Several PC makers said Friday they were voluntarily including China’s controversial Internet filter software in new shipments despite Beijing’s decision to postpone making it mandatory.

The government had been set to introduce the Chinese-made “Green Dam Youth Escort” programme but announced the delay hours before its implementation on July 1.

Customer service staff at PC makers including Taiwan’s Acer Inc and China’s Haier Group said they were nevertheless installing or packaging the software with all new PCs — but added it was easy to uninstall.

“You will find it with our PCs, as the state has requested. But … you can easily find a patch on the Internet to uninstall it,” one of Acer’s service staff told AFP on the phone, asking not to be named.

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Post tags: Green Dam, Internet censorship

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Inflation fears are spreading in China with expectations for an economic recovery. Sentiments have been on a roller coaster ride since the economy turned sharply from inflationary in the first half of 2008 to deflationary in the first half of this year. And if steep inflation re-emerges in the first half of next year, resource allocations will be distorted and the economy damaged.

The fears may be justified. If the nation’s GDP growth rate hits double digits, and the current flood of excess liquidity is not curbed within 12 months, CPI may rise by more than 5 percent per month next year.

China’s current liquidity levels are unprecedented, laying a foundation for steep inflation. A lesson from the past is that consumer and asset price inflation always follow increased liquidity levels.

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Post tags: economic growth, inflation

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Proposals to impose “carbon tariffs” on imported products will violate the rules of the World Trade Organization as well as the spirit of the Kyoto Protocol, China’s Ministry of Commerce said.

In a statement posted on its website, the ministry said collecting carbon duties from foreign products would enable developed countries to “protect trade in the name of protecting the environment.”

“This will not help strengthen confidence that the international community can cooperate to handle the (economic) crisis, it also will not help any country’s endeavors during the climate change negotiations, and China is strongly opposed to it,” the statement said.

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Post tags: carbon emissions, global warming, WTO

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China’s shares edged up Friday to a new one-year high on optimism about a possible economic revival, with real estate and dairies up but banks and metals mixed.

The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index climbed 1.67 points, or 0.05 percent, to close at 3,061.93, its highest level since June 10, 2008. For the week, it rose 3 percent.

The Shenzhen Composite Index for China’s second, smaller market rose 1.38 percent, or 13.66 points, to 1,000.68.

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Fueled by renewed confidence in economic growth in China and perhaps the kind of frenzied buying that took place a few years ago, Chinese stock prices are once again soaring.

The Shanghai composite index rose 52 points Thursday, to close at 3,060.25, putting the index up 68 percent this year.

In Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index fell slightly Thursday after ending its best quarter in 15 years on Tuesday. That index is up about 20 percent for 2009.

Though well off their 2007 highs, Chinese stock markets are again among the world’s best performing this year.

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Post tags: economic recovery, financial crisis 2009, stock markets

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I was a student at Beijing University at the time. My generation and the generation before us had grown up with censorship; there were severe punishments for voicing dissent. My parents were sent to a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution for being intellectuals. When I was 14 years old, I decided that I wanted to become a writer. My mother, who was a professor of Chinese literature, forbade it because writing was one of the most dangerous professions.

The history of modern China has been punctuated by bursts of rebellion followed by bloody crackdown. Throughout the history of the Chinese Communist Party not only has it been dangerous for the protesters, but also the protests have never produced any real impact.

The internet has changed this. The web gave the Chinese people a platform to express their opinions and to have their cases heard, and it is making a difference. The attention given to the case of a young woman working in a public bathhouse in a remote area of China is a good illustration of this.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1989 protests, Deng Yujiao, Internet activism, online public opinion

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Dameisha beach, Shenzhen, by janipenttinen

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When Bank of America was negotiating to take a stake in China Construction Bank four years ago, advisers who worked on the investment gave it the code name “Project Solidgold”.

Yet the landmark “strategic” relationship between the US and Chinese lenders has conspicuously failed to glister. BofA was among a wave of overseas financial institutions that in recent weeks sold down their holdings in their Chinese counterparts as soon as lock-in periods expired.

The stake sales, driven largely by the foreign banks’ urgent need for capital, have angered China – prompting fears that the fallout will hamper the scope granted to overseas banks in the mainland financial services market for years to come.

