Must-read China news by Danwei

Historian Niall Ferguson, an old-fashioned Englishman not easily impressed by uppity orientals, writing in The Wall Street Journal:

"We are the masters now." I wonder if President Barack Obama saw those words in the thought bubble over the head of his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, at the G20 summit in Seoul last week...

...Maybe Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also heard "We are the masters now" as the Chinese shot down his proposal for capping imbalances in global current accounts...

..."We are the masters now." That was certainly the refrain that I kept hearing in my head when I was in China two weeks ago. It wasn't so much the glitzy, Olympic-quality party I attended in the Tai Miao Temple, next to the Forbidden City, that made this impression. The displays of bell ringing, martial arts and all-girl drumming are the kind of thing that Western visitors expect. It was the understated but unmistakable self-confidence of the economists I met that told me something had changed in relations between China and the West.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 4:55 PM | Permalink

From bored-bored.com:

A team of LEGO make this LEGO models of the buildings which are built for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. This models represent the Birds Nest stadium, WaterCube - the National Swimming Center and Olympic Village. This model really looks cool and amazing, once again great creation from LEGO.

Posted by Eric Mu at 12:20 PM | Permalink

Tom O'Mally at CNNGo.com:

...Always stuck in second gear? Seek out this eerily precise replica of TV show "Friends’" Central Perk for big cups of Joe, chocolate muffins, hot dogs and endless re-runs. A giddy student crowd fights over the famous couch, and takes turns strumming “Smelly Cat” on guitar. Fanatical owner Du Xin confesses to studying “millions of pictures online to get it right.” Yes, he dresses like Gunther.

Posted by Eric Mu at 12:00 PM | Permalink

Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times:

A Chinese woman was sentenced to one year in a labor camp on Wednesday after she forwarded a satirical microblog message that urged recipients to attack the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, human rights groups said Thursday.

The woman, Cheng Jianping, 46, was accused of “disturbing social order” for resending a Twitter message from her fiancé that mocked young nationalists who held anti-Japanese rallies

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:02 AM | Permalink

Writing on The Daily Maverick, a rant about the lack of South African media coverage about Xi Jinping's just concluded visit to that country, by Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn.

Posted by Danwei at 4:10 PM | Permalink

From Routers:

McDonald’s has raised menu prices in mainland China by 0.5 yuan to 1 yuan per item with immediate effect because of rising materials costs as the country grapples with accelerating food inflation.

Posted by Eric Mu at 1:25 PM | Permalink

From Wall Street Journal:

…China’s undervalued currency is also at the core of the effectiveness of its government because it enables the government to essentially transfer wealth from those earning it to the government in the form of its roughly $2.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, he said. ‘It makes for a powerful government in China,’ he said. The Chinese government has more policy options than the U.S. because it has a substantial trade surplus, he said.

Posted by Eric Mu at 1:15 PM | Permalink

The endless ambitions of Chinese engineers: Media reports on a proposal to pipe sea water from the Bohai Sea to Xinjiang to make the desert bloom.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:34 AM | Permalink

China Web Radar attended Sina's Weibo microblogging developer conference, and came back with some numbers from Sina, including the following:

By October 20, 2010, just 14 month after its beta launch on August 28, 2009, Sina Weibo has reached 50 million registered users, and over 25 million updates (tweets) published every day. So far, over 2 billion tweets have been published on Sina Weibo platform.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:29 AM | Permalink

The Global Times reports on the sexual issues of China's senior citizens.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:26 AM | Permalink

David Pierson in the Los Angeles Times:

Already worried about runaway real estate prices that have shut millions out of the housing market, China's leaders are grappling with yet another threat to social stability: the soaring price of food.

The nation's State Council on Wednesday announced that it would move to stabilize prices by cracking down on speculators and boosting supplies of some staples from government stockpiles.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:12 AM | Permalink

In the Financial Times, Foxconn’s milestone for a rising China price, David Pilling examines "before and after Foxconn", seeing the giant electronics manufacturer as an indicator of China's future, where labor isn't so cheap and Chinese companies start moving inland and even sourcing manufactures from other, cheaper countries.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 9:06 AM | Permalink

Michael Wines in The New York Times on the Li Gang case:

[P]arty propaganda officials moved swiftly after the accident to ensure that the story never gained traction.

Curiously, however, the opposite has happened. A month after the accident, much of China knows the story, and “My father is Li Gang” has become a bitter inside joke, a national catchphrase for shirking any responsibility — washing the dishes, being faithful to a girlfriend — with impunity. Even the government’s heavy-handed effort to control the story has become the object of scorn among younger, savvier Chinese.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 8:33 AM | Permalink

On Patrick Chovanec's blog:

The other day, I was talking with a part-time maid we had hired to help us settle in to our new apartment after relocating within Beijing. She had told us, when we hired her, that she was divorced. Now that she had gotten to know us, however, she informed me — matter of factly — that while she was, in fact, officially divorced, she still lived happily with her husband and daughter as a family. Seeing the quizzical look on my face, she reassured me that the only reason they had gotten a divorce — a mere legal technicality — was so they could circumvent the one-home-per-family restriction and qualify to buy a second home in Beijing.

At first I figured her case must be an outlier, an exception. It turns out the practice is far more common than I imagined.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 7:27 AM | Permalink

by Martin Wolf:

So how might this end? I envisage three possible outcomes.

First, the “positive sum” view wins out. Awareness of the absence of any deep ideological conflict, of mutual economic dependence, of a shared planetary destiny and of the impossibility of war in a nuclear age force adequate levels of global co-operation. For this to happen there must also be a profound commitment to co-operation, not much evident recently in such areas as climate change or global imbalances.

