Before China's dairy industry imploded in a swirl of tainted products, milk was a cash cow. Investors flocked to buy stock from leading dairies Mengniu, Yili and Bright as a way to tap into the growing purchasing power of Chinese consumers and the country's rising dairy exports, which totaled $232 million last year. In rural China, poor farmers scrimped to buy cattle to boost their incomes, becoming part of the food chain serving the Chinese middle class's ...

At the global headquarters of eHarmony in Pasadena, Calif., one blue wall is papered with testimonies of love: snapshots of couples who met on the Internet matchmaking site and subsequently got hitched. There are older couples, military couples, kissing couples, couples with physical disabilities, couples dressed in wedding whites. Soon, if all goes as planned, there will be Chinese couples, Indian couples, European couples, many dressed in the brilliant matrimonial hues of their cultures. They're going to need a new ...

Li Li has lost exact count of how many men she has bedded, but she knows the number is far above 100. "I don't keep statistics," says the former journalist, 27. But she isn't averse to kissing and telling. For the past couple of years, Li has kept a blog--written under the pen name Muzi Mei--that has chronicled everything from her penchant for orgies and Internet dating to her skepticism toward marriage when it means staying faithful to one man. ...

For a short time at the launch of GM's new Baojun 630 sedan at the Shanghai Auto Show this week, the car was the side attraction. On a stage behind the car, two male models dressed in black performed a strange routine in which they drew car parts with their fingers in the air and then tossed the phantom pieces to one another. A ballet dancer emerged to twirl in front of a video of the Baojun ...

Chongqing. Guangzhou. Wuhan. If any business claims to be a global player over the next 20 years but has no eye on these emerging Chinese cities, short its stock. According to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, "Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities," nine of the 10 urban areas that will experience the highest GDP growth from 2007 to 2025 are in China. Out of the top 25 growth cities, an astonishing 21 are in the ...

"What country is this?" Many bemused Americans might ask that question as they go about their work and play. Whether shopping for vegetables among the hundreds of Korean-run greengroceries in Manhattan, or stopping for the night at one of the innumerable Indian-owned hotels in California, Americans are increasingly finding that entire businesses have acquired a foreign-born flavor. Indeed, through a process that is at times too slow to be noticed and at others astonishingly quick, industrious newcomers have been carving ...

Re "The Roar of the Tiger Mom" [Jan. 31]: As a young Chinese American who has been on the receiving end of this sort of discipline, I can say that the ways of the tiger mom are effective and laudable to an extent. What worries me is the lack of creativity Asians instill in their children. Without creativity, we can only follow paths that someone else has made instead of making our own paths. Grace Wu, FREMONT, CALIF., U.S. It is disturbing ...

On the outside, Betsy Lueth's school looks like any other in this arty neighborhood of Minneapolis: a sprawling, boxy red brick building with plain steel doors. Yet inside, the blond, gregarious Minnesotan presides over an institution unique in the heartland: Yinghua Academy, a charter public school where elementary students of every ethnicity study subjects ranging from math to American history in Mandarin. Yinghua, the first such immersion program in the Midwest, is on the leading edge of a movement that ...

On Sept. 16, 2010, a team of U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigators arrived at a Shanghai purveyor of dough, macaroni and baby cereal. Federal authorities had long suspected that Shanghai Chuangi Food Co.'s plants were unsanitary. Many of its products, like soup base, had been shipped to the port of New York and ultimately placed in an unknown number of goods that ended up on kitchen tables in the U.S. That's why federal authorities assigned to one of the ...

Liu Dehai and Hai Hongmei's matrimonial bed is laid with a thick quilt embroidered with the characters for "double happiness," words meant to augur good fortune for just-married Chinese couples. This should be a room of joy and hope, but Liu's mother doesn't want anyone investigating too closely. "Please," she says, "do not speak of this room." The marriage of Liu and Hai is a subject of shame, for they are not just husband and wife; they are also first ...