ZGBriefs September 8, 2011
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FEATURED ARTICLE
Chinese dissident author Liao Yiwu-the once lauded, later imprisoned, and now celebrated author of The Corpse Walker-profiles the extraordinary lives of dozens of Chinese Christians, providing a rare glimpse into the burgeoning underground world of belief that is taking hold within the officially atheistic state of Communist China. A luminous writer, and not a Christian himself, Yiwu offers a uniquely objective and insightful perspective on the position Christians occupy in mainland China. |
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GOVERNMENT / POLITICS / FOREIGN AFFAIRS
China Says It Will Tighten Arms Sales Procedures (September 6, 2011, The New York Times) China will tighten its procedures for selling weapons abroad after the disclosure last week that state-owned arms manufacturers were negotiating arms sales to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's government as it sought to fend off rebel fighters this summer, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Tuesday. The spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, also said China would continue to obey a United Nations embargo on weapons sales to Libya that was approved in February with Chinese support. The rebels, who now hold power in Tripoli, the capital, have said they think Chinese companies shipped weapons to Qaddafi forces. China has insisted that the negotiations took place without the government's knowledge and that no arms were shipped.
China starts to reshuffle engineers of economic boom (September 6, 2011, Reuters) China has begun work on an 18-month reshuffle of its top economic and regulatory policy officials as part of a leadership transition that will see President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao hand their posts to a younger generation. Sources and analysts with ties to China's ruling elite say the political musical chairs among ministers, cabinet officials, agency chiefs and provincial governors is under way and will run its course by early 2013. In the meantime, with officials unsure of where they will end up, the jockeying could lead to a slowdown in the reform agenda in the world's second-largest economy. That slowdown could approach policy paralysis as a Communist Party Congress late next year finalizes the changes to the teams that have led China's runaway growth over the past decade.
China white paper pledges peaceful rise (September 6, 2011, BBC News) China's government has released a policy document that lays out its vision for the country's future. It says it wants to be a rich, strong nation at peace with other countries. China will not repeat the mistakes of other great powers who sought to dominate other nations, the white paper says. But the document's description of China and the world sometimes seems at odds with reality. This is a lengthy document, running to nearly 10,000 words, but its main point is summed up in the three-word title, China's Peaceful Development. The country's current leaders see the nation getting more powerful all the time, mainly brought about by its opening up to the outside world three decades ago. "[We want to] build China into a rich, strong, democratic, civilised, harmonious and modern socialist country by the 100th anniversary of the People's Republic of China in the mid-21st century," it says. But it adds that no one needs fear this rise.
Muslim militant group claims western China attacks (September 8, 2011, AP) A militant Muslim group has released a new video claiming responsibility for recent attacks in western China that killed at least three dozen people, a U.S. group that monitors such organizations said this week. The video was purportedly made by the Turkistan Islamic Party, which seeks independence for China's western Xinjiang region, the SITE Intelligence Group said. The militants are believed to be based in Pakistan, where security experts say core members have received training from al-Qaida. The more than 10-minute video released in late August features Turkistan Islamic Party leader Abdul Shakoor Damla, whose face is blotted out, saying those attacks were revenge against the Chinese government.
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HEALTH
Conjoined twins separated by doctors in China (September 5, 2011, BBC News) Doctors have successfully separated conjoined twin girls after a six-hour surgery in a Chinese hospital. The official Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday that doctors separated "An An" and "Xin Xin" on Monday at the Shanghai Children's Medical Center. The twins were born in April with connected livers and hearts. The report says doctors separated their organs, reshaped their ribs and reconstructed their chest with titanium-alloy plates. The babies are in stable condition, but are relying on a breathing machine and will require intensive care treatment.
