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Also see this video on Youtube: Fiction Pyongyang
The World Bank raised its forecast for China's economic growth this year to 10.4% from 9.6% on strong first-quarter growth but it added that the nation's economy doesn't appear to be overheating.
Several months ago, Chinese clothing executive Shao Zhuliang got bad news from his U.S. agent: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., his biggest customer, wouldn't be placing any orders for the spring 2008 season...
China and India are both planning to launch moon shots within a year in the latest sign of the two Asian powerhouses’ intensifying rivalry and growing technological prowess.
Although both countries deny they are engaged in a 21st century re-run of the 1960s race to the moon between the cold war superpowers, their haste to launch suggests more than casual interest in the other’s progress.
Beijing's Internet watchdog has accused 12 dating websites of being a cover for prostitution and has ordered them to clean up their act by next Friday.
'The outrageous pimping content in some websites is very shocking,' said a statement of the Beijing Online News and Information Panel, an Internet watchdog made up by government officials, experts and representatives of netizens.
The 12 dating websites are loaded with detailed information on the sex trade, including 'service items, pricing and contact information,' said the statement.
(Thanks to Shaan Kahn for the link)
A fortnight ago, news came of the proposed demolition of Dongsi Ba Tiao, a hutong north east of the Forbidden City and supposedly situated in one of Beijing’s 25 protected areas. The Chinese media was quick to rip into the decision with the Beijing News leading the charge and the China Daily backing it up in English.
The number of share trading accounts established in China now exceeds 100m as the country’s retail investors continue to ignore warnings about the risks of a stock market bubble and continue to put new money into the market.
The surge in the interest to buy shares among China’s population has accelerated over the past few days, with 385,000 new accounts being opened on Monday alone, taking the total to 100.27m, according to China Securities Depositary and Clearing Corporation. In the previous week, around 1.5m new accounts were opened.
China's leaders are probably more insecure than they need to be because they don't have very accurate information about what the public actually thinks about them. The CCP has proved itself surprisingly resilient and is effectively co-opting college students and private businesspeople. But on the other hand, there are plenty of examples of authoritarian regimes that were toppled almost overnight thanks to cell phones and the Internet.
[Turning away from Lei Feng, Chinese people today] look instead to people such as Lin Yuan, a jovial, plain-looking man referred to as the 'Warren Buffett of China' and revered for supposedly turning a paltry Rmb8,000 into a fortune exceeding Rmb1bn ($130m) during 18 years of stock investing.
First, the tide of democracy is vast and mighty, and no one can block it.
Chinese police have arrested a corpse trader who killed six women so he could sell their bodies for superstitious 'weddings of the dead'.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has asked local governments at all levels to ensure the supply of pork and maintain market order amid rising concerns over soaring pork price...
...According to the Ministry of Agriculture, in April live pigs nationwide were priced 71.3 percent higher than a month earlier, and pork, 29.3 percent higher, largely due to tightened supply.
The government's continuing tight grip on NGOs appears increasingly out of sync.
Guangdong police will strengthen cooperation with their Hong Kong and Macao counterparts in fighting illegal emigration to the two special administrative regions through fake marriages with local residents...
...Hong Kong residents too have been investigated for charging fees to mainlanders to obtain marriage certificates. The fees range from a few thousand yuan to more that 50,000 yuan ($6,500).
Kweichow Moutai confirmed yesterday that its former general manager, Qiao Hong, is in custody and under investigation for corruption...
...There were rumors that Qiao accepted a bribe of at least 3 million yuan from a Shandong -based tour agency, which helped organize Moutai distributors' travel to South Korea.
The story includes a photo of Qiao.
49 Million Illegal Publications Confiscated in First 4 Months of 2007
Chinese law enforcement agencies have confiscated 49 million illegal books, periodicals and audio-visual products in the first four months this year during the latest crackdown on pornographic and illegal publications.
Nearly 90 percent of the confiscated publications were pirated products, the National Office for Cleaning Up Pornography and Fighting Illegal Publications announced on Tuesday.
