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Based on stories Kim heard when working with North Korean refugees in China and told (mostly) in a first-person narrative from the point of view of the title character, a North Korean orphan who manages a comparatively privileged existence, Jia doesn't pretend to have documentary verisimilitude. What it does is paint a composite portrait with small, intimate strokes. This is a fast, oddly flat but hypnotic read, full of tiny but searing details about life in what is commonly regarded as the world's most secretive and most repressive regime.
China and seven countries in and around central Asia have reached a preliminary agreement to build a $19.2bn (£9.6bn) modern-day equivalent to the historic 'Silk Road' trade route between China and Europe.
The plan was agreed by senior officials in Manila this month and is expected to receive formal endorsement at a November ministerial meeting in Tajikistan. It is backed by the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Islamic Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations Development Programme and the World Bank...
...The road and rail investments agreed to by Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are to begin next year, for completion in 2018.
Hell hath no fury like 11 angry mistresses. Stories didn't get much better than this. Subordinates having to send their wives to a corrupt party secretary and mayor if they wanted to get ahead. He's finally brought down by his own treachery after allowing one of the husbands to be executed to protect himself. The story was everywhere on the Internet, and it traveled round the world's media. Google "Pang Jiayu" and take your pick.
Unfortunately it wasn't necessarily true.
Without a doubt the life of migrant workers in Chengdu, like elsewhere in China, is one of acute poverty and instability - but is anything being done to help them?
In Chengdu, at least, something is being done. According to an article in the September 24th edition of the Chengdu Commerce Report, a new school called "New Citizens School" will be opening its doors in October, and will be attempting to help many new migrant laborers adjust to life in the big city. It will take in just three hundred eager pupils as its first class.
All the participants in a two-day forum held in Wuhan on Tuesday agreed that the project had exerted a "notably adverse" impact on the environment of the Three Gorges reservoir, with a total circumference of 600 km, and along the Yangtze since last year, when the project began operation. They said the huge weight of the water behind the Three Gorges Dam had started to erode the Yangtze's banks in many places, which, together with frequent fluctuations in water levels, had triggered a series of landslides.
Both domestic and foreign media have been trumpeting last night's "opening" performance of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women...as the venue's premiere performance. However, despite all the big proclamations, the venue has been holding unofficial test performances for over a week....Alice Xiu did manage to sneak into a performance of another revolutionary production, Sister Jiang, last Wednesday. She offers this report from inside the egg.
Includes lots of links to other articles in the media.Privately, in talks with the US, and publicly in recent weeks, although less explicitly, China has urged Burma to engage the now-detained Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, directly in recognition of her democratic mandate...
...In September, Tang Jiaxuan, a former foreign minister who has been used as an envoy by Beijing, told Burmese leaders that "China wholeheartedly hopes that [Burma] will push forward a democracy process that is appropriate for the country".
Do Chinese street cops need more weapons? On the same day earlier this month that it was reported urban riot police in one southern city were undergoing training to use crossbows, a new program began in south-central China's Chongqing Municipality which, in addition to handguns and bulletproof vests, would see traffic police there equipped with machine guns every night after nine for the purpose of carrying out drunk driving and traffic violation spot checks.
The concept behind the show is one I haven’t seen before, as every episode takes place one year after the previous one. It goes from 1956-2005....
The series is also important because it shows the continuity in Chinese society that we don’t get to see from accounts of the turmoil of the 50s-70s period. I think it’s hard for us non-Chinese to imagine what it might have been like living during that time, and here is a completely plausible story of one family. In a lot of brief China histories from western news stories one gets the feeling that China did not really exist before 1980, or that it was this backward, chaotic place, but people really did live through that time.
Dell Inc said yesterday it will begin selling personal computer products through Gome Group, China's largest electronic retailer, in a move to win back consumers by going beyond its direct-sales mode
Like those who preceded him, Hu, 64, aspires to be not just his country's political leader but also its chief theorist, and the revised constitution is expected to serve as his platform. Indeed, it has taken considerably less time for Hu Thought to work its way into the party charter than it did for the wisdom of Deng and Jiang to be recognized as sacrosanct.
See CMP for an interesting statistical analysis of some buzzwords.Too many appalled foreigners, too many foreigners with links to the media. If their thinking is that the rough treatment will convince the drug dealers to go straight, then they are surely misguided. The incident had the appearance of being all for show and it has received negative coverage in the media. There won’t be any further drug raids in Sanlitun for a while so it appears it is now safe to peddle illegal substances on its streets.
