The Chinese place great emphasis on grand gestures and confessions. To many girls, you are not officially in a relationship until you make the ultimate confession and ask her formally, "I like you. Will you be my girlfriend?" It doesn’t matter if you’ve already had sex, or if you’ve never said a word to each other. The act of confessing, the grand, sweeping scale of expressing your feelings which have been so deeply bottled up, is the only way to consolidate a relationship.

"The North Koreans are not a reasonable people," Ms. Lee said at the beginning of our trip. It was less a warning than a statement of fact.

The bus tour of the Korean Demilitarized Zone—the four-kilometer-wide ribbon of land that bisects the Korean Peninsula—left from downtown Seoul at eight in the morning but had begun raining long before.

Before this year, I didn't get philanthropy. I knew it was important, and gave a moderate amount when disasters like the Sichuan earthquake struck, but still, it rarely felt better to give than to receive.

However, it's been a tumultuous year for charity in China and I don't think anyone living here feels quite the same about giving as they did a year ago for one simple reason: Guo Meimei.

As a China watcher, the most remarkable aspect about the recent death of North Korea's hereditary Dear Leader is the level to which it has exposed the Chinese media's divorce from reality. Last night before bedtime, a CCTV news anchor read out a complete list of branches of the Chinese Communist Party, the People's Liberation Army, Navy and Airforce, and all major government ministries, all of whom "stand in solidarity with our North Korean comrades."

The salmon sashimi platter at Golden Jaguar is never full. Every time the employee behind the counter slides some on, diners descended on it like ravens on a deer carcass. The sight reminds me of those Chinese temples with fish that try to jump over each other to snatch a morsel of food, or piranhas at feeding time.

Perhaps because I had just finished Jonathan Watts' fabulous but depressing book When One Billion Chinese Jump, but I suddenly had a vision of the apocalypse.