China and the global financial crisis
The Spring 2009 issue of the China Left Review features Chinese and English articles on the global financial crisis and its effect on China, China's role in the Middle East, and a variety of other topics.
« April 19, 2009 - April 25, 2009 | Main | May 3, 2009 - May 9, 2009 »
May 2, 2009
Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow Jones get the green light?
From Taiwan's China Post comes a story that no other sources (including Xinhua) seem to be reporting:
Beijing announced rules that ease controls on foreign financial information providers Thursday under an agreement with the United States, Europe and Canada but said those already operating in China must apply for permission to continue.
If this story is correct, it's the second victory in a struggle that the foreign wire services have been waging for over a decade.
China suspends flights from Mexico
From Xinhua:
With a case of influenza A/H1N1 confirmed in a flight coming from Mexico, the Chinese government has decided to suspend flights from Mexico to Shanghai in east China, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
For detail and commentary on the cause of the flight suspension, see Adam Minter: Fever (even) When You Hold Me Tight: Shanghai's unmistakable H1N1-related PR mistake?
April 30, 2009
China's internal "war of information control"
At the China Media Project, David Bandurski summarizes the latest cases of Chinese citizens jailed for criticizing local officials, Wang Shuai and Wu Baoquan, and puts them into a context of wenziyu.
My Tibetan Students and I
From Fool's Mountain, Nimrod translates a letter that originally appeared on Zaobao.com: a teacher from the Shanghai Administration School wrote about his experiences with his Tibetan students:
I love my Tibetan students very much. But my romantic vision at the beginning gradually disappeared. I feel that people everywhere are the same. If they have some special characteristics, these must be imprinted by their environment. Usually we believe Tibetan people are simple and warm, unmoved by materialism. But I think this is caused by living a long time in a closed and monotonous environment. In my observation, my Tibetan students all adjust to Shanghai very quickly. They go from nervous and shy to fashionable and confident quickly. In a matter of months, if they have the financial resources, they become no different from the young Shanghai boys and girls. They don't get assimilated into Han, but they get urbanized, modernized. This is certainly not the deliberate doing of the government.
I don't believe that Tibet was heaven fifty years ago, because my students showed me her family photos from the Fifties. They frightened me.
The original Chinese article from Zaobao.com.
Cross-border relations in the face of swine flu
NBC News Producer Adrienne Mong travels on a plane from Beijing to New York, and wonders if China will step up its border quarantine controls:
Among those lessons learned is greater surveillance of travelers' health - which happens even when there is no apparent threat. For instance, at the Beijing airport, departing and arriving international passengers must always walk through an infrared temperature scan - even when no pandemic threats are in the headlines.
And in recent days, the government has responded with alacrity by promising greater openness and vigilance in its monitoring of the H1N1 virus. It has also banned pig and pork imports from Mexico and the U.S. - although the World Health Organization (WHO) has stressed the virus is not transmitted through the handling or consumption of food.
$3.4 bln on energy saving and ecological projects
From Xinhua:
Of the 23 billion yuan spending, 13 billion went to improving urban water treatment facilities, 4 billion yuan to pollution prevention projects on the Huaihe and other big rivers, 3.5 billion yuan to forest planting projects and the other 2.5 billion yuan to key energy saving projects across the country.
Can you name your local Party official?
Peter Foster, stationed in Beijing for the Daily Telegraph, conducts a survey on the streets of Korla, Xinjiang:
Tellingly perhaps, the 55yr-old security guard said: "I used to remember the party secretary's name when he was a Uighur, but not any more."
Visa controls ahead of the Party's party
For The Age, John Garnaut reports on tightening visa controls ahead of the 60th anniversary:
"It is even more important than the Olympic Games -- this is the party's party," said Geremie Barme, professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University.
Wen and Aso chat about
wireless communication, friendly ties etc.
From The China Daily:
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao held official talks on Wednesday with his Japanese counterpart Taro Aso on bilateral ties, the global economic downturn and other major issues of common concern...
...Topics high on agenda in Aso's talks with the Chinese leaders include the global downturn, the environment, energy, personnel exchanges, wireless communication, regional security and measures to build "strategic mutually beneficial ties", said Kazuo Kodama, press secretary of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
A veil of silence over the mahjong tables
Beijing Loafer writes about a trip home after a several-year absence:
The most awkward was with my two distant cousins whom I used to be close to. They might have lost their jobs from their work units. One married a truck driver, the other a railway employee. Both had kids who have no access to dancing rehearsals, piano classes or french lessons as my sister's kid. No one asked about my sister's or my work, unlike in the past when they would excitedly query us about our academic awards at school. I did not dare ask how they were doing, for fear of making it even more obvious how differently we had fared in life.