Rash of food poisoning cases hits China schools (September 8, 2011, AP) Nearly 300 Chinese primary and middle school students have been sickened by unsafe food or water provided by their schools in five separate incidents over the past week, state media said Thursday. The rash of food poisoning cases coincides with the start of the new school year. The latest case occurred Wednesday in Shandong province, affecting 86 primary school students who became ill after eating lunch, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Ten remained under observation in hospitals Thursday, it said, and authorities were testing the school's food for problems. Four other cases affecting 205 kids were reported in Hebei and Jiangxi provinces in the past week, Xinhua said. |
EDUCATION / CULTURE
Home schools rise in China (September 5, 2011, China Daily) Home schools emerged in many places of China today due to the parents' concern about the public education, the China Youth Daily reported Monday. A growing number of parents in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces are choosing to let their children receive an education at home rather than attend public kindergartens, primary, junior or senior middle schools. Some parents think their children cannot realize the happiness of learning, acquire useful knowledge effectively and master learning for a modern society through the current methods taught in schools. A recent seminar about launching home school projects was held by 21st Century Education Research Institute in Southwest China's Yunnan province, attracting a lot of advocates. Ririxin School, one of a number of home school style private schools in Huilongguan and Tiantongyuan communities in north Beijing, which was set up in 2006 by four families who wanted to give their children a better education, now has about 150 students. Although it has developed into a formal school, it features parent self-help teaching and parents' participate into school affairs. |
SOCIETY / LIFE
Satellite TV will reach 200m rural households (September 6, 2011, Shanghai Daily) Direct-Broadcast, a satellite TV service, will replace wireless signals for about 200 million rural families in China by 2015. A pilot project has gone smoothly in Ningxia, Hebei and Inner Mongolia, in the north and northwest of China, since April, according to Zhang Haitao, deputy director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. About 200 million rural households rely mainly on wireless signals for analog TV programs. At best they receive six channels with poor image quality.
China rich list topped by construction magnate (September 7, 2011, BBC News) A former weapons plant manager has topped an annual list of China's richest people. Liang Wengen, 55, chairman of construction firm Sany was at the summit of the Hurun Rich List, with a doubling of the company's share price sending his fortune to $11bn (£7bn). The number of US-dollar billionaires increased to 271 this year, up from 189 in 2010. Internet and property tycoons were also on the list. Zong Qinghou, head of the Wahaha beverage empire, fell to second place on the latest list with a fortune of $10.7bn.
Chinese Law Could Make Divorced Women Homeless (September 7, 2011, The New York Times) Millions of Chinese women, and some men, woke on Aug. 13 to discover their spouse had, in effect, become their landlord. On that day, the Supreme Court's new interpretation of the 1980 Marriage Law came into force, stipulating that property bought before marriage, either outright or on mortgage, reverted to the buyer on divorce. Previously, the family home had been considered joint property. Experts agree the change would mostly affect women, since men traditionally provide the family home. The result has been uproar - and, in the cities, a rush to add the wife's name to title deeds. Some husbands have agreed to this, but others have balked, and Chinese news outlets have already reported on marriage breakdowns caused by a husband's refusal to add his wife's name.
Suicide 'the leading cause of death' for young Chinese (September 7, 2011, Shanghai Daily) Suicide is the leading cause of death for teenagers and young adults in China - a country where almost 250,000 people commit suicide and more than 2 million people attempt to kill themselves each year, the Beijing Morning Post reported today. The survey, released by the state center for disease control and the Beijing Huilongguan Hospital, showed that suicide was the fifth leading cause of death in China - but the first among the teenage and young adult group aged between 15 and 34.
China struggles to tame micro-blogging masses (September 8, 2011, AFP) A train crash that killed 40 people in July sparked an outpouring of public fury on the weibos, where thousands demanded to know why more care had not been taken over safety on China's flagship high-speed rail network. The scale of the response appeared to take authorities by surprise. Shortly after the accident, the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of China's Communist Party, urged officials to use the weibos more to communicate with the public. Weeks later, Beijing's most senior Communist Party official, Liu Qi, visited the offices of Sina and Youku, a Chinese site similar to YouTube, to urge them to stop the spread of "false and harmful information". Xiao Qiang, media scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, said the weibos made it easier for individuals to speak out, and harder for censors to pinpoint troublemakers. "Weibo is a social media platform particularly effective at aggregating micro-opinions into a collective voice," he told AFP. "This mechanism of forming public opinion is new and effectively contesting the traditional method of control and censorship of the party."
