The world’s fastest growing economy isn’t China; it’s the “unheralded alternative economic universe of System D” aka the $10 trillion global black market.

Without fanfare—indeed, with some misgivings about its new status—China has just overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy.

An army of Western luxury-lifestyle purveyors flock to China to teach the country’s new billionaires how to act rich.

How KFC brought fried chicken to China and Africa as U.S. sales slumped.

The city’s radical pro-democracy movement faces a stiff test from Mainland China.

It’s less about robots and the gig economy and more about companies stripping away the security full-time work has long afforded.

On former CIA agent John T. Downey, who spent more than 20 years in China as the longest held American captive of war.

Nearly all the world’s fake products come from China. America’s oldest private detective agency is on the case.

On former Knicks savior Stephon Marbury and his post-NBA life playing in China.

How the China National Tobacco Corp., which manufactures 2.5 trillion cigarettes per year, came to make more money than Apple.

China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang.

A profile of Rupert Murdoch from 1995, as he fought monopoly charges in the U.S. and U.K. and prepared to expand his empire into China.

Murdoch is a pirate; he will cunningly circumvent rules, and sometimes principles, to get his way, as his recent adventures in China demonstrate.

Darren Lumar lived in mansions he didn’t own, ran companies that didn’t make a dime, went to colleges that didn’t exist and slept with “any number of women” despite being married to James Brown’s daughter. When he was murdered, the cops had a problem: too many possible suspects.

Foursquare and Gowalla are in a VC-funded race to become the dominant location-based social network. But their founders say both companies have a larger purpose.

Local communities are taking the world’s largest polluters to court. And they’re using the legal strategy that got tobacco companies to pay up.

Ankle bracelets are promoted as a humane alternative to jail. But private companies charge defendants hundreds of dollars a month to wear the surveillance devices. If people can’t pay, they may end up behind bars.

On the development of South Korea’s New Songdo and Cisco’s plans to build smart cities which will “offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities – water, power, traffic, telephony – into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.” The demand for such cities is enormous:

China doesn't need cool, green, smart cities. It needs cities, period -- 500 New Songdos at the very least. One hundred of those will each house a million or more transplanted peasants. In fact, while humanity has been building cities for 9,000 years, that was apparently just a warm-up for the next 40. As of now, we're officially an urban species. More than half of us -- 3.3 billion people -- live in a city. Our numbers are projected to nearly double by 2050, adding roughly a New Songdo a day; the United Nations predicts the vast majority will flood smaller cities in Africa and Asia.

Companies are figuring out how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the value of the physical workplace.

The rise of an expensive, experimental stem-cell treatment in China and the medical tourism it attracts.

He was a powerful executive at some of the best-known companies in the world. Then he started robbing banks. The meteoric rise and dramatic fall of Steve Carroll, the high-flying corporate executive who wanted it all.

How packaged-food companies like Campbell and Hershey are responding to the backlash against pesticides, preservatives, high-fructose corn syrup, growth hormones, antibiotics, gluten, and genetically modified organisms.

Ankle bracelets are promoted as a humane alternative to jail. But private companies charge defendants hundreds of dollars a month to wear the surveillance devices. If people can’t pay, they may end up behind bars.