A SLOW news week in China?

All last week - while the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China was in session - we were bombarded in the local media with pompous pronouncements about how this was the most important event happening anywhere in the world and how gazillions of journalists from every country you could think of (except Taiwan) were in town, hungry for stories about it. (Well, that's all we heard morning, noon, and night on CCTV-9 [the English-language channel] anyway, and I don't imagine it was much different in the Chinese-language coverage.)

Oddly enough, last week's Asia Media roundup of stories from across the East Asia region was the first I can remember that didn't have a single China story amongst its headlines.

The Congress perhaps had limited success in generating international media attention for itself - but it may have provided a potent smokescreen to keep other China news out of sight for a while (and let's face it, it's usually negative news, isn't it?).