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China’s foreign minister on Thursday scornfully waved aside criticism of his country’s human rights record, suggesting local police would be more likely to give dissidents a cup of tea than to arrest them.
The comments by Yang Jiechi come amid what human rights groups have called a crackdown on dissent ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August, including the recent detention of several high-profile social activists.
China is considering a gradual raising of its limits on the number of children a couple can have, according to a senior official of the National Population and Family Planning Commission.
The comments by Zhao Baige, family planning vice-minister, highlight growing concern about the demographic implications of the strict and sometimes harshly enforced population control rules that are a cornerstone of Chinese social policy.
on April 1, 2003, Gucheng district announced its ban on "production, sale and use of disposable, non-biodegradable polystyrene and plastic packaging." A small group was established to monitor the ban, and the first battle in Lijiang’s war on white pollution had begun. Soon environmental workers and volunteers were distributing leaflets about "white pollution". There were announcements on the local television station every hour.
The ban came into formal effect on July 1. At the time, Zhang was deputy head of group behind the huge political offensive, which saw posters put up across the city explaining the ban. "Using plastic bags is extremely convenient; it was an ingrained habit," he said. "Without pressure no one would change. So we had to get everybody involved, and make sure the message was spread into every single household."
An op ed in the Wall Street Journal last month said the Beijing authorities had closed three monitoring stations in the centre of the city and opened two more in less-polluted areas, thus bringing down the average pollution levels recorded.
'This phenomenon does not exist,' Du Shaozhong, Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau spokesman, told a news conference.
The homeowner groups in China's new private housing estates (xiaoqu) are a complicated mosaic. Some of them can be seen as a manifestation of civil society, while others are something else. For instance, a lot of them are not actually controlled by the homeowners themselves but instead are dominated by the property developers and their management companies. Sometimes the homeowners themselves become factionalized and get bogged down in internal conflict, so that there's no functioning organization. In some places the government has blocked the formation of a formal yeweihui, although there can be informal activity regardless. In other neighborhoods, the homeowner group functions well, holding regular meetings and elections and representing the residents' interests much as, say, a healthy condo association might in the United States.
3,527 screens worth 5.1 billion RMB
What does this mean? 3.327bn/3527 = 943k/screen = 2584 /screen/night
In Beijing, e.g., the movie ticket cost 50-70 Yuan (!!! yes, that is right, almost as much as that in HK). But it is cheaper in other cities and other cinemas (eg, 20-30 for Kunming). Therefore 2584/day means 100 people/screen per day (assuming 25/ticket), which is very small considering there are more than one show per day on average.
When Lou Jiwei visited Switzerland one spring weekend in 1993, the Chinese government economist was so eager to see the inside of a Swiss bank that Credit Suisse Group opened its Zurich head office on a Sunday to show him around...
... Lou also stopped at the homes of farmers in the village of Weesen, an Alpine community with a population of 1,500 people and 3,000 cows. 'He even looked inside the fridges and cupboards,' says Dean LeBaron, a Boston-based fund manager who owns a vacation home in Weesen and hosted Lou's visit. 'He was very inquisitive.'
Today, investors, regulators and politicians are asking questions about Lou, now chairman of China Investment Corp. a sovereign wealth fund set up last year. Lou, 57, who's never been a fund manager before, has about $200 billion in his care, $70 billion of which he will invest outside China...
...His first investments for CIC have had mixed results so far. He spent $3 billion in May for a 9 percent stake in Blackstone Group LP, the world's biggest buyout fund, which has since lost almost half of its value. In December, he bet $5 billion for as much as 9.9 percent of Morgan Stanley, the second-biggest U.S. securities firm. As of Feb. 26, a 9.9 percent stake would have been worth $4.91 billion.
The article contains plenty of numbers about CIC, the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, and biographical detail about Lou.The tragedy in this - for both China and the Houston Rockets - is that Yao’s laudable efforts to please both masters has resulted in an injury that will disappoint both. The Rockets are in the midst of their best run of Yao’s NBA career, and I think it unlikely that they’ll be able to repeat it. Likewise, China’s Olympic basketball team was not expected to win in Beijing, but it surely expected to place well, and Yao’s (presumably) superb play was the key. Now it’s not even clear that Yao will play in the Olympics. But if he does manage to appear, he’ll be doing it with all of the rust that accompanies rehab from a major injury, and his team and country will suffer for it.