A common problem I find among editors from China is an attempt to package the culture without ever having left China. The result is another book on the Great Wall, another book on Chinese tea and another guidebook on the magnificent places to see in China. Yet how can one understand a country without ever having left it?
In her essay Lung responds to criticism that Eileen Chang did not portray the character of Mr. Yi (who is inspired by Ding Mocun) as a sufficiently evil person. I certainly commend her for this, as I really don't think Chang's fictional character Yi needs to be either everything that Ding Mocun was. However, many writers who try to counter efforts to portray the wartime collaborators as one-dimensional evil-dooers and malicious traitors, in my view, take the completely wrong approach: the reversal. Instead of restoring nuance, or at least moving beyond simple nationalist critiques to evaluate the legacy of these figures in terms of their acts while in positions of power (under whatever regime), Lung embraces a strategy I find frustrating, to say the least: the evil-dooer wasn't evil at all, he was, in fact, a patriot.
Lung Ying-tai's essay is translated at ESWN.That's right: the State Council and China's meteorologists are willing to permit the release of 1000 hydrogen-filled balloons at an event - so long as permission is obtained and the balloons are "checked." I, for one, would very much like to know when - in China's recent history - such an event was held. Barring the release of such information, I'd be content knowing who thought that it was a good idea to release 1600 hydrogen-filled balloons at a facility dedicated to the study of electricity.
According to the government, [Thomas Debrowski] was apologising for the fact that though the problem was Mattel's, Mattel allowed it to appear as if the problem was China's. But according to Mattel, he was apologising to Chinese customers of his dolls (I wonder how many of them there are), and in particular for the one issue that no-one disputes was Mattel's fault - a design flaw involving detachable magnets.
So why didn't they sort this out between them beforehand? Well, we'll come to that.
In any case, it associates Mattel with a piece of nonsense.
The new launch site will be mainly used for launching synchronous satellites, heavy satellites, large space stations, and deep space probe satellites, according to the plan which has been approved by the State Council and the Central Military Commission...
In 1958, China began building its first rocket launch site in northwest China's Jiuquan. At present, the country has three space launch grounds. The other two are located in Taiyuan, capital of north China's Shanxi Province and Xichang in southwestern Sichuan Province.
"I have not really ever seen anything so brutal," my friend told me. "There was blood all over the street. I will not sleep well for a long time."
Police also beat up the son of the Trinidadian (some say Grenadian) ambassador, until he was able to pull out his ID between blows Witnesses say as many as twenty black men were arrested, although many were quickly released.
Also in SCMP and China Expat's Daily Tea Leaves.Linfen was listed as at number 3 among the nine most polluted cities in the world according to National Geographic magazine. In the discussion of Linfen's severe pollution problem, National Geographic reported: At 10am, the sun is invisible even though everybody knows that it is overhead; when tourists walk in the street, their clothes are covered with soot; the water is malodorous and brownish black with white foamy bubbles on top; the rate of birth defects leads the world in recent years.
The mayor is upset that National Geographic didn't mention that the city's record is improving.China is to impose a quota on investments on the Hong Kong stock market – which will reduce capital outflows to a fraction of the $100bn-plus forecast when its outward investment scheme was announced last month...
...It was the first mention from Beijing of a quota on its plan to allow individuals to invest in foreign stocks. Chinese officials refused to disclose the level of the quota but it is reckoned to be lower than the amount of investment expected by the Hong Kong market, which has soared in anticipation of a flood of mainland Chinese money.
Though directors of this "Fifth Generation" once created films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell, My Concubine, which exposed cruel realities of country life and the Cultural Revolution, their biggest concern these days is box office numbers....
On the other side of the game has been China's industry underdogs; this "Sixth Generation" of directors, often working at odds against censors, have cultivated a pop aesthetic and depiction of quotidian ennui Martin Scorsese has hailed as "some of the finest, toughest, most vitally alive work in modern movie-making."...
As the dispute in Venice between Jia [Zhangke] and Zhang [Weiping] may have already suggested, the ideological rifts between the two generations aren't just commercial, nor even merely stylistic. Instead, the two modes represent competing visions of national representation.
But it is too early to say whether opening the corporation's equity capital to outside investors also means a new attitude to foreign involvement in China's highly regulated communications sector. Only last month Han called on Chinese filmmakers to make more patriotic movies.
