It can take the uninitiated a minute to realize that 'Gangnam Style' is satire.

In Chinese, there are an impressive number of ways to describe saying nothing at all.

In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you've finally discovered just how much you don't know.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core.

China's Communist Party is wary of independent-minded movements.

For all that we can see from the road in China, there is a lot that we cannot see. We miss what's behind the trees, the cover-ups, the darker side of things - the ingredients that so often drive a reporting trip.

Valuing the road over the goal was a Taoist goal in itself.

Walking, it turns out, is a sublime way to get to know people in China. They're used to meeting strangers on the road. Many here understand what it feels like to walk a long way.

By the Nineties, so many people were moonlighting and creating their own professional identities that China generated a brisk new business in the printing of business cards.

The fastest way to get around the southern Chinese city of Foshan is on the back of a motorcycle-for-hire.

Lei Feng is reported to have died in a freak accident in 1962 - struck by a falling telephone pole.

Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology.

When I moved to Beijing in 2005 to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China's transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes - involving one fifth of humanity and great pivots of politics and economics.

For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.

China is so central to our economic lives that journalists have had no choice but to engage China with greater technical analysis and precision.

For years, China expected foreign companies not to publicly voice their complaints about hacking or intellectual-property violations in order to protect their broader interests in the country.

In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.

When Libya was in turmoil in 2011, the Chinese public was surprised to discover that more than thirty thousand of their countrymen were living there, most of them working on Chinese-run oil projects.

In 1975, the collapse of a cascade of Chinese dams during a flood killed a hundred and seventy-one thousand people, but the event is rarely discussed, and the names of the victims are largely unrecorded today.

For much of their history, life for most people in China was arduous and circumscribed - and people travelled as little as they could.

For my book, 'Age of Ambition,' I spent time documenting, among other things, the trials of young Chinese strivers who are bombarded by pressures unlike those that their parents faced.

Young Chinese, who have grown up in an age of prosperity and stability, are typically the most passionate defenders of the Chinese political and economic way.

The devotion that young Chinese feel to the Internet is driven by deep factors ranging from youth unemployment and income inequality to political repression and the demographic imbalance between men and women.