The Cline Center for Democracy at UIUC has been running a data mining project, scanning archives and contents of newspapers around the world for reports of political disturbances such as riots &tc. The project, a collaboration between the center and the UIUC CS department, is meant to facilitate research on domestic stability and the like. Currently it's focused primarily on English papers, but efficiency and completeness will dictate searches in other languages sooner or later.

Information can be suppressed or 'spun', but at least this will ensure that the data's available for such evaluations instead of paying some graduate student peanuts for years and years to put it together.

Of course it does mean that I'm sort of out of a job...

I checked in XiDan (huge shopping district in Beijing besides WangFuJing) for you. Price is current as of yesterday. Tall: 23 RMB, Venti: 27 RMB. Now, this translates to about 3-4 USD at most, but compared to the average salary in Beijing...well, you've got problems. According to official reports, average salary in the cities is ~9000 RMB per annum, and it's 2900 RMB per annum in the countryside (but this figure also includes the capital needed for seed for the next year). These are, of course, official, and unofficial estimates are higher and lower, depending on who you ask. To give you another idea of how much things cost: 23 RMB will buy you (at least around the universities, prices current of yesterday): 2 1-kg package of dumplings about 23 kg of bok choy a 10 kg bag of rice six bottles (500 mL size) of Coke 4 pirated DVDs (assuming an average price of 6 RMB per disc) 1-2 legal DVDs, depending on title (His Girl Friday was 12 RMB, and the legal boxset of La Femme Nikita, season 1 - 6 disks, was 130 RMB, prices both from yesterday) 35 Xia'r'bing - flatbreads about the size of an average adult palm, filled with a variety of veggies or meats OR seven issues of Reader's, a popular literary anthology magazine among Chinese readers.