Underlining CFG's ability to attract capital, Han unveiled a slate of 10 major movies in various states of production to be released over the next 18 months. All are produced or co-financed with leading local, Hong Kong or foreign partners.
Shanghai Media Group, China's second-largest media group by revenue, plans to launch a 24-hour English TV news channel in China this year as it seeks to expand to reach a global audience...
... Shanghai Media's plan has already won strong support from the Shanghai city government, which owns the firm, and is now subject to approval from top regulators in Beijing, they said.
They can probably get over the regulatory obstacles. But will they be able to produce any content that is worth broadcasting? On another note, CCTV 9 is not going to be charmed, but a bit of competition can only be good for the currently appalling English TV in China.Much as the whole thing reeks of media circus, it's still worth a look. Wu Huaiyao, no dummy, went to ten of China's most influential literary critics to nominate the 58 writers who formed the basis of the list. Zhu Dake and Xie Youshun (who has a blog post about it) are probably best-known among the critics, and Zhu gets most of the media attention. He warns that strength does not equal influence does not equal earning power, and gets a few digs in at the inanity of last year's wealthy writers ranking.
"How about the Great Wall of China?"
"Hey, that's great! Nobody in Denver knows much about it!"
"We can say it's going to be demolished to open up China to outside trade."
"Yeah - four engineers who stopped here overnight on their way to San Francisco and then China told us!"
via Bookslut. Explanation here.God-men, inspired by the Roman Empire's style of government and linked with traditional Christianity, have come and gone in Europe for almost two millennia. In the last issue of Vision we looked at a Eurasian manifestation of the ruler cult as it played out in the history of the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. Manipulation of religious sentiment is an important element in the rise and rule of false messiahs, and even atheistic states have succumbed to the temptation to call on the power of piety.
With the spread of totalitarianism and communism in the 20th century, it should not surprise us to find examples of messianic political aspirations in modern oriental Asia, nor to find indigenous antecedents in its ruler cults. China's Mao Zedong, Cambodia's Pol Pot, and the Kim dynasty of North Korea have all claimed savior status. And they have all called on historical precedent and religious sentiment for legitimacy.
A Chinese researcher for The New York Times who was arrested on charges of revealing state secrets and later convicted of fraud was released Saturday after serving a three-year prison sentence...
... The state secrets case was dismissed in March 2006 in an apparent effort to ease strains with Washington ahead of a visit by Hu to the United States. The charges were refiled after Hu returned to China and Zhao was acquitted after a trial.
A Beijing court convicted him in August 2006 of taking $2,500 from a man in 2001 after promising to have the man's 18-month sentence in a labor camp rescinded, according to state media.
Apart from the Australian angle, it is interesting because it introduces a Chinese football legend that I had never heard of, a Hong Kong native called Li Huitang. The article says that in 1976, a German football magazine rated Li as being one of the world's five best football players. Li was influential in retirement as well, becoming Deputy Chairman of FIFA in 1966.
So, how come I haven't heard of this guy? He seems like the perfect example of Chinese soccer prowess and we all know that Chinese soccer desperately needs to be reminded about what is possible.
"There is only one correct figure you and Xinhua can report, and that is the official figure."
Now clearly it is common practice for the Chinese government to not so much massage statistics as give them a merciless pummelling for the people's consumption but it is rare to see such a glaring admission of governmental deception. According to the SCMP, Zheng was delivering the report (which included the real figure) in English to a multinational audience at the annual meeting of the China Association for Science and Technology in Wuhan. I presume that when he says "you and Xinhua" he is talking to the SCMP reporter directly with naive confidence that his comments would not be reproduced in print.
Instead of lecturing Chinese people on how bad they are, Reznor has elected to engage in dialogue. Chinese people are attracted to counterfeit goods for the same reason Americans are attracted to Chinese (and sometimes counterfeit) goods: they're cheaper. He's no fan himself of major record labels and their inflated CD prices. After their last contract album with Universal, NIN going to sell everything online, for "say, $4 an album".
There has been a great deal of speculation in media outside China lately that Li Keqiang (李克强), who is currently serving as party secretary in the northern province of Liaoning, will be pegged as Hu Jintao's successor - or "crown prince" (储君) - at the upcoming 17th National Congress. Without a doubt, Li Keqiang is one of the key figures to watch over the next few weeks. But as a note of caution, it would be careless to focus one's attention entirely on Li. Why is that?
