Isaac Stone Fish

Shi Yongxin has turned Shaolin into a thriving brand.

Straight from a suburban shopping mall, American 'Chinese' food is coming to the mainland.

A generation of Chinese Artists are Grappling with one of the nation's greatest tragedies.

The popular Pakistani politician and former cricket player talks about what's next in Afghanistan, what his country can learn from China, and the fallout from the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden.

China's most famous dissident artist, Ai Weiwei, speaks out about the ordeal of his Detention.

Border transients, poverty, and desperation fuel a drug scourge in the Chinese hinterlands.

With "Let the Bullets Fly," Jiang Wen has succeeded in creating an officially acceptable yet enthralling film—one in which political subversion exists only in the eye of the beholder.

In the category of the world's sexiest politicians, China's dour communist apparatchiks would seem to be far behind America's legendary ladies'-men presidents and Europe's bunga-bunga leaders. But a survey released in December by the All-China Women's Federation found that a Middle Kingdom mandarin is the top pick for an ideal partner among Chinese women.

As Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Washington this week, Chinese officials have launched a charm offensive with an ad that will be shown on American TV as well as on the screens of Times Square. But the ad has mostly created confusion.

As China's economy roars into another year, analysts are keeping a wary eye on the country's land and housing prices. Beijing's National Bureau of Statistics reported a 7.7 percent rise in those prices over the past year, and many experts believe that the actual increase was far more steep than that.

An apparent affection for Jewishness has led to a surprising trend in publishing over the last few years: books purporting to reveal the business secrets of the Talmud that capitalize on the widespread impression among Chinese that attributes of Judaism lead to success in the financial arts.

Foreign policymakers distracted by recent history—the fallout from the end of the Cold War, the morasses of Iraq and Afghanistan—should shift their gazes from northern landmasses to southern seas. That's the thrust of Robert Kaplan's new book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, which argues that the Indian Ocean "will demographically and strategically be a hub of the 21st-century world."

Over the past year, China has seen a rash of labor disputes, as employees of state- and foreign-owned factories have begun to clamor for better working conditions and higher wages.

Of all the unfamiliar products in a Chinese supermarket, one of the most shocking to American visitors is a toothpaste featuring the logo of a minstrel singer in a top hat, flashing a white smile.

China has been making a lot of noise lately about the sanctity of its territorial claims, and its bluster is getting louder by the month. The most recent manifestation: the opening ceremony of the Asian Games in early November.

Beijing knows how to use the thorn in its side. North Korea, reclusive and reckless, poses constant risks. A collapse of the government in Pyongyang would send thousands of starving North Korean refugees pouring over the border into China. Worse, a reunified Korea could let America base troops on China's border. Both concerns provide good reason for Beijing to keep up the flow of trade and envoys to its isolated ally.

Since Google's spat with Beijing and subsequent retreat to Hong Kong, the search-engine market in China has further opened to domestic companies, and search is not the only online sector targeted by the state business empire.

The government's attitude toward gays resembles the way it treats ethnic minorities. It distrusts any group, whether Tibetans fighting for freedom of worship or gay activists agitating for marriage rights, whose goals ostensibly don't line up with those of the majority.

China's recent belligerence toward Japan has worried its neighbors, including Taiwan, which the mainland regards as a prodigal son. China has been drawing Taiwan closer with improved trade links, and the June signing of a breakthrough free-trade agreement between the two entities will bind Taiwan's economy even tighter to the mainland's.

Liu is the principal author of Charter 08, a manifesto modeled after Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, calling for greater freedom of expression and human rights in China.

The Web in China has been seen from the outside as a boon for dissidents—a place to organize and spread their views, with only sluggish harassment from the state in the form of blocked Web sites and occasional arrests.

The Great Leap Forward, the period from 1958 to 1962 that saw the deaths of an estimated 45 million Chinese, lacks the heft of horror associated with Hitler's and Stalin's genocides.

Beijing is currently showering attention and resources on the region in order to boost the local economy and develop further trade ties into Central Asia and Europe, but also to placate Kashgar's restive Uighur population.

It had all the trappings of a globally significant confab: big-deal appearances (by Google, the BBC), a weighty theme ("the digital age"), and speechifying by international pooh-bahs. Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp., even delivered a peppery keynote, vowing war on "content kleptomaniacs."

The Dear Leader may be as unwell as he looks, and famine may be a constant worry, but North Koreans can still count on one thing: China.

In August, China's biggest job-search site released a survey of 200,000 Chinese college students, ranking their -preferences for employment. Only three non-Chinese multinational corporations made the list of the top 50: Google, Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble, all in the top 10. That's a steep decline from the 21 foreign firms that made the list last year.

Amway China's chairwoman, Eva Cheng, started at the company as a secretary in the Hong Kong office in 1977 and now oversees the company's operations in Greater China and Southeast Asia, which was reportedly responsible for more than one third of its $8.4 billion in 2009 revenue.

Shoppers throughout the West, wary of a double-dip recession, are still pinching their pennies. But Chinese consumers are opening their wallets—big time. According to McKinsey, retail sales in China have grown by 25 percent annually from 2007 to 2009, making the Chinese consumer sector arguably the healthiest of any major economy in the world, says Yuval Atsmon, a consultant in McKinsey's Shanghai office.

Once upon a time, the rural poor were the beating heart of China, welcomed gladly at the nation's top universities. Now almost none of them attend, and with so few opportunities, poor high-school educations, and terrible public health, they're rapidly falling behind.