« December 23, 2007 - December 29, 2007 | Main | January 6, 2008 - January 12, 2008 »
China's Shougang Corp., parent of the only publicly traded steelmaker based in Beijing, will cut its production by 4 million metric tons this year to improve the environment as the capital city hosts the summer Olympic Games.
...Beijing Shougang is China's second-biggest producer of construction-grade steel.
For house-arrested Hu Jia in Beijing, it was his firsthand news last week that Guangzhou-based Zhang Qing, wife of imprisoned lawyer Guo Feixiong, had on Dec. 26 discovered that the roughly USD 1,000 left in her bank account had disappeared. No time like the present, Hu Jia was arrested the next day in the middle of a Skype chat while his wife Zeng Jinyan was in the bathroom giving their month-old baby a bath. Ten or more police had forced their way in, disconnected all communications in the house, and left, placing 24 year-old Zeng and baby under house arrest, where they most likely still remain today.
See also: Richard Spencer's comments on the foreign ministry's response to reporter inquiries.According to a CMP source, the Central Propaganda Department issued a ban early last month on all coverage criticizing the rollout of DTV services in the country. Censors, the source said, singled out a December 7 editorial from the official Xinhua News Agency’s Xinhua Daily Telegraph. The article was called, "Overbearing ‘digital TV’ harms our self-respect."
The Xinhua Daily Telegraph article was still available on the Xinhua News Agency website this month, but the propaganda department ban expressly directed all national and local media against excerpting the article or attempting their own coverage of the issue.
A secretive Hong Kong-based subsidiary of China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, manager of the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, has bought stakes in three of Australia’s largest banks, raising fresh questions about transparency of China’s sovereign wealth investments in international markets.
Australia and New Zealand Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia said Hong Kong-registered SAFE Investment Company had bought stakes of less than one per cent in each of the banks. An entity with the same name has taken a stake of about one-third of a per cent in National Australia Bank , people inside NAB reckon.
The SAFE Investment Company? Kinda like Acme Inc.What I mean is that corporations often behave like livestock when it comes to public relations. They herd. Every company likes to think of itself as the hard-charging alpha-bull leading that herd into pristine new pastures, but in fact most are just ambling along with the crowd and dreaming of having the biggest horns. Our job, as PR cowboys, is to pry our particular cow far enough from the herd that it can be spotted from a distance, but not so far out that it is devoured by wolves.
This herding is the product of two ingrained things: similar approaches to risk management in many PR departments, especially in Asia; and a tendency for those PR departments to all grab onto the same big ideas at the same time. It's the latter that's bugging me now. 2008 is on the way and virtually every company that Imagethief has helped with its 2008 China PR planning has asked for the same two things: Make us Olympic and make us green.
In terms of capital and ownership structures, the biggest change is about Ming Pao. Ming Pao Ltd is going to merge with two listed companies in Malaysia, Sinchew and Nanyang. But the plan is not yet implemented. According to this plan, Sinchew and Nanyang, no longer listed in Malaysia, will be owned by Ming Pao. Ming Pao might be listed in the stock markets of Hong Kong and Malaysia.
This is the media empire of Tiong Hiew King. As the biggest shareholder of Sinchew, he acquired 20.02% of Nanyang from Malaysian Chinese Association in October. Now the biggest Chinese newspapers are already owned by him. Now with his ownership of Ming Pao, he further integrates the two media groups in Malaysia into it. His business widely covers the Chinese communities in Malaysia, Hong Kong, US and Canada. But Ming Pao does not make much improvement in revenue and profit. Perhaps, after merger and acquisition, Tiong will make something news.
The parent of Air China plans a HK$5-per-share counter offer for rival China Eastern, representing a 32 percent premium above Singapore Airlines' proposal of HK$3.8 per share, Mingpao Daily reported on Thursday.
China National Aviation Corp (Group) Ltd (CNAC), parent of Air China, the world's biggest airline by stock market value, had said Singapore Airlines and its parent Temasek's offer to buy a combined 24 percent stake in China Eastern for US$920 million was too low.
