Quick quiz: name a single mainland Chinese company that has successfully built brand equity in the U.S. market sans acquisition?  Lenovo doesn’t count as most of its brand value derives from the purchase of IBM’s …

Here we go again… yet again… a new Chinese international television network launches with great fanfare amid high expectations that this time, finally, China’s story will finally get a fair airing in the global marketplace. …

By any measure China’s awe inspiring embrace of Africa is impressive.  Let’s put aside the staggering financial statistics on how many billions of dollars Beijing is spreading across the continent or even the scale of …

(Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) — on this my first night in the capital, I thought it would be fitting to talk about what it actually takes to get here.  For the average visitor, …

There is a current within the recent debate over Google and China that many Chinese observers are overlooking. Both Michael and I feel agree that the reaction to Google’s opposition to Chinese censorship rules and the company’s threat to withdraw entirely from the China market are misunderstood. It is easy to take this one dispute and examine it in a vacuum. By itself, this controversy can be seen as a human rights issue/information imperialism/a Google business failure/control over the internet and the list goes on and on. While those are all valid filters to explore this issue, none of them adequately explain the overwhelming public support that Google is receiving in the United States for its decision to challenge the central government. Americans are rallying behind Google in this dispute because we, as a culture, as a people love to challenge authority:

Atlantic Monthly correspondent James Fallows has coined a wonderful expression to summarize a series of controversial Chinese decisions over the past year: the new “Bush-Cheney Phase.” The stunning news that Google and China are about …

Too many people focus on the same 15-20 China analysts for their insights on Sino-U.S. relations.  Elizabeth Economy, Nicholas Lardy, Jonathan Spence and Orville Schell among others are all extremely learned and no doubt represent …

Pew Global Attitudes Project shows global perceptions on US & Chinese leadership. What can we read into numbers from such surveys? Is national pride or despondency distorting true opinions?

Quite a few blog entries and articles have been posted around the web regarding the CCP’s initiative to “channel public opinion.”  Authors mainly cite two pieces of information:
a) Hu Jintao’s June 20, 2008 speech on …

How does the Chinese public know what it thinks?  My own characterization of the last 30 years posits three stages of evolution:
1) from the Communist Party and government institutions telling the population what to think,
to …