Of the confiscated publications, there were 1.69 million pornographic publications, 1.06 million illegal newspapers and magazines, and 2.96 million smuggled discs.
The office said 13,000 shops and booths, 364 printing factories and 97 websites were closed for illegal operations. Another 17,000 shops, 1,825 printing factories and 2,123 websites were fined...
Shanda's hit game in China is Legend of Mir II (传奇2) which was created in Korea. The game is free to play — Shanda makes money by selling virtual items and services to players.
Nasdaq-listed rival The9 (best known for World of Warcraft 魔兽世界) is also offering a Korean game free to play, while Netease.com, best known for the home-grown Fantasy Westward Journey (梦幻西游) has been struggling to develop new games on its own and has stuck with the pay-to-play revenue model.
The Xinhua update the next day said that 'a local government investigation has found that the drowning accident occurred on a day-off. The relevant school had not organized group activities.'
One of the parents took issue with Xinhua's altered copy in a post on the popular Tianya Internet forum. Ansfied has translated the parent's complaint, and some of the online responses.
The government looks set to back down from its long-held intention of imposing real-name registration for the country's 20 million bloggers following protests from the industry.
In a draft self-discipline code for blog services published by the Internet Society of China (ISC) yesterday, real-name registration is only to be 'encouraged' instead of being made compulsory.
But the proposal triggered protests from the Internet industry and the growing number of Internet users.
There's no word on whether the deal means that service and food on China Eastern will improve.
Both the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal have reported this news - this link is to the FT.
The launch of a Chinese version of the Your Gallery website - the world's largest interactive art gallery with 20 million hits a day - shows how hot the Chinese art market is. Your Gallery was launched last year to provide a free global platform for artists.
You can find the Chinese version linked off the main site at saatchi-gallery.co.uk
If you are interested in this topic, Danwei yesterday published a translation of Wang Xiaofeng's post about it and a summary of Chinese views.
The Chinese government said yesterday that it would acquire a $3 billion stake in the Blackstone Group, the private equity firm, in the country’s first effort to diversify its $1.2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves beyond United States Treasury bills and into commercial enterprise.
China's central bank announced on Sunday a series of measures, including allowing more money to be cashed from ATMs in a day, to address complaints of clients that they have to queue up at banks for hours.
Wen Jiabao's recent speeches mean that reformists among the Chinese intelligentsia are optimistic about the seventeenth national congress.
China's immense patient populations suffering from cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular illnesses, and a whole range of infectious diseases have captured the attention of drug and medical device companies across Europe and America. They are expanding research and testing facilities in China ... the past 12 months have seen a flurry of new activity
The article examines the legal and economic factors behind business as well as ethical concerns.No mention was made of when a moon colony and mine populated by migrant workers would be constructed.
China intends to provide about $20bn in infrastructure and trade financing to Africa during the next three years, eclipsing many of the continent’s traditional big donors by a single pledge.
The scale of China’s accelerating financial flows were revealed to the Financial Times on Thursday by Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank (AfDB).
The sums involved are beginning to outstrip individual contributions from traditional donors, including multilateral development agencies.
In 23 minutes, they designed an office, a hallway, and three living rooms for factory managers. On the top floor, the workers' dormitories required another 14 minutes. All told, they had mapped out a 21,500-square-foot (2,000 square meters) factory, from bottom to top, in one hour and four minutes. Boss Gao handed the scrap of paper to the contractor. The man asked when they wanted the estimate.
'How about this afternoon?'
Weeks after tainted Chinese pet food ingredients killed and sickened thousands of dogs and cats in the United States, China faced growing international pressure to prove that its food exports were safe to eat.
But simmering beneath the surface is a thornier problem that worries Chinese officials: how do they assure the world that this is not a nation of counterfeits and that 'Made in China' means well-made?
..much has changed in the official attitude towards art in the last four or five years. In particular, the art colleges have been opened up and enormously expanded. Mr Chang, who teaches at the Huang Zhou Academy, says that it used to have about 300 students to 300 teachers, but in the last four to five years it has grown to 6,000 students, only 2,000 of whom are in the fine arts, and the rest in new subjects such as design.