“The institutions that bought stakes in Chinese banks with promises of helping them to improve their risk management, but later crashed out, will not be seen positively in China,” says Andrew Crockett, president of JPMorgan Chase International and former head of the Bank for International Settlements, the central bankers’ bank.

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Post tags: Bank of Beijing, Bank of China, banking

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A little-known deputy film censor has been promoted to oversee China’s rapidly growing movie industry, sources inside the State Administration of Radio Film and Television told The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.

On June 25, Zhang Pimin was promoted to vice-director of SARFT, where he formerly was deputy director of the Film Bureau responsible for helping to cut out too much onscreen sex and violence and for erasing messages perceived as hurtful to China and its ruling Communist Party.

A little-known bureaucrat, the 56-year-old Zhang took up a recently vacated seat next to SARFT vice director Zhao Shi, long the highest-ranking Chinese official to engage the Hollywood studios in public on the issues of piracy and market access affecting the movie industry worldwide.

“The responsibility for China’s film industry is shifting from Zhao to Zhang,” said Liu Chun, deputy director for international cooperation at the Film Bureau at SARFT.

Zhang took the vice director seat vacated after the recent retirement of Lei Yuanliang, who was not involved in the oversight of the film industry, Liu said. “Zhao and Zhang will share some of the responsibilities previously managed by Lei,” who reached the typical retirement age of 60 in December.

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Post tags: film, film censorship, film industry, SARFT, Zhang Pimin

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On July Fourth, we think about our country and its future. But these days it’s impossible to think about America and its future role in the world without also thinking about China. This was the subject of a combative discussion this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

The agent provocateur was Niall Ferguson of Harvard. China and the U.S., he argued, used to have a symbiotic relationship and formed a tightly integrated unit that he calls Chimerica.

In this unit, China did the making, and the United States did the buying. China did the saving, while the U.S. did the spending. Between 1995 and 2005, the U.S. savings rate declined from about 5 percent to zero, while the Chinese savings rate rose from 30 percent to nearly 45 percent.

This savings diversion allowed the Chinese to plow huge amounts of capital into the U.S. and dollar-denominated assets. Cheap Chinese labor kept American inflation low. Chinese efforts to keep the renminbi from appreciating against the dollar kept our currency strong and allowed us to borrow at low interest rates.

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Post tags: China trade surge, U.S. China business competition, US trade deficit

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This is one of the decisions taken during meetings between Chinese leaders and Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama over the past two days. The move is apparantly driven by Colombo’s desire to attract large amounts of Chinese investment and Beijing’s desire to keep its citizens and investments focussed in one secure place close to the national capital instead of scattering them across the country.

“China is a major player in the world, and a major player in the regional context too. We will work very closely with China,” Bogollagama said. But he made it clear that friendship with Beijing will not be at the cost of India. Colombo viewed relationship with the two countries as “two tracks on a railway-line running independently”…

China gave $1 million US dollars in humanitarian aid to Sri Lanka to help the displaced civilians. China’s provision of 20-million-yuan tents had also reached Sri Lanka. “China always backs Sri Lanka’s domestic reconciliation and peace process and will continue to play its positive and constructive role,” said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.

See also past CDT posts on http://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/sri-lanka/#mce_temp_url#.

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Post tags: aid to foreign countries, special economic zones, sri lanka

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China may allow foreign firms with investments inside the country to list domestically, as part of efforts to boost trader confidence during the global downturn, according to an official.

“We will continue to actively work with relevant authorities to study and complete the policy of allowing foreign-invested companies to list in the country,” Vice Commerce Minister Chen Jian told reporters.

“We will guide high-quality foreign-invested companies to carry out domestic listings at appropriate times,” he said.

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Post tags: foreign companies, foreign investments

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China will allow companies to use the yuan to settle cross-border trade and let them keep their entitlement to export tax rebates, seeking to reduce the reliance of importers and exporters on the U.S. dollar.

The People’s Bank of China will encourage banks to offer yuan settlement services from today, the bank said in the regulations published on its Web site. Transactions inside China will take place in Shanghai and four cities in southern Guangdong province, including Guangzhou and Shenzhen, while those outside China will occur in Hong Kong, Macau and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, it said.

