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.

128
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~862 min
Total reading
All 128 Business 101 Chinese Culture 25 Home & Living 2

Articles Showing 41–50 of 128

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
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 · 8 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
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