Memoirs of a Geisha star is the latest Chinese to be branded a traitor, for her defection to Singapore:

A decision by one of China’s most famous film stars to take Singaporean nationality has set off an online furore with many ardent nationalists branding her a traitor and a shame to her native country.

Gong Li, the 43-year-old star of such Hollywood movies as Memoirs of a Geisha, Miami Vice and Farewell My Concubine took the oath of citizenship at the weekend along with 149 other new citizens. Her husband, the Singaporean tobacco tycoon Ooi Hoe Soeng, accompanied her.

Beijing does not allow its people to hold double nationality and the star will be obliged to give up her Chinese citizenship. This means she will no longer be eligible for membership of an advisory body to the Chinese parliament – a largely honorary position that the government confers on many celebrities, successful businessmen and famed academics and scientists. …

A new London exhibit of Chinese contemporary art inspires some pithy analysis, plus an interview with the curator Charles Saatchi:

As you go round the show you keep encountering Chairman Mao, popping up everywhere like a proprietorial logo on a range of national goods. Zhang Hongtu shows the chairman taking the place of the kindly Quaker on a tin of porridge oats. Shi Xinning has Mao joining Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the infamous Yalta conference that carved up the postwar world and which, of course, Mao did not actually attend. Qiu Jie paints a giant pussy cat buttoned up in a Chairman Mao suit apparently to illustrate a simple Chinese pun: mao in Chinese means cat.

What is being reflected here is not only Mao’s continuing embedment in the Chinese consciousness, but also his iconic visual presence. Long before Warhol turned the chairman into one of pop art’s most striking faces, Mao himself had reduced his own image to a set of catchy visual clichés. I can certainly see why mocking him has become the default mode of Chinese art, and why Chinese collectors so enjoy owning these naughty counters to the Cultural revolution. It’s like teasing the gorilla in a zoo…

A drug-addicted elephant has been rescued and rehabbed:

“A heroin addict elephant who was kept doped up with drug-laced bananas by animal smugglers will return home this weekend after emerging clean from a three-year detox programme.

Big Brother, a four-year-old bull Asian elephant also known as Xiguang, was captured in 2005 in southwest China by the illegal traders, who used the spiked bananas to control him.

Months later, police arrested the traders at the Burmese border and freed Big Brother, only to notice that he was behaving strangely.”

New evidence has led to an official investigation:

“The International Olympic Committee has ordered an investigation into mounting allegations that Chinese authorities covered up the true age of their gold-medal winning gymnastics star because she was too young to compete.

An IOC official told The Times that because of ‘discrepancies’ that have come to light about the age of He Kexin, the host nation’s darling who won gold in both team and individual events, an official inquiry has been launched that could result in the gymnast being stripped of her medals.

The investigation was triggered as a US computer expert claimed yesterday to have uncovered Chinese government documents that he says prove she is only 14 - making her ineligible to compete in the Olympics - rather than 16, as officials in Beijing insist is her age.

Mike Walker, a computer security expert, told The Times how he tracked down two documents that he says had been removed from a Chinese government website. The documents, he said, stated that He’s birth date was January 1 1994 - making her 14 - and not January 1 1992, which is printed in her passport.”

Ma Jian says Chinese writers need to speak up about the past:

“The most powerful words written in Chinese last year were not by a novelist, but an unknown citizen who placed in a Sichuan newspaper an ad that simply said: “Respect to the mothers of the victims of 6/4.” The young clerk who had approved it for publication hadn’t grasped the significance of the date. The slip was soon discovered by the authorities, and three of the paper’s editors lost their jobs.

The Chinese people have been denied knowledge of their past and the right to reflect on it. Large gaps exist in the collective memories of the nation. It is the role of Chinese novelists, poets, bloggers and journalists around the world to help fill them.”