« November 23, 2008 - November 29, 2008 | Main | December 7, 2008 - December 13, 2008 »

December 6, 2008

Chinese property hunters to raid US

By Geoff Dyer in The Financial Times:

Chinese bargain hunters are preparing to descend on American cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, where homeowners have suffered some of the steepest price falls in the US.

SouFun, the biggest real estate website in China, is organising a trip next month to look at properties in California and possibly Nevada. Liu Jian, the company's chief operating officer, said about 300 people had expressed interest in the idea in the three days since it was advertised, though the company would take only a small group on the first trip.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:40 PM |

December 5, 2008

Eight-legged Internet essays

ESWN translates an op-ed by Guo Guangdong in the Southern Weekly:

We might as well as characterize these government websites as "Internet eight-legged essays." These websites claimed to be running an open government, but they are actually making sure that government affairs are being hidden.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 3:44 PM |

China, India to hold joint anti-terror military training

From Xinhua:

The Chinese and Indian military forces will hold a joint anti-terror military training from Dec. 6 to 14 in India, the Chinese Defense Ministry said on Thursday.

The two armies will each dispatch an infantry company to take part in the joint training, code-named 'Hand in Hand 2008', in south India's Belgaum District, said the ministry spokesman Huang Xueping...

...The two countries held their first joint anti-terrorism military training in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province last year.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:13 AM |

Sheng Shicai, Xinjiang warlord governor

The Opposite End of China blog looks at

'Sheng Shicai 盛世才 (pictured above), Xinjiang's warlord governor from 1933 to 1944. Some of you may remember him for chasing the Pickle King of Islamistan back to Britain ten years earlier. Others may remember him as Stalin's hand pick for Communist Party membership... who then flipped to the Kuomintang in 1942 and executed Chairman Mao's little brother.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:09 AM |

Be nice to the countries that lend you money

In The Atalantic Monthly, Q&A with writer James Fallows and 'Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages 'only' about $200billion of the country's foreign assets but makes most of the high-visibility investments, like buying stakes in Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, as opposed to just holding Treasury notes.'

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:07 AM |

Scrapped

Adam Minter in The Atlantic Monthly:

For the last decade or so, scrap metal has been the largest volume export from the United States to China. But with the economy in a tailspin, unclaimed scrap metal is starting to pile up at China's ports.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:03 AM |

Mining and conflict in Chongqing

At China Dialogue, Zhou Jigang and Zhu Chuhua write about a county that produces one-fifth of the world's supply of manganese:

Central government directives and local laws exist to control the pollution from the manganese mines, but in reality local and county officials have done little or nothing to prevent the mining from wreaking environmental havoc. In recent years, 41 manganese mines were given permits to operate in Xiushan. But a local newspaper reported that as many as 230 additional mines were operating illegally in the county, using an estimated 700,000 kilograms of explosives to blast holes in the mountains, after which workers hacked out the manganese using picks, their hands, and some mechanised equipment.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:46 AM |

December 4, 2008

Baidu's problems: The other side of the equation

China Vortex talks about Baidu's integrity problem:

On one level, Baidu is a victim of its own success. Search engines are really mapmakers: they show what's in the neighborhood. In its early days, before Baidu became pervasive, it may have been alright to take money for businesses to show up on the map without caring too much about the reputation of the business. After all, search was a comparatively new thing, and Baidu, not yet public, wanted to grow as fast as possible, both in terms of its indexes and database, and in financial terms. But now, everyone knows what a search engine does and expects it to basically tell the truth. And if it doesn't, they are shocked and outraged.

See also: Speak, Baidu, Speak at the Silicon Hutong, and AdTech, AdGate and Blue Collar Blogging at One Man Bandwidth.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:36 AM |

After quake, reverse vasectomies

The Wall Street Journal reports on families who lost children in the Wenchuan earthquake starting to move on:

The Sichuan Reproductive Faculty Hospital in Chengdu has performed more than 30 procedures to reverse tubal ligations and vasectomies for quake parents, including Mr. Zhu. More than 110 couples have visited the hospital for consultation since the earthquake. About half have been given some form of fertility treatment or counseling, although the hospital turned away 18 couples because they were believed to be too old to benefit from treatment.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 11:34 AM |

Mocking a Beijing icon

dakucha_cctv.jpg
Internet wags across the country and newspapers in Shanghai are mocking Beijing's new landmark, the CCTV building designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:27 AM |

China to shun dodgy Western financial institutions

FromThe New York Times:

The chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund said on Wednesday that China had no plans for further investments in Western financial institutions, nor did it have any plans to 'save' the world through economic policies.

The comments by Lou Jiwei, the chairman and chief executive of the China Investment Corporation, are the clearest signal yet that after taking heavy losses on initial investments in the Blackstone Group, Morgan Stanley and Barclays, state-run Chinese institutions have no appetite for further purchases in this sector.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:09 AM |

English essay templates

Sinosplice presents fill-in-the-blank templates for ESL essays, "taken from an MBA prep course in Shanghai":

Nevertheless, it is a pity that every medal has two sides and the disadvantages of 主题 can't be ignored. To begin with, there will be a danger of (缺点1) spending too much time on it therefore ignoring what you should concentrate on. To make matters worse, (缺点2)主题 is most likely to add to your daily expenses. Worst of all, (缺点3)主题 may plunge you into an unexpected trouble.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:45 AM |

December 3, 2008

CASS remains bullish: China "could" enjoy 9% GDP growth

From Xinhua:

Chinese economy is forecast to grow by more than 9 percent next year, according to an annual blue paper released by the Chinese Academy of Social Science on Tuesday.

