Must-read China news by Danwei

Every kind of natural disaster can be found in the oracle bones of the Yin ruins, such as: droughts, floods, earthquakes, windstorms, thunder storms, locust plagues, also solar eclipses and lunar eclipses, because the Shang people also saw these astronomical phenomena as natural disasters. If we say that the oracle bone inscriptions are the source of the Chinese people's characters, then we can say that anxiety about natural disasters is one of the motive forces behind the coming into being of Chinese characters.

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It also occurs to me that few westerners know the subtleties and nuance surrounding the participating parties in the CR. I once did an informal poll among writers I workshop with on what they thought of the Red Guards, and the answers were pretty much uniform with the representative one being "pretty much the same as the Hitler Youth." This is quite baffling and at the same time very interesting. As we know (I'm aware of the pitfall of generalization) Americans hate the communist government of China; but did they know the biggest thing the Red Guards did was to break China's state apparatus? Should a communist hater applaud or condemn that? There is just no simple black-and-white answer.

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The province's standing committee of the people's congress recently released the draft - Regulation on Protection of Rights and Interests of the Aged - to seek public opinion. It is expected to become law by the end of the year.

An article says if children do not live with their parents, they should "often send greetings or go home to visit them." Government employees, who fail to do so, will face sanctions by their respective agencies.

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"Chocolate consumption has been growing rapidly in China in recent years," Lee said. "China's chocolate market may exceed its candy market in size in the next three to four years."

China's 6.46 billion yuan (922 million) chocolate market is growing more than 10 percent each year, fuelled by rising wealth and increasing Western influence on consumer tastes, according to market intelligence company Euromonitor International.

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The possibility of flooding from the Tangjiashan 'quake lake,' caused by China's May 12 earthquake, increased Thursday even as water levels rose steadily to the point where engineers believe they may be able to open a drainage sluice.

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The State Council, China's Cabinet, passed a draft regulation on post-quake restoration and reconstruction at an executive meeting here on Wednesday.

The regulation put forward special requirements on earthquake-resistance levels of infrastructure construction in the quake-hit regions, including schools and hospitals...

...Local governments must organize personnel to conduct safety appraisals of all school buildings as soon as possible to ensure the safety of students as they return to school, according to the statement.

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The beginning of the end

... In recent years there has emerged a consensus that the CCP is here to stay. Talk of democratization in China is dismissed as a 'fantasy' by journalist James Mann ... Fellow writer Ian Buruma ... says the Chinese model represents 'the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930s.'...

...These writers have espied a central truth about contemporary China. It is a relatively legitimate state that is not under immediate pressure to introduce democratic reforms. But does this imply democracy is not in the offing? Absolutely not, and for two related reasons.

First, the CCP today is a 'responsive' or 'legitimacy-driven' regime...

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According to M:Metrics an astounding 34.8% of the 530 million mobile subscribers in China use their phones to listen to music, compared to 5.7% in the US. China's networks, infrastructure and data capabilities might need to improve but the mobile juggernaut is well on its way.

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Guangzhou-based video sharing site 56.com, one of China's triumvirate of 'YouTube clones,' has been temporarily shut down by the Guangdong provincial branch of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), acting on orders from SARFT's national leadership, according to a highly-placed industry insider who declined to be named. The closure seems to have been in effect since 6pm on June 3.

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Thousands of Sichuan parents are grief stricken.

They want answers: why did their children die in the Sichuan earthquake when many other people in surrounding, better-constructed buildings, lived? What are the facts?

...Unknown hundreds of other Chinese have been grieving for 19 years, unacknowledged.

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The advancement of civil society in China in recent weeks has not only been initiated by compassionate citizens and NGOs but also, if a new anti-corruption experiment will pan out, by the Sichuan government. NPR reports that there is a rare opportunity for the Chinese people to supervise government officials. In an effort to prevent local government officials from embezzling part of the aid money that is streaming into Sichuan, the local government is planning to use citizens to supervise the aid process. So far the state has started to take down the contact information of interested citizens. Hundreds of volunteers have already signed up. If this process moves forward it will create a unique public participation experiment in the fight against corruption in China.