[T]he controversial plan to dam Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge (虎跳峡) has been scrapped.
The sparing of the gorge and its 100,000 inhabitants – who would have been forced to relocate to much less hospitable terrain – may be the biggest win to date for mainland environmentalists. The victory may only be a pyrrhic one, as other portions of the Yangtze River's upper reaches, known in Yunnan as the Jinsha River (金沙江) are under consideration for hydropower projects.
Chinese-language literature in Manchuria (known then as Manchukuo 滿洲國) during the Japanese occupation (1931-1945) has proved perplexing to those working in the areas of colonialism, national identity, and modernism. In recent years, it has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, but the difficulty of locating original publications, which were rare to begin with and are now widely scattered, combined with negative views of the Japanese invasion and subsequent rule, have prevented both domestic and foreign scholars from a genuine restoration of the subject's history and a creative, integrated interpretation of the works. The study of Chinese-language Manchukuo literature has thus been dominated by the following discourse of resistance: the contemporary sociopolitical environment faced by Chinese-language writers in Northeast China was extremely difficult; not only did they suffer economic deprivation, but their ambition to be spokesmen of the colonized natives was threatened by draconian literary regulations and severe censorship; young writers, especially those who chose to stay after the establishment of Manchukuo, resisted government-sponsored, conservative, Confucian wangdao 王道 (kingly way) ideas.
The use of lethal injection will be expanded to replace gunshot executions, a senior judicial official has said.
Jiang Xingchang, vice-president of the Supreme People's Court (SPC), said half of the country's 404 intermediate people's courts - which carry most of the executions - use lethal injections.
'It is considered more humane and will eventually be used in all intermediate people's courts,' Jiang told China Daily without revealing a timetable...
...Xiao said abolishing the capital punishment or strictly limiting the use of the death sentence are a global trend and 'China is also working toward that direction.'
He, however, stressed that the goal cannot be achieved overnight.
On the afternoon of December 4, we were attending the fifth anniversary event for the Jiangsu bureau of Jiangsu Legal System News and we learned from a media friend that the CCTV program Focus Interview intends to come to Xiangshu to cover the November 27 incident. We took a high degree of attention. On one hand, we reported to the relevant leaders to make sure that the preparations were made. On the other hand, we quickly found out the name, mobile telephone number and background of the informant and applied pressure through the department that employs him. At the same time, we quickly made contact with the informant and met with him directly in Quanyun. We discussed with him rationally and we appealed to his feelings. We asked him to contact the CCTV reporter and said that the information was inaccurate. This stopped the CCTV team from coming and therefore prevented what could be a major news story just in time.
I cannot forget the look of terror in the eyes of one of the middle-aged billionaires. As he looked at me, he grabbed my hand hysterically and screamed: "You are asking me why I need to run so far away before I dare to speak to you? You ask me why I am afraid? That's because he has guns. Do you know how many guns he owns?"
This middle-aged man was an iron mine owner in Tangshan city (Hebei province) with about 1 billion yuan in wealth. The local gangsters Yang Shukuan held a gun to his head and forced him to sign a contract to provide 60 million yuan in "aid." Afterwards, Yang drugged the man's wife and raped her. The wife took 30 million yuan from her husband and vanished without a trace. "Yang must have killed my wife. What is the use of my money? My family is broken." He was crying as he spoke. It was very sad.
Gibbons says she now hopes to teach children in China and will take a new teddy bear, called Barnaby, for her new pupils.
"I've been to China on holiday before and loved it," Gibbons told Hello! magazine.
"Besides which, I know I'm the most notorious teacher in the world at the moment but I'm hoping that perhaps no one has heard of me there."
Beijing on Friday approved the launch of China’s first gold futures contracts, with simulated trading on the Shanghai Futures Exchange set to begin on Wednesday.
The exchange is expected to begin selling real renminbi-denominated contracts soon after and is preparing for huge demand from the rapidly expanding number of Chinese producers and consumers.