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 111–120 of 194

A Chinese calligraphy practice sheet printed with traditional characters in a grid, with a black ink stone, a brush and two small jade water droppers resting on top of it.
Chinese Culture

Why a converter turns a toast into an obscenity

干杯 converts to 乾杯 correctly. Insert one character and 干了一杯 comes back 幹了一杯, which reads as an obscenity in Taiwan. The converter did exactly what it was built to do, and the reason it fails explains most of the bad traditional Chinese you will ever see.

1 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A tray of movable metal printing type, the letters in sharp focus in the foreground.
Chinese Culture

Most advice on writing Chinese dates quotes a standard that was replaced in 2011

The rules for numbers and dates in Chinese publications were revised in 2011. A great deal of guidance, including the style rule governing Chinese Wikipedia, still reproduces the edition it replaced — and one line tells you which you are reading.

1 Sep 2026 · 9 min read
A weathered stone sundial, its gnomon casting a shadow across the engraved dial face.
Chinese Culture

The Chinese festivals that are set by the sun, not the moon

Most Chinese festivals fall on a lunar date, and two of the best known do not. Qingming and the Winter Solstice are fixed by the sun, which is why Qingming takes only three Gregorian dates across two centuries but thirty-two lunar ones.

1 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A Chinese calligraphy brush resting across a shallow dish of black ink.
Chinese Culture

The character that means a million in Beijing and a million million in Taipei

兆 is the SI prefix for mega on the mainland and for tera in Taiwan. It is not a gap between the two conventions but a swap — each side gives the other's word to the other's number — and Taiwan's own government cannot agree with itself about it.

1 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
A small-business seller works at a laptop showing performance charts, with stacked cardboard parcels beside it on a wooden table
Business

The FTC Says Amazon Ran a First-Price Ad Auction But Called It Second-Price

In a second-price auction, bidding your true value is optimal and cannot hurt you. In a first-price auction it is the worst thing you can do. The complaint says advertisers were told the first and given the second.

1 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A row of coloured network patch cables arranged by length
Business

Nvidia Licenses NVLink So Rivals' Chips Run on Its Fabric

Licensing an interconnect to your competitors is not a revenue line. It means a rack of somebody else's accelerators still runs on your fabric, and often your switches.

1 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A small circuit board carrying discrete components, on a repair bench
Business

A Dongguan Court Froze $300m of Nexperia. It Is Not a Seizure.

Asset preservation pending litigation exists in most legal systems and decides nothing about the merits. What is unusual is the situation that produced it, not the order.

1 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A night view across Islamabad with the city lights spread below the hills
Business

A Google Office in Islamabad Is Not a Pakistani IT Export

IT exports are domestic firms invoicing foreign clients. A foreign company registering locally sits on the other side of that ledger, whatever the target it is announced alongside.

31 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
A dense field of stars against a dark night sky
Chinese Culture

Why two calculators give you different birth charts

The same birth details can produce different charts because the tradition has argued for centuries about when a day begins and what to do with a leap month. Almost nothing tells you which answer your tool picked.

31 Aug 2026 · 6 min read
A gilded Chinese signboard mounted beneath a temple eave
Chinese Culture

What happens to Chinese punctuation when text runs vertically

Turning Chinese sideways does not turn its punctuation sideways. Quotation marks become different characters entirely, the smaller marks move to two different positions, and CSS does none of it.

31 Aug 2026 · 5 min read
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