Another recent post reflects on how the experience of Chinese students studying in the US has changed over the years:
For some, research was an indifferent existence one had to maintain in order to stay in America and make the family back home proud. For some others, it was the pecking order to climb on top of, out of a lifelong habit.
In that regard, I could understand Lu Gang. Academia was his only way of climbing up in America. When he flopped, he exploded at his fellow Chinese student--his rivalry--at his advisor, at the ambiguous American environment that failed him.
April 29, 2009
China is its own planet
Chubb at Cold China has more fun stories from the road. This time: a petitioner in an Internet bar, a pimp in Sanlitun, and a group of drunks in Songyuan:
My mind flashed back to the taxi driver in Beijing the previous night, and it gave me an idea: rectify the situation by cravenly stoking regionalism. "I'm sorry," I said, taking the money off their table and stashing it in my wallet, "I owe you an apology. I've been out of the Northeast for too long and, well, people in the South are just not as polite and kind as you Northeasterners. Actually they're really very rude. They don't have your level of culture. Or quality."
"We'd heard that too," one of them replied. And all was well.
"A Japanese movie shot by Chinese director"
The WSJ China Journal translates comments about Lu Chuan's Nanking! Nanking! or City of Life and Death from Netease and other portals.
Swine flu spreading not impossible
From China Daily:
A meeting, presided over by Wen, heard reports from central government departments including the MOH on the global situation.
The State Council decided to set up a multi-sector mechanism involving the health and agriculture ministries, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), and other related departments.
The meeting did not exclude the possibility of the epidemic spreading to China as "the situation in some countries is developing, more suspected cases have been found and the epidemic-stricken area is expanding".
April 28, 2009
Double-digit growth for Chinese media this year
From China Daily:
Getting a boost from what experts call the "lipstick effect" - women turning from expensive purchases like jewelry to smaller feel-good items during a recession - the output of the industry hit 422 billion yuan ($62 billion) last year, an 11.3 percent increase from the previous year.
Red guards and brand fundamentalism
In the April issue of iLook, editor Hung Huang compares brand image control with Cultural Revolution-era dogmatism, and explains how this inspires shanzhai parody culture.
Students complain about spring break
High school students in Hangzhou have set up a website complaining about their schools' practice of scheduling mandatory review classes on vacation days.
Kristie Lu Stout on media and technology
Kristie Lu Stout, who presents the CNN Today program from Hong Kong, talks to Danwei about using Twitter live on her show, and her view of technology's use in the media.
"A case of adapt or die"
The Telegraph talks to law professor He Weifang, who was recently transferred from Beijing to Shihezi University in Xinjiang:
"When the head of Beijing University suggested Xinjiang, I said 'ah yes, what a good idea. I don't suppose I shall miss any dramatic legal or political reforms in the next two years," he recalls with a roar of laughter.
The modern breed of Chinese students Prof He now teaches have a far more conservative outlook than in the days when he was a young faculty member out demonstrating on the streets of Beijing in 1989.
Global Times webchat
Hu Xijin, editor of the Global Times, will talk about the paper's new English-language edition in a webchat to be held on April 28 at 2pm.
What's up with Chinese people having English names?
At Slate, Huan Hsu writes about the craze for English names he encountered after moving to Shanghai last year:
"You don't have an English name?" the HR woman gasped. "You should really pick one." She then waited for me to do just that, as if I could make such an important existential decision on the spot; I told her I'd get back to her. People--Chinese people--had trouble recalling my name. One guy at work, a Shanghai-born VP, called me "Steve" for almost three months. At my workplace, which is 90 percent mainland Chinese, just about everyone I interacted with had an English name, usually selected or received in school.
April 27, 2009
Hackers: the China syndrome
Mara Hvistendahl writes for PopSci about hacker communities in China
On May 20, 2003, a man named Peng Yinan, then known only by the moniker coolswallow, logged into a public Shanghai Jiaotong University student forum and described how he formed a group at the university's Information Security Engineering School that coordinated with other hackers to bring down whitehouse.gov in 2001. "Javaphile was established by coolswallow (that's me)" and a partner, he wrote in Chinese. "At first we weren't a hacker organization. After the 2001 China-U.S. plane collision incident, Chinese hackers declared an anti-American Battle . . . and coolswallow joined in the DDoS White House attacks." Later, he bragged, his group defaced other sites it considered anti-Chinese, including that of the Taiwanese Internet company Lite-On.
via Shanghai Scrap, which has an interview with the author about recent developments and how the story was written:
In the GhostNet report, the people at Infowar Monitor were actually very careful not to blame the hacking web they uncovered on the Chinese government. They went out of their way to explain that as complex as it sounds, GhostNet could easily be the work of independent hackers. There are some great lines in there about how the Internet gives individuals to carry out the sort of intelligence operations that were once reserved for governments. They call it "do-it-yourself signals intelligence." But you wouldn't know it from reading some of the press on the report.
