A Washington Must: Embassies with Élan, from the NY Times. Foreign embassies in Washington DC are competing to build the grandest buildings and hold the most inventive parties and cultural events. Imagine this strategy amployed on a global scale. Jiang Zemin lounges in the US embassy sauna, smoking cigars and watching HBO over satellite, while Zhu Rongji sips cocktails and chats with Barbara Walters/Britney Spears/Pamela Anderson at the bar. Out back, young Beijing locals play in the embassy skate park while their parents browse the Sino-US art gallery, also on embassy grounds. This is my plan for when I become a Foreign Service Officer. Haruki Murakami is one of my pet Japanese authors, and for good reason. His stories are rich on many levels, depicting depressing relationships and disfunctional people as they interact and stew in their lack of direction or ambition. The feelings expressed are so very post-modern, very neo-Tokyo though set in today's Japan. Recently he has crossed over into non-fiction with "Underground", a series of interviews with survivors of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. His newest work is the recently translated "After the Quake", just reviewed in the New York Times. "After the Quake" is a collection of fictional stories that take place a month after the Kobe earthquake. To me it's very interesting that Murakami took the leap from writing fiction to documenting non-fiction, to stepping back somewhere in between. Although his first novels had no connection to historical events, the characters were true to life and expressed emotions that were deep and sincere, as do the interviewees in "Underground". (related: Salon.com intervew, "unofficial" page) "Lines Crossed in China", on dirty competition in the telecom market: "Sometimes I think we just should let one company do it," Rui continued, strolling under a maze of phone lines, electricity lines and clotheslines. "You know, just let one business do it and regulate them. You know, a real socialist company serving the people. But we don't have those in China anymore." Struggle for control of China as Jiang clings to power. It sounds like the Beidaihe meetings ended without much conclusive results. News to me is that Tianjin native Wen Jiabao has been unofficially pegged as Zhu Rongji's successor. A little Googling brings up a speech by Mr. Wen to the UN General Assembly, but nothing surprising, just the usual calls for "the right of a country to choose independently its path of development in light of its specific conditions" and the standard Chinese support for world-wide economic development. The original article also mentions Jiang Zemin's son first-born, Jiang Mianheng, who turns up on Asiaweek.com's list of China's I.T. Power Players, an interesting read.