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Business people across Asia have developed strategies to recover and prosper in the midst of the 1998 economic crisis. A Thai banker has aligned his bank with a powerful Dutch financial services corporation. Singapore Airlines is refurbishing airplanes when other Asian airlines sell stock to raise needed funds. Executive search firms have transitioned to posting applicants' resumes on the Internet. Japanese entrepreneurs have opened restaurants in urban areas where rents have significantly fallen.

People thought they were crazy. In 1994, when three foreign exchange students formed Arabica Roasters, mainland China's first specialty coffee roasting company, they knew that selling coffee in a land [...]

They bring their pliers, their paint rollers and their red and white signs reading labor for hire. Then they wait on the street corners in Anshan, Liaoning Province, until a [...]

Sambuu Yondon, a retired Mongolian truck-driver, is something of an expert on disasters. Now 77, Sambuu spent 38 years trucking relief supplies to remote herders hard hit by summer drought [...]

For decades, people have left developing countries in search of better lives and careers in the United States. Now some of the best opportunities are back home. JAMES LIANG WAS […]

Han Gengchen is in his element, pushing his way through rows of scratchy green cornstalks in a field north of Beijing. In his 12 years abroad--first as a student in [...]

The Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party doesn't look like a bunch of stodgy communists. At recent rallies, candidates were flanked by funky rappers and an all-female band called the Lipsticks. But [...]

In Fuzhou, China, nightclub boss Chen Kai, 38, has achieved what he says 'everyone here dreams about.' In 1990 he slipped into America and made a small fortune working in [...]

Chinese farmer Xiao, whose name means 'desolate and dreary,' has a life that is much the same. Every morning he's up at 2 a.m., tramping through mud in blue rubber [...]

As soon as the auctioneer placed lot 749 on the block, the crowd murmured with excitement. Beijing had done its best to stop last week's scheduled sale of the life-size [...]

The Rev. Zhang Mengen steps solemnly to the pulpit and gazes out at the hundreds of followers packed into his new $50,000 church. Even the upper balcony is full. Slowly, [...]

Last January, when Chinese officials began to enforce a rule to make software companies register encryption products, the information- technology industry worried. But nobody worried more than Microsoft, which was [...]

This week the international media will descend on a concrete-walled police-academy auditorium nestled in the suburban hills outside Taipei. It's the digital nerve center for the Taiwan Election Commission--and beginning [...]

For those who are into Pekingology, President Jiang Zemin's recent bedside reading has provided rich material for speculation. According to Jiang watchers in Beijing's diplomatic community, the president was stunned [...]

The odd thing about it all was that peace was becoming a campaign theme in Taiwan's presidential election. All three of the major candidates had put forth proposals to improve [...]

Yet the whole question of America's relationship to other nations and peoples is one of nuance. Rethinking the U.S. role. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. In [...]

Being an accountant in China requires unusual creativity. Li Xuecai's weathered face crinkles into a sly grin as he recalls how he lifted Taizipo village out of poverty in 1994. [...]

One day in 1998, Zhao Jingxin returned home to find this shocking message painted on the wall of his centuries-old house: to be demolished. Built during the Ming dynasty, he [...]

The world's biggest copper and gold mine is not easy to get to. It's a huge hole in the top of a remote mountain in the Indonesian province of Irian [...]

To look at the sina.com Internet portal is to understand why it took 13 years, countless political struggles and six days of round-the-clock negotiations to hammer out a deal that [...]

The talks in Beijing started Wednesday and were only supposed to last two days. But each time they stalled, the United States and China found a way to keep them [...]

Hengde Lian's daytime boss has no idea the mild-mannered information- systems specialist is a 'cyberguerrilla' by night. Jailed as a dissident in China after the Tiananmen protests of 1989, Lian [...]

Last May, rumor had it that Wu Jichuan was out--and that China's telecom sector was opening up. But rumor was wrong on at least one count, and maybe both. Wu, [...]

Bob Manning, a longtime Asia hand in Washington, noticed the difference immediately. There was a tougher mind-set, a harder undertone in the voices of Japanese Diet members and intellectuals who [...]

From the propaganda, you might have thought Li Hongzhi was an ax murderer, or at least an incendiary figure. Over and over, Beijing's government-controlled television ran an Orwellian tape recounting [...]

Li Hongzhi doesn't seem like a revolutionary with the power to topple the Chinese government. His guiding principles, taken from a blend of Buddhist, Taoist and mystical beliefs, are 'Truth, [...]

Alarmed by the wildfire spread of an extraordinarily disciplined spiritual movement, Beijing launches its most sweeping crackdown since Tiananmen The 2,000 devotees of master Li Hongzhi stood calmly, five or [...]

China reckons a surging stock market will be good for the economy's ills. But keeping things from getting out of hand isn't going to be easy. On May 19, the [...]

In imperial times, Chinese officials expected foreigners to kowtow to the emperor, lying prostrate and knocking their foreheads on the ground nine times. They expected almost as much from U.S. [...]

Describes the riots in China in response to the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Attacks on the United States embassy in Beijing; Role of the Chinese media and of students; Control over the demonstrations; Symbolic protests against US businesses in China; Safety of US diplomats and investors; Projections for US-China relations. INSET: Rocks, Paint and MREs.

The Chinese are snapping up books on such topics as homosexuality, memoirs from the Cultural revolution and voyeuristic tales. Book publishers began to grow when China opened its doors to the global economy in 1978, 20 years later, book publishing has become a flourishing industry and writers are struggling to keep up. Political topics remain sensitive, underground presses can publish once a book is banned and books have far less influence than television or newspapers.

When Chinese troops stormed into Tiananmen Square in 1989, they quickly pulled down the students' soaring statue--the 'Goddess of Democracy'-- which had become a sentimental link between the young protesters [...]

Western business people generally applaud the concessions Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji has offered in his bid to get China into the World Trade Organization. The part they're cheering the [...]

The bombs fell in belgrade, but the fallout spread all the way to Beijing. In the Chinese capital, thousands of protesters turned out Saturday, chanting 'Down with American imperialists' and [...]

A fast-growing meditation group demands respect It started in the northern city of Tianjin. A local magazine asserted that practicing Falun Gong, a type of meditation, had in some cases [...]

Prime minister Zhu Rongji knows how to charm Americans as perhaps no Chinese leader ever has. As blunt as a Chicago ward boss, Zhu planned to embark this week on [...]