’s founding to that key date, 10,674 days passed. Add another 10,674 days, and you come to a date earlier this year (March 13, 2008).

So in short, modern China has lived for more time under the reform and opening up era than under Mao’s era.

And if you don’t think that’s significant, check out this interesting essay. It notes that we are in the second generation now of the “one-child policy” that has been integral to slowing China’s demographic growth and has gone hand in hand with the economic reforms. It says that this second generation of kids -- without siblings and in some cases even cousins – is relying more and more on online networks as a replacement for real life friendships.

The article quotes a Pepsico executive, Harry Hui, saying Chinese young people comprise “one of the loneliest generations in the world.”

So they have turned to technology, like mobile phones, to connect with others.

"The mobile phone is more important than boyfriends or girlfriends for 90 percent of the younger generation," Hui says.