At my company, Berkshire Publishing Group, we are not only publishing about doing business in China. We’re in the process of actually doing business in China ourselves, and not only with GUANXI. I am dealing with our first rights contract (to publish an English edition of the marvellous Black Horse Chinese Horoscope series that we […]

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I was reading about the “measure words” or counters used in Chinese and it seemed very complicated. Ben is the counter is you’re talking about books; ping is the counter if it’s bottles of wine being talking about. Then I remembered about English collective nouns. Here’s something a student of English might read from the […]

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Instead of spending an hour a day simply studying Chinese, I find myself buying yet another thing to help me–even when I know that time and discipline is the key. But yesterday something happened that seemed to promise good fortune.
I received a box from Amazon with a set of Chinese flashcards (I knew that […]

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Today’s article on China-Africa cooperation provides a great example of what we can learn about global perspectives from raeding the Chinese newspapers available online. It’s fantastic to have all this at our fingertips (of course, the Chinese have to read our newspapers in English, which puts the U.S.A. at a disadvantage in this media effort):
“In […]

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I was talking with a future Guanxi contributor this week and he mentioned that his son in Beijing had “seen the bird’s nest.” I knew exactly what he meant because I’d just finished editing our July issue about the 2008 Olympics, and wrote the feature about the media and PR challenges of the event. Here’s […]

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Every day we hear that Guanxi is needed and timely, and articles like this confirm our view about “Red Hot China”. I’m especially glad to say that we’ve decided to add tone marks to all our transliterations of Chinese starting with the July issue. Not that you need to read a word of Chinese to […]

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I have puzzled over, and been intrigued by, something a Chinese friend in Beijing friend wrote a long time ago, when she was describing a tagline she’d come up with for our encyclopedia business. She said the last character had the “implication” of water–and thus of abundance. An appropriate meaning, she said, for a company […]

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Our mistake about Macau is more embarrassing because we have an old colleague and friend, anthropologist Paul Hockings, is the dean of a university in Zhuhai, near Macau. Paul was a member of the editorial board for our Encyclopedia of Modern Asia and also edited a volume of the Encyclopedia of World Culture, David Levinson’s […]

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I enjoy the fact that the word gung-ho comes from Chinese, because when I lived in England I was more than once called, disparagingly, a “gung-ho American.” Liz tells me that ping-pong, too, is a Chinese word. Here are a few others, from a Chinese language website, zhongwen.com.

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We make mistakes, and when we do the chagrin spreads far and wide at Berkshire. Some of us are compulsive about style and spelling. Others are fact-checking neatnicks. And still others (I name no names) are casual about spelling and dangling modifiers, but nonetheless care intensely about the accuracy of what we publish.
We’ll be […]

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