China

Chinese authorities tracked down Westwood resident Mike Su recently at a networking banquet in Beijing. They forced him to pack his bags, then whisked him away to a budget hotel on the edge of the city where they detained him for a week. Su's crime? On his flight from Los Angeles, the website director had the misfortune of sitting near someone who had allegedly contracted the H1N1 flu.

A Santa Barbara company said Friday that the Internet-filtering software that China has mandated for all new personal computers sold in that country contains stolen programming code.

The long-awaited golden monkeys from China have some bad news: They're not coming to the Los Angeles Zoo. The arrival of the exotic blue-faced simians was part of a deal struck during a 2002 trade trip to China by former Mayor James K.

The order by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was unprecedented in scope: All personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 would have to include government-sponsored Internet filtering software.

Would Confucius drive a Hummer? News that an obscure Chinese company has reached a tentative agreement to buy the bankrupt General Motors Co.'s Hummer unit has people here pondering the larger meaning of Chinese ownership of the mother of all gas guzzlers.

There is no twittering about Tiananmen Square, or anything else, in China this week. In a crackdown apparently timed to the 20th anniversary Thursday of the crushing of pro-democracy demonstrations, the Chinese government has pulled the plug on the social networking site Twitter and dozens of other Internet sites and blogs.

When Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner arrives Sunday in Beijing, he will have to begin assuring the Chinese that their vast holdings in federal bonds are safe and that the Obama administration is doing everything it can to preserve the value of the American dollar.

Like everybody else in his farming village, Zhan Changchun used to get around on a bicycle. This month, the 29-year-old walked into a local dealership, pulled out $7,300 in cash from his leather satchel and drove away with the family's first car: a seven-seat micro-minivan that's jointly produced by China's Wuling and General Motors.