Unlike the rest of the world, this event was not merely a chance to mourn the passing of a technology icon. Instead, it was an occasion for Chinese citizens, especially the emerging middle class that is the key to the nation’s consumer culture, to reflect on what Steve Jobs’ life said about their own prospects and future.

This comes just a few days after one of Beijing’s top Communist party leaders visited the offices of the nation’s most popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Sina Weibo, and strongly suggested that Sina do more to block the spread of “false information” among its 200 million plus users.

. . . the Third Ring, looking north from Fortune Plaza, looks like this at 1 p.m. on a Monday.

Working with Planet Water Foundation and the WWF, a group of Edelman managers and executives focused a portion of a regional meeting on solving this school's drinking water problem. Well done to everyone who took part. The photos in this presentation are great to see.

Both economically and politically, China is a different place than it was before the global recession of 2009. It is stronger, more aggressive and more demanding of its partners, especially multi-national companies operating here.

And, like most things in China, when the government puts its weight behind an initiative it often succeeds beyond expectations.

An iconic, grand figure, Goodall is the British anthropologist who brought worldwide attention to the chimpanzees of Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park and inspired a generation of conservation and animal welfare activists.

She was in Beijing as part of a world tour to generate interest in her NGO, Roots and Shoots, which is trying to empower young people to save the planet. She was also carrying her message that humans, the smartest of the great apes, aren't smart enough to realize they are choking the planet to death with global warming, deforestation and the other ills of economic development.

The recent case of Qiu Ziming, a business reporter for the Beijing-based Economic Observer, had a happy ending this week when he was able to come out of hiding after the police in the Eastern China province of Zhejiang were pressured to drop their efforts to arrest him for doing his job. For several days, though, the reporter was on the lam, because police put him on a national list of wanted criminals "for damaging a company's reputation." His crime: Writing stories that exposed insider trading and bribery at a powerful paper manufacturer in Zhejiang province.

The Economic Observer broke the corruption story,
marshaled internet support for an investigative reporter.

In 1996, if you were lucky enough to be among the handful of people with an internet connection here, you could freely surf across what was then called the World Wide Web. You could drink all the tea you wanted, but getting a decent espresso was impossible. The great Chinese leader and father of China's modern day economic miracle, Deng Xiaoping, was still alive, even if the economic reforms he launched had yet to transform this country. And the word "baseball" would have been as foreign on the streets of Beijing as the concept of a hot dog.

If you speak and write Chinese, you will officially become a full-fledged member of the world's internet community next month, when the Chinese characters in this blog's headline, known up to now as .cn, .hk and .tw respectively, will make their internet debut as top-level domain names.

The agency that manages internet URL names, ICANN or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, announced that the language now spoken by 20% of the world will soon be all you'll need to surf the night away. Up to now, users could almost complete a web or email address with just a Chinese keyboard. Almost. But once the user got to the characters that follow the final dot (.com, .org, .cn, etc), only Latin letters would do.

For the world's English speakers, the web has always been a language-friendly place, where our Latin characters were the basic typographical currency. If you wrote Chinese, or Arabic, or Russian or Hebrew you were something of a second-class citizen.

I watch it deteriorate each day, from "pretty good" during my early morning walks with my dog Buster, to worse in the afternoon as seen from my 33rd floor office window, to "very unhealthy" on many days by the time evening rush begins at 5 p.m.

And the internet enables my obsession.

I've written before about how the media in the two countries each present a unique point of view, in the context of objective reporting, on issues that divide the world's two most important economies, and the Yuan revaluation news was no exception. Each country's media played to readers and viewers who expected to read or hear the story from a U.S. or China perspective. Like that Louis Armstrong song, "Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off," a tomato can be a tomahto when it comes to China / U.S. media coverage.

I was reminded of that in New York Sunday during a brief business trip back to the U.S. when, over a cup of coffee and a bagel, I read a really smart piece of reporting by Ian Urbina about what went wrong on that BP deep-ocean rig in the Gulf of Mexico -- how a series of mistakes and poor decisions led to the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The story reminded me of ones I'd seen in the Chinese media, mostly the China Daily, CCTV and the Global Times, about the pressing environmental challenges facing that nation. And how different the stories were.

The Gulf oil spill.