Want to get famous in China? Do something zany on the Internet.

In the past five years China has adopted the Internet with a passion. It is now second only to the US in the absolute number of users, although by proportion of population it still ranks fairly low in adoption.

Although bulletin boards are the Chinese Internet medium of choice, blogs are popular also. And the Chinese are world champs at instantaneously elevating someone to either stardom or infamy based upon fleeting blog or BBS performances.

Read more »

When I was in high school and had to take the SAT, which is America's standardized test for university aspirants, the rules were simple: No calculators, no talking. In 1984, there wasn't much chance of anyone smuggling a cell phone into the test, and certainly not an undetected one given that what cell phones existed then were suitcase sized.

Here in China, both mobile phones and academic testing are a big deal. The university placement test (高考 or gaokao), is taken by about eight million students a year in early June, and is the biggest test of all, thanks to its ability to determine a student's academic and thus professional future. It is a time of notorious sweats, high anxiety, occasional suicides, and hundreds of newspaper articles chronicling the woes of China's suffering students.Read more »

Earlier this week German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to China. As always happens in these kinds of visits, a raft of commercial deals was signed. Among these was one for Germany and China to collaborate on the building of a second high-speed, magnetic-levitation train system.

Read more »

For someone from the California suburbs China can certainly feel like another planet. There's the language, the traffic, the air, the smells, the food, the culture, the profusion of yappy little dogs in Beijing and more. A thousand things to overwhelm the senses and challenge the mind.

Part of the problem is that there is no "one" China. China may exist as a political entity, but by any other yardstick it's more like several completely different countries within the same border. From Tianjin on the east coast to Kashgar on the Central Asian border, from Harbin's famous ice lanterns in the sub-Siberian north to the mysterious Yunnan-Burma border in the sub-tropical south, there are dozens of distinct cultures and dialects.
Read more »