Search Results for: China

At Huawei, Matt Bross Tries to Ease U.S. Security Fears

Longreads Pick

For all its recent success, Huawei’s accession to the global scene has been awkward. Its corporate culture tends to come off somewhere between xenophobic and absurd to local critics. Sample headline published last year in the Times of India: “Huawei Technologies Bans Indians in India.” (Huawei says there’s no discrimination at its Indian facilities.) More pressing, though, is the reputational baggage tied to the company’s founder. Pundits wonder whether China’s premier technology company, a privately held organization run by an ex-deputy director of the army’s engineering corps and former delegate to the Communist Party’s national congress, can overcome suspicions among politicians, security officials, and would-be customers outside China. “Huawei is a large company with state-owned interests involved, and also Chinese military linkages,” says Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor at the Center for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “So one of the concerns is what these guys are up to.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Sep 17, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,324 words)

Unveiling the Capital City of the Future

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But I already knew the numbers, more or less, before I ever got to China. The reality behind the numbers was something else. It began to register with me at the Great Wall, at Badaling. I arrived there in August 2004, my first time on the Chinese mainland. It was almost exactly four years—1,458 days, to be exact—before Beijing was scheduled to host the Summer Olympics. This meant very little to me at the time. Experts were proclaiming or warning that the world was at the dawn of a Chinese Century, and China saw the Olympics as a chance to prove the proclamations true, to demonstrate that its capital city had become a great global metropolis. Though I didn’t yet know it, I would be living through that demonstration from the inside. I would become the audience for the display of the New China and a part of the display itself—tied to Beijing by habit and blood, but still a foreign body, for China to tolerate or not.

Author: Tom Scocca
Source: PopMatters
Published: Aug 26, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,662 words)

The Genius Behind Steve Jobs

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Tim Cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran – he’d worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years – with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”

Source: Fortune
Published: Nov 10, 2008
Length: 16 minutes (4,102 words)

Enter the Cyber-Dragon

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China’s aggressive campaign of cyber-espionage began about a decade ago, with attacks on U.S. government agencies. (The details have still not been divulged.) Then China broadened the scope of its efforts, infiltrating the civilian sector in order to steal intellectual property and gain competitive advantage over Western companies. Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee, who gave Aurora and Night Dragon their names and has written definitive studies of A.P.T. attacks, says that “today we see pretty much any company that has valuable intellectual property or trade secrets of any kind being pilfered continually, all day long, every day, relentlessly.”

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Aug 2, 2011
Length: 25 minutes (6,411 words)

The Beer Archaeologist

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“Dr. Pat,” as he’s known at Dogfish Head, is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long-forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab. He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer (from Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating to 3400 B.C.), the oldest grape wine (also from the Zagros, circa 5400 B.C.) and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jun 24, 2011
Length: 18 minutes (4,678 words)

Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg

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“There are compromises on not being in China, and there are compromises on being in China. It’s not clear to me which one is bigger,” she says. Three people familiar with these internal deliberations say that Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg fundamentally disagree on the issue. Zuckerberg believes that Facebook can be an agent of change in China, as it has been in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia. Sandberg, a veteran of Google’s expensive misadventures in the world’s most populous country, is wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.

Author: Brad Stone
Source: Businessweek
Published: May 12, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,046 words)

J.P. Morgan’s Hunt for Afghan Gold

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To Hannam, chairman of J.P. Morgan Capital Markets, Afghanistan represents a gigantic, untapped opportunity — one of the last great natural-resource frontiers. Landlocked and pinioned by imperial invaders, Afghanistan has been cursed by its geography for thousands of years. Now, for the first time, Hannam believes, that geography could be an asset. The two most resource-starved nations on the planet, China and India, sit next door to Afghanistan, where, according to Pentagon estimates, minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie buried.

Source: Fortune
Published: May 11, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,059 words)

Hillary Clinton: Chinese System Is Doomed, Leaders on a ‘Fool’s Errand’

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In an exclusive interview, the secretary of state says Beijing’s human rights record is “deplorable” and it is “trying to stop history” by opposing the advance of democracy. “It was during this part of the conversation, when the subject of China, and its frightened reaction to the Arab Spring, came up, that she took an almost-Reaganesque turn, calling into question not just Beijing’s dismal human rights record, but the future of the Chinese regime itself.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,857 words)

Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference

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Exiled from the NBA, vilified by the press, and ridiculed for a serious of questionable YouTube videos (eating Vaseline? c’mon!), Stephon Marbury is seeking redemption—and vast riches—in basketball-mad China. Now, if he can just win over his Communist bosses, he’ll be the biggest thing since Yao Ming

Source: GQ
Published: Apr 18, 2011
Length: 22 minutes (5,683 words)

City of Dreams

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An outsider might imagine that the novel that captures China’s current gilded-age mood would be set in Shanghai, the financial capital elbowing its way into competition with New York and London, or Shenzhen, the megalopolis built on marshland. But Shanghai was punished by the Communist party for the city’s history of cosmopolitanism, and is still shaking off the effects of that cultural paralysis. Shenzhen, for its part, is a transient place that sanctifies commerce, not ideas. Beijing, by contrast, stands alone in China as simultaneously the center of authority and a hotbed of creative thinking. It is home to thousands of apparatchiks in the machinery of the Communist party, as well as to many of the nation’s most provocative artists, writers, activists, and filmmakers.

Author: Evan Osnos
Published: Apr 12, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,801 words)