40 Archives | Week In China

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Back Issue

WiC 40 (Nov 27, 2009)

Heritage industry

China Consumer China erects barriers to multinationals buying its most beloved brands

When Richard Nixon returned home from China in 1972, he brought two pandas and a bag of White Rabbit milk candy back with him. White Rabbit, then a ...

A local shop for local people

Banking & Finance Domestic private equity dominates the ChiNext. A model of things to…

When an investor takes a stake in a start-up company, it probably doesn’t expect to have to wait 10 years until it can cash out. But that’s exactly ...

Banking & Finance, Talking Point Its early investments lost money, but CIC has revived its performance

"Be nice to countries that lend you money” was Gao Xiqing’s suggestion, in an interview in The Atlantic magazine late last year. Gao, a former ...

Good advertising

Economy Perhaps the best barometer yet of China's rapidly rebounding economy

A year on from the worst downturn in a generation, and financial commentators will grab at any indicators that seem to suggest a way back to happier ...

Time to overtake

Sport Racing ace aims for grand prix breakthrough

The raw material seems to be there, says racing legend Michael Schumacher. Chinese taxi drivers are able to execute sudden and flashy turns, he muses. ...

Flat unaffordable

Property Expert predicts surge in personal bankruptcies

Wang Ling, a 29 year-old white collar worker from Beijing’s Dongcheng district, and his wife bought a 60 square metre (642 square feet) apartment in ...

Photo essay: 150 million workers

Society Seibert's photographs capture realities of migrant life

Readers will recall that in WiC6 we cited the old axiom that you should never judge a book by its cover. We were reviewing Factory Girls; an ...

Who’s Hu Duty, and then Dalian Wanda

Wang Jianlin was born in Sichuan in 1954 and, like his father before him, joined the army at 15. After an 18 year military career, he was demobilised ...

The thin red line

Agriculture Recent drought resuscitates debate in Beijing about 'food security'

Pre-modern societies used ceremonial rain dances to bring a good harvest. In China, the Weather Modification Office has a different technique. Earlier ...

Healthcare Crackdown looms as fake medicine continues to circulate

Preserving one’s health is a key aspect to the study of Chinese philosophy and traditional medicine. And Xianyang, a city in Shaanxi province, is ...

How China Mobile recharged

Environment Telco's energy savings equivalent to taking 1.7 million cars of the…

Last week, China Mobile announced that it had agreed with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to reduce its power consumption by 20% ...

A more refined solution

Energy & Resources Why Exxon Mobil thought Quanzhou refinery was worth the 12 year…

More cars. More petrol. More refineries. And more petrol stations. The logic seems clear enough, and the announcement 10 days ago that China’s first ...

Gross miscalculation

Entertainment Should we believe China's box office figures?

In a country with a reputation for unreliable economic data it should come as little surprise that Chinese filmmakers have been accused of fiddling the ...

The not so white house

Planet China Zhang Zhi’an’s pretensions to the Oval Office have well and truly…

Zhang Zhi’an’s pretensions to the Oval Office have well and truly unfurled. The bureaucrat from Anhui province caused a public outcry when he spent ...

A winning hand, or rather, glove

Cartoons A winning hand, or rather, glove

They say you can never beat the casino but, for a particular casino-and-resort in Macau, Beat It was on everyone’s lips this week. Michael ...

The other Obama

And Finally President's half-brother lives in China and has written a novel

Long before Barack Obama began to display his political ambitions, he harboured ideas of becoming a novelist. And now his China-based half-brother ...