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The kiln slave incident demonstrates that without constitutional oversight from free citizens, an independent media, and democratic organizations apart from the party, this structure cannot prevent corruption in itself or renew politics. Nor can it maintain 'advanced' political ideals...
Chinese media has little international influence, in part because it doesn't tell the whole truth, the head of Hong Kong-based Phoenix Satellite Television was quoted on Friday as saying.
China welcomed its second non-communist minister in just two months, a move highlighting that outstanding people without Communist identity are having more say in politics.
Chen Zhu, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), was appointed the minister of health by China's top legislature on Friday, after the cabinet nomination of non-Communist Wan Gang as the minister of science and technology in April.
Over the past few years, veteran Vermont activists Ellen David-Friedman and Stuart Friedman have been teaching community organizing to university students in southern China while also quietly working with labor groups not sanctioned by the communist government. Now the East Montpelier partners are leaving their respective Green Mountain jobs...in order to focus more intensively on their work in the People's Republic. Their ambitious aim is to help mitigate the negative effects of the global market economy model espoused by Gov. James Douglas and the Vermont business leaders who recently concluded a joint prospecting trip to China.
In a post titled 'You are a citizen, but also a journalist,' the popular online public forum tianya.cn asks visitors to contribute photos of extravagant government buildings around them. The post says the China Central Television is calling for these photos to prepare for a program revealing how local governments waste tax dollars for lavish structures.
The historical significance of the upheaval of 1989 in Beijing does not lie in one paradigm or another, espoused by this or that spokesman or leader. It lies in the space the movement opened up for creative imagination and the opportunities it offered for experiment. The focus was always on the right of citizens to participate in the public life of the country, and the channels that would enable them to do so.
As many of you know, my business here in Xinjiang involves frequently cooperating with various arms of the bingtuan (兵团), aka Xinjiang Production & Construction Corps (XPCC), aka the "army farm" system. (I think "XPCC" works best - its vagueness as a term mirrors the imperfect clarity with which the system can be described - but I still find myself using "bingtuan".)
China launched a $1 billion fund Tuesday to finance trade and investment by Chinese companies in Africa ... The new fund is to be financed by the government's China Development Bank, which said the fund eventually will expand to $5 billion.
Rather, the process is about helping companies find a way to do business in all major markets, including China, while doing all they can to protect their users' interests against government encroachment globally. It's as much about protecting Internet users from an over-reaching Bush administration as it is about protecting them from the Chinese public security bureau.
...the attitude of anti-virus software firms is really intriguing: they only recognize that they misreported the program as a virus, but did not acknowledge misreporting it as a security problem. In other words, this suggests that there might be someone (either in the United States government or Microsoft) deliberately designing unsafe programs for users that are not viruses, but still fall into the category of a security issue....are the two reported 'back door' programs targeted at the mainland of China or even the Chinese government?
China National Petroleum Corporation, the country’s largest oil company and the parent of listed group Petrochina, signed a deal with Iraq in 1997 to develop the al-Ahdab oil field. The field is one of the first to be offered to foreign investors since the 2003 US-led invasion....
...'The contract with the previous administration is still valid – it was signed and we will honour it' [said the Iraqi Oil Minister]
"I thought it was just going to be like the fruit commission coming out and taking out and taking some pictures for the China market or something. I didn't know it was MTV."
Well, not exactly MTV. It's a Chinese production crew that's about to shoot a music video that will air on MTV in China. Wingerter's orchard near Yakima, Washington, is the backdrop....sometimes, the best way to market an American product in China is with a Chinese star....In this case, that star is Jing Tian, age nineteen. She wears a simple red dress for this video shoot. As the music plays, she lip syncs and strolls through the fruit-laden trees stopping to admire the cherries. During a break in shooting, she's on-message with a reporter. Tian: "Cherry is delicious."
When "kiln slavery" becomes only "illegal employment," then what can possibly break the law? Has our nation become a zero-crime nation? It is very hard to accept that utopia has arrived so quickly....If the state still only wants to call this "illegal employment," then our entire society may collapse because that definition is simply too far removed from humanity - it creates the impression that there is nothing one won't do in order to protect the interests of the criminals. When the Internet exposed the "kiln slaves" affair to the world, those government officials who don't like public opinion monitoring as well as those who have interests involved in the case obviously tried to cover up. They even said that these were "lies intended to mislead the people" and that it was too severe to even consider the case to be "illegal employment."
