One Child, Left Behind?
China’s one-child policy will soon celebrate its 30th birthday—but the controversial social program may not be around to celebrate a 31st

As recently as 18 months ago, Chinese officials assured the world that there would be no changes to the country’s one-child-per-couple policy for at least another decade. Whoops! With the 30th anniversary of mandated family planning fast approaching (the policy officially launched Sept. 25, 1980), the government is testing the waters of relaxing its stringent single-child [...]

Chinese Character for Rich?
A growing group of newly wealthy in China is suffering some bumps on the freshly gold-paved path to fiscal success

There’s an emerging class of citizen in China: the new rich. “New” is no exaggeration, since the country has only recently loosened restrictions about personal wealth. So it might just be growing pains that are causing these affluent business titans to be charged with everything from reckless spending (in both the U.S. and U.K.) on expensive houses, [...]

Bold New Wage
Chinese workers, long considered a docile work force, finally demand better pay and improved working conditions

A startling rash of suicides at a Chinese company, Foxconn, in which at least 10 workers died in six months, shined an unflattering light on the less-than-ideal working conditions and low wages laborers endure in China. It also seemed to galvanize the workers to action, as a series of labor strikes were set off across the country. Though the Chinese Ministry of [...]

Love Is Universal
Romantic love is felt the same in China as it is in Western cultures

Scientists wanted to know if romantic love produces the same brain activity in Eastern cultures (where arranged marriages are common and “love” has more negative connotations) as it does in Western cultures like Britain and the United States. Researchers were over the moon at the results of a study conducted in China that showed subjects experienced the same physiological reactions to photos of significant [...]

China’s Global Dis-Ambitions
Chinese youth express an interest in global politics while Chinese officials shy away from global leadership role

Among more than 15,000 young people polled the world over, young adults in China, surprisingly, are the most global-minded—a full 60 percent strongly agree or tend to agree that global politics are vital to their well-being (local politics are important, too, grabbing the attention of 78 percent of the respondents). Perhaps someone should let Chinese officials know that the generation coming [...]

Cause marketing is one of the biggest trends shaping our industry these days, right up there with social media. Can the two work together? Can social networking support social responsibility?
A growing chorus of advocates would say yes. (I count myself among them: I spearheaded Tweet to ReMIND, a Twitter-based fundraising effort for the Bob Woodruff Foundation that brought in more than $172,000 for helping wounded military personnel transition back into society.) USA Today reported earlier this year about a new [...]

As I’ve been traveling and researching the ways people socialize online around the world, I’ve been interested in the differences in users’ attitudes and behaviors. This is a case where the old adage “Think globally, act locally” rings true. It’s not just about various venues for social networking (for instance, Facebook in the U.S. versus Orkut most everywhere else); it’s about fundamentally different expectations and approaches to navigating the social Web.
As British tech-trendspotter Tom Smith put it in a presentation [...]