What Chinese art needs now, says Lorenz Helbling, is better exhibitions, focused on a single artist to get away from the undifferentiated 'Chineseness' of group shows. It needs better curators within China (Hou Hanru, although excellent, is now more of a Western figure).
In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Leow writes about how industry pressure and technological limitations have forced the authorities to delay plans to have mobile phone users and bloggers to register with their real names.
The Financial Times reports:
Not content with exporting Dom Pérignon champagne, Hennessy cognac and Glenmorangie whisky to China’s elite, France’s LVMH has taken a majority stake in Wenjun, a Chinese distillery.
Its decision to buy 55 per cent of the business for an undisclosed sum highlights the desire of international drinks groups to win a foothold in the fast-growing market for Chinese clear grain spirits, known as baijiu or “white alcohol”.
Diageo, the British drinks group that owns Johnnie Walker whisky and Smirnoff vodka, said in January it was taking a stake in a leading maker of baijiu.
Andrew Field introduces the work of David Spindler, the subject of an article by Peter Hessler in the latest issue of the New Yorker:
David's unique combination of field research and library research has allowed him to put together a set of stories behind the building of the Beijing-area walls in the late 1500s-early 1600s that had remained obscure for centuries, as well as enabling him to describe the structures and functions of the walls and towers in far greater detail than anybody has done before.
Bill Dodson at the This is China! Weblog continues his first-hand account of a dispute between homeowners and developers:
It was then I understood why the police had stayed out of the high-rise protest until that moment: now it was a public disturbance; before it was much like a spat between a husband and wife, an internal affair. The protest now though spilled out onto a public thoroughfare, Xing Gang Street. A very busy street in the mornings during rush hour, especially for trucks loaded with building materials for other construction sites around Suzhou Industrial Park.
Will Moss at Imagethief writes about Darfur, the Beijing Olympics, and western protests:
Propaganda and censorship are two sides of the same coin. Both share the same goal: to enable an individual or organization to shape consensus in a group. They often work together. Censorship eliminates competing ideas, creating a void in which propaganda can be more effective. Having a coup? Seize the transmitters and studios so you control the message. It's time-honored strategy. Propaganda and censorship are related in another way. They both work cumulatively, over time. It's not usually the 'magic bullet' that drives consensus so much as the patient steering of discourse over time via many channels.
Issue #14 of the 'Asian History Carnival' by the Granite Studio blogger is an excellent annotated round-up of the past month's history-related news. Not to be missed.
From David Bandurski at CMP:
Wang Guixiu (王贵秀), a scholar with the Party School of CPC Central Committee, criticized normative approaches to 'power monitoring' in China, saying they were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the notion of power relationships and the delegation of power. Effective monitoring, he argued, could only come with 'rational decentralization', in which power was delegated through an electoral process and officials were monitored independently by those who entrusted them with power.
With translated excerpts from Wang's op-ed in the Beijing Daily.
fiLi at fiLi's World writes about a presentation by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday at Tel Aviv University on the publication of the Hebrew edition of Mao: The Unknown Story. Videos and a bullet-point summary of their speeches are included.
In Spot-On, Jonathan Ansfield writes about wealth and gender issues in contemporary Chinese society: 'When a man reaches 40,' Mr. Zhang reflected, 'his main occupation should be beautiful women.'
Tim Johnson travels on a tourist permit instead of a journalist pass and gets a measured talking-to from the Foreign Ministry.
The editor of The Times of London, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, has written to a member of the board of Dow Jones, defending his newspaper's China coverage.
Google, Baidu, Nokia, Motorola, and BP are tapped to plug a Beijing building project in a series of advertising puns.
The Wall Street Journal's China-based reporters -- whose coverage won a Pulitzer this year -- have sent a letter to three key members of the Bancroft family, the Dow Jones Company's controlling shareholder, urging them to refuse Rupert Murdoch's bid to buy Dow Jones.