Food prices ballooned by 18.2 percent in August, followed by consumer goods, which jumped by eight percent. Meanwhile, the prices of non-food products rose 0.9 percent, said the bureau.
Grain prices went up by 6.4 percent, cooking oil prices 34.6 percent, meat and poultry 49 percent, eggs 23.6 percent, aquatic products 6.2 percent, and fresh vegetables 22.5 percent, but fresh fruit prices dipped by 3.3 percent, said the bureau.
the Shaanxi Ministry of Education cadre has presented all the identifications to Zhang Lijun and wrapped his hand around the shoulder to explain. But another five or six security guards emerged from a side entrance to the Xi'an International Studies University. They were led by a strong and powerful man over 1.8 meters tall whom I learned later was named Liu Gong. He is the director of the security division of the Xi'an International Studies University.
At this time, there were a dozen security guards. Zhang Lijun challenged again: "What are you? CCTV? If you have the guts, you come over here."
It's not every day that you get to sit and watch a senior Chinese diplomat rip Thomas Friedman 'a new one' (as we say in American colloquial parlance) as all the Chinese members of the audience cheer him on.
Lenovo Group Ltd. plans to introduce the first desktop and laptop computers from its new consumer business unit early next year, Chairman Yang Yuanqing said Saturday.
The plan comes at a crucial juncture. Lenovo is trying to sell more personal computers to consumers and small businesses, a faster-growing segment of the PC market in the U.S., and rely less on sales to large companies, particularly in markets outside China. But it faces stiff competition from rivals including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Taiwan's Acer Inc.
Liu's point is not subtle: today's foreign scrap exports to China are the moral and economic equivalent of the 19th century opium trade. Or, as the printed materials distributed at the opening put it: "...past opium is today's 'foreign' rubbish."...
Unfortunately, none of the "foreign rubbish" that Liu has installed at the Shanghai Gallery of Art is prohibited under Chinese or international law. That is, none of it is e-scrap. In fact, 99% of it is highly recyclable scrap plastic that fetches strong prices on the open market in China and the developed world.
"Is this how you will treat journalists when China hosts the Olympics?" I ask one of them. "Oh, everything will be different then," he says.
Penguin gets big money for Victoria Beckham's new style book from a Chinese publisher.[The Bookseller]
HarperCollins will distribute a travel guide published by China's military just in time for the 2008 Olympics. [Forbes]
Macmillan hooks up with Chinese publisher FLTRP (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press) for Chinese course guides. [The Bookseller]
America is the "developed" market, China the "derivative" one. So the gimmicky phrases we at first adopt to describe cultural currents end up doing much more to drive the trends once exported to China. So it is with LOHAS in the booming metropolises. There the appeal is obvious right now, given the glaring ills of the country at large....
The Party is not blind to this. It's no coincidence that Beijing has been talking LOHAS in its own right for quite a few years now.
It is not surprising that, in the highly bureaucratized world of Chinese Communist Party politics, the guys who make it to the top level are careful, conservative, yes-men, who have made a career out of sensing which way the political wind is blowing and bending accordingly. We should not expect bold, individualistic leadership styles to emerge from such an institutional milieu. The era of powerful singular leaders (powerful in the sense of having the capacity to individually turn public policy quickly in new directions) is gone. There are no more Maos or Dengs. And that may be a good thing. Remember what happened under Mao's personalist rule (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution) and how Deng turned out the army when things got rough in 1989.
But how different is the life of a rural Indian farmer 1,000 miles from Delhi with a vote, and a rural Chinese farmer 1,000 miles from Beijing without a vote? Probably not much. China has never been a democracy, even before Chairman Mao it was ruled by an Emporer and further back split by feuding warlords. Democracy has only become a consideration as the country engages with Western democracies.
Surely if we reject China for some of its values, we are rejecting the opportunity to engage in cultural and social debate about those differences, and to encourage the country to embrace democracy as we have in the West? After all, 25 years ago we would scarcely have considered China to be the economic powerhouse it has become. It has shown a willingness to change - that is a good starting point.
What's most important is that upon knowing that the UA had smashed someone's push stall, I believe that Chongqingers have seen it so often that it doesn't even strike them as unusual now; at the time I also didn't expect the incident to keep escalating to as large as it did. The UA don't just smash people's rice bowls [means of living], but their dinner tables too...not letting people eat, not even letting them earn a living...
