Eva Chin writes for RECATOOLS on business and commerce in Southeast Asia: the commercial decisions small businesses actually face, and the markets and regulation around them. She also covers Chinese naming and cultural practice, education and qualifications across the region, and the arithmetic of a tropical home. Coverage of cultural practice is educational — it explains what a tradition holds and where it came from, and does not make predictive claims.

166
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Business
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Jul 2026
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~1075 min
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Articles Showing 1–10 of 166

Stainless steel pipework and valves on industrial process equipment
Business

Schneider Electric Will Borrow Heavily to Buy Design Software Maker PTC for $22.6 Billion

The French energy-equipment group is paying US$205 a share in cash, funded largely by €16 billion to €17 billion of new debt, and will pause share buybacks for two years.

8 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
Hands taking a paper rubbing of Chinese characters carved into a stone tablet
Home & Living

The 3,500 commonest Chinese characters mostly have an exact Mandarin homophone

By Unicode's Unihan 17.0 readings, 89% of the 3,500 first-level characters on mainland China's 2013 standard list share their exact Mandarin sound, tone included, with another character on that level. Cantonese spreads the same characters over more syllables and groups them differently.

8 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Several generations of one family standing together outdoors around a baby
Home & Living

Taiwan's marriage law extends to second cousins, and other ways cousins are counted

A cousin's degree and removal come from counting the generations from each person up to the ancestor they share. Counted that way, Taiwan's Civil Code reaches second cousins, while Singapore's and Malaysia's civil marriage statutes for non-Muslims name no cousin.

7 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Close-up of chips and components on a green circuit board
Business

onsemi Will Now Pay US$123 Cash for Synaptics After a Rival Bidder Appeared

The deal's total value falls from about US$7 billion to US$5.7 billion because onsemi's shares dropped, yet Synaptics holders get more than the old stock offer was worth.

5 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
Close-up of the cells and grid lines on a solar panel lit by low sun
Business

First Solar Sued JA Solar and Its Vietnam Unit Over a Patent China Has Already Struck Down

The US thin-film maker accuses JA Solar and a Corning subsidiary of infringing its TOPCon cell rights. China's patent office invalidated those claims in May, and a US review is also under way.

3 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
A small stack of books with Chinese titles on their spines
Home & Living

A Simplified-first pinyin library trips over Taiwan's Zhuyin readings

Run the text of Taiwan's primary-school dictionary through pinyin-pro, a widely used pinyin library, and it disagrees with the ministry's Zhuyin on 1 character in 19. How much its Traditional option and a Simplified-first lookup help, which readings Taiwan teaches differently, and what Unicode's Bopomofo blocks hold.

3 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
A pair of bookmarks printed with lines of Chinese verse in calligraphy
Home & Living

Mandarin rhymes share a Pingshui rhyme group about half the time

Two level-tone characters that rhyme exactly in Putonghua share a 平水韵 group only about half the time, by our count of 942 common characters. Where the old groups split, how 中华新韵 and 中华通韵 differ, and what Cantonese and Taiwan readings change.

3 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Red lanterns strung above a pedestrian street lined with Chinese shopfronts
Home & Living

Xiehouyu are mostly metaphors, and many Mandarin puns miss in Cantonese

外甥打燈籠──照舅 is a pun in Mandarin and not in Cantonese. Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary lists 305 xiehouyu and only about one in nine explains a pun; we checked 256 Putonghua pun pairs against CUHK's Cantonese database and about four in ten miss.

3 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
Incense sticks smouldering in bronze burners at a Chinese temple
Chinese Culture

The temple's own grades for Wong Tai Sin's 100 fortune sticks

Sik Sik Yuen publishes all 100 Wong Tai Sin fortune sticks with their verses and grades. How the five grades divide the set, where sticks are drawn, the temple's history from a Wan Chai shrine to a Grade I building, and the medicine sticks that ended in 2005.

3 Oct 2026 · 4 min read
A page of a printed Chinese book set in vertical columns of characters
Home & Living

Classical Chinese particles, counted in the Analects and Mencius

About a quarter of the Analects and Mencius is 23 small grammatical words. How often 之, 也, 矣, 焉 and 乎 appear, which ones end a sentence, 乎 as a preposition, the gaokao's 18-word list against the counts, and what Hong Kong and Taiwan set.

3 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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