This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Economic Observer. Yuan Jiang started his first business, a direct marketing services provider called Roadway, in 2001. Seven years later, Roadway ranked first in its sector in China, with profits twice that of its nearest rival. At that moment, Yuan agreed to a merger with the American firm D&B for more than $40 million. It was ...

Before Disney, China's first amusement park was Chengde in Hebei province. Call it Qingland — in honor of the decadent Qing dynasty that walled off 5.6 sq km of rolling forest to create a summer retreat 230 km northeast of Beijing. But forget Space Mountain or It's a Small World. The attractions on these carved-out hunting grounds, aside from the few deer left as a reminder of former wildlife , are some 120 preserved palaces, pavilions and pagodas ...

On May 25, U.S. businessman Charles Hubbs made the short trek to Hong Kong from his office just outside Guangzhou, a city in Guangdong province in southeastern China that is known for good reason as the manufacturing workshop of the world. For the 64-year-old native of Louisiana, it was a trip that may have marked the beginning of the end of his successful 22-year run as a China-based exporter of medical supplies. Hubbs was going to listen to a pitch ...

Another Mother's Day down, the awkward ceremony survived. Loaded like a German fruitcake, you smiled wide as a freeway, wobbled under tulips, chocolates, a witty card, wished her all the happiness in the world and told all the old stories. Wasn't it fun? Wasn't she pleased, the ancient matriarch who, in a time so distant that it seems made up, slid you out soaked, milky, blind into the sheets? On her designated "day," that same panting, sweating girl sat dry ...

Mao Zedong loved to swim. In his youth, he advocated swimming as a way of strengthening the bodies of Chinese citizens, and one of his earliest poems celebrated the joys of beating a wake through the waves. As a young man, he and his close friends would often swim in local streams before they debated together the myriad challenges that faced their nation. But especially after 1955, when he was in his early 60s and at the height of his ...

This fall, young girls in China's southern Guangdong province will be learning a new subject in school: how to avoid becoming a mistress. Although Chairman Mao kept a stable of women at his disposal, extramarital peccadilloes were frowned upon during China's more fervent socialist years. But as economic reforms have helped Guangdong become one of the nation's wealthiest regions, the province has been beset by a flood of ernai, literally, "second breast," as mistresses are commonly known ...

— China's worst drought in a half-century is deepening, with the parched weather that has left millions in the Yangtze River region without enough drinking water pushing inflation higher and adding to widespread power shortages. Shanghai's government promised Thursday that the city's 23 million residents would not face shortages at home, after the city's electricity utility warned that some stores and factories may have to close in the hottest days of summer to limit demand.

You can't get to the town of Ruili by plane or train. There is only the road. Or, to place Ruili more precisely, two roads. One winds down through the rolling hills of Yunnan province's far west. The other comes up from hermetic Burma. Ruili is where the roads meet, and much else besides: two countries, one expanding in all directions, the other penetrated only at soft spots such as Ruili. More than two ethnicities intermingle: Han ...

Apple's long-awaited white iPhone 4, which hit stores April 28, is expected to be another smash for Steve Jobs. But how much will it benefit the American economy? Though invented in the U.S., the iPhone is manufactured in China, so, ironically, iPhones sold in the U.S. add to the trade deficit with the Middle Kingdom. Yet China contributes almost nothing to the value of an iPhone; it does little more than assemble parts from elsewhere. A host of other countries, ...

Over the past six years, The Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled more than 180 million pieces of metal jewelry that contained dangerous levels of lead, and in August 2009 it lowered the acceptable amount of lead in children's jewelry to 300 parts per million . But the progress in regulating lead appears to have propelled manufacturers to use another toxic metal, cadmium. In January of this year, an Associated Press investigation revealed that many cheap metal pendants and ...