The first time I visited Macau was to find a smuggler. Nothing as exciting as opium, gold or indentured coolies, three Macau exports before it became a gambling emporium, of course. No, my flat mate in Hong Kong wanted to bring his treasured Burmese cats into Hong Kong and he could not abide being separated from them for the six-month [...]
CRI reporter Dominic Swire talks to Belgian entrepreneur Jack Leblanc about his 20 years in China, and how he turned from a physics teacher into a successful businessman. Listen to the radio interview online. Leblanc recalls several anecdotes from his recent book Business Republic of China, along with explaining the importance of guanxi, and how the shortest route between A [...]
Hiking recently in Shaoguan, in northern Guangdong, I was grateful for the handy suggestions offered by the local authorities, and I fell down the hillside paying the proper attention to health and safety. The Danxiashan region of the province is a weird landscape of forest punctuated by dramatic red sandstone formations and divided by meandering rivers. Some of the hilltops [...]
Some years ago now, I crossed the border from Kazakhstan into Xinjiang in China's far northwest, and found myself stuck in Urumchi with the equivalent of US$50 and no onward tickets. It wasn't a problem; saving my cash for food, I 'hitch-hiked' on China's trains by boarding them at small-town stations and then jumping off before the ticket collectors reached [...]
Mild-mannered photographer Bernd Hagemann tiptoes around Shanghai with his camera. He has to keep quiet to avoid waking his snoring subjects. But despite his low profile, his photo website Sleeping Chinese has been getting a lot of attention from media as far afield as Apple Daily and La Repubblica. Britain's Daily Telegraph reports: "Bernd Hagemann moved to the Far East [...]
Thanks to ULN at the insightful blog Chinayouren for his review of Chinese Gods: … in terms of surprises, this book delivers from the preface. First, you discover it was actually written and self-published by Chamberlain 30 years ago, inspired by a series of painted glass figures he collected from local markets. It goes on [...]
Beijing-based dealmaker Jack Leblanc's book Business Republic of China has just been reviewed by the South China Morning Post: It has been just under 20 years since Belgian Jack Leblanc heeded a call to go to China and arrived in Chongqing with a suitcase of science books to teach at a university. The freshly minted nuclear physics graduate had abandoned [...]
"Successful negotiations in China require great reserves of the most precious commodity of all: Time. The ability to squander it as if you had a lifetime to wait will earn you the goodwill of your Chinese partners." Jack Leblanc's Business Republic of China has been recommended by the China Economic Review, Inside-Out China and, most recently, James Chau, newsreader at [...]
It was some decade. The universities were closed. Students were at war. Poetry was banned. And the word “love,” unless applied to Mao, was expressly forbidden. Artists were denounced, and many opted for suicide. This is the time — its madness, its passion, its complexity — that Xujun Eberlein brings vividly to life in Apologies Forthcoming, her moving collection of [...]
Just months after he was expelled from China for climbing Shanghai's tallest building without permission, a daring French climber is preparing to scale another Chinese peak — but this time at the invitation of the government. Alain Robert, dubbed the French Spiderman for his ascents up some of the world's tallest buildings without climbing gear, will scale one of China's [...]
Excited spectators gathered with their camera phones today to watch daredevil Alain Robert scale the 88-storey Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai. The 420-metre ascent ended in arrest for the fearless Frenchman, but he took it in his stride: having climbed the world's three tallest buildings barehanded, he wasn't about to let the fourth-tallest pass him by. Reuters has the story: [...]