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BUSINESS / ECONOMICS / TRADE
Mysterious fish kills strike Fujian (September 5, 2011, China Daily) Fish farms along the Minjiang River in the Shuikou Township section of East China's Fujian province have been hit by a wave of fish kills in recent days, but the cause has yet to be determined, local authorities said on Sunday. Some 9,000 tanks of fish, including about 8,000 in Shuikou town and some 1,000 in Huangtian town, were reported dead as of Saturday, according to a release from the government of Gutian county, which administers the two townships. One tank usually holds 3,500 to 5,000 fish. "We're calculating the number of the dead fish and economic losses," said Zeng Lisheng, a Gutian publicity officer. The river's Shuikou section is Fujian's largest freshwater fish cultivation base, and it provides local markets with about 100,000 kilograms of fish a day during harvest seasons. Zeng said that local fishery and environmental protection departments are investigating the case and examining the water, but the reasons for the fish die-offs are unknown.
Starbucks to triple outlets in China by 2015: report (September 6, 2011, Reuters) Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) plans to triple the number of coffee outlets it runs in China over the next four years, the Associated Press reported. The world's biggest coffee chain would increase the number of coffee shops in China from 470 now to 1,500 by 2015, Asia-Pacific President Wang Jinlong said on Tuesday.
China growth may slide below 9 percent in 2012: FX regulator (September 6, 2011, Reuters) China's economic growth in 2012 may drop below 9 percent for the first time in a decade, a senior Chinese foreign exchange official said on Tuesday, underlining the gloom in Beijing over the deteriorating health of the global economy. Still, Huang Guobo, the chief economist at China's currency regulator, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, told a forum that policy would remain focused on controlling inflation in coming months. That echoed comments last week by Premier Wen Jiabao, who said inflation is unacceptably high. "The Chinese economy is facing serious challenges despite strong growth," Huang said. "The weakening global demand for Chinese exports will be a challenge... Next year, if the situation continues, China's growth rate may fall below 9 percent."
China must rebalance economy: World Bank chief (September 6, 2011, AFP) The head of the World Bank on Monday urged China to rebalance its export-driven economy and said taming rising inflation remained the most important challenge for the country in the short term. Robert Zoellick said the world's second-largest economy would have to focus more on domestic demand, and warned that the coming months would be a "sensitive time" for many of the major developed economies. "It's hard for me to see that a continued reliance on export-led and investment-led growth will work for China over the next 10 years," he told journalists at the end of a five-day official visit to China. "And that challenge will even become clearer if the major developed countries have a hard time resuming their growth. So China needs to rebalance its economy, rely on more domestic demand, and increase consumption." The World Bank in July reclassified China as an upper middle income economy, putting it in a group of nations that he said needed to move on from the growth models they relied on while they were poor.
China renews Google's licence to operate local website (September 7, 2011, BBC News) The Chinese government has renewed Google's licence to continue operating its local website in the country. China regulates content on the internet through licensing and oversight of internet companies. Last year Google started redirecting Chinese users to its Hong Kong website, citing concerns over censorship and hacking. The search giant has since been losing market share in the biggest internet market in the world. Regulators renewed Google's licence for another year.
287,000 commit suicide in China each year (September 8, 2011, Xinhua) About 287,000 people commit suicide each year in China, resulting in 3.6 percent of the country's annual deaths, the latest official statistics show. Seventy-five percent of suicide cases occurred in rural areas, three times number of suicides committed in cities, according to statistics posted on the website of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. "China's suicide rate reflects a trend different from other countries," said an article posted on the website. The number of suicides is 25 percent higher for females than males in China, but in developed countries male suicide rates are three times higher than female suicide rates, said the article.
