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19 Nov 09
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About my frozen Google account Well, at least I know what the problem was. It was China's fault! When I was living in Beijing early this year, I tried to reserve a domain name and pay for it using the Google Checkout system. Google's fraud-detection system flagged the transaction as... |
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18 Nov 09
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Those tin-eared Americans I noted here recently, as I have since time immemorial, that Chinese government spokesmen can often seem deaf to the concerns and mindset of their potential audience overseas. A reader from France says that maybe my own ears need to be inspected for... |
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18 Nov 09
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More on Nine Nations of China I mentioned two days ago Patrick Chovanec's online Atlantic feature, "The Nine Nations of China." He has just done a followup on his own site, about some preceding Chinese and Western exercises in the same spirit. Very much worth reading, here, along... |
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18 Nov 09
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On Obama's Asian diplomacy -- #2 Previously here. A reader writes:"Relating to comments on the Shanghai town hall, enough of the parsing of what he said on issues and how he said them, I think the most significant sentence was "That's why I'm pleased to announce that the United States... |
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17 Nov 09
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On Obama's Asian diplomacy -- #1 First of several updates on the fly:On reflection, I still stick with my initial reaction to the Shanghai Town Meeting appearance, rather than being won over by the on-scene complaints of my Shanghai friend Adam Minter as described here. If you combine... |
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17 Nov 09
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What "green collaboration" might mean in practice As I never tire of mentioning, the big opportunity -- and challenge -- of the Obama Administration's interaction with China is finding ways for the countries to work together on climate, energy, and pollution issues. The countries are two of the main... |
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17 Nov 09
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In case you were really curious about my views on different topics... For the record: - Last night's panel discussion with Jim Lehrer on the News Hour about China, Obama, et cetera, here;- Also last night on BBC America with Matt Frei, also about Obama and China, here;- This morning on CSPAN Washington Journal, with Bill... |
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16 Nov 09
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Further on local reaction to Obama's Shanghai town hall After my real-time late-night note a few hours ago saying that I thought things had gone OK for Obama in Shanghai, I wake up to see this report from my friend Adam Minter, on the scene in Shanghai, about ways in which Obama's answers seemed disappointing... |
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16 Nov 09
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Obama's town hall in Shanghai just now I got up to watch the live stream on the White House site, out of nostalgia for my Shanghai days. No very shocking questions from the students, though some had swathed edges to them: What about harmonious relations and arms sales with Taiwan? Obama... |
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16 Nov 09
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Were you possibly wondering... ... about that picture on the front page of today's NYT, showing a little shop in Beijing with Obama-related memorabilia in honor of the president's visit? There's a prominent hand-lettered Chinese sign in the upper left-hand part of the picture. Wonder... |
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15 Nov 09
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"Nine Nations of China" Even if President Obama weren't getting to China just now, it would be worth checking out the illustrated feature "Nine Nations of China," by Patrick Chovanec, which has just gone up on our site. Given the visit, it's all the more timely.I've mentioned... |
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15 Nov 09
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More on Mao, Lincoln, the lamas, etc I mentioned yesterday the oddity of a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman welcoming Barack Obama to China with a triple-backflip metaphor linking Chairman Mao to Abraham Lincoln, since both Lincoln and Mao fought against secessionist rebels. From a reader... |
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14 Nov 09
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James Lilley I was sorry to hear that James Lilley has died in Washington, at age 81. Lilley, who was born in Qingdao and mainly lived in China until age 12, was a very important figure in the modern US-China rapprochement. He was a career CIA agent who served as CIA... |
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14 Nov 09
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Here's why the China trip matters Nearly thirty years from after he left office, the most important achievement of Jimmy Carter's time as president was his cementing the relationship with China that had begun under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (Second-most important: Camp David accords... |
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14 Nov 09
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Those silver-tongued spokesmen in Beijing I have marveled many times (eg a year ago in the magazine here) at the lack of savvy Chinese government spokesmen often display when presenting their country's case and face to the world. Locus classicus #1 is the description of the Dalai Lama as a... |
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12 Nov 09
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Doing Business in China: Legalese Nearing the end of our Doing Business in China clips, here's the story of a Western businessman who went to the Chinese courts for relief -- and got it. Larger point involves the uneven way that "rule of law" applies in China. Some place, yes; many... |
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10 Nov 09
