It also was a surprise to Doug and other tech-savvy China hands I know.
Of course the China Hands, the Over Sympathetic saps such as me, see it differently.
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In Las Vegas last September, nearly 400 attended one gathering, the fourth and largest ever Old China Hands Reunion.
Long live something more effective: a pretzel populated with New China Hands.
But for years he was accused of being one of the State Department China hands who had "lost China" to the Communists.
"We lived our lives with great panache, " says Shanghai-born Mario Machado, a longtime Hollywood broadcaster who organized last year's Old China Hands conference.
If they are not well equipped to do so (despite the fact that some of them are ethnically Asian), then where are their China hands?
Opinions among China hands tend to three scenarios.
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At t he time my China hands made little of the seemingly worrisome instruction.. I guess everyone wanted to believe that the Chinese equity market would remain the golden goose even as US equity prices faltered.
And that will just play into the hands of China's hard-liners.
As long as U.S. production growth continues apace, China knows they win hands down when it comes to sourcing larger volumes of energy on a global basis.
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That was only 21 years after China's Communists had got their hands on Xinjiang, and 19 years after China had marched into Tibet.
The 350 million smokers in China may also get their hands on it.
As for Congress, Ralph Cossa, at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Honolulu, argues for restraint there, to avoid feeding anti-American sentiment in China and playing into the hands of hardliners.
Is the administration at all concerned about the precedent being set in terms of secrecy, in terms of operating military craft in other sovereign nations, and what we might see as a result when China or Russia get their hands on drones?
Ultimately, technology developed (or copied) in China finds its way into the hands of massive state-owned enterprises.
Having seen post-Soviet state assets fall into the hands of oligarchs, China built up a select group of SOEs with cheap loans, land and energy, so that the wealth would remain with the party.
With the value it sets on social stability, China is unlikely to tie its hands on energy in the manner the U.S. is doing, and it is for that reason that the world is seeing the biggest, peaceful transfer of power in history.
But China has ambitious targets for getting its hands on it all the same.
And how could he opt to leave China when his family was in the hands of Chinese officials who could have caused them harm?
With all due respect to Phelps, the most dominant performance in the pool should come from China's Sun Yang, the hands-down favorite in the men's 400-meter freestyle.
Despite the fact that for the best part of two centuries China came to suffer hugely at the hands of the West, and to lag badly behind the West, the Chinese never stopped believing in themselves.
At every level of China, power is almost always in the hands of party secretaries rather than elected leaders.
Thanks to this combination of labour mobility and a preference for young workers, a growing proportion of China's new economy is in the hands of people under 30.
But wait, says nearly everyone, won't cheaper hands in Indonesia and Vietnam eventually take China's jobs?
The rebalancing trick is to get a big share of this buying power into private hands, who will then consume inside China.
China, meanwhile, has itself suffered at the hands of its erratic neighbour.
People's Daily features a photo of the two leaders shaking hands and the headline: "China firmly supports the just cause of the Palestinian people".
First, a devaluation would knock the stuffing out of Hong Kong's financial markets, and China's carefully won reputation for keeping its hands off its new territory would be destroyed overnight.
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