As I am off the grid hiking in China, today's issue is a reprint of a recent article written by award winning journalist and author Pallavi Aiyar on her Substack, The Global Jigsaw . Pallavi is back in Beijing almost twenty years after her first, multi-year stint living there as a foreign correspondent. In How has China managed to make people mind their manners? Or has It? , she writes about changes in people's behavior, the software of China, that have accompanied the upgrad

Turning the corner and coming face-to-face with a jade burial suit for the first time, even one behind glass, with the hum of the museum crowd in the air, stopped me cold. Its solemnity was almost overwhelming. 2,000+ years old from China’s Han Dynasty. An Imperial extravagance from shortly after the end of the 100 Schools of Thought Period when the foundations of the Chinese society we know today were coalescing. As I get ready to return to China next week, today’s issue sp