These first few months of blogging have been a lot of work, and also a lot of fun. I appreciate all the feedback I have been receiving along the way. This project serves simply as a way to provide an on the ground look at China showing both the good and the bad, attempting to explore the big picture through conversations with co-workers, students, [...] Keep reading »

The wedding fun continues (Part 1, Part 2)! Today we will wrap up with a few odds and ends about the activities surrounding the wedding day and the wedding night, before we begin to look at marriage in China. I realized this morning that I had almost forgotten an incredibly important part of getting married in China, wedding photos.The name is misl [...] Keep reading »

One of the things I enjoy about living in China is that culture here seems to be in a constant state of change, even if many Chinese stubbornly claim that it isn’t. This is true of many cultures but China is doing it at an impressive rate. Yesterday we looked at an example of weddings in modern China, but it’s also important to get a sense [...] Keep reading »

With so many changes in China over the past 30 years of opening up, it isn’t surprising that weddings have been hugely impacted as well. The result is that in modern China it’s incredibly hard to say what a “typical” wedding includes beyond a large meal and a lot of drinking. So I will describe a wedding I attended last year in Chengdu [...] Keep reading »

A few weeks ago I wrote “Can Culture Be a Problem?” in which I detailed some of the public health problems that are common in China, and how they are at least partially perpetuated by ideas in Traditional Chinese Medicine. This weeks story highlights one of the problems, tuberculosis, and it’s prevalence in China, and that many of [...] Keep reading »

A few years ago I was reading a pirated copy of “The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor–and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!,” that I had picked up at the book stall next to a large university. In the book I found an interesting discussion of used cars, and only months later realized th [...] Keep reading »

Yesterday we looked briefly at the way copyrights are ignored in China, and today we will be diving deeper into the fascinating world of Chinese knockoffs. In China these knockoffs are called Shanzhai, and there are even references to a shanzhai culture. Some of the more well-known products are the “blockburry”, the “A-Pad” and the “O-Pho [...] Keep reading »

Intellectual Property Rights are a constant issue in China, and you know it is bad when People’s Daily devotes a special button on the front page to help you find the official information (Tibet gets a special button too). ChinaLawBlog.com says that IPR is one of the top 4 concerns companies should investigate before coming here. It’s no secret [...] Keep reading »

I think a lot of us picture China as a place where the people are completely ignorant of the outside world due to heavy censorship (yesterday’s post on the topic). Coming to China often does little to change this perception, as people will smile politely and tell you that everything has always been fine in Tibet, or that Tiananmen Square’s [...] Keep reading »