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ENVIRONMENT / TECHNOLOGY
China's Cabinet orders ConocoPhillips spill probe (September 7, 2011, AP) China's top leaders have ordered an investigation into oil spills in China's Bohai Bay that have drawn intense criticism from marine authorities and environmentalists, adding to pressures on oil field operator ConocoPhillips. A notice calling for the probe was posted on the government's website following a meeting of the State Council, or Cabinet, on Wednesday. The government has already ordered ConocoPhillips China, which operates the Penglai 19-3 oil field with state-owned partner China National Offshore Oil Corp., to stop all production pending a full clean-up and review to ensure no more oil seeps into the sea.
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LINKS TO DETAILED ARTICLES AND ANALYSIS
China's demographic time bomb has been attributed to the one-child rule. But it's more than that. Some Chinese couples are choosing to remain childless, and many single women are in no hurry to marry.
He wants a wife, of course. But ask what kind of woman he seeks and Duan Biansheng looks perplexed. "I don't have any requirements at all," said the 35-year-old farmer. "I would be satisfied with just a wife." His prospects of finding one, he added, are "almost zero". There are dozens of single men in Banzhushan village, perched high on a remote mountain peak in central Hunan province - and not one unattached woman of marriageable age.
Theleader of China's most populous province is cautiously promoting a more democratic model against the country's prevailing political winds.
China offered huge stockpiles of weapons to Colonel Moammar Gadhafi during the final months of his regime, according to papers that describe secret talks about shipments via Algeria and South Africa. Documents obtained by The Globe and Mail show that state-controlled Chinese arms manufacturers were prepared to sell weapons and ammunition worth at least $200-million to the embattled Col. Gadhafi in late July, a violation of United Nations sanctions.
Rebellion is in the air in China, too. In mid-August one of the largest demonstrations since the Tiananmen Square protests took place on the streets of Dalian, a north-eastern boomtown, which forced the authorities to shut down a chemical factory that had been damaged in a storm. Demonstrations and capitulations on this scale, though not unprecedented, are highly unusual.
Now China is answering complaints by rights activists that the disappearances of those and other Chinese are unlawful and potentially inhumane: It is rewriting the national criminal procedure code to make them legal.
Chinese companies, like companies everywhere, do best when they are privately run. In China, however, the state is never far away.
This capital city's skies were clogged with pollution, as is often the case, and China's government was concerned. So it summoned officials of the American Embassy here to a meeting.
For a Chinese-language newspaper, I recently did a report on the use of such agents in China. A study done at Iowa State University and published in the Journal of College Admission suggests that most Chinese undergraduates enrolled at American colleges had relied on intermediaries to help them navigate the admissions process. Through dozens of interviews with agents, students, and experts, it became clear to me why that is. A tremendous disconnect exists between Chinese students and American universities.
The rapid increase in the wages of unskilled workers in China is well documented. Since the initial appearance of labour shortages in 2003, wages have increased substantially in all sectors.
With China's economy booming, art collectors there have become an increasingly powerful force in the market, demonstrating a growing interest in Western as well as Asian art.
Top of Chinese wealthy's wish list? To leave China (September 7, 2011, AP) Chinese millionaire Su builds skyscrapers in Beijing and is one of the people powering China's economy on its path to becoming the world's biggest. He sits at the top of a country - economy booming, influence spreading, military swelling - widely expected to dominate the 21st century. Yet the property developer shares something surprising with many newly rich in China: he's looking forward to the day he can leave.
In a country where some 47,370 babies are born every day, 46.2 percent of expectant mothers in China choose to give birth with surgical help. That's a rate much higher than the Asian average of 27.3 percent, according to a World Health Organization global survey published in the Lancet journal in early 2010.
Despite increasing efforts to tackle the illegal traffic in cultural artifacts, every year thieves break into tombs and steal priceless treasures. These thefts endanger China's cultural heritage as never before, said Wei Yongshun, a senior officer from the Ministry of Public Security's criminal investigation bureau.
