Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

What's going on in China? Anybody else here like Chinese food?

The Fortune Cookie

The Fortune Cookie is the brainchild of two friends, Fung Lam and Dave Rossi. Fung was born on the doorstep of New York's Chinatown.

"I was in the playpen of the kitchen of my parents' restaurant, of my grandparents' restaurants," he recalls. "All my earliest memories were of the woks going, my dad coming home with the smell of Chinese food."

Fung met Dave at graduate school. Outside of class, they soon discovered a shared love of American Chinese restaurants.

"Friday night was Chinese food night in the Rossi household," Dave explains. With more than 40,000 American Chinese restaurants in the United States, families of all ethnic backgrounds grew up eating New World Chinese classics.

When visiting Shanghai as tourists, Fung and Dave missed their usual versions of noodles and stir-fried classics, and thought others might too.

They decided to open what they believe is Shanghai's first American Chinese restaurant, featuring specialties served in Fung's family restaurants for 40 years: orange chicken, kung pao chicken and sesame shrimp. Dave describes the menu as "really American".

American yes, though a version of this menu is served in Chinese restaurants around the world - from Madrid to Melbourne.

But not usually in mainland China.

Dave and Fung flew Fung's father over to Shanghai to teach the chefs how to make each dish, so it
is exactly the same as the food served in the family's American restaurants.


Extra American effort
One of the biggest challenges was finding the right ingredients to use in the kitchen.
"As weird as it sounds, we actually import a lot of ingredients to make authentic American Chinese food in China," Fung says

Items like Philadelphia cream cheese, Skippy peanut butter, cornflakes and English mustard powder must all be brought in from outside China. Even the soy sauce must be imported from Hong Kong, because that's what the first Chinese immigrants to the US used in their cooking.

War defines the United States. Domestically, it is the country’s greatest budgetary priority: $598 billion, 54 per cent of discretionary spending, in fiscal year 2015. Globally, we have more than 800 bases in some 80 countries, and spend more than the next nine nations combined. Yet academic historians, especially those at the nation’s most richly endowed research universities, largely ignore the history of the US military. This year, historians at the Ivy League schools, plus Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – who collectively offered instruction on hundreds of scintillating subjects from Puritan New England to women in the workforce – provided just six that directly examined the US military.

This is a tragedy. Knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon observed. Insofar as we neglect to study our military, we reduce our ability to understand it, and weaken ourselves.

[…]

I occasionally go to a Chinese restaurant and have European dishes.

So do you order Chinese at German a restaurant in your insanity? I think I'll go to El Pollo Loco (literally the Crazy Chicken) and order a burger and then Burger King to Mexican-style chicken, not :p

But really, you can just get a bunch of stir-fried vegetables at any Chinese place.

Or at the grocery store. Eat'em right out of the bag.

In Henan province, there is a property management consulting firm called Trump Consulting. It has no connection with Mr Trump, but says on its website it is inspired by his property empire.
There is also a company in southern China, Shenzhen Trump Industries, that produces smart toilet seats and bathroom fixtures for high-end hotels, and Trump Electronics, a company based in eastern Anhui Province, has been making air purifiers since 1996, according to People's Daily.
Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump has more than 14,000 fans on microblogging site Sina Weibo. There is also a Trump Weibo fan page that is dedicated to "everything Trump".

Shanghai-based corporate lawyer Wei Li, who spent 10 years living in the US, tells the BBC that Mr Trump "is really speaking for heartland Americans, and he is a rare politician who speaks in plain English".
Mr Li says American election politics is "like a theatre" and rational politics will ultimately triumph over rhetoric.
"Trump's pragmatism, his access to information, his smartness as well as good counsel may translate into good decisions, should he win," he says.
Sijia Liu, a veteran radio host and commentator who has millions of daily listeners in Beijing, agrees.
"Perhaps Trump will be the president who makes politics understandable to ordinary people," Ms Liu says. "In America, even though you are the president, you cannot behave recklessly."
"So I wouldn't worry that Trump might become a bad president."

Even among the Chinese diaspora, who might have been put off by Mr Trump's views on race and immigration, there is some admiration.
"Many people are having a hard time understanding why Trump is so popular, or have the misconception that people who support him are poorly educated, white and angry males," says Wendy Wang.
Ms Wang moved to the US from China at the age of 25 and became a naturalised American citizen three years ago. She holds a PhD degree and is a professor at a private California university.



Ms Wang says she plans to vote for Mr Trump
Ms Wang tells the BBC she will "definitely" vote for Donald Trump as she sees him as "the medicine America needs".
I asked what exactly it is about Mr Trump that appeals to her. Her answer: "He's smart, honest, outspoken, and he is also a strongman."
She adds: "He is the kid who yells that the emperor has no clothes."

THE 2016 election marked a coming-out party for conservative Chinese-Americans, who offered Donald Trump some of his most passionate support among non-whites. Now some are feeling the first twinges of a hangover, as their hero threatens a trade war with China and hints that he might upgrade ties with Taiwan, the island that Chinese leaders call no more than a breakaway province.

“My members worshipped Trump religiously for a whole year,” says David Tian Wang, a 33-year-old businessman originally from Beijing, who founded “Chinese Americans for Trump”

However, two days later, just before leaving the country, the Chinese officials paid a second visit to Guo, triggering a debate within the administration over whether they should be arrested. FBI agents were posted at John F Kennedy airport ready to carry out the arrests before the officials boarded their flight, but they were not made, after the state department argued it could trigger a diplomatic crisis.

Guo has filed an application for political asylum in the US, which is pending. But according to the Journal’s account, Trump called for Guo’s deportation in a discussion on policy towards China, describing him as a “criminal” at an Oval Office policy meeting in June, on the basis of a letter from Beijing accusing him of serious crimes.

The report said the letter had been hand-delivered to him at a private dinner by Steve Wynn, a Las Vegas casino magnate and Republican National Committee finance chairman with interests in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau, for which Wynn relies on Beijing for licensing.

The marketing director for Wynn Resorts Ltd, Michael Weaver, told the Journal in a written statement: “[T]hat report regarding Mr Wynn is false. Beyond that, he doesn’t have any comment.”

Weaver did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian on what part of the story was false and whether Wynn had ever delivered a letter from the Chinese government to Trump.

The Journal report said that aides tried to persuade Trump out of going ahead with Guo’s deportation, noting he was a member of the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. The aides later ensured that the deportation would not go ahead.

Ms. Sassen argues that a global economy has created new kinds of needs for companies: accountants specializing in Asian tax law, lawyers expert in European Union regulation, marketers who understand Latin America. Global cities must connect to other global cities to tap these resources, which have become more valuable to them than lumber and steel.

Inventors in these global cities are also increasingly connecting to one another. Using the addresses of patent co-inventors, Mr. Mudambi has traced a steep rise starting in the early 1990s of global connections from a few American metro areas, which are today among the most prosperous in the country.

Many American companies still create physical things, in addition to inventing digital products and ideas. But globalization has changed who benefits from their business, too, enabling firms to separate intellectual work from routine work and scatter those roles across the globe. The knowledge work has tended to stay in the United States. The routine work is what was historically performed in the hinterland. And that in large part is the work that has gone overseas.

“The hinterland for Silicon Valley is Shenzhen,” said Timothy Sturgeon, a senior researcher at the M.I.T. Industrial Performance Center.