From just after seven straight until midnight, the "upstairs" officials took their sweet time getting there, I really don't know what good they thought dawdling around would do....It was around eleven when I heard the first bang, and I thought the police had fired a warning shot, so I took out my camera; but then a flame shot out, then smoke, and the crowd went chaotic...you couldn't see anymore who was a cop and who was a civilian...
Beijing is providing funding for the country’s first home-grown venture capital funds in an attempt to foster a local industry to rival foreign funds operating in China and kickstart a new development zone.
As many as 10 funds with a combined total of more than Rmb20bn ($2.6bn) to invest, including joint ventures with foreign funds, will be approved for the Tianjin Binhai New Area, a new special economic zone, according to a senior government official.
Beijings’s state-led approach to fostering a domestic private equity and venture capital industry has raised eyebrows among managers of foreign funds in China.
After reporting yesterday that Chinese military hackers had compromised Pentagon computers, today The Financial Times reports:
China strongly denied reports on Tuesday that its military was behind a successful hacking attack on the Pentagon computer network earlier this year.
Jiang Yu, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, said at a regular news briefing on Tuesday the accusations against China were 'absurd'.
In a government-sponsored survey on spirituality in China that was conducted earlier this year, officials were shocked to find that 31.4 percent of Chinese 16 or older are religious, putting the number of religious believers in China at approximately 400 million -- way higher than initially thought....
But the Chinese are not just coming to Jesus en masse, they are also turning to Allah, Buddha, and to many other religions (and cults). More schools in China are now opening their doors to religion, and China is also becoming the most unlikely birthplace of progressive Islam, with the establishment of female mosques (unheard of elsewhere) and one of the largest numbers of ordained female imams.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has agreed to declare and disable all its nuclear programs by the end of this year, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill said here on Sunday...
Kim Gye Gwan, head of the DPRK's delegation, confirmed that his country had shown 'clear willingness' in the talks to fully declare and disable its nuclear programs...
... 'We are happy with the way the peace talks went ... And we reached agreement on a lot of things,' he said in Korean.
... But Kim did not mention the end-of-2007 timeline for its nuclear declaration and disablement actions.
From The Wall Street Journal:
China will give the U.N. secretary-general 'basic data of its military expenditures for the latest fiscal year,' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said yesterday in a statement posted on the ministry's Web site.
China stopped providing data for the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms -- which details imports and exports of seven categories of conventional arms -- in 1996, after a 'certain country' gave the register details about its arms sales to Taiwan, Ms. Jiang said in the statement. The country wasn't named.
China will resume giving data on its arms deals because that country has stopped providing information on Taiwan, Ms. Jiang said. The Foreign Ministry statement said China will provide information starting this year, but didn't give a specific date.
According to the U.N. register, the U.S. first reported exporting arms to Taiwan in 1995. It last listed arms exports to Taiwan on the 2004 register.
...the donor organization to require the students to write reports on their schooling lives is completely justified. The donor has the right, prior to granting the funds, to put forth a few requirements, such as where the money is to be spent, or what level of performance the students are to attain - basically donors and charity organizations must all make use of these sorts of approaches to ensure that their money doesn't get abused, and to see the fruition of their original intention.
....Writing letters directly to the donors implies they will be faced with an extremely unequal relationship, with what seems would be a forced, mandatory expression of feelings of appreciation. The later situation proves that this coerciveness is not just psychological pressure, but that it's part and parcel of the whole engagement. This would leave one with an extreme desire to get out, not perhaps of giving thanks itself, but of the forced requirement to do so.
Like other fundees, Duan also went through a "mentally tortuous" process, singing "heart of gratitude" and dancing on stage along with the generous donors....
Many students like Duan went through the fancy ceremony to receive their financial assistance. But many later chose not to show up at a second such event, and didn't even write a letter of thanks to the donors, according to the Xiangfan's workers union, which organized the donation extravaganzas on behalf of the women entrepreneur-philanthropists.
Related: Should students decide whether their classmates are poor?.This isn't the Cold War anymore. China was cozy with Zimbabwe and sold them all the neat internet filtering and radio jamming technologies its own government so enthusiastically employs. But it was never about ideology. It was about strategic interest. And for whatever reason, China's decided it's no longer in its interest to throw its weight behind Robert Mugabe.