« March 16, 2008 - March 22, 2008 | Main | March 30, 2008 - April 5, 2008 »

March 29, 2008

Cooperatives: Once diminished, twice powerful

The Economic Observer examines the revival of cooperatives in Ningbo:

When being questioned if SMCs were monopolizing the rural market through administrative means, Zheng replied that the government redefined SMCs [supply and marketing cooperatives] as public entities in order to guarantee farmers' interests to the greatest extent. "Companies work to maximize profits, and therefore can't guarantee farmers' interests, especially when there're conflicts between different groups of people," he explained.

To Zheng's understanding, there wasn't a monopoly there. SMCs were just organizing individual entities together and supplying the same goods to them in the form of chain operations, he said, adding that not only was this saving money and labor, but also guaranteeing the quality of goods sold.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:40 PM |

Price of rice skyrockets

Daniel Ten Kate of The Financial Times reports:

Governments across Asia were rushing to secure rice stocks on Friday in the wake of a 30 per cent price jump in international markets.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:22 AM |

March 28, 2008

China cracks down on 'illegal' maps

A misguided attempt by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping to stop national security risks, or a bureaucratic land grab?

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 5:45 PM |

China should go forth, write and conquer

China Machete gives the Chinese press a dressing-down in the wake of whinging about western media bias:

China is doing a great job perpetuating the domination of the Western media. Two of its most popular newspapers, the Global Times and Information Reference, derive most of their content from foreign media reports. How can you complain about Western media bias when it is one of your main sources of information? I think Chinese journalists spend most of their time hiding behind the words of the Western media, e.g. so and so said this about the PLA and this US professor said that China has many economic problems. The problem with the Chinese media is that hardly anybody voices their own personal opinion about anything, so the whole world relies on foreign reports.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 4:06 PM |

Defeating the Nanny: blog hosting

Thomas Crampton has a post titled 'Best blog hosting service to sidestep China’s Great Firewall?' that has also elicited some useful feedback in the comments.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 3:12 PM |

Tîbet and the environment

Alex Pasternack has posted an article on Treehugger that rounds up a good variety of sources about problems in Tîbet, including environmental issues.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 2:27 PM |

Google ads on Beijing tricycles

Photos from the Go Too Far East blog: Is Google advertising on the sides of Beijing tricycles (三轮车)?

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:49 PM |

China still a small player in Africa

From Pambazuka News:

What I find a bit reprehensible is the tendency of certain Western voices to … raising concerns about China’s attempt to get into the African market because it is a bit hypocritical for Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa when they have had centuries of relations with Africa, starting with slavery and continuing to the present day with exploitation and cheating.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:23 PM |

Idiot-proof

At the That's Beijing website, Kaiser Kuo reviews China for Dummies: Making the Inscrutable Chinese more Scrutable, a guide to China written by the late Harry O. Chestnut:

With an historian’s subtle grasp of China’s 5,000-year history (the author holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of Southwestern Kentucky), Mr. Chestnut gives us a clear understanding of those timeless cultural forces that continue to shape the Chinese way in business. "Business is warfare," he says, "and the Chinese literally wrote the book." In just six chapters, Chestnut succeeds in distilling the ancient wisdom of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and the classic works of just about every other notable Tzu not into nebulous platitudes, but rather into actionable insights that you can put to work at the negotiating table, in your marketing plan, or in managing your Chinese staff.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:41 AM |

Returning home, remembering

The bezdomny ex patria blog translates a poignant blog post about catching up with old friends.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:30 AM |

Fallen Shanghai mayor in the dock

From the International Herald Tribune:

The trial of Shanghai's former Communist Party chief, who was ousted in a sweeping corruption cleanup that began nearly two years ago, has begun in the northeastern city of Tianjin, reports said Thursday.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Chen Liangyu, the highest party official to be ousted in more than a decade, is being tried in the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 8:49 AM |

March 27, 2008

Weather engineering in China

MIT's Technology Review looks at how China is preparing to guarantee good weather for the Olympic Games:

The Chinese began experimental weather engineering in 1958 to irrigate the country's north, where average yearly rainfall compares with that during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and sudden windstorms blasting down from the Gobi desert have made drought and famine constant possibilities. Today, the People's Republic budgets $60 to $90 million annually for its national Weather Modification Office. As for the return on this investment, the state-run news agency Xinhua claims that between 1999 and 2007, the office rendered 470,000 square kilometers of land hail-free and created more than 250 billion tons of rain--an amount sufficient to fill the Yellow River, China's second largest, four times over.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:41 PM |

