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A good opening sentence should be like a vodka shot:  clear, quick, strong, and with a sharp finish that gets you reved up for what comes next — i.e. it shouldn’t ramble on like this Aabservation does with no intention of stopping, completely unrelated to the main topic:  in this case, the question “bells or brakes?”, a with-us-or-against-us type of question which came up last night, when I was biking to a party and panicked for a moment when I realized my brakes were worn out — but quickly regained confidence (and speed) as I realized that my bicycle bell at least was working, meaning that instead of slowing down, I could just announce my arrival and others would get out of my way, which I did, often, and in so doing realized that I would rather have a fully functional bell than fully functional brakes — perhaps a revelation about a change in my attitude toward risk-taking since moving to China (or perhaps the attitude that brought me here in the first place?) — and beyond just me, I started to wonder whether China itself is a country that values bells or brakes more — a question which, after a considerable period of high-speed contemplation (and pedaling), I came to conclude:  yes, China is indeed a country that would rather be able to slow down safely than charge forward bells a-ringing (think of China’s slow unwind of capital controls, its patient and quiet emergence as an international power, and the truly measured pace of its transition from a centrally planned economy to an open one), while the US is the country with the largest bells in the world, and which loves ringing them (think of the US’s strong attitude to foreign relations and its love of global media attention)… though I’d love to hear back from you whether you agree with this assessment and (perhaps more interestingly) whether you would rather have working bells or working brakes, with only one requirement for your reply:  that you, like me in this Aabservation, try writing using as many punctuation bells & whistles as possible (bonus if you can incorporate Chinese backward commas and <> quotes), but that you strictly forbid yourself from using a period to brake your train of thought (a ridiculous challenge — I know — inspired by a hilarious and geeky late night conversation on punctuation in a rooftop bar with a handful of copy-editors, writers, researchers and blumblum friends):  a gimmick which is (outside of Victorian literature and legal documents) only sustainable for so long, and eventually (as you can see) must at some point come to an end.

Cheers, Liz

After a wonderful year and four months of persuading monks to wear bunny ear muffs while overlooking Mount Everest, blowing on beer bottle tops as part of a music ensemble, teaching 600 students English by singing ‘I will survive!’ on a Saturday afternoon in rural Yunnan, inadvertently biking through military training exercises in a patch of forest behind downtown Beijing, staring at a perfectly flat plain with no trees for two days on the cross Australian railroad, and drinking a lot of green tea, I am now back in a suit and working full time in Beijing. (more…)

So you want to do business in China, but you keep hearing about the fact that there is no “rule of law,” or that it’s “unsafe.” Well, last night I sat down with a lawyer friend of mine, and listened as she told me the biggest potholes in the road of China Opportunity.

At one point, my stomach full of Korean food and my brain stuffed with terms like “judicial review” and “normative law” I asked her to stop. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Can you explain it again?”

She smiles and says, “No, if you don’t get it, that actually means you get it.”

So what is fishy about the Chinese legal system? I don’t know law from a chicken leg, but here are three things I’d be careful about: (more…)