Flying back to Beijing from Hong Kong last Wednesday, I decided to peruse everyone's favorite English-language propaganda periodical, China Daily, to familiarize myself with any state-sanctioned stories I'd missed while traveling outside of the mainland.  What I found was deeply disturbing and serves to illustrate why I continue to call China the Wild Wild East:

    A 28-year-old man managed to stab five policemen to death and wound five others in Shanghai before authorities subdued him.

    Riots raged in Guizhou Province after the suicide-maybe-murder of a 16-year-old girl. Coverage of and debate about the unrest has since been carefully choreographed.

    The mainland stock market hit a 17-month low on worries about rising inflation and oil prices (sounds familiar).

    60 students at a primary school in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region fell ill after drinking water that police now suspect was deliberately poisoned with pesticide.  

    Seemingly the only good news was that a 30-year-old gorilla in Xi'an gave up a pack-a-day cigarette habit and then gave birth to a baby girl. She first became addicted after eating cigarette butts thrown on the floor of her enclosure by spectators; after that zookeepers continued to feed her cigarettes whenever she became enraged. You can't make this stuff up.

    Oh, and Zheng Jie became the first Chinese tennis player to reach the semifinals of a Grand Slam Tournament after beating Nicole Vaidisova of the Czech Republic at Wimbledon. She ended up losing to Serena Williams, but expect to see a Red Star profile of her soon.

    What really irked me however was an article in which the director-general of the Foreign Ministry's consular department, Wei Wei, claimed that China's new visa policy was not limiting the number of foreign tourists traveling to China in anticipation of the Olympics in August. Wei didn't deny that hotel occupancy rates were way down, but instead blamed the slump on "market fluctuations". Classic.

    Meanwhile, I was returning from Hong Kong because, for the first time since I moved here in June of 2005, I'd been unable to renew my visa on the mainland. Never mind that I have 11 Chinese visas already in my passport (and one from Russia for good measure), which should demonstrate that I'm a foreign friend in good standing and uninterested in disrupting the Games with pro-Tibetan-independence protests. Now I have a tourist visa that requires me to leave China every 30 days (and by leave China, I mean travel to Hong Kong, one of the peculiarities of the "one country, two systems" policy).

    Which makes me wonder what kind of hoops travelers unaccustomed to China's particularly viscous brand of bureaucracy have had to jump through at their local embassies. We've previously reported on the new visa policy here, here, and here. Expect to see more coverage in the near future. This is a problem that won't go away anytime soon (or at least until after the Paralympics wrap up in October).

    The noxious combination of lies and airplane food left more than my stomach upset.