Inception to Premiere in Mainland China September 21

It’s official!  Inception is hitting IMAX screens across the mainland on September 21, nearly 2 months after its release in Hong Kong.  There was some back-and-forth about whether the movie would be given one of the 20 slots reserved for foreign films each year but the release date has now been confirmed by the Associated Press and China Radio International. Many believe... Read More

Friends Like These

Kim Jong-il’s unprefaced, unofficial visit to China two weeks ago was the diplomatic equivalent of a drunk dial, with both parties behaving awkwardly, saying things they don’t really mean, and then pretending to forget the incident, or, in the case of North Korea, deliberately misremembering events. Strangely, the the story of Kim’s visit was only reported ex post... Read More

China: America’s New BFF

Yes, We Can Do It! Obama’s town hall in Shanghai pleased me greatly. His silver tongue was on full display in appeasing the Chinese with conciliatory praise and refined humility. Humility, a word I would rarely associate with American politicians, is an extremely important trait in Asian cultures. He was not forceful, he was not arrogant, and he was the first to point out America’s... Read More

The Amazing And Spectacular Antics of the Roundeye

Imagine, if you will, flipping through channels and coming to a rest on this: a Chinese, an Arab, and an African man are facing off in a contest of English.  The next question: “A _____ by any other name would smell as sweet?”  *BZZT* “Frower!” says the Chinese guy.  The audience groans in disappointment. Next up: the talent portion.  The African announces... Read More

Who Owns the Paracel Islands?

In the South China Sea there are a group of tiny, uninhabited islands known to the western world as the Paracel Islands (Quan Dao Hoang Sa in Vietnamese and Xisha Qundao in Chinese). The archipelago lies roughly 200 miles from the nearest mainland shore, equidistant from Vietnamese and Chinese coastlines, and is delineated into two groups: the Amphitrite group in the northeast and... Read More

Writer’s Block

There is a Chinese idiom about a man who buried a sum of silver underground and, worried that passersby would find it, placed a sign next to the plot that read “ci di wu yin san bai liang,” or “There is not 300 liang of silver here.”  Needless to say, the next day his silver was gone. I wonder if the censorship bureau understands this parable because one... Read More

Working YouTube Proxy

For anyone that remembers, YouTube was blocked in late March and, sadly, shows no sign of returning. Luckily, a friend linked me a working proxy for the site: http://www.ensa.info/. Usually proxies can’t stream videos but this site uses their own player. It’s not perfect, and there are spasms of pop-ups, but it’s something. June 2, 2009 – EDIT: This proxy... Read More

The Loss of Soft Power: It Begins

About 5 months ago, I posted an article, The Loss of Soft Power, about how China’s rise in soft power would eventually meet the same problems that the United States had to deal with decades ago.  Namely, that in times of duress, China would come first, and that Chinese companies would either have to back out of their riskier investments, or China would have to send in military... Read More

Cover to Cover

The most recent cover of The Economist was quite an interesting one: an homage to Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker cover in which a distorted map of the world showed the streets of New York dominating the environment, with the rest of the United States an afterthought and China (along with Russia and Japan) mere blips on the horizon. The Economist‘s cover does not... Read More

Toward a Less Flat World

The weakness that the global supply change has displayed will surely mean changes for the world. As Thomas Friedman has argued, the world has become much flatter in the past few decades. The growing trend of pursuing a first-world living, the globalization of commerce, and the export of certain cultural icons worldwide has had startling implications. But as the global economy,... Read More