In sum, the politics of making wenhua an enterprise is key to understanding the problem of contemporary Chinese culture. In this politics, the future of wenhua is encoded through historical narratives of entrepreneurialism. In other words, the contours of Chinese history are reshaped by economic discourses--in the cases of fashion, museums and theme parks, and personal memories of economically successful people--to legitimize the ruling ideology of the Chinese state. Moreover, creativity and aesthetics in cultural production can hardly be said to have evinced political committment (despite appearances to the contrary) since the early 1990s. Collusion between aesthetics and commerce has become a dominant practice in cultural production (in cases of film, music, and poetry).
China will begin Monday building a 'highway' on Mount Qomolangma [aka Everest]... so as to ease the path of those bearing the Olympic torch.
The top prize of this year's Silverdocs documentary film festival went to a nail-biting political drama . . . about 7-year-olds.
"Please Vote for Me," which chronicles the battle of three Chinese students to become class monitor, beat out 99 other films to win the Sterling Award for feature film on Sunday, capping off six days of screenings, conference panels and workshops. "It's a film about the idea of democracy, and a window into modern China," says Patricia Finneran, the festival's director. "It's also about the shady politicking that goes on with third-graders."
...there is a ubiquitous ideology or discourse that treats "China" as an organism whose spontaneous biological functioning needs to be tweaked by the party-state-brain (ideally at a distance, through people's internalization of the brain's will, or the nation's collective best interests - that is, through governmentality...), and that this ideology regards the peasants as particularly prone to canceration, and which justifies all kinds of injustice with the logic of intellectualization of the economy (an inexorable aspect of national development, i.e. the maturation of the national organism so that it can "stand up" to and compete with the most highly evolved species of nation).
[Chen Guangcheng's wife] Yuan Weijing asked why Guangcheng had been moved to 'restricted security' and was told that all inmates having done less than a year are kept in 'restricted security'. "We were surprised to see prison staff twist the law at will and speak nonsense." The prison then immediately gave another explanation, saying that Guangcheng often filed complaints against the prison, bringing them to the police, and that this why he had been put in 'restricted security'. This statement proves that the Linyi, Shandong political and legal departments are using illegal tactics to strike and get revenge in response to civil supervision and complaints filed against a judicial department.
When YJ - crusading journalist and peeved Chinese patriot - confronted the bao'an about the double standard, the guard simply replied that they were "under orders not to stop foreigners, only Chinese." Wrong answer. Right now she's organizing some kind of "bao'an boycott" among the other staffers at the compound. Every day at noon I check CNN Asia to make sure the lead story is not some crazy lady burning her laminated identification badge in front of the foreign diplomats compound.
[blocked in China]Microsoft China is buying 15 million shares of China's Sichuan Changhong Electric, one of the mainland's largest television makers.
Microsoft will pay 94.05 million yuan for the shares at a price of 6.27 yuan each and they will not be tradable for 36 months from the end of Changhong's non-public offering of 400 million shares, a statement from Changhong said.
ESWN has translated a short notice from the Taizhou city government looking for Internet astroturfers to 'make positive commentary and articulate main themes consistent with the work and plans of the city party and government'.
Senegalese president, Abdoulaye Wade ... [was quoted] urging G-8 nations to invest in Africa 'like India and China.'
Implicit in his remarks is the widespread feeling that Western promises typically amount to little more than lip service and that it is Africa's new partners, led by China, that are showing the kind of decisiveness that can change the landscape.
In Taiwan's gradual transformation from a "savage island" into a "Chinese province" we see the profound changes in the imagined geography of the Chinese domain wrought by Qing expansionism. In the contemporary construction of Taiwan as a "renegade province" that must be "reunified" in order to restore China's territorial integrity we see the lasting impact of Qing expansionism on the imagined geography of the modern Chinese nation-state.
My wife saw Xiao Li recently in Shanghai. She was frantically searching for a hospital that would admit her husband, since he had recently been forced out of the last two hospitals he was in. They told him that there was nothing they could do for him now....And the reason no hospital will take him? It looks bad if patients die in your hospital. It affects your "statistics." And, anyhow, he's a terminal case: there is no more money to be made off of tests or treatments. Go home and die.
'Dozens of Wahaha employees took to the street yesterday to protest the alleged takeover bid by Groupe Danone SA of its Chinese partner.
