China Law Blog

I often receive email complaints from bloggers whose blogs are not on our blogroll. Increasingly, they favorably compare themselves to blogs on our roll, along with sometimes veiled or not so veiled complaints about those blogs. Though China Law Blog has been in existence for more than three years, we have never really provided an explanation for our blogroll, so here goes. In this intermittent series of posts, I am going to go through our blogroll in alphabetical order and explain, five blogs at a time, why each blog has made it there.

Our blogroll basically consists of those blogs we like and which we think our readers will like or should be reading. We tend to like blogs that are unique in their content, well written, or consistently helpful. If we really like a blog, it makes it on no matter what. The less we like the blog, the more we have to believe it can be helpful to our readers. If a blog has not posted for a couple of months, we start seriously consider removing it from the rolls. Three months and it is usually removed. We obviously focus on China related blogs and, within that, we generally focus on those blogs related to law or business.

Now for our first five:

Absurdity, Allegory and China. This blog is subtitled, "The Kingdom from another angle," and that is exactly why I like it so much; it really is written from a very original and creative angle. Jim Gourley, who lives and works in Tianjin is the blogger. One never knows on what Jim is going to write (or photograph), but his is really one of the consistently most original and thought provoking China blogs out there. I am always flogging it for a reason.

AimeeBarnesBlog. Aimee is a China consultant now based in New York, from where she both assists foreign companies going into China and Chinese companies going overseas. Her blog is subtitled, "form, seizing the peak business" (translated from Mandarin). Aimee spent many years in China and she knows whereof she speaks. She has done some great interviews on her blog and she often writes very interesting posts on crime in China. She is working on a book on China's shadow economy. Her only flaw is that her name starts with "Ai" as does my legal assistant's so I have been known to inadvertently email Aimee an internal law firm email or two.

All Roads Lead to China. Rich Brubaker, a Shanghai-based China logistics guru, is the force behind this blog. It is subtitled, "China Based News Analysis, Strategic Insight, and Advice," and it is the go to blog for China logistics and supply chain management. So if you are shipping product to or from or within China (and who isn't?), this is THE blog for you.

Asia Business Intelligence. This is one of the oldest China blogs. It has been online for eight years. Rich Kuslan is the force behind it, and though he posts only once a twice a week his posts are virtually always thoughtful and original. It is subtitled, "The Web's First China Business Blog."

Beijing Boyce. Because everybody needs to have some fun sometime and Beijing Boyce is the best place I know to go to find out how to do that, at least in Beijing. Its subtitles(!) are "A consumer's view of
Beijing's bar and wine scenes" and "A Somewhat Young China Hand on the Local Drinking Scene>." It has been headed up since 2005 by the perennially gracious Jim Boyce.

So whaddya think? A good list so far? Anything missing?