The China Teaching Web

Hillary Clinton is a hypocrite on China. Plain and simple. These days, I try not to dabble with politics too much on the Vance Report but sometimes I just cannot help it. This is one of those situations.
Last week, on her first trip to Asia as Secretary of State, she made it abundantly clear that [...]

Weddings in the Chinese countryside are expensive, and not just for the couple who is getting married. Recently, I had the unique opportunity to attend a wedding in China, and as a close friend of both families, I was expected to give a red envelope (hongbao 红包) to the blissful couple. And not just once. [...]

At first glance, they seem to be UFO’s but what are those red dots in the Chinese nighttime sky?

I have never met a single mother in China. Not one. Do they exist? Sure, but even in a country of 1.4 billion people, they are few and far between. And if you do happen to run into a single mother, it is more than likely that she lost her husband through a divorce or [...]

Like most teachers in China, I rarely have the chance to get away from the all of the noise, pollution, and crowdedness of my busy city life. I am not complaining. I happen to like the big city; I like feeling as if I am apart of something.
But every-once-in-a-while, especially when I am crammed into [...]

1. You periodically hear large explosions in front of your house and see people shooting fireworks out of their windows.
2. On your way home, your taxi driver seems to have a bad habit of stopping to pick people up, charging them the full amount for their segment, and then charging you the full amount when [...]

On a recent flight into southern China, I found myself sitting next to a middle aged couple who were obviously flying for their very first time. Throughout the flight, I tried to move my head out of the way as they both continually leaned over to look out the window. When the stewardess served dinner, [...]

It was very nice of Google to apologize to China this week for allowing ’smut’ links to appear in its search listings. The question is, did Google actually make any effort to modify its search listings in China? Search results for the word ’sexy girl’ causes one to wonder if Google was simply giving lip service [...]

Recently, one of my foreign friends became so frustrated with the smoking habits of Chinese men that  he decided to take matters into his own hands. He purchased a few sheets of sticky ‘No Smoking’ signs and began plastering them up in front of people’s faces whenever they lit up in an inappropriate place.
“I was on [...]

It was not hard for me to look back on China in 2008. All I had to do was peruse through my blog the ‘Vance Report’ to get a snapshot of 2008. It has been an amazing year for China and one that will go down into the history books as a bittersweet collection of [...]