News

As with books found in the capital’s bookstores, Beijingers now have access to a much wider range of periodicals, including newspapers, magazines and local and foreign television programmes.

Magazines in English include: Beijing This Month, Business Beijing, That’s Beijing, Urbane, City Weekend and Time Out. China Daily and Beijing Today are leading English-language newspapers. These are generally available for free at most four- and five-star hotels, in Sanlitun and around the embassy-area bars and restaurants.

It’s also easy to get issues of popular imported English-language magazines, such as TIME, Newsweek, The Economist and other foreign-language publications from the bookshops of four- and five-star hotels.

Beijing’s larger hotels, some smaller ones and many apartment buildings where foreign residents reside receive satellite TV broadcasts with dozens of channels from all around the world; including the Cable News Network (CNN), Channel NewsAsia (CNA) the BBC, NHK from Japan, TV5 of France, Star TV from Hong Kong and HBO and Cinemax, among others. For sports, there is ESPN. CCTV-9 is a local terrestrial English-language channel. Its programmes cover Chinese political, economic and domestic news plus information about the culture, language and history of China.

Most of these periodicals, news and entertainment outlets can be accessed via the Internet, either from a hotel room or one of the city’s numerous Internet bars (wangba or 网吧) or WiFi-equipped restaurants.

News can also be found at:

Olympics/Paralympics-specific News: Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG)

http://en.beijing2008.cn/

Chinese Olympic Committee News

http://en.olympic.cn/

BOCOG/Paralympics News

http://en.paralympic.beijing2008.cn/index.shtml

General News and Olympic News

China Daily

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/

Xinhua.net

http://www.chinaview.cn/

People’s Daily Online

http://english.people.com.cn/

Beijing International (Official Web Site of Beijing)

http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/default.htm