“I suggest the government prohibit wasting food by treating it as a kind of crime and shameful behaviour,” he said. “Many banquets I have attended offered dozens of different dishes to the guests, who only briefly tasted each dish and then threw them away. The authorities should fine them.”

Yuan said squandering food was unforgivable, especially because China had to pull out all stops to provide enough food for its 1.3 billion people due to its limited arable land. “It was difficult to improve rice’s output, but after we did we found the food was being wasted,” he said.

China News Service has reported that the country’s leftover food could feed more than 200 million people a year. The State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development said about 128 million people were living below the official poverty line in 2011.

Meanwhile, 28 million undergraduates studying at mainland universities throw away enough food every year to feed 10 million people, according to research by China Agricultural University.

The abundance of wasted food in China – a country where some are struggling even to meet their nutritional needs – has prompted an online campaign against food squandering, as pointed out by a recent tweet from Xinhua. Below are two images circulating the Weibosphere as part of the “clean plate campaign”:

Today, leave no leftovers

It starts with me

I have a “clean plate”

今天不剩饭

从我做起

我，是 “光盘”

@LongjiangGourmet “Clean Plate” movement starts with me

@龙江美食 “光盘” 行动， 从我做起

Every year, China’s restaurant industry throws out enough food to feed 200 million people!

我国餐饮业每年倒掉的饭菜相当于两亿多人一年的粮！

China has tens of millions of people in need of food and clothing!

中国还有数千万人口处于温饱线之下！

Recovering just 5% of wasted food could feed four million people!

只要回收5％被丢弃的食品， 就能养活400万饥民！

Guarding our savory civilization starts with me. I won’t waste food anymore!

守护舌尖上的文明，从我做起，以后不剩饭！

© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Confucius Peace Prize, food waste, online opinion, waste, Yuan Longping
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Many of the implications of a rising China for the United States were barely addressed by President Obama and Mitt Romney in their debate Monday night, as both candidates swung foreign policy questions back to domestic issues like jobs and education.

[…] Heated tensions between China and three American allies in the Pacific — Japan, South Korea and the Philippines — went unmentioned during the debate. The worrisome standoffs and violent protests over various disputed islands did not come up.

[…] Two weeks from now, the Chinese Communist Party will install a new group of leaders — the Standing Committee of the Politburo, with just nine members, or perhaps now seven — who will be making the major policy decisions for China over the next decade. The party congress and the leadership transition were not mentioned in the debate.

Despite Romney’s repeated threat to immediately label China a currency manipulator, examined by The Los Angeles Times’ Jim Puzzanghera, one of the few eye-catching moments was the Republican’s conciliatory tone when he stated that “we don’t have to be an adversary [with China] in any way, shape or form”. This challenged Obama’s unusually hardline reference to China as only a “potential” partner. Brian Fung at The Atlantic analyzed the rhetorical reversal between the two candidates:

The exchange between Obama and Romney was merely one of several painting the former as the hawk and the latter as the dove — an odd turn when the president is actually the one who has had to work with the Chinese on world governance while Romney, as the challenger, has had the luxury of making campaign commitments the media will forget or overlook later.

As for the way the Chinese themselves might view this exchange, the leadership in Beijing likely recognizes that in an election-year context, candidates will say things to appease domestic audiences they aren’t necessarily committed to. But one thing’s certain: The fact that the People’s Republic will be going through its own power transition just days after Americans head to the ballot box has China’s elite watching Boca Raton about as closely as the rest of us.

Zhu Feng, an expert on U.S.-China relations at Peking University, shared his views on the dynamics of China issues in the campaign with The Wall Street Journal:

In the past, the sitting president would typically have to defend his administration’s China policy against attacks from the challenger. But it seems the two of them have some sort of tacit agreement on China policy.

The only point that made Romney stand out was this so-called “labeling China a currency manipulator.” But I really doubt if that’s anything more than just election rhetoric.

The interest seems to extend well beyond officials and academics. Surveys suggest that more ordinary Chinese are watching the 2012 U.S. election than followed the 2008 race. Josh Chin at The Wall Street Journal looked into Chinese online reactions to the Monday’s debate:

“It’s a shame we can’t see the U.S. presidential debates broadcast live,” said another user. “Actually, I don’t care so much about who would be the president. I just want to learn more about the election itself. Over here, it was decided who would be next a long time ago, so there’s nothing to watch.”

[…] ”What I don’t quite understand why they spend so long debating international issues in a country where 70% of people probably wouldn’t be able to locate China on the map,” said another user. “Is it because they’re not capable of solving their domestic problems and are looking for easier overseas target instead?”

