Chinese has no word for –ing

Wrote Johnson [sic] in The Economist, "A friend currently in Kunming, in southwestern China, sends in a doozy [above].... He translates it as 'fall fashions, selling fast.' (The characters are autumn, style, hot and sell in that order.)  What's unusual is the borrowing of just a single bit of English: that '-ing' ending.  Chinese doesn't have a progressive aspect that closely mirrors the English 'running' and such. So this seems to be nothing more than to add a little foreign glamour to a bland shoe-sale sign."

"Here none of the many characters pronounced 'ying' were used. Though one might have been, it probably would have been confusing, since the characters also have meanings, and none of them has (yet?) been conventionalised as representing the English '-ing.'"

"Addendum: Ben Zimmer notes that Mark Liberman covered this ground in 2008. If so, the real news here may be that Chinese '-ing' has made it from Hong Kong [below]

and Taiwan, where we might expect this to begin, as far as Kunming. It's a big city, but far inland, away from China's outward-facing coast."