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.

194
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~1230 min
Total reading
All 194 Business 125 Chinese Culture 46 Home & Living 23

Articles Showing 101–110 of 194

A row of European Union flags flying in front of the curved glass and steel facade of the Berlaymont building in Brussels
Business

Google's 890 Million Euro Fine Is Small. The Daily Penalty After 21 September Is Not.

The EU fine is about two days of Alphabet's revenue. What starts on the 22nd is a periodic payment of up to 5 per cent of average daily worldwide turnover.

3 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A wooden gavel lying on a light wooden desk
Business

Nobody Could Be Found to Buy AdX, So Google Keeps It

Brinkema rejected the AdX divestiture and ordered behavioural remedies. One stated reason was that no credible buyer for AdX was ever identified.

3 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
The Palace of Westminster under a grey sky, the Union flag flying from the Victoria Tower
Business

The UK Cyber Bill Leaves Out AI Vendors, and Also the Government

The bill can order a power station to stop using a particular AI model, while imposing no duty on whoever built it. Peers challenged that and the minister answered on hostile actors.

3 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A long flight of stairs photographed from the bottom, rising through tiled walls towards daylight at the top
Business

Uber Is Cutting Management Layers, and 3,300 Roles With Them

Uber is cutting 3,300 roles, 20 per cent of manager positions and every job more than seven layers from the chief executive. That last instruction implies at least eight layers existed.

2 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Trays of metal letterpress type seen from above, individual raised letter blocks sorted into red compartments, the nearest ones in sharp focus.
Chinese Culture

The letter Chinese passports will not print

Hanyu Pinyin has a letter no Chinese travel document will print: ü. The rule that replaces it is two rules, not one — 吕 becomes LYU but 略 becomes LUE — and the standard everyone cites says only that the change is permitted, while the authority that prints the documents says it is required. Buried in the same notice is a clause letting you keep your old spelling.

2 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A Chinese calligraphy practice book lying open on a pale desk, its ruled grid squares each holding one traditional character in regular script, with a hand at the right holding a brush pen above the page.
Chinese Culture

花 has seven strokes, and eight, and ten

Count it on the mainland and you get seven. Taiwan's education ministry says eight. A 五格 name reading says ten — a number worked out from an index the Kangxi dictionary never totals, by a method whose own founder said it was not stroke counting at all. Unicode hands your software exactly one of the three and does not say which.

2 Sep 2026 · 10 min read
The wave-patterned Portuguese paving of Senado Square in Macau, with the white Leal Senado building on the left and a pink colonial-era building on the right under an overcast sky.
Chinese Culture

The 226-page book that decides how Macau spells your name

Macau has a statutory table for romanising Cantonese names, running 226 pages of the 1985 gazette. Hong Kong has no rule at all — the word romanisation does not appear anywhere in its statute book. And in 2024 Macau quietly turned its mandate into a default.

2 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A batsman in whites playing a shot with the wicketkeeper crouched behind the stumps and the red ball in the air
Business

JioHotstar Went Global Without the Cricket That Built It

JioHotstar replaced Hotstar in three markets on 2 September. The Indian business is a volume play at ₹79 a month; the international one is a premium subscription without sport.

2 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Glass and steel office towers photographed from ground level looking straight up into a pale sky
Business

Oracle Cut 21,000 Jobs and Bans AI-Generated Code From OpenJDK

Oracle's headcount fell by 21,000 in a year and its chief executive calls AI-assisted engineering superhuman. OpenJDK, which Oracle stewards, bans model-generated contributions.

2 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A vertical pink neon sign spelling three Chinese characters, glowing against a dark city street at night with blurred lights behind it.
Chinese Culture

Most 火星文 converters are running the same copied file

Feed the same characters to several Martian-text converters and most agree exactly. That looks like a standard. It is one 3,753-row table copied between sites, a third of whose rows convert a character to itself, and 436 of whose rows cannot be undone.

1 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
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