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 […]
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Enter the Cyber-Dragon
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 […]
Mao Inc.: China’s Communist Party Turns 90
Does Zong, a member of the Communist Party, see himself as more of a communist or a capitalist? He smiles. “That’s a very German question,” he says. “I’m a pragmatist.” As such, he says, he fights for the rights of business owners and workers. “If there is anyplace in the world where socialism prevails, it’s […]
The Beer Archaeologist
“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 […]
Women in China: A Social Revolution
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 […]
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 […]
