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Public or Private?
New York Times: China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves. China said on Wednesday that nearly a fifth of the food and consumer products that it checked in a nationwide survey this year were found to be substandard or tainted, underscoring the risk faced by its own consumers even as the country’s exports come…
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Giving Chinese Food a Bad Name
Los Angeles Times: China speaks out on food safety. Clearly annoyed by the bad press China has been getting, officials Thursday also denounced media reports that they said exaggerated the nation’s flaws and overlooked the fact that more than 99% of Chinese food exports to the United States in the last three years had met…
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Left Behind
Los Angeles Times: Taishan’s U.S. Well Runs Dry. Down a narrow red dirt road past rice paddies, water buffaloes and abandoned farmhouses is the dab-sized town of Wo Hing. Locals know it as Lop Cham Kee village, or Los Angeles village. The LA Times ran an interesting article about Toisan (Taishan) that deals with the…
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Rogue in Vogue
New York Times: An Export Boom Suddenly Facing a Quality Crisis. Hoping to investigate why melamine contaminated so much pet food, investigators from the Food and Drug Administration spent two weeks in China this month. […] After United States investigators left, China issued a statement asking the United States not to punish other exporters of…
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China’s Upton Sinclair
Whenever I read any negative news articles about China, I don’t see a society too different from the one we celebrate in America. From a business, legal and political perspective, some analysts may contend that America and China are polar opposites. But, that is not the case. In fact, we are traveling along the same…
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Sounds from Inside China
A typical tour of China passes through the major cities of Beijing and Shanghai with excursions to Xian and Guilin. Even if you’ve taken several trips to China, you probably have never seen some of the sights and sounds found in KQED’s Soundscape of China. Here are some of the highlights: Muslim prayers at a…
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In Search of Roots
As a child, Chinese New Year was a time to receive red envelopes (红包) and eat sticky rice cake (年糕) or nian gao. It is quite easy to be a child during Chinese New Year. However, what about the adults? Whatever customs we picked up, if any, from our parents, one day, each of us…
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A Timeless Tale of Families Split Apart
Photographer: Peter Morgan The Wall Street Journal featured a story about liushou ertong, which refers to the roughly 22 million children left behind in the Chinese countryside while their parents seek higher-paying jobs in cities such as Shanghai. In China, small problems do not exist by mere fact of the population size. By way of…
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A China Adoption Story
Every time I visit China, I always see Western families in the hotel lobby with their Chinese adopted children in tow. If you ever wonder what exactly become of them, how they are doing, and what struggles and challenges they face, here’s an interesting essay I found by Elizabeth Holmes, a Chinese adoptee, who won…
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Macao Leaving Las Vegas Behind
New York Times: Macao Surpasses Las Vegas as Gambling Center. Macao surpassed the Las Vegas Strip to become the world’s biggest gambling center in 2006, measured by total gambling revenue, according to industry analysts and government figures released today. I suppose this is good news if you own or run a casino in Macao. But,…