A roundup of Chinese illustrations of the impending Coke-Huiyuan deal:
“It’s a reminder that western companies trying to acquire well-known Chinese brands are almost always behind the PR eight-ball…
Now, from around the Chinese Internet, some of the caricatures and cartoons making the rounds (inspired by one particularly fine example on the WSJ blog). You may detect a certain theme…”

On the show “Certain ideas of Europe,” Mark Leonard, author of ‘What does China think?,’ poses a new challenge for Europe and the West:

“One of the big challenges for the West, actually, is to try and put a wedge between Russia and China and to stop them forming a sort of axis of sovereignty which scuppers the shift toward a more liberal world order that we saw in the 1990s.”

Why aren’t modern overseas Chinese embracing the West?

“In the West there’s long been an assumption that this cohort would import Western values along with their iPods. They were envisioned as the bridge to a more open, liberal, Western-friendly China.

That daydream got a cold bath during the torch relay this spring, when furious Chinese students in the West showed they could be even more jingoistic than Chinese who had never left home—and good luck to anyone who dared buck the trend. One courageous Duke University freshman from the coastal city of Qingdao tried to intercede in a campus confrontation between a dozen or so pro-Tibetan demonstrators and a much larger group of pro-Beijing Chinese students. For her trouble, she was called a ‘race traitor’ and a ‘whore’; feces were dumped on her parents’ doorstep.”