I was commissioned to write a piece about Murdoch’s wife – then someone pulled the plug

Asian sirens cast a spell but leave some things to be desired

They're robust and the road to the future, but our nearest and dearest could resolve to do better

Pearls for the orient

What is ''The String of Pearls?''

Who knows what happens in the shadows?

Such is China’s opacity that we may never really know what went on concerning Stern Hu

The Stern Hu affair is a worrying preview of a world run on China’s rules

As China struts the world stage in the lead-up to the Olympics, its behaviour has been more revealing about future relations than anyone could have imagined

Few of Rupert Murdoch’s former employees are eager to write about him. Likewise, few of his publications are eager to review a book about him. This review was turned down by the Far Eastern Economic Review, which is part of Murdoch-owned Dow Jones, after it was initially accepted. Nor was it reviewed by the Murdoch-owned Australian or the Australian Literary Review

Eric Ellis suggests potential slogans and policy statements from new Labor leader and former Australian diplomat to Beijing, Kevin Rudd

The name Chen Jiulin doesn't roll off the Western tongue in quite the same manner as Nick Leeson but many Singaporeans see awkward parallels

Has Asia, home to the world’s most dynamic economies, a region which provided the world’s first modern female leader, suddenly become enlightened?

The six Chinese police banging at the hotel room door on Saturday night were clearly not out to improve their English.

"You have broken the regulations of the People's Republic of China, and you could be severely punished," barked Ms Chen Yuyan, the deputy director of the Fujian Provincial Public Security Bureau (Foreign Ministry Division).

If it weren't for the empty polystyrene noodle lunchboxes, it could have been a mining site in deepest darkest Pilbara.

When your government decides to hurl missiles from your back yard, it's no surprise that the neighbours expect an explanation.

"Beautiful Alice Springs: for a little touch of Aussie!" Illustrated by hectares of green pastures and gambolling kangaroos, the roadside hoarding hawking a new housing development outside the old Malaysian tin-mining centre of Ipoh promoted an image of Australia not immediately obvious to most Australians.

An island province that is supposed to be a laboratory of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" experimenting with capitalist reforms, Hainan has no shortage of "scientists."

Eric Ellis last spoke to Li Lu in Tiananmen Square just before the tanks rolled in.

The Great Leap Forward To Corporate Downsizing

There is a new battleground in China. Market dismantlers of greying State firms are hard up against party hard-liners fearful of a Solidarity-style movement emerging among angry workers made jobless by reform.

THE glitzy sports store on Wanfujing Street, China's Fifth Avenue, suggests the first gold medal of the Olympics may already have been won.

The Guangzhou Jockey Club may not be quite ready for the Chinese Communist Party Invitation Cup, but it has a reasonable claim to host the Socialist Market Economy Improvers Handicap.

The Audi and Volkswagen motor service centres seem out of place in the sprawling compound that spreads the gospel of the Chinese Communist Party. But in China today, the centres are more than garages to get one's car fixed. They have become essential to the survival of the Renmin Ribao, the fabled People's Daily, the mass circulation official organ of the ruling party.

Eric Ellis reports from the Pearl River Delta on the millions being made in a place where capitalism is practised at its most hostile, most venal and its most out of control.

China's leading "red-chip" company, the China International Trust and Investment Corporation, is already on its way to becoming a powerful world-wide investment force. Eric Ellis reports from Hong Kong, where CITIC has swapped its Mao suit for a business suit.

Eric Ellis, the AFR's China correspondent until last year, recalls a visit to the ancestral village of the Great Designer.

AN old dissident joke that circulated through Stalinist Eastern Europe could well apply to Deng Xiaoping's China.

Despite new market zeal, one State way of raising hard currency is thriving in the new China. Eric Ellis reports from Beijing

IT wasn't so much the shorts, curious though they were, as the sockless sandals that puzzled the Chinese.

The push of the market in China has created some very wealthy if eccentric entrepreneurs. Eric Ellis, in Chengdu, meets the richest man in Sichuan province.

Spare a thought, particularly if you are about to board an aircraft, for Chinese aviator Mr He Ping.

Graham Baldock doesn't speak a word of Mandarin. But he reckons he's got a better form of communication for doing business in China's inhospitable north-east provinces: "Good old fashioned Aussie body language."

When your government decides to hurl missiles from your back yard, it's no surprise that the neighbours expect an explanation.

They are the fat cats of China's new order: rich, privileged and the owners of great contact books. They are the tai zi dang, the so-called princelings.

Take a swamp, add money, a large dose of political patronage, some of the world's ugliest buildings, as little ideology as possible and what do you get?

It has been called the Road Warrior City, a place where there is nothing to do but eat, buy sex and do business. Ten years ago it was a sleepy border post to Hong Kong of barely 10,000 people; today it is China's richest city with a population estimated at nearly four million people.

Hollywood and Washington tend to agree on the enemy. And the foe of the moment is China, as Eric Ellis reports from Los Angeles.

It is difficult to imagine anything other than disgruntled peasants rising up from the sodden paddy fields outside Suzhou. Yet in just 15 years' time, and possibly as early as 2003, China expects a gleaming metropolis the size of Singapore to be planted on the outskirts of this ancient city, three hours up the Yangtze from brassy Shanghai but a million miles away in attitude.