Christian Science Monitor’s Reporter Bids Farewell to China

choi

Peter Ford, Inside China's Hard Drive; In a farewell letter, our longtime Beijing correspondent tells what's behind China's global ambitions and gives insights into where the country might be going. Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 2016.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/A ... -China-s-hard-drive
("Will the Chinese economy founder? It is hard to make accurate predictions when neither I nor anybody else even knows what China’s real growth rate is. (The official figure is universally derided as fictional.)" )

Note:
(a) "By the time I moved to Beijing in 2006, I had been this news organization’s Europe correspondent for seven years. As a European, I felt that the beat was familiar: I did not find events there [Europe] hard to understand."

(b) "At midnight on the eve of the recent Chinese New Year, as fireworks exploded all around me on the banks of the imperial Houhai 后海 lake in Beijing, I uncoiled my bandoleer of firecrackers. Ten thousand tiny tubes of gunpowder, wrapped in red tissue paper, stretched along the road like a giant fish bone."

bandoleer (n; etymology)
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bandoleer