Posted by Eric Mu at 2:34 PM | Permalink

From Global Times:

In fact, this is a good opportunity and China's civil society should consider setting up a "Confucius Peace Prize," launching the evaluation and selection and finding the real Peace Prize winners from all over the world.

This is the best opportunity for the Chinese to declare China's view in peace and human rights to the world.

Posted by Eric Mu at 2:06 PM | Permalink

From Guardian:

But pianos and violins don't make an orchestra, and there are constant comments about the unevenness of provision, China having often failed to achieve the balanced youth orchestras one might expect from such a vast pool of talent. There is nothing in China to match the Venezuelan orchestral revolution. That would require a massive act of social will such as Venezuela made, to empower students to work in orchestras and perfect their skills communally. It could yet happen, but it would require a seismic shift.

Posted by Eric Mu at 5:13 PM | Permalink

The China Daily, reporting from the wonderfully named city of Bengbu in Anhui Province:

Track-laying work for the long-anticipated Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway stood complete when Railways Minister Liu Zhijun tightened the line's last bolt on a windy Monday morning.

"The project has entered its last stage," Lu Chunfang, vice-minister of railways, said at a ceremony to celebrate the latest success in the city of Bengbu, situated in the center of the railway line.

Since the project kicked off on April 18, 2008, some 135,000 workers have toiled hard to lay 1,318 km of high-quality tracks.

In the next few months, workers will race against time to install the railway's power supply, communications and signal systems, and carry out operation trials to test the line and trains to ensure the railway can open to traffic next year, Wang Yongping, spokesman of the Ministry of Railways, said.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 12:02 PM | Permalink

Ananth Krishnan in The Hindu:

China has started damming the middle reaches of the Brahmaputra river, or the Yarlung Tsangpo as it is known in Tibet, to begin construction on a 510 MW hydropower project that has raised concerns in India.

The government for the first time revealed that it has, since November 8, begun damming the Tsangpo's flow to allow work to begin on the hydropower project at Zangmu. This is the first major dam on the Brahmaputra and has been billed by the Chinese government as a landmark hydropower generation project for Tibet's development...

...The Indian government has raised concerns about the possible downstream impact of this project during talks with China earlier this year.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:30 AM | Permalink

In The Sydney Morning Herald, John Garnaut looks at the 18-kilometer monorail linking Mecca to the Muslim holy sites of Mina and Mount Arafat, a gift from China to Saudi Arabia that cost China Railway Construction Corporation $US600 million, a gift they could not refuse to give.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 11:25 AM | Permalink

In The China Daily:

Government approval of plans to open part of its low-altitude airspace to the general aviation industry may unleash pent-up demand for private air services and create a market worth more than one trillion yuan ($150 billion), experts said.

A circular jointly issued on Sunday by the State Council and the Central Military Commission said China will gradually open part of its low-altitude airspace - altitudes lower than 1,000 meters - for private flights to promote the country's general aviation sector, or the use of aircraft for purposes other than those of airlines, the military and the police.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 10:49 AM | Permalink

How bad is the inflation? Netease gives you a sense of how much your money has shrunk with a series of photos. See how many goodies that your 100 yuan could no longer buy: 30 apples, four and half instant noodles, six kilogram of garlic and etc.

Posted by Eric Mu at 9:42 AM | Permalink

Xinhua

The death toll of a big fire that engulfed a high-rise building in downtown Shanghai had risen to 53 by 9:20 a.m. Tuesday, local authorities said.

More than 70 people injured in the inferno are being hospitalized.

The 28-story building at the intersection of Jiaozhou Road and Yuyao Road in Jing'an District, a densely-populated area in Shanghai, was being renovated when it caught fire at about 2:15 p.m. Monday.

Posted by Eric Mu at 8:57 AM | Permalink

From Asianpopular:

Compared to all the people who have lost their lives due to the fearsome power of rumours, my retirement from micro-blogging is just a small protest against this ridiculous ‘collective public trial’, Hsu told reporters, vowing not to update her micro-blog again.

Posted by Eric Mu at 4:19 PM | Permalink

From GoKunming:

The story begins in 1998 in a hamlet in Jurong City in China's eastern Jiangsu province where Yuan, 28 years old and still unmarried, was employed as a security guard. There he was acquainted with a woman married into a local family who was originally from Yunnan.

Posted by Eric Mu at 8:58 AM | Permalink

The China Daily

Top Chinese and Japanese diplomats on Sunday vowed to adopt concrete measures to improve bilateral relations one day after an eye-catching meeting between senior leaders of the two neighbors.

Hopes for a diplomatic thaw were raised since a territorial spat escalated in September and strained bilateral ties, but analysts note that there remains no immediate solution to the disputes despite the meetings.

Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and his Japanese counterpart Seiji Maehara met on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit as they accompanied state leaders for the regional conference.

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 8:51 AM | Permalink

By Scheherazade Daneshkhu in The Financial Times:

Africa is becoming a route to China for Société Générale as the French bank targets Chinese companies doing business in the mineral-rich continent as part of its African expansion strategy.

Bernardo Sanchez Incera, SocGen’s deputy chief executive in charge of international consumer banking, said the group’s expansion in China has been limited by local restrictions.

But it is able to access part of the explosive growth in Chinese commercial activity in Africa, particularly in the sub-Sahara...

Posted by Jeremy Goldkorn at 8:35 AM | Permalink