The author is a columnist and culture critic with China Daily
Come Valentine's Day, shop windows and magazine covers will display perfectly matched pairs happy in love. And one of the "perfections" is compatibility in age.
Tomorrow night is the eve of Spring Festival the Lunar New Year when hundreds of millions of Chinese families sit around a table and take in the year-end feast and the heart-warming atmosphere of family reunion.
In an act of powerful inspiration, a public library has carved on its wall the names of the construction workers who built it.
The term "urban village" connotes very different things in English as it does in Chinese.
One of the most eye-catching and photogenic sights that China offers international visitors is a picture of serene beauty and harmony between nature and man: Rows and rows of senior citizens do morning exercises in unison, moving at the majestic and leisurely pace of Tai Chi in a sun-drenched, beautifully landscaped public park. Looking at photos of them, one can almost touch the morning dew and hear birds chirping.
If you're a single male living in Beijing, you need to make a mental note of this figure: 1,068,000.
'Desperate Housewives' has bombed in China.
In the United States, the conservatives and the liberals are constantly fighting over something: the war in Iraq, abortion rights, gun control, tax policy, etc. This time of the year, they have picked a topic that would surely baffle us Chinese - the Christmas holiday itself.
I've heard many media mogul wannabes proclaim their lofty goals. They've usually set their eyes on the Chinese equivalents of The New York Times, The Financial Times or Time magazine. But given the choice, I'd say they'll end up going for something like The National Enquirer or The Star.
"Guoxue" is sometimes translated as "Sinology," but it actually covers a much narrower area, mainly the study of classics by such masters as Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu.
The story of Yang Bailao is at least 60 years old, but how he comes to epitomize the evolving fate of a debtor would have been beyond his comprehension had he lived to this day.
"Why do you need elevator attendants?" a puzzled expat friend of mine asked, shortly after he arrived in Beijing.