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Doing Business in China: Lost in Translation Ah, the mysteries of language. This little clip, next in the Doing Business in China series, actually does a nice job of introducing some of the tangles and intricacies of the "what language are people speaking, when they say they're speaking English?"... |
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09 Nov 09
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The other shoe drops at Caijing According to Ian Johnson in the WSJ just now, Hu Shuli, the founder and editor of Caijing magazine in China, has finally resigned, along with her deputy Wang Shuo. This is Hu, at the magazine's big annual conference last year in Beijing. (I didn't take... |
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07 Nov 09
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Unemployment and airplane crashes A man in Florida sends what may be the ideal example of reader mail, combining as it does aerodynamic theory, politics, economics, and presidential rhetoric. If only there were a China- or beer-related angle... Seriously, his critique of how the... |
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05 Nov 09
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Nien Cheng My wife just alerted me to something I had missed in the paper today: news that Nien Cheng had died in Washington this week, at 94.Life and Death in Shanghai, her memoir of her life in China in the pre-Communist era, and then her daughter's murder and her... |
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05 Nov 09
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Doing Business in China: Who Holds the Purse? You can probably guess the answer to the question above, explored in this next clip from the Doing Business in China series. But I do love the way this clip gets to the answer, via both its pre-Communist era documentary and movie footage and also its... |
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03 Nov 09
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Doing Business in China: An Eastern Perspective This clip is about numbers, and the varying ways to make sense of them in China. At one extreme the power of numbers is of obvious and unignorable importance. The opening scene of the clip, on a winter day in Shanghai, give a glimpse of the sea-of-people... |
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01 Nov 09
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Language politics: Germany, Japan, Cote d'Ivoire Following this item about how China and America had one attitude toward foreigners trying to speak their language, while Japan, France, and (arguably) the Ivory Coast had a different view, some assent, dissent, and elaboration. These are long but if... |
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28 Oct 09
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Health-related follow up: can Asians drink? The latest installment of the Doing Business in China series talked about the ritual of drinking-to-the-point-of-drunkness in formal Chinese "business" gatherings. This doesn't always happen, but it happens enough to be a factor in professional life. In... |
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27 Oct 09
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This is heartwarming! (From Shaanxi to Carnegie Hall) This summer I mentioned the mesmerizing experience of hearing lao qiang, "Old Songs," in a middle-of-nowhere rural theater in Shaanxi province in China. The patriarch and star of the troupe I saw was Zhang Ximin, more or less a traditional Chinese... |
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27 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: Drinks and Deals Ah, drinking in China as part of business negotiations. Where to start... This next installment of the Doing Business in China series is a beginning. It really is true that the purpose of many "business" dinners is for everyone, Chinese and foreign, to... |
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23 Oct 09
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More on Chinese air Following this item and this article in our new issue.The pictures below are from an extremely powerful exhibition by Lu Guang (卢广), a Chinese photographer, about pollution and its effects in his home country. His photos have just won a major prize ... |
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23 Oct 09
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On the Fox News / White House dispute I didn't see anything on Fox from mid-2006 through mid-2009; for better or worse, it's not carried in China. (The English TV news channels you can get there are BBC, CNN International, CNBC, sometimes Bloomberg.) I have seen it since coming back this... |
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23 Oct 09
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Win 7, Nook, and other tech follow ups Windows 7: My wife will get it for the HP laptop she bought when we returned from China, since that qualifies for a free upgrade. Don't think I will myself. My original-Vista-blighted ThinkPad T60 is having so many other problems that I am keeping it... |
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22 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: A Piece of the Pie Next in Doing Business in China: the pizza wars! Early in our stay in Shanghai, my wife and I tried to stop in to the Pizza Hut just north of People's Square -- and were turned away, by a head waiter whose face was barely visible beneath his gigantic... |
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22 Oct 09
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I love the English-language Chinese press (chap. 17,825) An article now buzzing around the China-hand blogosphere: multi-shot photo feature on "Most beautiful Chinese female soldier" from the People's Daily today. For later discussion: why the PLA often seems less fearsome inside China than when described in... |
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21 Oct 09
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First-hand experience with Chinese air, pro and con Following this item yesterday, about this article in the current issue on the health effects of living in China, good-news and bad-news reports from American friends with long experience in Asia.First, the bad news."I check the BeijingAir Twitter every... |
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20 Oct 09
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The air over there In the new issue of the magazine (subscribe!) I have a short article about a topic I discussed constantly with Chinese and foreign friends over the past few years: how dangerous it is, really, just to live in China. To breathe the air, drink the... |