ESWN translates articles from the Chinese Internet: 'Did a photographer save a girl with blue hair from throwing herself in front of an oncoming train? Or did he take advantage of her disadvantage and violated her sexually afterwards? On the Chinese Internet, who can you trust nowadays?'
Yu Dan (于丹) gets criticized by 'real scholars'. He Dong (何东) writes in her defense, saying that TV program hosts are the ones who ought to be upset. Zhao Yong in Southern Metropolis Daily writes that she upholds the mainstream government line.
Jane Macartney of The Times (London) reports: 'China has tightened restrictions on travel by foreigners in the Himalayan region of Tibet after five Americans unfurled a banner at the foot of Mount Everest to protest against the staging of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing ... 'We can’t let foreign tourists just go anywhere by themselves,” she said. “In the past they could be left alone to travel independently as they wanted for a few days. Now this is not allowed any more.''
BOCOG has released a document named 'Service Guide for Foreign Media Coverage during the Olympics' with contact details and rules for foreign journalists that apply from January 1 this year until just after the Games. The only dodgy part is the 'Coverage of Public Emergency' section which specifies that journalists must 'follow the security personnel's instructions'.
James P. Hoffa, son of Jimmy Hoffa and General President of one of America's largest trade unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, is in China on a fact-finding mission and will hold 'media briefings': Hong Kong May 17, 9am at Grand Hyatt; Shanghai May 18, 5pm at Grand Hyatt, Beijing May 21, 8am at St. Regis Beijing. Workers of the world unite and enjoy five star hotels!
Zat Liu at Shanghaiist introduces a Life Week interview with Wang Momo, creator of those cute bunny animations you see all over Chinese chat programs and blog providers.
A Shanghainese man is apparently suing China Telecom because his company website, hosted outside of China, is blocked. China Telecom is his Internet service provider, so he he taking them to court because they can neither solve the problem nor explain what is causing it. This could be an interesting test case for the Net Nanny aka Great Firewall. The blog post linked here gives the time and venue of the first hearing of the case (May 29).
Soon after the launch of MySpace for China at myspace.cn, the international myspace.com appears to be blocked.
Seed magazine (slogan: 'Science is culture') has published an article by Mara Hvistendahl titled The China Experiment — Inside the revolution to green the biggest nation on earth. Excerpt: '[C]rucial awareness of global climate issues is penetrating China's political leadership, who realize that environmental damage threatens their economic miracle ... If China's peasants get hooked on renewable power before they join the middle classes, and if its existing middle classes can learn to conserve energy before they can afford two cars, the country could effectively leapfrog over the West in developing sustainable energy and growth.'
Xinhua reports: 'China on early Monday morning launched a communications satellite for Nigeria, the first of its kind in Africa and the first time a foreign buyer has purchased a Chinese satellite and its launching service'. The report also makes the following dubious claims: 'Experts estimate that the satellite program will revolutionize telecommunications, broadcasting and broadband multimedia services in Africa. It will create more than 150,000 jobs for Nigerians, save broadband users more than 95 million U.S. dollars a year...'
The Financial Times reports on changes to China's laws that will allow Chinese people and companies investing in foreign equity products: 'The new rules, in effect, let foreign fund managers tap China’s $2,000bn in retail bank deposits, the world’s biggest savings pool, without forming mandatory domestic operations.'
ESWN has a roundup of the media coverage about the man who tried to set fire to Mao's portrait on Tiananmen.
From The Wall Street Journal: As Shanghai plays host this week to the African Development Bank's annual board of governors meeting, African countries are likely hoping that China will use the event to show that its developing affection for the continent extends beyond energy and commodities. Showing China's deepening relationship with Africa, the board of the 77-member organization will meet here Wednesday and Thursday -- only the second time it has met outside of Africa, the first being in Spain in 2001 ... In trade terms, the importance of the relationship is growing for both sides. China-Africa trade reached $55.5 billion last year, more than four times its 2002 level, and it is expected to hit $100 billion by 2010.