A recent round of banquets with local government officials inspired me to post a blog on The Diplomat:

One of my colleagues refers to the endless rounds of saucy dishes served at government banquets and countless rounds of toasts as ‘speed dating’. The idea at these meetings between government officials who want to entice investors into their region and these potential investors is to bond as quickly as possible by making one’s body as uncomfortable from over-consumption as possible. Hosts call out to banquet guests ‘gan bei!’ (empty glass), with toasts between two people more like races to the bottom of the glass. As one government official in the Shandong Province coastal city of Yantai once put it to me, ‘I am ruining my health for our relationship.’

Check out the rest of the article here.

Image credit: Cultural China