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20 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: From Supply Chains to Supply Networks Next up in the Doing Business in China series: a clip that gives a brief look at one of several central, and complex, parts of the US-China business interaction. This clip has some worthwhile shots of the insides of several Chinese factories -- a... |
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15 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: Keeping Employees Happy Next up in the Doing Business in China series: a look at an issue whose importance may come as a surprise to people who have not worked in the country. This is the challenge of keeping Chinese employees, once they have become skilled in factory or... |
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14 Oct 09
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Festival of links, part 2: Coates, Kaplan, Green Following this earlier dispatch, a few more.- Like my Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, I've been in a no-TV mode for a while -- in my case, most of the time since returning from China. We finally got TV coverage re-connected last month for the US Open... |
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13 Oct 09
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Festival of links, part 1 Before an impending "real," as opposed to false-alarm, absence from this site for a while, because of impending "real" writing, a variety of links about things I've meant to mention. Two now, two or three later in the day.- Everyone on the China-media... |
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13 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: What is Communism? I love this clip, once again from the Doing Business in China series. In particular I love the initial interviews with business people, average folk, Communist Party members, etc. about what this thing called "communism" (共产主义, Gongchan zhuy... |
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08 Oct 09
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Offline for a little while For reasons involving -- what was that concept again? Oh, yes, reporting and writing -- online activity will be suspended here for a few days. Except for Business in China clips, of which more in the pipeline. |
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08 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: Kissing in Public All I'll say about this clip, next in the Doing Business in China series, is that I did in fact frequently patronize the Haagen-Dazs stores shown in Shanghai to get presents of ice cream for my wife. The clip explains why this makes me a romantic-hearted... |
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07 Oct 09
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The TSA: bringing us ever closer to China! One of the predictably nutty aspects of life in China was the tyranny of objectively unimportant details of ID records. To mention only experiences I had first-hand: I once had to buy a whole new airline ticket for a Beijing-Shanghai flight, and tear up... |
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06 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: Battling Pirates Next in the Doing Business in China series: a look at the morass of intellectual property protection, plus ways that some foreign companies have tried to cope with it. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that the opening scenes, in which CDs of operating... |
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03 Oct 09
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Olympic notes: good for Rio 1) I love Chicago, but Rio is the best choice overall. Probably better for most people in Chicago (I speak from having lived through the ramp-up to the Beijing Olympics these past few years), although some of them may not feel that way right now.... |
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02 Oct 09
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The big parade As I mentioned in real time while watching the 60th anniversary festivities from Beijing on middle-of-the-night Chinese language TV, the whole event was a surprising relief. It had been shaping up ahead of time as a mammoth and imposing display of... |
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01 Oct 09
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Doing Business in China: As Good as Their Word Next up in the Doing Business in China series, a look at the implications of the heavily freighted term guanxi -- 关系, usually rendered in English as "relationship" and often thought by Westerners to indicate the shadier senses of that term. As... |
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01 Oct 09
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I take it back Have been watching live coverage of the 60th anniversary festivities from Beijing for the last two hours (on the local Chinese-language TV station in DC). Nice blue-sky day in town! Yes, they had the giant and threatening-seeming military displays I... |
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30 Sep 09
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Beijing, 3am Well, we're going to see a lot of these shots in the next 24 hours out of Beijing, as the 60th anniversary celebrations for the founding of the People's Republic take place. This is from a reader looking down Xidawang Lu, not far from our former home, at... |
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29 Sep 09
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Local boys make good, China version In an article this spring about China's recovery from the world slowdown, I mentioned a visit to the BYD company in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, where a materials-science PhD named Wang Chuanfu was leading the development of advanced battery powered... |
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29 Sep 09
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Doing Business in China: Porcelain Skin Next installment in the Doing Business in China series: a look at the cosmetics business in China, in particular the very strong market for skin-whitening creams. The desirability of "porcelain skin" in China -- like the analogous light-skin beauty images... |
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29 Sep 09
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A nice offhand allusion in the NYT The third paragraph of Sharon LaFraniere's story today in the NYT, about the Chinese government's obsessive over-preparation for the 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People's Republic, on October 1 (background on the celebrations... |
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