Reforms that may please nobody
CCTV may set up a critiquing system for its nightly news program. ESWN translates one blogger's critique of this idea:
I do not support any changes to Joint News Broadcast, but it is because I simply do not believe that they can come up with any content that is worth bothering with. Will they present international news first? then the Chinese people? and finally the leaders? Since this is Joint News Broadcast, what can they possibly broadcast except those contents? The hairstyle of the Joint News Broadcast announcers have not changed over the years. Could the reformatting consists of new hairstyles for the announcers?
Spa vs. temple in Chongqing
Xujun Eberlein summarizes a China Economic Times-Southern Metropolis Weekly report about the controversy surrounding a luxury spa that's being constructed next to a Buddhist temple in Chongqing:
From the monks' perspective, however, a modern spa center encircling the temple breaks the tranquil Buddhist environment and atmosphere, and the massive view of exposed bathers is unacceptable to worshippers. To date, the chaotic construction activities have already damaged some cultural relics and interrupted the temple's religious affairs. Since the construction began, worshipers have been prohibited from entering the temple, the joss sticks and candles stopped burning.
In negotiation, the temple has proposed that the developer to build a wall around the temple's property, in order to block the unsightly entertainment scene in the spa and leave the temple in peace. The managing abbot also wanted to block vehicles from passing through the temple. However the developer rejected those ideas,
China Digital Times has translated some reactions from netizens.
'Israeli oranges' faked in China
The BBC reports on a fruit that was sold between enemy states:
A twist has emerged in the story of Israeli citrus fruit reportedly sold in Iran in defiance of a ban on commercial dealings between the two enemy states.
It has now been revealed the fruit, a type of orange-grapefruit hybrid marketed as Jaffa Sweetie, were not Israeli in the first place.
The Sweeties were brought to Iran from China, where faking the origin of goods is a common practice.
Contrasts as stark today as they were twenty years ago
The China Beat speaks to Geremie R. Barmé about a lawsuit brought by Chаi Ling and her IT company Jenzabar against the Long Bow Group, which produced the documentary The Gаte of Heavenly Peace:
On the first page of their complaint, Chаi Ling, Maginn, and Jenzabar claimed that Long Bow was, "Motivated by ill-will, their sympathy for officials in the Communist government of China, and a desire to discredit Chai, a former student leader in the pro-democracy movement in China's Tiаnanmen Square..."
Specifically, the lawsuit cited the posting of mainstream news articles about Chаi Ling and Jenzabar on our website and the use of the term "Jenzabar" in the keywords or "metatags" used to index and describe the contents of certain pages of the site. With respect to their trademarks, they alleged that Long Bow intends to "confuse their [that is, Jenzabar's] customers" by luring them to our site in order to make money. They demand "a disgorgement to Jenzabar of Long Bow's ill-gotten gains."
April 26, 2009
Shanghainese stand-up comedian Zhou Libo
On the Sinosplice blog:
Shanghainese Stand-up Comedian Zhou Libo:
Shanghai comedian Zhou Libo (周立波) ... clearly deserves a bit more attention. His DVD, 笑侃三十年, has been selling like hotcakes in DVD shops across Shanghai for weeks, and I hear his upcoming live performances are selling out.
You could say his act is "comedy with Shanghainese characteristics" because 笑侃三十年 is Zhou's humorous take on the changes Shanghai has experienced in the past 30 years.
A century of cultural collisions in Shangri-la
Bruce Humes talks to Sichuan-based novelist Fan Wen, whose work deals with intersecting cultures in southwest China:
Fan Wen: ...In my opinion, first and foremost this is a book about Tibet, and secondly it describes the experiences of the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris. More importantly, it's because this book revolves around the collision between Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism, and the interaction between different cultures and civilizations as the West and the East approached one another. These are global motifs.
Chery planning car plant in Brazil
From China Bystander:
A Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de S. Paulo, reports that Chery Automobile is going to start making cars in the country within a couple of years. It says a new plant will have annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles, which would be sold locally and exported to other Latin American countries and the U.S.