09.21.12
China has been pulled into the center ring of the U.S. Presidential campaign in recent weeks, with the candidates seeking to outdo each other on pledges to harden up on trade, currency, and security. In the Times today, Mark Landler charts Obama’s experience on the subject: the Administration’s initial...
09.06.12
The men who run China today are avid readers of history, especially of the decline and fall of the Soviet Union. They can recite its causes, and they are explicitly dedicated to avoiding a repeat of the experience. So I have to wonder if anyone this week is talking about what became known in the obituaries of the Soviet empire as “the incident at...
08.30.12
The Japanese ambassador to Beijing, Uichiro Niwa, and his wife were riding in their limo this week when an unknown Chinese man approached and tore the mini-flag off the hood. There is some debate about whether the limo was blocked in a coördinated effort by two cars, or if it was simply stopped by traffic. The distinction only...
08.16.12
Orgies are back in the news in Beijing, but this time it’s the Communist Party that has found itself in an uncomfortable position, and it is now praising the virtues of privacy. A leaked batch of photos swept across the Chinese internet this month, depicting a festive gathering of five, arrayed in various numerical combinations. Of more than a...
08.07.12
When China’s fallen political grand dame, Gu Kailai, steps into a courtroom this week to face a murder charge, one of the few things we can expect with any certainty is the verdict: guilty. Barring a political tornado between now and the scheduled start of her trial, on Thursday, Gu will be convicted in the poisoning of her erstwhile associate,...
07.31.12
The People’s Daily, the flagship of China’s state-run media empire, tried, in all honesty, to make sense of the opening ceremony at the London Olympics—an event, the paper noted, that cost not only a fraction of the opening ceremony four years ago in Beijing, but even less than a quarter of what Qatar spent on the opening of the Asian Games in...
07.26.12
After years of debate, the Senate is set to take up a cyber-security bill that would force power companies and other vulnerable parts of the infrastructure to meet a certain level of security. President Obama is backing the bill, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, as a response to “one of the most serious economic...
07.20.12
In vetoing a U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria for the third time, China and Russia have tested Western diplomats’ capacity for creative contempt. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton already described their veto as “despicable” back in February. This time, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice settled on “dangerous and deplorable.”...
07.17.12
What sells in China? The answer may be poised for a change. Advertising on the mainland has traditionally been about volume: loud, busy, and overwhelming. (One study found that the average Shanghai resident is exposed to three times as many ads on a typical day as someone in Britain.) But when the global advertising business handed out...
07.11.12
Nearly forty years ago, S. J. Perelman described a fictional Hong Kong hotel he called the “Golden Bamboozle,” a reference not only to a bed chamber that cost a “prince’s ransom,” but to a city that was a magnet for bon vivants and grifters and risk-takers of every stripe.
07.09.12
John King Fairbank, the father of Chinese studies in America, once described China as a “journalist’s dream and a statistician’s nightmare, with more human drama and fewer verifiable facts per square mile than anywhere else in the world.” These days, the statistician’s dilemma in China extends not simply to the problem of what is true but also to...
06.28.12
The farther away one stands from the Obamacare cases, the more curious they look against the portrait we usually imagine of ourselves. By now, America’s declining place in rankings of global health is so well known at home that it has lost its rhetorical punch, but it can be striking to notice how much other countries have done in the years that...
