How a touring dance company battles the Chinese Communist Party.

China is securing sub-Saharan Africa’s natural resources at a staggering rate. With the buying spree comes contracts, workers, and of course, politics. (Part 1 of a 6 part series, rest here)

How the social networks that popped up in Facebook’s absence—the site is not available behind the Great Firewall—are changing Chinese culture.

As labels big and small attempt to gain traction in the world’s largest market, they’re learning that selling pop is never simple in the epicenter of piracy.

The CIA’s declassified account of the two decades two young officers spent as captives after being shot down over China during the Korean War.

In a sea of skeptics, this physician was one of fibromyalgia patients’ few true allies. Or was he?

How Craigslist dealers do business in New York City.

Inside China’s vast new experiment in social ranking.

Forty-five days of avoiding the coronavirus.

The paper reports on a battle of its own.

How Chicago is key to a business moving tons of drugs for billions of dollars.

How an autocratic CEO made the company billions, alienating almost everyone else in the process.

While political leaders trade threats, the pandemic has made Americans even more reliant on China’s manufacturers.

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

Fentanyl is quickly becoming America’s deadliest drug. But law enforcement couldn’t trace it to its source—until one teenager overdosed in North Dakota.

“None of this should have ever happened. It makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s truly crazy.”

Bentonville, Arkansas, is home to Walmart’s headquarters. It’s also a town in which the Walton Family Foundation works like a parallel state, creating a kind of twenty-first-century company town.

Sean Quinn was once a billionaire folk hero, but then things turned very dark in the borderlands.

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

Previously: “Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class”

China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.

Sexual harassment. Hate speech. Employee walkouts. The Silicon Valley giant is trapped in a war against itself. And there’s no end in sight.

We stopped at a service station where there were old truck drivers, their vehicles festooned with red banners: “All-out war against the virus, weather hard times together.” The drivers wore their masks down around their chins as they smoked. I asked for water at the only open shop, and the assistant pulled his jacket up to cover his mouth before saying “over there.”

The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. What went wrong, only one of them could say.

The Charleston-based evangelicals had much in common: guns, God, Trump. What went wrong, only one of them could say.

“The government calls it “Operation Open Market,” a four-year investigation resulting, so far, in four federal grand jury indictments against 55 defendants in 10 countries, facing a cumulative millennium of prison time. What many of those alleged scammers, carders, thieves, and racketeers have in common is one simple mistake: They bought their high-quality fake IDs from a sophisticated driver’s license counterfeiting factory secretly established, owned, and operated by the United States Secret Service.”