China is considering an emergency plan to tackle a traffic jam crisis enveloping the capital Beijing.

Construction workers put down their tools, drivers stopped suddenly in the street, and rescuers briefly paused in their increasingly vain search for survivors amid the rubble of China’s earthquake devastation.

THE aisles swayed with dancing Chinese people as Riverdance and Altan sounded a lively warning cry that the Irish Festival of Culture and Arts in China is very officially under way.

With sequins and thundering steps, the flashy Irish sensation Riverdance arrives in China this week for what organisers say will be the biggest foreign production to come to a land where Western entertainment used to be denounced as subversive.