The Beijing government avidly asserts its control over matters of reincarnation as a way of securing the loyalty and political complexion of influential Tibetan figures.
China believes that it has the rightful claim to a vast portion of the South China Sea, which is claimed by other countries.
Although Shanghai is on the sea, it long lacked the prosperity that Hong Kong enjoyed, so while Hong Kong became known for its exotic ocean creatures, Shanghai built its diet around more commonplace river and sea fish.
Donald Trump has a mantra of despair, of loss. He says we don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't. And he says the American dream is dead.
When I lived in Beijing in 1996, it was a horizontal city. If you wanted to go out for a burger, if you wanted to really treat yourself, you went to this place called the Jianguo Hotel. The architect had proudly described it as a perfect replica of a Holiday Inn that he had seen in Palo Alto, California.
In a city that worships the new and the sleek, the street market at Da Jing Road is willfully out of step. It is a splendid jumble of centuries, full of sizzling pot stickers and bleating cell phones, pungent rice wine and bullfrogs as plump as softballs.
Beijing has a glut of charming and traditional or brash and luxurious places to stay.
It's worth being clear - you know, I think that the ideas that somebody like Richard Spencer endorses and that other members of the self-identified white nationalist groups endorse - those ideas really are repellent to most people.
The Da Jing street market is little more than a few narrow intersections, barely six blocks long. But for a visitor, it is a living, breathing education in Shanghai cuisine, a style distinguished by its thick savory sauces spiked with sugar and soy sauce.
To Confucius, harmony was consensus, not conformity. It required loyal opposition.
'419 scams,' named for a clause from the Nigerian penal code, are such a part of the white noise of the digital age that we no longer notice them.
There's a deep underlying unpredictability to life that is thrilling. In China, my wife would say you go out to buy toilet paper, and you come back, and something interesting or revealing or funny happened on the way.
I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.
By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core.
Being in a Chinese coal mine for 30 years is like an epic novel. It's tragic.
In Beijing, we talk about air purifiers the way that teenage boys talk about cars.
In the final years of his life, when former Communist Party Chief Zhao Ziyang lived under house arrest, in Beijing, his aging friends resorted to donning white doctors' coats in order to slip past the guards stationed outside his home.
I started working as a reporter in Washington on October 1, 2013, the day the government stopped working.
Christianity is permitted under China's constitution, and the government has long supported a network of official Christian churches.
The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.
