The concept of customer service is still fairly new in China. That's most noticeably true if you're traveling on business. Even the five-star hotels in Shanghai and Beijing struggle to train staff in such basics as English-language skills but also etiquette body language and a perennial -- when best to...

If the recent National Day celebrations in Beijing weren't convincing enough evidence of China's rapid ascendancy on the world stage, then the super-charged spirit among Chinese entrepreneurs and investors in the San Francisco Bay Area had to be. Indeed, during the week-long holiday, seemingly half of China's venture capital community...

It's taken a long time, but Silicon Valley has finally taken off its blinders and recognized that there are other tech clusters out there. Today, nearly every venture capital firm along the famed Sand Hill Road is in China, India -- or both. Bring up the topic of Asia tech...

McCain's presidential running mate Sarah Palin "packed a punch" at her convention speech -- and mentioned my hometown of Lancaster, Ohio! I had no idea that a Lancaster area resident -- former Air Force fighter pilot Tom Moe -- was a fellow prisoner of war with McCain at the Hanoi...

The Beijing Games were billed as the world's first web 2.0 Olympics -- the time when social networking over the Internet and video streaming would shine as they reflected China's glory of hosting this grand event. But I found it not so.

Facebook was slow and often not accessible. Email...

What a whirlwind weekend in Beijing! While everyone was at the Games and the city was empty, I took a close-up tour of a few of the city's trendy new spots. Some are copycat ideas, others are purely original--just like the tech startups I write about in Silicon Dragon.

It was a week of surprises here in Beijing, where I'm writing about everything BUT what's going on at the Olympics Village. The normally congested city is a ghost town as visitors expected for the Games didn't arrive -- guess they had trouble getting their visas with the tighter security...

China was largely missing from talk at two major conferences in California's Bay Area this week -- the Fortune Brainstorm Tech and the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford University. Yet China is emerging as a tech trend-setter.

Instead, it was Twitter, clean tech and cloud computing that took the spotlight...

Just about every Fourth of July, I make the trek from New York City to my home state of Ohio. This year, I made this journey with fresh eyes, having spent a good deal of time in the booming economy of China in recent months.

It's always a bit...

One place that could surely use a technology upgrade is the Chinese Consulate in New York City. With the Olympics in Beijing fast approaching, the line of people applying for visas snakes out the door and halfway down the block on Manhattan's W. 42nd Street.

Recent rules changes for...

China now leads the U.S. for technological leadership. I'm not the only one saying this is a leading edge trend that needs attention from our top policy makers and businesses. Now, a study by the Georgia Institute of Technology affirms it.

Ranking 33 nations on technology competitiveness, infrastructure, socioeconomic...

The best and brightest U.S. entrepreneurs might have to take steroids to keep up with their counterparts in China. For energy, motivation and raw talent, American entrepreneurs just cannot compare.

One of the superstars of China's digital media boom is Joe Chen. A maverick entrepreneur who reads Warren Buffet...

It's one of those clear, blue-sky days in Beijing -- one of the very few I've seen during the last two weeks, where a grey dusty hue has covered the landscape (sandstorm or not). I take care to stay indoors as much as possible, and when riding in a taxi,...

Here, at the grand ballroom of the China World Hotel in Beijing, the chairman of Microsoft China, Ya-Qin Zhang, has the podium and the audience's attention. "China is quickly emerging from a low-cost manufacturer to a high-tech innovator," he says.

Why is China becoming a lab...

Today, one week after a massive earthquake struck China, I was sitting in front of my laptop computer in central Beijing and contemplating my next column. Just a few hours before, I had landed safely in Beijing after a choppy 11-hour flight from San Francisco that left many of the...

Ramping up a startup business in China is challenging enough already, but try doing one in the video sharing space these days. With the Beijing Olympics taking political sensitivities to the forefront, topics that might usually go unnoticed are drawing attention from government censors on the Internet.

I recently returned...

Read the tea leaves of the recently nixed $2.2 billion bid by China's Huawei Technologies to take over U.S. networking systems leader 3Com Corp., and witness a Washington, D.C. nervous about protecting America's intellectual property from falling into mainland Chinese hands.

What can also be predicted from the American government...

The Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo sent shock waves not only through Silicon Valley but also across the Pacific to China. With technology developments increasingly spanning out from the Valley to hotspots worldwide, including Beijing and Shanghai, that's no surprise.

What's been mostly overlooked in the news reporting so far...

Don't be surprised if the next Steve Jobs comes from China. Already, I can see the beginnings of this trend in the likes of entrepreneurs Jack Ma of e-commerce startup Alibaba, Robin Li of search engine Baidu, Gary Wang of video sharing service Tudou.com and Joe Chen of web 2.0...