A stock broker from Inner Mongolia

If you’re looking for examples of modern China, consider my friend Aviva.
She’s the one in the yellow sweater, and she is dancing on the bar in a place called Zapata’s, in Shanghai.
She’s 30 years old, which means she was born about the same time China decided to transform itself from a Mao Zedong-led Communist state [...]

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What my students know about Barack Obama

1. He’s black.
2. His half-brother lives in Shenzhen. (This was major news in the national press here)
3. He just won the presidential election in America.
4. He beat Hillary Clinton.
Almost no one at the school has heard of John McCain, but there are quite a few students here who are still bummed out about Hillary losing [...]

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Yellow Mountain

HUANGSHAN – I’ve had some time off while my students practice their marching and chanting on the school’s football field during mandatory pre-college military training, so I decided to head to Anhui Province for a few days and climb a mountain.
I hopped on the overnight train in Nanjing, where my inability to speak Mandarin landed [...]

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Military training

YANGZHOU – Sometimes, it really pays to work for a technical college.
Take this morning, for example. If I had been a regular American citizen passing through Yangzhou on holiday, perhaps on my way to Slim West Lake or maybe a bit of shopping on Wenchang Road, I might have been a bit confused (and perhaps, [...]

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So, was it worth it?

With the Olympics now in our rear-view mirror, it’s time to answer the $40 billion question.
Was it worth it?
China spent $43 billion on these Games, more than doubling the previous record of $15 billion for the 2004 Games in Athens. The government shut down hundreds of factories across northern China and pulled half of the [...]

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