Despite the huge uncertainty in 2009, China could still achieve a 9-percent growth as long as it unveils timely and suitable macro-economic control measures to boost domestic demand, said the blue paper.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 1:46 PM |

Xiaogang and the search for the truth

Richard Spencer tracks down the date that farmers in Xiaogang, Anhui Province, signed a compact to end the commune system in their village. Was it November or December, 1978? Or perhaps the following January?

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:48 AM |

December 2, 2008

Only diversity of opinion is normal

From David Bandurski at the China Media Project:

As the December 18 anniversary of 30 years of economic reform in China approaches, there is no better time to reflect back on changes in China's media. In an interview that appeared in yesterday's edition of the Economic Observer, journalism professor Chen Lidan (陈力丹), of Renmin University, discusses his personal experiences as a press worker and researcher....

...I'm no longer interested in guidance of public opinion as an expert question. Guidance of public opinion is not a serious academic question, but rather a political demand ... Uniformity of opinion is abnormal. Only diversity of opinion is a normal thing.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 5:57 PM |

Cultural understanding in Washington, DC

Capitol Hill interns, as seen by a visiting Chinese journalist.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:55 AM |

Mass incidents and the culpability of officials

Xinhua's Outlook Weekly magazine runs an opinion piece suggesting that officials who blame civil unrest on the masses being out of touch with the facts are themselves guilty of not providing the public with better information. China Journal summarizes the piece and puts it into context:

"The masses have the right to understand the truth, so the appearance of situations where the masses 'don't know the truth' is truly a dereliction of duty by local powers."

A full translation by David Kelly is on China Digital Times.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:24 AM |

Let 1000 peasant robots bloom

Mutant Palm comments on the Chinese media's fascination with the genuis of backwoods inventors.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:11 AM |

Xinhua top story: Hu Jintao visits AIDS patients

The country's propaganda apparatus is finally behind education and openness about HIV and AIDS. The top banner story on Xinhua's Chinese website links to a photo of Hu Jintao inpecting AIDS treatment facilities at Ditan Hospital in Beijing, with the subtitle:


General Secretary Hu Jintao inspects AIDS treatment work at Ditan Hospital in Beijing and emphasizes:



Let every citizen understand AIDS prevention and let every patient have timely access to treatment

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 7:57 AM |

December 1, 2008

Chinese chef escapes Mumbai massacre

From The China Daily:

'I wasn't sacred until seeing the war-like scene at the hotel lobby,' Shi Xilin, survivor of the Mumbai attack, said Sunday afternoon.

Shi works as a chef for the Golden Dragon Chinese Restaurant of Taj Mahal Hotel which had been captured by terrorists during the disastrous attack that lasted almost 60 hours starting from Wednesday night.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:55 AM |

World's oldest marijuana stash in China

More news from Xinjiang, where the excavation of a mummy has already caused some controversy; this from Canda's The Star:

Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China...

...'To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent,' says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo...

...Russo is a full-time consultant with GW Pharmaceuticals, which makes Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for pain linked to multiple sclerosis and cancer.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:49 AM |

Transforming China's civil society from the inside out

CNReviews recaps the remarks of some of the presenters at the recent CNBloggercon.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:19 AM |

Carlyle Group to invest 50 million into Beijing education company

From Caijing English:

The education sector's resistance to recession and its potential for growth are luring funds from private equities and venture capitalists.

The private equity firm Carlyle Group announced that it plans to invest US$ 50 million into Haoyue Group, a Beijing-based private education service. The venture is part of Carlyle Group's new effort to shift its assets to sectors that are relatively immune to economic cycles.

Haoyue will use the money to expand its campus, to acquire other private vocational schools over the next three years, and to launch short-term training programs, Carlyle Asia Growth Partners Group (CAGP) said Thursday.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:10 AM |

November 30, 2008

Bringing the water tax to a remote village

The Absurdity, Allegory and China blog describes two attempts at a public works project:

In the two years that the original water system worked the community had good, free water, but, the quality of the work ensured that the system wouldn't last. After we went in last year and assessed the problem, privately raised the funds to redo the system and worked with the villagers.....90 households now have running clean water into the walled yards of their houses....

Well, two days after the water began running the local government showed up, saw the progress that had been made and decided to take action: everyone would now have to pay a water tax, despite the fact that there had not been one even during the two years when the old system actually worked, and despite the fact that the government had nothing to do with the expensive repair of the broken system.

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 10:00 AM |

Child in US custody fight adjusts to new country

A lengthy AP profile of Anna He and her life in China a year after a high-profile custody battle in the US:

On a recent Friday night, Anna and Avita huddle in one room, dressed in matching Hello Kitty tops and whispering to each other in English on a bed strewn with a Chinese checkers board, marbles and miniature plastic figurines.

Here at home, everybody talks to Anna in English. Her brother and sister are perfectly fluent in English and Chinese. Everyone calls her "Anna," instead of her Chinese name "He Sijia."

After nine months in China, Anna still does not speak much Chinese, a notoriously difficult language to learn. She says she can understand some things "if it's really easy."

Posted by Joel Martinsen at 9:52 AM |