Journalist Ian Johnson will be in Berlin from half June to half September, and is available to share his insights on civil society, culture and religion. He is a Beijing-based writer for the New York Review of Books, and his stories also appear in the New York Times and ChinaFile.Read More →

Alibaba shares have gone up since their massive IPO, but the situation is very volatile, says business analyst Shaun Rein, according to the Drum. The hedge funds are waiting for their chances, and they might come soon as the company releases its figures on Thursday.Read More →

Author Zhang Lijia attended in March the Bookworm International Literary Festival, and talked about the changing role of women in China´s society. Here is the report of Al Jazeera. Zhang Lijia is currently writing a novel on prostitutes in China.Read More →

Slowly, very slowly, some good news about China´s environment is coming in. Journalist Ian Johnson talked for the New York Times with Mark Clifford, author of The Greening of Asia, about the changes in the world´s largest coal consuming country.Read More →

Baidu, China´s largest search engine, has launched an initiative to rebuild Nepal virtually, in 360 degrees using the many existing pictures of destroyed sites. Communication director Kaiser Kuo explains on his Facebook page how it works, and how tourists´pictures will be used.Read More →

Haier is not only for years the largest white-good manufacturer, not only in China, but worldwide. IMD professor Bill Fischer explains how the first Chinese company to go global did so by unconditional focussing on their customers, in Strategy Business. How Haier reinvented itself four times in 30 years.Read More →

For centuries the world has been hoping China would become a buyer of (their) consumption products. Now this has been the official line of the central government and financial analyst Sara Hsu looks how successful the push has been from investment to consumption in the Diplomat. Good jobs are key, she argues.Read More →

Books need a book number to get published and sold in China, although every store would have a little counter of banned or not approved books. But censorship rules have become stricter enforced over the years and when an autobiography of Li Rui, a retired party official, got confiscated at an airport, his daughter decided to take the case to court, writes journalist Ian Johnson in the New York Times.Read More →