THE DAOGUANG EMPEROR tasked Commissioner Lin Zexu (image above) with suppressing the opium trade bedeviling China in 1839.
Lin initially tried diplomacy.
As British traders were growing the drug in India and then smuggling it into China, he hoped an appeal to their country’s sense of honor might be salutary.
Before the outbreak…
Huge disinformation campaign ran for almost five years, study shows
Network blackened reputation of Chinese, Russians, Iranians
Agents used AI to generate photos of fake humans for Facebook and other media
Falsified accounts pushed stories in tandem with US govt media VOA, RFE and others
A TORRENT OF DISINFORMATION about the Chinese and other communities…
A LEAKED PIECE of audio today revealed prospective new UK leader Liz Truss wishing that British people worked hard, like the Chinese. The country needs “more graft”, she says, using a British slang term for hard work. “Essentially it’s partly a mindset and attitude thing, I think. It’s working culture, basically. If you go to…
Shopkeepers in China 900 years ago accidentally created restaurant food culture, and their achievement is listed among Life magazine's 100 greatest achievements of the past millennium. Emily Zhou reports
IN OR ABOUT THE YEAR 1120 AD, a shopkeeper in the old Chinese city of Kaifeng had an idea. There were lots of merchants arriving from…
IS IT IMPORTANT TO YOU that your investments don’t worsen problems of pollution, the mistreatment of workers, and corruption? If so, you are probably aware of two hot topics in finance: Environmental, Social and Governance investing (ESG), and Sustainable Finance. Both initiatives are bringing business opportunities for investment banks and commercial banks to drive profit…
Planners designed ten thousand kilometers of bike track in China, as cycling makes a huge comeback
THE BICYCLES ARE BACK. Cycling, for decades the dominant mode of transport in China, is becoming popular again, and the potential is immense.
Shanghai, 1980s
As recently as the 1990s, China was known as the Kingdom of Bicycles, with roads…
FOR THE FIRST TIME. Chinese enterprises made more money than firms in the US or elsewhere on the planet, it was revealed yesterday. And an obscure Chinese firm you’ve never heard of called State Grid came in well ahead of Apple Inc.
The data is in the 2022 Fortune Global 500 chart, released yesterday.
It…
China managed to reduce air pollution in seven years by as much as the US did in three decades, says new report.
The forceful implementation of policies to target factories and transportation has accounted for 75% of the reduction of air pollution – not just in China, but globally.
The speed of the reductions in…
The real issue underlying the Hong Kong discussion today is decolonization. By 1914, almost 85% of the world was colonized by Western powers, including this part of China.
Over the decades, the West withdrew from most colonies, but not from Hong Kong, which it liked to use as a tool against mainland China.
American…
UH-OH. YOU’VE HAD too many drinks. You’re too intoxicated to drive home. But you can’t take a taxi because you don’t want to abandon your car in the bar's car park. What do you do?
Reach for your phone. A new category of app called Dai Jia (代駕) - literally "designated driver"- lets you summon…
