Welmer

A couple of weeks ago, a Chinese friend of mine from Beijing was in town, and I spent a couple of evenings catching up with him. He’s an intelligent guy and a real gentleman. His main weakness is an obsession with golfing, but that’s no big deal to me, as this same tendency is very [...]

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Not long ago, the press was covering the story of the resettlement of Uyghur refugees who had been taken captive during Operation Enduring Freedom and subsequently sent to Guantanamo Bay. Some are in Albania, one made it to Sweden, a few are in Bermuda, and the rest have been offered asylum in Palau.
Only one [...]

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I’m no economist — actually, I find most economic discussions boring and somewhat depressing. It also seems that economics attracts a number of evangelists, only they are preaching the Gods of the Marketplace, and I tend to prefer sticking to the devil I know. However, it’s hard to ignore what’s been going on for the [...]

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America is said to be obsessed with beauty and body image, and it has long been argued that the standards of beauty in the US are unnatural and unrealistic. They are allegedly oppressive to women, as well as based on a particular racial standard that many women do not fit into. This, like much of [...]

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The street fighting that killed well over a hundred people in Urumqi a couple days ago went beyond a “riot.” It was more of a Uighur intifadeh in the heart of the largest center of Chinese settlement in Xinjiang. However, that is not to say that it was a Muslim uprising — there are plenty [...]

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Soong May-ling (better known in America as Madame Chiang Kai-shek), daughter of a prominent Hakka businessman of Christian faith, was born in Shanghai in 1898, blessed with wealth and privilege at a time when most of her Chinese compatriots were suffering from the chaos that accompanied the disintegration of the Qing dynasty. Together with her [...]

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After reading Novaseeker’s latest post on escorts, I found a nice little piece on China Expat that uses the art of the short story to expose the longings and unmet needs of the men of our world to explain why there is a demand for such services. It is, indeed, a hard world out there [...]

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I have been expecting kidnapping to become more popular for some time now. Given rising inequality and the fact that many people living in America (whether citizens or not) have less to lose than they did before, it only makes sense. However, what I did not expect, and never even thought of, was state-sponsored kidnapping [...]

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For centuries the people of Beijing have dwelt in neighborhoods defined above all by the hutongs, clusters of small, brick houses built around a communal courtyard, surrounded and connected to each other by a labyrinthine network of narrow alleys. Hutongs are usually enclosed by brick walls, upon which broken glass is set in a thin [...]

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It is well-known that commerce is deeply rooted in Chinese culture — so much so that it seems at times to be an immutable genetic trait among Chinese. However, there are important differences between Chinese and Western cultural views on trade and business. After coming into contact with overseas Chinese and gaining first-hand experience with [...]

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