Cup of Cha
This is China

Yesterday I went to “The Second China (Beijing) International Cultural & Creative Industry Expo” that was supposed show different aspects of Chinese modern culture. I think that’s what it was supposed to show anyway. It was a bit of everything with booths that ranged from jewelry, to China’s space ambitions, to one area devoted to [...]

Continue reading “Exhibiting Chinese Oddness” »

A couple of days ago I was poking around on Frog in a Well, a fairly academic blog on Asia run by several professors, when I ran a across an article on Gini Coefficients. It got me thinking about the income inequality now in China, and what it was just before the Communist revolution that [...]

Continue reading “Will Income Inequality Bring a Second Chinese Revolution?” »

With all of the talk about Chinese democratization in the recent 17th National Congress, I wondered what a Mainland election would look like. Would it be like an American election, with Swift-Boat ads and fund raising bonanzas? It’s hard to know, and we’ll probably never see it, but it’s fun to imagine. Oh, wait, I [...]

Continue reading “An Imaginary Chinese Election” »

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates came to Asia this week to speak to Chinese and Korean officials. One of the major concerns he expressed with Beijing is their enormous recent military build up. Western countries are beginning to get concerned about the intentions of the Chinese who seem to be putting more and more of [...]

Continue reading “Robert Gates Lectures China, but US Lacks Moral High Ground” »

After only ten days I realized that promising to publish my favorite podcasts every week basically forces me to recommend something even if I haven’t heard anything good. So, this probably won’t be a weekly bit, but when I have a few to pass on I’ll post something.
The first of these was a podcast, but [...]

Continue reading “Podcast Recommendations Nov 7” »

In Spring and Fall my bicycle gets met to work in a flash, no trouble at all. It’s only two and half miles, a straight shoot through the bustling Chinese morning craziness. But in the brutal Summer and blistering Winters, the subway is the only mode for me, anything else would be laziness.
Sure there are [...]

Continue reading “My Beijing Commute” »

Stephen Colbert is a brilliant and hilarious comedian. His work on The Colbert Report is a remarkably cutting counterpoint to right-wing TV hosts like O’Reilly. He manages to make them look ridiculous without ever confronting or attacking them. Instead he imitates their machismo self-confidence in a way that makes it clear no level-headed person could [...]

Continue reading “A Vote for Stephen Colbert is a Vote for the Enemy” »

This also wins the “Too Much Information Award”. I went to college with this guy, which makes strongly question my choice of higher learning institute.

Continue reading “Best Halloween Costume” »

As the Games get closer, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the IOC should bite the bullet and threaten to switch host cities. In fact, I think they should have begun to discuss this drastic and unprecedented action months ago when it first started to become clear that there were going to be major problems. This [...]

Continue reading “Beijing Should Lose the Olympics” »

Don’t get me wrong, I would never publicly complain about colleagues and certainly never bosses. However, there is one particularly Chinese experience with someone at my office that I think is fairly telling about the culture here. It’s actually 2 experiences, but they happened 27 minutes apart, so I’ll combine them. (editor’s note: this did [...]

Continue reading “When Secretaries Attack” »