Wearing yellow shirts and holding the banners, the protesters, who work for one of the companies' joint ventures, stood in front of a hotel where a Danone-organized news conference was scheduled, shouting Oppose Danone...'
'Last year, 68,000 mixed couples registered for marriage, 4,000 more than in 2005.
Official figures from Shanghai show that in the city alone, 372 Chinese men were in interracial marriages in 2005, up from 91 men 20 years earlier.
Chinese archaeologists have discovered a the remains of gigantic bird-like dinosaur in the Gobi Desert in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, which could overturn theories that dinosaurs became generally smaller as the evolved into birds.
The animal, named gigantoraptor erlianensis, is believed to have been about eight meters in length, weighed 1,400 kg, and stood up to five meters high.
According to the Times article, 'John Bussey, a deputy managing editor who has been based in Hong Kong, will lose that title ... He has been offered a position as a columnist'
China's food-safety agency said a government probe uncovered the sale of fake blood protein to hospitals and pharmacies in at least eight provinces and autonomous regions across China.
The article includes numbers of people with different surnames.
Wang: 93 million
Li: 92 million
Zhang: 88 million
Chen, Zhou and Lin: more than 20 million
Xinhua calls the the campaign, 'experiencing energy shortage', and quoted an official: 'After we feel for ourselves how we are going to suffer without electricity, the value and importance of energy become more real to us.'
The two Internet giants will share advertising revenue from Google searches on Sina.com, and Google text ads may later be displayed on Sina's pages. Future cooperation may include news services.
The prospect of sharing parts of our “job” with non-professionals may be frightening to many journalists who are used to doing things a certain way. But if we are being true to the ideals of our profession, then we should welcome the fact that global information flows - and thus the global conversation - are being democratized.
Does the world - and do libraries - really need new books on China, the largest, fastest-changing, and perhaps most contradictory country in the world? Yes...here are the latest works on this challenging global phenomenon - now poised to take the world stage with the summer 2008 Beijing Olympics (motto, "One World One Dream") while reckoning with intense challenges regarding pollution, product contamination, corruption, and the establishment of political legitimacy.
Wynn Resorts has delayed a planned expansion of its Macao casino, citing new restrictions on visitors from neighbouring Guangdong province and an unprecedented increase in capacity
Since 2002, when the monopoly on gambling in Macao previously held by Stanley Ho's Sociedade de Jogos de Macau, the enclave's economy has been booming as Las Vegas gaming operators moved in with mega-projects intended to profit from China's national fixation with gambling, that happens top be illegal elsewhere in the country.
Danone won a partial victory on Thursday in its dispute with Chinese partner Wahaha when Zong Qinghou, the founder of the Chinese company, resigned as chairman of their soft drinks joint venture.
However, the French group now faces the difficult task of asserting control over the lucrative but troubled joint venture. Mr Zong, a hard-driving entrepreneur, had almost total management control of the business.
Obviously there is great significance to the cities in which these stories take place. Shanghai, the semi-colonial "whore of the orient" is a fitting background for a tale of seduction and corruption featuring a virile German man (read the West) who steals a pretty Chinese women (read China) from a weak, heroin (read opium) addled Chinese man. In Beijing, it is the Western woman who is seduced by virile, artsy Chinese men, and made into a caricature of herself by agreeing to do a TV series. In Shanghai, the West seduces China. In Beijing, China seduces the West.
The Coca-Cola Co. said it will revamp bottling practices globally to save water and fund conservation efforts to clean up stretches of the Yangtze and other major rivers, highlighting a surge in social and environmental spending by multinationals in China.
It's becoming a rite of spring. Around 120 bosses of Beijing-based magazines withdrew to the hillside resort of Hongluo Temple last week, for five days of rest, relaxation, and, when they paid attention, re-indoctrination.
[One] editor confessed ... 'You choose what you want hear. It’s hard to pay attention all the way through.'
The Chinese capital's anti-drug authorities burned 135.3 kilograms of drugs [including heroin, ecstasy and ice] on Sunday, as an effort and determination to crack down on drugs before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games....
...The capital city will begin to use sniffer dogs as of June 26 to detect drugs in public places, such as the airport, subway and railway stations and shopping malls...
...The city will also expand the number of anti-drug volunteers with rewards of between 1,000 and 10,000 yuan (129 to 1,290 U.S. dollars) for those who provide tips on drug crimes for police.