“It’s China’s first step to make the yuan global,” said Shi Lei, an analyst in Beijing at Bank of China Ltd., the nation’s largest foreign-currency trader. “It will protect exporters from swings in exchange rates and boost the yuan’s role in the world currency system.”

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Post tags: currency, renminbi

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Until last week, Alice Li’s summer plans were simple: work part-time at a convenience store, study for graduate exams and go to the amusement park with friends.

The upcoming celebration of 60 years of communist rule in China has changed all that. For many students in Beijing, the summer holidays will instead center around government-mandated drills for an elaborate parade to mark the Oct. 1 event.

Li, a third-year student at the Capital Institute of Physical Education, will have to quit her job and put everything else on hold to attend practice. For now, the sessions before class last only about half an hour — but will stretch to three when school lets out at the end of July.

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Post tags: 1949 60 years, students

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As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower.

Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. Although coal remains the biggest energy source and is almost certain to stay that way, the rise of renewable energy, especially wind power, is helping to slow China’s steep growth in emissions of global warming gases.

While the House of Representatives approved a requirement last week that American utilities generate more of their power from renewable sources of energy, and the Senate will consider similar proposals over the summer, China imposed such a requirement almost two years ago.

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Taiwan will allow investment from mainland China in 100 industries and projects, helping the island’s economy to benefit from the warmest cross-strait relations in 60 years.

Taiwan will open up 64 sectors in manufacturing, 25 in services and 11 public infrastructure projects from today, the Ministry of Economics Affairs told a briefing in Taipei. Foundries and the liquid-crystal-display and telecommunications industries will remain closed, the ministry said.

Tensions between Taiwan and China eased after Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou abandoned his predecessor’s pro- independence stance. The island’s benchmark stock index rose 23.4 percent this quarter on speculation that closer ties will aid the economy which contracted by a record in the first three months of the year.

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Post tags: Taiwan economy, Taiwan relations

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Liu’s last interview before his arrest was with The Australian. “No matter how rich a society is, as long as it is ruled by a privileged class (that) gains its wealth from an unbalanced and opaque system, there will be strong discontent,” he said.

“And any defence of this group’s economic interests will evolve into a defence of its political rights.”

His determination to remain in China and to communicate through whatever channels remain open - from now on, probably none - as well as his good-humoured decency have made him an inspiration to other independent-minded spirits in the country.

[...] Fan Yafeng, a researcher at the Law Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says: “Liu is a great example of a Chinese intellectual whose imprisonment, his purgatory, has given him added strength and underlined his status. Our intellectuals have had our backbones bent but Liu pulls us upright again.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Charter 08, dissidents, Liu Xiaobo, political prisoners

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Making rice wine in Wuzhen Town, Zhejiang Province, by rc!

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Shi Pei Pu, a Beijing opera singer and spy whose sexually convoluted love affair with a French Embassy worker created one of the strangest cases in international espionage and was the inspiration for the Broadway show “M. Butterfly,” died in Paris on Tuesday.

His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by an aide.

Mr. Shi (pronounced Shuh), who was convicted of espionage in France in 1986 along with his lover, Bernard Boursicot, was believed to be 70. He had also been believed for years to be a woman, at least by Mr. Boursicot, who served time in prison after the affair and became a laughingstock in France.

Mr. Boursicot, who is 64 and has been living in a nursing home in France while recovering from a stroke, showed no sadness when he learned of Mr. Shi’s death in a telephone interview.

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Post tags: espionage, France, France relations, Shi Peipu

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Junior officers have claimed that a senior official told his men to “use violence to control violence” before they interrogated Wan. The official denied the allegation.

Local press have also reported claims that heavy publicity surrounding the case – concerning the deaths of six people at a Nanchang hospital – had increased pressure for a result. An unnamed official said a senior officer promised that whoever solved it would be acclaimed as a “second grade hero and model”.

According to prosecutors, during the interrogation police hung Wan upside down, punched him, shocked him with stun guns and beat him with sticks as they interrogated him – stopping only when they realised he was not breathing. He died of damage to the heart and lungs due to the severe beatings.

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Post tags: police violence, torture

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