By the time Joan Chen (then known as Chen Chong) was 17 years old, she was a movie star in China. “I was considered the darling of the country,” she said, in an exclusive interview for aiisf.org. “Everyone had a picture of me in their home.”

Joan was discovered on a Shanghai school’s rifle range – she was an excellent shooter -- by no less an authority figure than Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong. In 1975, when she was 14, the Shanghai Film Studio placed her in the Actors’ Training Program.

Chinese TV show "Happy Boys", deemed as local version of "American Idol", will for the first time to launch contests in the United States and Australia this year, the show producer Hunan Satellite Television said Thursday.

Winning contestants in the two countries will likely join other contestants in China in the final, though the contest's details have yet been finalized.

Li Hao, spokesman of Hunan TV based in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province, said the decision was made in order to attract more talented musicians overseas to join the popular program.

MEMPHIS, Tenn.—World traveling flight attendant Ms. Wong wore red lipstick, sophistication, and a sense of humor to the Memphis performance of New York-based Shen Yun Performing Arts. She joked about China’s contributions spreading to the rest of the world.

“The girls that looked like they were flowing on water—to see their delicate foot movements—and it seemed like they just floated across the stage, [that] was when the beauty of the artistry hit me,” she said with an open, tender expression.

Rapper Jin’s career journey has been ‘ruff’ at times, now his music has taken him to his ancestors’ country.

If you think that rapper Jin Au-Yeung is lying low somewhere in the United States, you are mistaken. The “106 and Park” Freestyle Friday Champ has been living in Hong Kong since May 2009 where it is hard to walk down the street without seeing him.

Pork ribs tea is a dish with history. It was the food of young men who left China for Nanyang with nothing more than the shirts on their backs and determination in their pockets. Pauline D Loh has the story

In a dank, dark museum in Singapore's Chinatown, columns of fly-spotted, sepia-stained photos document the first hard days of the Chinese immigrants. They appear to be a sun-scorched, skinny, penniless lot - part of the continuing diaspora forced overseas by poor harvests, floods and famine along the southern coasts of China.

In April 2007, I signed off a Metro review of the high concept pan-Asian restaurant Haiku by saying “I can’t imagine there were many people yearning to eat dinky portions of prawn tom yum and lamb rogan josh at the same meal before the restaurant opened and I don’t think many will regret missing the chance when it inevitably closes.” Just over a year, and a reported £3m investment later Haiku served its last portions of pad Thai, Peking duck and chicken Yakitori.

Dutch-born Chinese driver Tung Ho-pin is revving up to race in Formula One - all he needs is to find is willing sponsors.

"There are teams for sale and three new teams set to join the ranks. This is the right moment to jump into F1," Bert Winkler, manager of Tung, told China Daily.

"The discussions we have had with teams are positive as they absolutely want Ho-pin in a F1 car. However, we need some partners. We are close to making a deal with some people. We still need some more Chinese companies to give us some backup. It's 50-50 that Ho-pin will be in a F1 car next year."

AMERICAN-BORN Tim Wu has brushed up on Chinese and is about to launch a very different hip-hop album speaking to young Chinese in the language of their streets. Sam Riley raps.

Most foreigners learning Chinese find it hard enough to wrap their tongues around its confounding variety of tones and new sounds - rarely does anyone aspire to use their burgeoning linguistic skills to write poetry, let alone rap.

American hip-hop artist Tim Wu's American-born Chinese friends used to poke fun at his Chinese skills, but he is now about to launch his first album, which is entirely in Chinese.

Taiwan-born writer and University of Hong Kong professor Lung Ying-tai's latest book, titled "Wide Rivers and Seas, Untold Stories of 1949, " proved to be a big draw at the Frankfurt Book Fair Oct. 14-18.

Though China has banned all Internet articles and discussions on the book - published by Taiwan's CommonWealth Magazine and Hong Kong's Cosmos Books in September - Chinese publishers and exhibitors at the book fair scrambled to gain the rights to publish her book in their country.

Hamburgers, pizza, hot dogs, fried chicken and warm apple pie. You can just see the stars and stripes waving in the summer breeze. These foods symbolize “Americaness.” They did not, however, necessarily originate in America, but are Americanized versions of dishes that were created some decades or even centuries ago.