China

Climate change and irrigation schemes are drying up rivers and speeding the spread of deserts, leading to plans to move tens of millions of people.

Despite efforts to clean up Beijing during last year's Olympic Games, pollutant reductions were very minor, according to a new report.

A 1999 law forbids the State Department from funding pavilions at international expositions. Fred Bernstein argues that the law is misguided, and should be changed before the next year's World's Fair in Shanghai.

With the unfettered ability to zone, plan and fund construction projects, the government of Shanghai is turning the city into what looks like "one immense architectural competition."

A new building going up in China is will be the as long as the Empire State Building is high. It will also be raised on columns to create a parkland underneath, giving the impression that it is floating.

The ambitious green Chinese city of Dongtan was hyped up to be one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. But now, like other eco-city plans, work on the project has slowed to a halt.

A slightly watered-down version of the traffic reduction methods the Chinese city of Beijing instituted in Summer 2008 to reduce congestion and pollution during the Olympics has been extended for another year.

Environmental issues are becoming a growing concern in China, and officials there seem ready to begin addressing them.

The question is whether the burrowing machines can outrace China’s growing love affair with the automobile.

Flashy plans to build a green city on an island near Shanghai have yet to take any shape. The Chinese government claims the project is still on its way.

A new sixty-minute TV documentary explains how maglev technology works, and covers the first major accident on a maglev track.

This piece from Next American City looks at the human toll major building projects are taking on construction workers in China, Dubai and other rapidly developing places.

The Olympic Forest Park in Beijing is standing out as one of the rare Olympics-related projects to remain in use after the 2008 event. Hu Jie, the park's designer, talks about its planning and the role of public space in Beijing.

The 2008 Summer Olympics brought a boom of construction to host city Beijing. But now, six months later, much of the office space built in the lead up to the games sits empty -- and likely will for years.

The global economic downturn is hitting China's urban factories. Millions of migrant workers who had left their farms for factory work are now facing the possibility of making an urban-to-rural migration.

For the first month and a half of 2009, the amount of new cars added daily in Beijing has climbed from 1,350 in 2008 to more than 1,450, bringing more than 65,000 cars into the city so far this year.

More than 20 million Chinese who had migrated to cities for work have been forced to return to the rural countryside as urban jobs dry up.

While the U.S. waffles over its stimulus package, China is two months into a grand countrywide transportation facelift, building high-speed rail, expanding freight capacity and generally beefing up the country's mobility.

The income gap between rural and urban residents in China has increased again in 2008, and has been attributed to other social inequities in the growing country.

Wrecking crews continue to clear the old hutongs of Beijing, replacing them with modern streets and skyscrapers. Meanwhile, a handful of scavengers work to save pieces of history from the wreckage.