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There are many different types of fruit trees in Shao and Wei's front garden. Shao lit a cigarette. "See those pomegranates? They're about to flower - red flowers, really beautiful. But in autumn, as the fruit ripen, you will find they are black and rotten inside." He pointed out a loquat tree. "We used to get fruit as big as a hen's egg from that. Now, they are more like pigeon eggs."

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Last October, when the CCP held its 17th congress, CNN reported the event with the headline "China rules out copying Western democracy." My first reaction to this headline was, So what? That spontaneous reaction might have been an unconscious consequence of my reading Political Confucianism by Jiang Qing, a contemporary Confucian in China. In this book, Jiang Qing draws a blueprint for China's political future based on Confucianism. It is the first such conception since the 1919 May 4th movement that denounced the traditional Chinese ideology as a feudal relic and began the age-old country's modernization efforts.

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By 17:00 on June 3, the water level at Tangjiashan, holding 205.5 million cubic of water, had reached 737.33 meters, only some 2.37 meters away from its overflowing point near the diversion channel dug by risk mitigation team, according to the Water Resources Ministry.

Liu Ning, chief engineer of the Ministry, disclosed that if rainfall continued, chances of the lake to burst were 93%, as every two millimeters of rainfall upstream could increase the water level by one meter. Frequent aftershocks also added the risk, he said.

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A later principal of the school, Lin Mingfu, had filed a report regarding the dangerous situation of the building to Dujiangyan education officials in 1998, saying that this building, constructed in 1986, had serious flaws. Officials told Lin to use some steel wires to hold up the part of the roof that was about to collapse rather than add anything to really buttress it. These few wires wrapped together are what held the building together until the day that it collapsed.

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The Beijing Vantone Real Estate Company plans to build the China Center, a combination chamber of commerce and cultural center, on floors 64 through 69 of the Freedom Tower, at the southeast corner of West and Vesey Streets. Although Vantone has been close to deals at two other sites downtown in recent years, a company executive and officials from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey expressed confidence that it had finally found a home.

"The China Center will be a gateway for Chinese corporations doing business in the U.S. or U.S. companies that want to understand the Chinese culture and do business there," said Xue Ya, project director for the China Center.

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Presumably, the invited fund managers won't sell their holdings into the declining market. But, at the same time, with their cash flow limited, they will be restricted in their ability to buy into the declining market. After all, who wants to buy an investment that can't be sold?

Which is to say that - by eliminating sell pressures - the authorities have succeeded in eliminating any and all incentives to buy into the declining market. Way to go. Down.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:21 AM | Permalink

But China has many good points so sometimes when the news is bad, you have to draw attention to the other side of the coin.

Put most bluntly, the other side of the coin is simply this: one reason a lot of schools collapsed was that there were a lot of schools.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:59 AM | Permalink

The death toll from the devastating 8.0-magnitude earthquake three weeks ago in Sichuan Province increased by three to 69,019 as of Monday noon, the Information Office of the State Council said.

It said 373,573 people were injured and 18,627 others were still missing.

The office said that 45.55 million people were affected by the quake, of whom 15.15 million had been relocated.

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The Chinese government has instructed domestic media outlets to rein in coverage of the schools that collapsed during last month's devastating earthquake in Sichuan province, journalists familiar with the directive have told the Financial Times.

A notice was sent to media outlets across the country late last week, following a spate of reports about the collapses that killed thousands of students.

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A case of apparent looting of disaster relief materials on the highway was solved by Internet users, a policeman and a newspaper reporter.

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From Sunday on, all Chinese retailers, including supermarkets, department stores and grocery stores, would no longer provide free plastic shopping bags. China will try to reduce the use of plastic bags in a bid to reduce energy consumption and polluting emissions.

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