And here is my piece in this week’s issue, Primates on Facebook, translated into Chinese. Brought to you …. not by The Economist, but by a group of enterprising Chinese amateurs (in the literal sense of lovers) called The Eco Team.

I learned about this in the New York Times today and find it very funny. Basically, a 39-year-old Chinese insurance broker who wants to beef up his English got a group together that translates my magazine just for fun. Without asking us for permission, of course, although my boss has apparently met the guy and winked.

Ah, how that takes me back to my memories of trudging around China, dodging the waiban (Foreign Affairs Bureau), those kind people who assigned “drivers” and “translators” to me whenever I wanted to interview, well, anybody. And that time when I walked for an eternity to get to a 5-star hotel to see my piece in that week’s issue, only to discover that it was among the pages that had been, ahem, torn out by some accident in the delivery process.

The Eco Team, apparently, is also careful not to translate those articles in The Economist that might, you know, be interesting in that way in China.

Anyway, I’m glad that people are learning the sort of English somewhere that complies with our style guide. 😉