The perilous routes through which information—video footage, secret documents, radio broadcasts—flow in and out of North Korea through its porous borders with China.

The angel saving jumpers on an infamous bridge in China.

He left China at 10 and would never see his mother again. He lived in extreme poverty once he arrived in America. He found his calling in art, became the creative force behind one of Disney’s iconic films, but didn’t get recognition for his brilliance until late in his life, when in addition to painting and illustrating he began to make fantastical kites.

A season with the American Football League of China.

A lifelong Jehovah’s Witness moves to China to proselytize.

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.

As America has turned away from searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, China has built the world’s largest radio dish for precisely that purpose.

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

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.

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

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.

A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.

The world’s population is rapidly getting older. How China and other countries stocked with young workers are taking advantage.

One expert warns that policies advanced by the think tank could lead to military conflict with China.

On the meeting of shaggy-haired American ping pong ace Glenn Cowan and Chinese master Zhuang Zedong (who died this week), and how their fleeting friendship thawed relations between the twon nations during the U.S. team’s historic 1971 tour of China.

The author boards the Costa Atlantica for several days of line dancing, burlesque and buffets as part of the cruise industry’s new foray into China.