Voracious mining has hollowed out vast tracts of the north of China, leaving three million people living on ground that could collapse at any moment.
In recent years, the centuries-old Chinese tradition of giving moon cakes to friends and relatives to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival has been marred by scandals of unscrupulous makers loading up the additives to preserve shelf-life and recycle unsold products. This year, the government is clamping down, but not without the addition of an unsavory tax ingredient into the mix.
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LINKS TO BLOGS
A Chinese married couple have both reached 60 of age, and have remained playful nonetheless. After they retired from work, they decided to size up the world with their itchy feet. They finished their backpacking trip around the globe that spanned 180 days and over 20 countries in five continents, including the Antarctic.
Pinyin Typist is an app for the iPhone and the iPad which allows for easy pinyin input with proper tone marks.
In what's become an annual tradition that began six years ago, the Yu Ming gymnasium at Wuhan's Central China Normal University (华中师范大学) serves as the venue of a mass sleepover for the the parents and family of incoming freshmen. This year, nearly 600 mats were provided for anxious family members who spent the night, not to mention other amenities made available, including sheets, towels, shower facilities and hot tea.
China recently took another step in presenting Li Keqiang, the country's presumptive next premier, as a global statesman, touting a meeting with Pakistani President and close ally Asif Ali Zardari and leaders of other central Asian countries, which China has courted in recent years for their geostrategic positioning as well as abundant energy resources.
For an insight into that, can I point anyone interested in China to a new BBC series called "Law of the Dragon" which landed on my desk recently from the BBC press office in he form of a DVD. It's a fly-on-the-wall documentary of a wandering judge in Xuan'en region, Hubei province who goes round settling petty disputes, handling emotive divorce cases and the like.
Hong Kong's long-term role as an international business center has been undermined by a decision by China's National People's Congress which in effect makes the territory part of the People's Republic of China rather than a separate legal entity in certain key commercial cases.
In Japan, in 1986, the value of the nation's real estate doubled in a single year-and doubled again the next year. Japan was the world's largest creditor, holding thirty per cent of U.S. debt, and was home to the world's ten largest banks, with a stock exchange bigger than Wall Street. A hundred square feet in downtown Tokyo was selling for a million dollars.
The truth is that like every rising power in history (including the United States) China wants to change rules, territorial delineations, and laws written while it was weak.
I just read Ai Weiwei's column in Newsweek in which he describes Beijing as a "nightmare" and a "constant nightmare". I am delighted that his detention ordeal hasn't dampened his spirits but I have to say that I don't agree with him at all, though I understand his frustration and bitterness.
Police in central China's Henan province said they have rescued 30 mentally handicapped people who had been enslaved at illegal brick kilns, in the latest case of slavery in China, a problem that continues in the country despite government pledges to eradicate it.
It's a raging debate in economics circles: Is China's commanding position as the world's low-wage factory floor eroding in the face of rising labor costs and a strengthening currency?
China Inc. boasts some of the biggest corporate names in the world today: China Mobile Ltd., PetroChina, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd, just to name a few. But while the commanding heights of the world's second-largest economy are still firmly in the hands of China's state-owned enterprises, who are the overachievers in the private sector?
Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival is almost upon us. We give you the skinny on the holiday's history, and the best ways to celebrate.
The Communist Party's crackdown on 'toxic' Internet rumours is misguided. The tighter it squeezes freedom, the more credibility slips through its hands.
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RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHERS
China has set its sights on Central Asia, triggering a new Great Game in a region where Europe, Russia and the US have all long sought influence.
While the 58-year-old "princeling"-a reference to the offspring of party elders-did not say anything earth-shattering during Biden's tour, Xi confirmed earlier impressions of being a conservative who is a fervent believer in many aspects of Chairman Mao Zedong's teachings. Moreover, his strong ties to the "princeling generals" in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) may predispose him toward seeking a hawkish foreign policy, or at least support the PLA's organizational interests.
The Information Office of the State Council, China's cabinet, on Tuesday published a white paper on China's peaceful development.
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