When I arrived in the university town of Nanjing on my first visit to China in 2007, I spent days on end watching and talking to students, marvelling above all at the confidence, competence and poise of the girls. I was working on a book about Pearl Buck, who grew up in the Chinese countryside […]
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Why Facebook Needs Sheryl Sandberg
“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 […]
J.P. Morgan’s Hunt for Afghan Gold
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 […]
Hillary Clinton: Chinese System Is Doomed, Leaders on a ‘Fool’s Errand’
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 […]
Welcome to the Far Eastern Conference
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
City of Dreams
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 […]
Aftershocks: A Nation Bears the Unbearable
To geologists, earthquakes are a constant in the planet’s eternal becoming. To the Japanese, they are simply a constant. In a given year, there can be hundreds, usually barely discernible micro-events. They rattle the pictures on the wall, the china on the table, but they rarely stop the conversation. Donald Keene, a professor at Columbia […]
North Korea’s Digital Underground
Their work is illegal and extremely dangerous, and it is producing results. In December 2009, for example, one reporter for the Daily NK, a Web site based in Seoul, embarrassed Pyongyang by intercepting a copy of Kim Jong Il’s annual message, a critical document that sets the ideological tone for the year, before it appeared […]
Can China Discover the Urge to Splurge?
For the rest of the world, the Chinese consumer is one of the best hopes for future economic growth. In the years ahead, when the United States, Europe and Japan will have no choice but to slow their spending and pay off their debts, China could pick up the slack. Millions of Americans — yes, […]
How Baidu Won China
Robin Li—the 41-year-old, American-educated chief executive officer of the Chinese search engine Baidu—has a fan club. And each year at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, the members of the Robin Li fan club come out to get close to the object of their worship. When Li emerges from a dark blue sedan, the fan […]
