Fast Company has a cool profile of TV host Yang Lan. She is one of China’s biggest celebrities and she’s aiming to become a media mogul.

She has sought to turn that fame into a full-fledged business empire. Yang has created new programming for TV — including one of the first shows targeting women — and set up sites on the burgeoning Chinese-language Web. She has bought print publications; she sells credit cards; she’s even hawking a co-branded jewelry line with Celine Dion. She and her husband, Bruno Wu, are one of China’s richest couples; Forbes has estimated their wealth at about $300 million. All of which has led the foreign press — and her own handlers — to rarely miss an opportunity to call her the Oprah of China.

It’s not a fair comparison: The clapping session is an apt metaphor for the ways in which the Chinese-media marketplace — and Yang herself — is fundamentally more constrained than the American. There are the constantly changing government regulations; television, says Jeremy Goldkorn of the Beijing media blog Danwei.com, “is the most tightly controlled of all Chinese media because it remains the one truly mass media. There are a huge variety of rules and restrictions on TV content, and they change regularly.” And there is her generation’s own worldview; China’s fortysomethings entered adulthood as their nation simultaneously opened up (under Deng Xiaoping, to get rich was seen as progressively more glorious) and closed down (Tiananmen Square in 1989 imprinted on their young minds that breaking the rules was not the path to glory).

Yang Lan, 42, has done wonders to achieve what she has so far, being careful to maintain her above-the-fray image while morphing with the fast-shifting landscape. “You do what you can do,” she says with a sigh in lightly accented, fluent English. Some of her ventures have succeeded — her interview show has been one of the past decade’s megahits — while others, including her Sun TV network, have been huge flops. Through it all, she has held on to her biggest asset: her fame. Liu Yingqi, vice president of China Life Insurance Co., which sponsors New Girl in the Office, says, “She’s the audience’s Yang Lan, society’s Yang Lan.” But the same country that has embraced her and elevated her to such success has also kept her from being the woman she wants to be — Yang Lan’s Yang Lan.

Good luck to her!

Bribery is a serious problem in China, but BusinessWeek reports that U.S. prosecutors, along with their Chinese counterparts, are stepping up enforcement.

U.S. prosecutors, empowered by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) to investigate allegations of bribery anywhere in the world, have been stepping up their activities in China, where a tradition of gift-giving in business often degenerates into serious graft. The FCPA bans U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials. It also applies to foreign companies like Siemens that list their securities on U.S. exchanges. Companies that violate the FCPA face millions in fines, and executives can go to prison. U.S. authorities have upped the number of bribery cases they pursued to a resolution around the world, from 11 in 2005 to 34 last year, according to Trace International, a nonprofit anti-bribery group based in Annapolis, Md. In a report released June 17, Trace pointed out that China, with 25 cases completed since enactment of the FCPA, fell behind only Iraq and Nigeria for the most international corruption prosecutions. Citing a World Bank estimate that more than $1 trillion in bribes are paid each year, U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on May 31 called “combating corruption one of the highest priorities of the Department of Justice.”

Chinese prosecutors, meanwhile, are getting more aggressive under their own antibribery laws, says Patrick M. Norton, a partner with Steptoe & Johnson who focuses on international mediation.

Slowly but surely, the game is changing.

The market for men’s grooming products is growing around the world. It’s been a big trend in the United States, and now we see evidence that it is growing in Taiwan as well.

The largest Online shopping site in Taiwan officially launched a men’s care section to satisfy growing demand in the men’s grooming market in Taiwan, an official from Yahoo!Shopping Mall said in a press conference Monday.

Men’s cosmetics sales in Taiwan grew 73 percent in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period of last year, according to sales performance statistics released by the online shopping company.

Sales of facial mask products showed fast growth, while other ranges, such as skin care and anti-acne creams, have also seen sales increase significantly in the first quarter of 2010, said Hsu Chen-fei, the company’s product director.

Men’s grooming products are selling well in China as well.

