Cup of Cha
This is China

Dan from over at China Law Blog has been pushing people to vote for his blog in the ABA ‘best of’ race harder than a Chinese arms dealer in Sudan. And since a who’s who of bloggers have already succumbed to his ‘charms’ I’ll give you the link here. It’s a very good blog [...]

Continue reading “Obligatory Plug and 2 More Links” »

For the last six weeks the Chinese internets has been a bit spotty, at least everywhere I’ve used it. It seems like a lot of sites are getting the “BBC” treatment. This means you can connect to the front page, but none of the links actually work. I’ve been using the proxy server Anonymouse, which [...]

Continue reading “What’s Up with the Chinese Internets?” »

The internets has made buying Olympic tickets one of the easiest things in the world. Before the internets, a series of tubes that connect people to one another, it would have been impossible to sell tickets to sporting events. This is why events prior to 1996 had no people in attendance.
For the Beijing Games, an [...]

Continue reading “Olympic Ticket Confusion, Part Deux” »

March 19th, 2003: President Bush announces in a joint press conference with Israeli and Palestinian leaders that the two sides would enter peace talks in Annapolis, Maryland.
July 27th 2003: President Bush announces that a framework for a two-state solution has been reached. Both Palestinian and hard-right Israeli protesters take to the streets as details emerge, [...]

Continue reading “The Quick Palestinian-Israeli Fix” »

The Chinese tax system has driven me to resemble a bag women, grabbing at scraps, just to save a few kuai here and there. You’ve surely seen this epidemic, and maybe are ever part of it. The government allows companies to provide up to 40% of income to employees as living/housing stipends , which [...]

Continue reading “Grabbing at Receipts” »

The Beijing subway map has always been interesting to me. Line one reaches tantalizingly far west, while line eight [correction: batong xian], the extension of line one, goes right off the map into an unknown, unexplained land. It’s almost as if the city is saying, “Don’t worry, no one important lives out there. If you [...]

Continue reading “The Ends of Beijing” »

I’m tired of all of the whining from poor African countries about their debt. Sure much of it was racked up under previous, corrupt rulers, or even colonial powers, but honestly, can’t they just dig their way out of it? Last year China forgave 1.3 billion dollars that 31 African countries owed Beijing. That works [...]

Continue reading “China Should Forgive American Debt” »

Recently Hillary Clinton mocked Barack Obama for saying his time living abroad has value when it comes to foreign policy. Yet, as someone who has lived abroad more than 15% of his life, I think that the experience contributes tremendously to understanding how foreign policy affects people outside of the US, and almost as importantly, [...]

Continue reading “What is the Value of Living Abroad?” »

To be honest, I’ve never really celebrated Thanksgiving in China. My first year (2001) the university I worked at sent all the foreign teachers to a Chinese restaurant. The director of foreign affairs clearly had no interest in being there, and sat himself at a table of his cohorts and did not speak to the [...]

Continue reading “Thanksgiving Fried Rice!” »

I remember thinking to myself in 2004 that if John Kerry picked Dick Gephardt to be his running mate it would be another in a series of uninspired moves. Kerry was always my choice to be president, long before he emerged in Iowa, but he had a knack for making baffling choices. Like voting for [...]

Continue reading “John Edwards, Lost Soul, or No Soul?” »