Day: August 22, 2024

In America businessmen learn to play golf in order to fit in and foster relationships. In China they learn guandan, a card game that has become a staple of business meetings and banquets. Millions of Chinese people enjoy it. “Eating without playing doesn’t count as a meal,” says one executive. Guandan, which translates as “egg tossing” or “bomb tossing”, involves four people in teams of two. Players try to shed their cards by forming various combinations. The game can last for hours and usually involves a lot of chit-chat. The…

“The internet is not beyond the law!” warned police in Fujian province earlier this month. They had recently arrested a man, identified as Mr Gong, for using a virtual private network (VPN). This is a piece of software that can make it appear as if a computer or mobile phone is in another country. VPNs thus allow netizens to bypass the “great firewall”, as China’s system of online censorship is known. By using one, Mr Gong had allowed “false foreign information” to flow into China, the police claimed. The Economist

CHINA IS OFTEN criticised for its emissions of carbon dioxide, which dwarf those of other countries. By way of defence, Chinese leaders can at least point to their official goal of having those emissions peak by 2030. But China is also the world’s biggest emitter of methane, another greenhouse gas. It produces about 14% of global emissions each year. When it comes to methane, Chinese leaders have less to say in their defence. They are just starting to grapple with the problem. The Economist

OVER RECENT decades, individual Chinese dreams reshaped the world. The largest manufacturing power on Earth emerged, in part, because hundreds of millions of rural men and women left behind families and villages to toil in coastal boomtowns. Behind dry graphs showing steep growth rates lurked stories of the human heart. Generations raised amid Maoist conformity reinvented themselves as entrepreneurs and risk-takers. The Economist