Siemens has won a big contract to tame the traffic in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province and China's fifth largest city. The system aims to coordinate traffic signal timing to increase traffic flow and reduce delay at road junctions, in a bid to improve the efficiency of the transport network. Wuhan, like a lot of China's second-tier cities, has seen an explosion of traffic growth in recent years...   more »

French food giant Danone has had a shipment of Evian mineral water seized by Chinese customs officials who found excessive levels of bacteria. It is hard not to see this as a retaliatory move following the recent outcry in the west about adulterated food and drugs exported from China...   more »

Sun Microsystems has signed a deal with a local software house to boost the appeal of the OpenOffice suite of office software in China. In theory, open source software could do well in China. But its software houses know that if they are to get closer to the west, then they have to use mainstream western technologies. While that does not exclude open source...    more »

Another strange-looking car that you will only see on the roads of China. Actually, the Great Wall Coolbear bears more than a passing resemblance to the equally strange-looking Scion xB, which you will only see on the roads of the US. Imitation, as they say, is the sincerest form of flattery...   more »

China seems hell-bent on consigning the bicycle to the history books, but a growing number of cities in the west are doing just the opposite by adopting bike-friendly policies that encourage people to leave their car at home and take the bike instead. EngagingChina was intrigued to hear on a recent trip to Paris of the Velib initiative...   more »

Two more Chinese solar energy companies are preparing to join the NYSE in the coming weeks. The IPO of LDK Solar has been waiting in the wings for over six months but apparently the time is now ripe to milk US investors' current enthusiasm for all things green...   more »

Every advertiser likes a captive audience. What better way to grab their attention than on one of China's epic train journeys? More than 120 train routes in China have been fitted with the Railway Motion Media system, developed by Chinese company Epinmedia. It allows bored railway travellers to enjoy TV content, check out web information or play online games, among other activities...   more »

Symantec, the US security software firm, has incurred the wrath of Chinese businesses by releasing a flawed software update has caused their PCs to stop working. The Chinese businesses are seeking damages and have apparently learnt quickly from lawsuit-mad US. If only it was so easy for western customers to sue Chinese vendors...   more »

China's overheated domestic stock market experienced its biggest slide in three months, dropping more than 6% in this morning's session, after the government tripled a tax on securities transactions. Should businesses in the west be worried by this phenomenon? Probably not..   more »

China Mobile is readying its first commercial order for handsets that use China's home-grown TD-SCDMA standard. Surprise, surprise, there are no western manufacturers on the supplier list...   more »