[…] Chinese interest in this year’s U.S. elections appears much stronger than it was in 2008—a shift some analysts attribute to an increased interest among Chinese people in democracy. More than a third of Chinese people said they were paying close attention to this election, up from 17% during the 2008 contest, according to a Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year. The only other countries that showed rising interest in the U.S. election were Turkey and Pakistan, which both edged up 1%.

A particularly controversial aspect of the debate was the absence of human rights topics. From Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

[T]he most surprising fact about the debate’s discussion of China—and the one that tells us the most about the new relationship taking shape the world’s two greatest powers—was that neither candidate in uttered the words, “human rights” in relation to the People’s Republic. That used to be a standard feature. On October 11, 1992, candidate Bill Clinton dinged George H. W. Bush for having “coddled” the Communist government in the years after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square. “I would be firm,” Clinton declared. “If we can stand up for our economics, we ought to be able to preserve the democratic interests of the people of China.” The next day, his campaign put out a statement denouncing the “butchers of Beijing” and faulting Bush for deciding “that we should give Most Favored Nation status to Chinese Communists, who deny their people’s basic rights.” (But, once in office, Clinton pushed through legislation making China’s Most Favored Nation status permanent, a decision he called a “principled, pragmatic approach.”)

The absence of a discussion of human rights will not go over well in the American human-rights community or with Tibetan groups. For the moment, however, in Beijing it is being greeted with pleasure. China takes careful note of vocabulary—the Foreign Ministry keeps track of the mentions of specific words—and the erosion of human rights from the candidates’ priorities will be taken as a sign, as foreign-affairs specialist Zhu Feng put it, that economic issues are “something they really care more about now than human rights or security.”

For detailed fact-checking of the final presidential debate, see ‘Romney Swaps Apology Charge With Obama Jab: Reality Check’, at Bloomberg.

See more on Sino-U.S. relations via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Barack Obama, china bashing, democracy, Mitt Romney, online opinion, presidential election, public opinion, U.S. election 2012, U.S. relations, United States
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While the Beijing papers worry about macro-economic and political consequences of the yuan’s possible revaluation, media in other, more economically dynamic regions of the country are concerned with the more immediate impact it would have on pocketbooks. On Oct. 17, Chen Xu, a columnist with Shanghai’s independent Oriental Morning Post, wrote that even though domestic politics are behind the U.S. push for currency revaluation:

It is impossible for the Beijing government to succumb to the external political pressure to appreciate the RMB and thereby harm their own export industry in the current global economic turbulence.

The editorial is mostly polite, until the end, when he sharply noted: “Beijing isn’t interested in the attitudes of Americans regarding this issue.”

That last point is almost certainly a blustery overstatement, and the proof is in the English: More than any other important Sino-U.S. issue in recent memory, China’s English-language newspapers have commissioned and translated currency-related editorials that speak directly to American audiences. Take, for example, a prickly editorial by Tao Wenzhao, a senior researcher with the Center for U.S.-China Relations at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University. Hewrote:

Economic globalization has expedited international competition, as well as industrial structural adjustments in the U.S. Labor-intensive industries have become “sunset industries,” and the U.S. is outsourcing its manufacturing to other countries, including China.

Thomas Friedman wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times titled “Imagined in America” where he urged that America must rethink the way it develops its economy.

We are never going to get those labor-intensive assembly jobs back from China — the wage differentials are far too great, no matter how much China revalues its currency. We need to focus on multiplying more people at the high-value ideation and orchestration end of the supply chain, and in the manufacturing processes where one person can be highly productive, and well paid, by operating multiple machines. We need to focus on “Imagined in America” and “Orchestrated From America” and “Made in America by a smart worker using a phalanx of smarter robots.” In total value terms, America still manufactures almost as much as China. We just do it with far fewer people, which is why we need more start-ups.

But we also need to stop thinking that a middle class can be sustained only by factory jobs. Thirty years ago, Hong Kong was a manufacturing center. Now its economy is 97 percent services. It has adjusted so well that this year the Hong Kong government is giving a bonus of $775 to each of its residents. One reason is that Hong Kong has transformed itself into a huge tourist center that last year received 36 million visitors — 23 million from China. Their hotel stays, dining and jewelry purchases are driving prosperity here. The U.S. Commerce Department says 801,000 Mainland Chinese visited the U.S. last year, adding $5 billion to the U.S. economy. More Chinese want to come, but, for security reasons, visas are hard to obtain. If we let in as many Chinese tourists as Hong Kong, it would inject more than $115 billion into what is a highly unionized U.S. hotel, restaurant, gaming and tourism industry.