Like a lot of marriages, Mao and the Party were in a bit of a rut, the passion was gone, they were missing the ZazaZoom. Not completely sure how best to rekindle the spark, Mao fell into a pattern that any $150/hour marriage counselor would quickly identify as "passive-aggressive."
First of all, his speech relied on the oft-used but fatally flawed strategy of fishing for compliments. In essence, he asked "You don’t really love me that much, do you?" — confident in his heart that there could be but one correct answer: "Yes, of course! Of course we love you Mao…"
The highway linking the town of Xinjie in Hekou County in southeastern Yunnan province with Lao Cai province in northern Vietnam was opened yesterday, marking completion of the first highway linking Yunnan with a neighboring country from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Six international and domestic airlines will begin operating in the terminal Friday, while others will switch over from the other two terminals in March.
The new building was designed by Norman Foster. See also this opinion piece in The Independent: The Chinese get things done — at a cost.A small U.S. delegation is currently in China, anticipating that a final agreement can be reached by week's end.
"We just hope that we can find something out of these records that they have. We believe that these records will help us … and hopefully, it will help us unlock clues as to the fate of our missing," said Capt. Mary Olsen, a spokesperson for the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO).
Once an agreement is signed later this week, U.S. officials hope a timetable can be reached soon for American investigators to begin researching the Chinese files, which DPMO has been seeking access to for years.
The draft forbids guards to do the followings: restrict personal freedom of any individual and make body search, insult, assault, battery or induce others to commit battery, withhold individual's property or identification, interfere official performance.
It also bans guards to use violence or threaten to use violence to importune for payment, infringe personal privacy or leak out secrecy and other illegalities.
In a blog post, journalist Huang Yilong welcomes the idea of kinder, gentler security guards, but finds the regulations redundant:If this regulation goes into effect, if the Chinese people no longer have their personal liberty restricted by security guards, or are subject to search and seizure at their hands, then this is indeed good news.
However, if instead of security guards carrying out the above acts, it is mayors and village heads, or police and urban enforcement, or even thieves and burglars who carry them out, must we then enact separate Service Management Regulations for mayors and village heads, police and urban enforcement, and thieves and burglars in order to guarantee that our personal and property rights are fully protected?
Then what use is the grand Constitution of the People's Republic of China, which guarantees citizens' personal and property rights? Is it just there so that we can gaze on in admiration?
The entrances to the tunnels (there are many) are locked, except for the tourist section east of Qianmen, and where the tunnels are still of use to certain personages…
I and an anonymous band of doughty explorers descended into the murky, flooded depths, to bring back these stunning images of the netherworld. Sadly all the tunnels leading off into the great unmonitored unknown were bricked up or choked with rubble (including the one that made a beeline to Zhongnanhai), but the itch was mostly scratched.
"The opera classes are by no means a nationwide compulsory class, but pilot programs implemented in certain schools from March to July next year," said ministry spokesman Wang Xuming at a press conference on Monday.
"The Peking Opera class is a meaningful move to uphold China's national spirit and cultivate student patriotism", said Jiang Peimin, director of the Ministry's Basic Education Department.
Cuban army general Raul Castro was elected the new president of Cuba on Sunday during a legislative session held at Cuba's Palace of Conventions in Havana.
Raul said his older brother Fidel Castro would remain a key figure and vowed to be on guard against U.S. 'meddling' as he assumed the presidency.
The Xinhua report also notes various facts about Cuban democracy in action, e.g.:On Sunday, 597 deputies unanimously elected a 31-member Council of State for a term of five years, which in turn elected Raul as president of the country.
The phonetic alphabet developed by Zhou Youguang, pinyin, turns 50 this month, having helped up to a billion Chinese citizens to learn to read, write and in many cases speak the national language.
The 102-year-old linguist is renowned as the "father of pinyin", the system for representing standard Mandarin in the Roman alphabet. The country is celebrating the anniversary with lectures, a TV series and educational programmes.
China's Communist leaders are taking another step away from their Marxist-Leninist roots by removing the word 'Revolutionary' from the titles awarded to those who die an heroic death.