Tag: china
-
China, Cement, and the Great Wall’s Sticky Rice Mortar
I’m fascinated by the scale of concrete usage in modern China, and some of the facts can be difficult to fathom on face value. For instance: Now I’ve just read about sticky rice mortar. As Liam said: “The Great Wall of China is held together with sticky rice” sounds like the kind of lie a…
-
Exporting Poor Work Environments
After a long time of successfully managing to avoid the blog, I eventually clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reaction to the news that an employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s Chinese ‘manufacturing partners’, committed suicide shortly after reporting a missing iPhone v4 prototype. We can’t make these products in…
-
2008 Reith Lectures – Chinese Vistas
If you haven’t yet discovered, the 2008 Reith Lectures are currently under way over at BBC Radio 4. This year they are being held by Jonathan Spence – a specialist in Chinese history – and the first two lectures have been on the topics of Confucius and UK-China relations.
-
Jonathan Franzen on Shanghai
The novelist Jonathan Franzen is skilled at describing the rich and colourful dreams we have about our futures, whilst still managing to portray the bleak reality of life for society at large (I loved The Corrections). Shanghai seems like a great place for this style to really shine, as a recent audio story in The…