Another idea officials here offer is that the United States invites Chinese firms to invest in toll bridges, toll roads, and rail systems across the United States, in partnership with American companies. They could build them, and operate them for a set number of years, until their investment pays out, and then transfer them to full U.S. ownership. It may be the only way we can rebuild our infrastructure.

© zhou shuren for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: currency evaluation, currency exchange rate oversight reform act, netizens, online opinion, rmb
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I was a fellow traveler in the 1972 Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars trip to China with Richard Bernstein and Jonathan Mirsky . . . and in other ways with Richard Kagan and Edward Friedman who followed in 1975 and 1978 (Friedman and I visited rural Hebei in 1978 and then spent the next quarter century trying to fathom and write collaboratively about China’s rural transformations). All five of us were or had been active members of CCAS, two of whose primary goals were ending the US War in Indochina and opening diplomatic relations with The People’s Republic of China.

My experience in this first China visit was framed by my recent experience with CCAS and the anti-war movement, and my understanding of America’s Asian wars, military base structures, and the US-China relationship, as well as my research on the Chinese revolution.

© alicebirney for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Americans in China, blog, online opinion
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Huang Jing claims that She bought an ASUS laptop for RMB 20,900 (roughly over $2000 at that time) in Feb. 2006. She faced overheating and blue screen problems immediately after she brought it home. After a few returns, an ASUS engineer finally told her that he upgraded her CPU to a better one. However, after she brought the laptop home again, she discovered that the newly replaced CPU was actually an Intel test CPU that is prohibited to sell. Huang Jing and her agent Zhou Chengyu (周成宇) then went to ASUS and asked $5 million for not making the “scandal” public. They claimed that they would use this huge amount of money to set up an anti-fraud foundation to protect customer right. After a few rounds of negotiation, ASUS finally called the police charging Huang Jing and  Zhou Chengyu for extortion. Huang Jing got released from the prison 10 months after she got detained.

The story did not bring too much public attention untill Zhou Chengyu set up an website in Oct. 2008 countersuing ASUS for defamation, false accusation and selling defective products. In the begining, almost all netizens showed their anger toward ASUS and also the state. As in many other cases, there is general suspicion among people that the state tolerates many Taiwan-based companies doing bad things in China for political purposes.

However, as the online discussion got heated up later, it was found that Zhou Chengyu actually had commited fraud and been put into jail many times in his personal history. In response, Zhou said that he had already decided to be a new person, and his past history is irrelevant to this case.

It also turned out that, as ASUS later started to provide more details, Huang Jing did not tell the whole story to the public. She used a faked identity to purchase the laptop; Zhou claimed to be her lawyer negotiating with ASUS although Zhou did not have a lawyer license at all; they actually prepared a whole detailed PR plan to make their case public; and, they never talked about the anti-fraud foundation in their negotation with ASUS,

Now, many netizens turn their suspicion back to Huang Jing as she does not appear to be a normal customer, and her whole dispute with ASUS seems to aim at the $5 million purposely. Still, nobody likes ASUS. Many still insist that, despite the fact that Huang might have been too greedy, ASUS should still be condemned for putting its cunstomer into jail.

© Thome for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ASUS, customer right, online opinion, Taiwan business
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China’s fiercely vocal online community latched on to Zhou’s photo evidence, hyper-analyzing it and exposing it as a paper tiger — an old poster propped up among the trees.

But outraging the Internet activists even more were the local officials, whom they accused of supporting the doctored photos to boost tourism to the arid, poor province of Shaanxi.

“In my opinion, this is the struggle between the truth and government interest,” said Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Fudan University. “Zhou’s just a normal farmer who was inspired by money. The big boss behind this is, of course, the officials of Shaanxi province.”

The scandal reinforced popular disgust with government corruption and showed that public opinion, amplified by the Internet, can occasionally win out in authoritarian China.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: local corruption, online activism, online opinion, South China tiger
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The Chinese public is venting its spleen online over inaccurate reports about the Tibet riots by some Western media groups.

Since March 20, various inaccurate photos that claimed to be of the Lhasa riots on March 14 by Western media were put on the Internet by some Chinese students studying abroad.

Chinese website www.sina.com placed a discussion page on their site to discuss the West’s representation which drew millions of participants.

The German-based RTL TV and N-TV made corrections on their Websites on March 23 and 24, and apologized to the public.

The Washington Post publicized an editor’s note on Monday, saying the caption for an earlier version of a slideshow on the Tibet riot was incorrectly associated with a photo from Nepal. The caption on the new version was corrected.

On the www.anti-cnn.com, Netizens continue to pressure Western media, including CNN and BBC, to apologize.

© Jenny Chu for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: foreign media, netizens, online opinion, Tibet coverage, Tibet protests
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