IN A SNOWY VILLAGE high above cloud level, two fur-clad young girls travel to a frozen mountain top lake and stand on the surface, surrounded by elders.
They smash through the ice to take a ceremonial ladleful of sacred water, and then everyone sings and dances.
It is the most ancient of rituals in a…
CHINA CAME FROM nowhere to become a leader in cash-free purchasing, a top London professor said this week.
It is now on track to becoming the world's top country for cash-free transactions, said Kent Matthews, professor of banking and finance at Cardiff University.
In China, the proportion of the total amount of money in circulation…
MEET AN ACTUAL COMMUNIST PARTY MEMBER. When teacher Ye Lianping hit retirement age, he felt he was still able to contribute to society, but had been left behind by the world.
So he turned part of his home into a school and re-started work as a teacher, focusing on children “left behind” by society because…
INDIA HAS AN ECONOMY that is growing faster than China’s – six per cent versus four per cent - and it has a population that is expanding while that of its Asian neighbor is shrinking.
Put these two facts together, and the implication is that India will surpass China in any race to become the…
OOPS. THIS WAS AWKWARD. In 2012, US defense planners made an embarrassing discovery. Lots of US military gear, or parts thereof, came from China.
This included bits of their jetfighters, the glass in their nightvision goggles, a key chemical in their hellfire missiles, and so on. Buyers had chosen China for offering the right…
It started with a death in the river, the legend says. But no one could predict the scale of the repercussions - which are marked today, more than 22 centuries later, with international sports events. The original festival has deep mainland Chinese roots, but was popularized worldwide by the people of Hong Kong. The…
THE UNITED STATES is still running a covert global empire, said Daniel Ellsberg, known as the “father of whistleblowing”.
And we are “on the edge of blowing up the world over Crimea or Taiwan or Bakhmut”, he warned.
The U.S. has a long history of creating needless conflicts for its own advantage, and it is…
THE US BAN on provision of powerful computer chip equipment to China is not really aimed at the Chinese military, a top defence expert revealed. It is an attack on the development of China.
Only a fraction of one per cent of the chips are used by the People’s Liberation Army, said Jon Bateman, a…
BRITAIN "SHOULD NOT make an enemy of China”, a top British foreign policy expert said this week. The country should part ways with America if it starts a conflict in East Asia, said Simon McDonald, former head of the Foreign Office, in an interview with New Statesman.
“This, for me, would be a break point…
A FORMER BBC reporter tried to politicize the tragic recent fire in Beijing by claiming that it was being covered up – there was no press coverage or videos or chat posts, Vivian Wu announced on Twitter.
Except people in China are quite smart now.
They quickly found lots of references to the fire in…