Complaints about the National People's Congress

JDM080327sessions.jpg
Some reactions to new developments at this year's NPC sessions: migrant worker representatives in the spotlight, a self-interested businesswoman, and officials with dismal popularity ratings.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 5:34 PM |

The heavier hammer

Jim Gourley addresses recent stories out of Tibet and bordering regions:

One story that is not being reported, though it is one with a great deal of tooth, is that Tibetan boarding schools – from middle schools to universities – have been under lockdown for the last two weeks....Tibetan students are not allowed outside the gates of their schools, and their families are not allowed in to see them. Parents who visit the school must stay outside the iron-barred gate, and their interactions are monitored. In at least one school students are not allowed to be alone in a classroom without a teacher present from 6 AM to 9:30 PM, and the campus dorms are patrolled by teachers throughout the night. That there are plainclothes police around the perimeter is understood.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 2:45 PM |

Bush and Hu have late night chat

Xinhua reports:

Chinese President Hu Jintao expressed his views on the Taiwan and Tibet issues to his U.S. counterpart George W. Bush during talks over the telephone held Wednesday...

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:16 PM |

Cult Rev vocabulary and Tîbet

Channel 4's Lyndsey Hilsum looks at the government's use of hoary old words with Cultural Revolution associations to talk about Tîbet.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:55 AM |

'Dia' a new English word?

From FEER's blog:

We’re not sure whether to treat this as credible, but Sina.com and Xinhuanet are reporting that the Oxford English Dictionary has added one of our favorite Chinese words, 嗲 or dia, as an import to the English language.

Maybe The First (the Xinhuanet link) got hoaxed: see this blog post from April, 2007.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:48 AM |

"National moral model" passes away

Xinhua reports on the death of Fang Yonggang, a professor of politics from Dalian who was named a "national moral model" last year:

Fang, who had been treated in hospital for colon cancer since 2006, had been visited by a number of senior leaders, including Hu Jintao...who praised him for his "significant contribution to the Party, the Army and the People."

Hu urged all people in China to learn from Fang, who kept studying and publicizing his innovative political theories and displayed the firm faith, staunch will and lofty spirit of a Communist.

Those unfamiliar with Fang's exploits can read a Washington Post profile from May, 2007.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:24 AM |

Religious buildings in Taiwan

At Global Voices Online, I-fan Lin presents a photo essay on religious structures in Taiwan.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 8:44 AM |

March 26, 2008

Six new Chinese ambassadors

Xinhua reports that Hu Jintao appointed new ambassadors India, Italy, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, and the Bahamas, as well as a new United Nations envoy.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:57 AM |

March 25, 2008

Xinhua top story: US deaths in Iraq reach 4,000

Xinhua's top story today:

Four U.S. soldiers died Sunday night in a roadside bombing in Iraq, bringing the American toll in the five-year war to 4,000...

...The grim milestone comes less than a week after the fifth anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Iraq...

...Estimates of the Iraqi death toll since the war began range from about 80,000 to hundreds of thousands.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:28 AM |

The trouble with Chinese cinema

Kaiju Shakedown returns from Hong Kong Filmart with some notions about problems in the Chinese film industry, from money to SARFT to distribution:

It's interesting to compare China to Bollywood, since both film industries have a lot of similarities - government regulation of the import market, restricted content, demographically similar audience - but whereas Bollywood has become the only country capable of competing with Hollywood on the world stage, China seems to be binding the feet of its industry in the cradle.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:24 AM |

Chinese SF writers remember Arthur C. Clarke

Translations of a few blog and forum posts from Chinese science fiction authors and fans who have written in commemoration of the SF master.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:07 AM |

The Olympics were already political

Richard Spencer argues that politicization of the Olympics was an inevitable consequence of China's political structure: the head of BOCOG, for example, is Liu Qi, the municipal party secretary for Beijing, "the capital's number one man, if you like."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:58 AM |

March 23, 2008

Ma Ying-jeou wins Taiwan election, smiles at China

From Bloomberg:

Ma Ying-jeou won Taiwan's presidential election, vowing to improve ties with China after eight years of pro-independence rule by Chen Shui-bian.

Ma, of the opposition Kuomintang, beat the Democratic Progressive Party's Frank Hsieh 58 percent to 42 percent, according to the Central Election Commission. About 75 percent of Taiwan's eligible voters cast ballots.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 4:09 PM |