Peaceful Rise

Dear friends, family, and secret admirers: I'm pleased to announce the release of the first somewhat significant production that has my name on it since The Kite Runner: The China Greentech Report 2011 PwC says this about the report: The China Greentech Report 2011 analyses recent developments in the greentech sector in China and examines existing and emerging opportunities in six key sectors: cleaner conventional energy, renewable energy, electric power infrastructure, green building, cleaner transportation, and clean water. The report provides comprehensive analysis and insight into the trends that are contributing to China's rapid rise to global greentech leader and the solutions supporting it. I'm credited as lead writer for the Cleaner Transportation chapter. It's a good introduction into what's going on in the way of greentech in China's road and rail transportation industries, and also provides key insights into what I've been doing at w...

Ah, Google, you have truly reached a new low...

"Save Energy, Protect the Environment"

As expected, I didn't last too long in my job at the state-owned enterprise, and now I'm back to watching episodes of DS9 on youku . As per Jackie's suggestion, I feel I should share some insights into the inner workings of the propaganda machine here, having now worked as a part of it, but really there's not much to say.  The long and the short of it that these people are all idiots.  I didn't find it much different from working in New Oriental.  There, our team of people, each person uniquely unsuited for their job, worked blindly to make a crappy product that would never sell.  And even though it was a private enterprise, my coworkers were concerned with censoring the content to make sure nothing remotely bad was said about anything, either in China or elsewhere. The SOE was just the same, except that it didn't matter if their products didn't sell, since they were government funded whether their products sold or not.  The only motivating factor for an...

I'm sorry I haven't been writing.  I think there's something wrong with my brain. Perhaps it's all the Chinese. The last time I was going to write was just after Christmas, when me and my friends all got detained overnight in a police station.  I got about halfway through a very detailed and winding narrative of the night when I became distracted and then forgot what happened. I think it's mostly that writing frustrates me.  My life could be portrayed so much more vividly and entertainingly in documentary format.  Particularly because so much of anything I want to write is inspired out of discontent, which comes off as whining self-pity.  If I had a videocamera on me at all times, then the tragicomedy of my existence in China could be fully appreciated. But since I don't, I'll try to keep this brief again. Let me begin by proudly introducing MomaDVD.com , Beijing's first online DVD rental service.  This was an idea that my friends Guy and Jeff ca...

Well it's been more than a month since I left my old company to its inevitable prolonged withering demise, and have since promptly lost all motivation to continue posting here. Despite my lack of creative impulse, things have been good.  I've been keeping afloat with a little bit of translating work for Greenpeace  (see the PDFs), which fills me with a warm glow of self-righteousness and makes pandas shed tears of joy.  I've also been doing a little research into the possibility of realizing my long held dream of opening a bagel shop (and investors, I think this is a great opportunity for you.  A low risk alternative to the U.S. financial system, I think).  I should be moving into a nice new apartment with the French guys where I'll finally have my own private bedroom at the end of this week, assuming the agent we're using is only acting like an infuriating cheating lowlife scumbag and is, in fact, not.  And I just bought a roundtrip train ...