It will be interesting to see if the trends overseas also extend to the barbershop resurgence we’re seeing in the U.S.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, actor Qin Hao, director Wang Xiaoshuai and actor Zi Yi arrive for the screening of the movie “Rizhao Chongqing” (Chongqing Blues) during the 63rd Cannes Film Festival.

Olympic silver medalists Tong Jian and Pang Qing of China perform a pairs figure skating segment during a performance at the Taipei Arena Ice Rink

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Tensions continue to ease between China and Taiwan.

Taiwan is to open its first office in mainland China since the two sides split at the end of civil war in 1949.

The office – known as the Taiwan Strait Tourism Association’s Beijing Office – will try to encourage more Chinese tourists to visit the island.

The opening of the office is a further sign of improving cross-strait ties.

Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou came into office in 2008 focusing on reducing tensions between the two former rivals.

Since Mr Ma opened up Taiwan to Chinese tourists in mid-2008, the number of Chinese visitors to the island has skyrocketed.

The photo above shows Chinese tourists leaving a duty-free shop in Taipei, Taiwan. Taiwan opened its first tourism office in Beijing to promote tourism and handle tourists’ problems, but will not issue visas.

Taiwan and China split at the end of a civil war in 1949. Tension eased in the late 1980s when Taiwan allowed its citizens to visit China. Last year, some 4 million Taiwanese visited China, while 970,000 mainlanders visited Taiwan.

The Chinese got busted. Do we really think this is the only violation?

Chinese sports fans reacted with anger to the news that gymnast Dong Fangxiao had been stripped of her Olympic medal. But their ire was directed at the Chinese government, not the International Olympic Committee.

“Cry for Dong Fangxiao, Victim of the Sports System” read the headline on today’s post by Li Jiayang, sports columnist on the popular Netease web portal.

“Competing for her local team in the Chinese National Games, she damaged her knee permanently, in order to win an Olympic medal for the national team, her age was hidden (I don’t dare to use the word ‘falsify’ which may cause trouble)” Mr. Li wrote, “and she has been humiliated. It’s enough to make you cry.”

On Wednesday, the IOC resolved a decade-old scandal with its decision to strip China of a gymnastics bronze medal from the Sydney Olympics for fielding an under-age gymnast.

The women’s team bronze will now go to the US team, following a finding that Dong Fangxiao was only 14 when she competed for China in Australia, two years younger than the minimum allowed.

That’s small consolation for the US team. Those girls were robbed of their shining moment by a system built on cheating.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and his wife Liu Yongqing along with France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy attend a welcome ceremony for the opening of the Shanghai World Expo in Shanghai. The sexy Carla Bruni makes a splash everywhere she goes!

Go here for more pics of Carla Bruni in Shanghai and Beijing.

China is a beautiful country, with its traditional heritage and culture. Major places to travel are Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Kunming. If you are planning on traveling to China, there is more than one way in which you can enjoy a thrilling tour of the country.

You can either rent a car for a land tour, or go on a cruise for a tour of the rivers, but here are the top 10 places of China that you shouldn’t miss:

• Great Wall of China
• Forbidden City
• The Bund
• Terra Cotta Warriors
• Yellow Mountain
• Potala Palace
• Dian Chi
• Li River
• Mogao Grottos
• West Lake

Land Tour
On a land tour, you can rent a car, and go sightseeing in China. While traveling on land, you can visit the capital city Beijing. Tours of Beijing always include the Great Wall of China. There are also many tours to Shanghai. You can get many agencies providing land tours to travelers.

Cruise Tour
Cruise tours are also famous in this country, and you can have fun over water in the beautiful rivers of China. There are many cruise tours that you can avail, like Yangtze River Cruise, Li River Cruise, Shanghai Harbor Cruise, Beijing Cruise, Grand Canal Cruise, and Gold Triangle Cruise.

You can get land travel and cruise deals fixed at any good travel site. Though complete China cannot be visited only by cruise, but a cruise tour is a must for a complete China tour.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

We decided to put together a gallery of photos from past fashion shows in China.

Here, models present creations for \’Ordifen Cup\’ 2008 Lingerie Innovative Design Contest at China Fashion Week in 2008.

We have more sexy photos of elegant lingerie after the jump.

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