From The Economist: Tens of thousands of lives devastated. Not a single official held to account Walking through the village of Shuangmiao, Henan province, Zhu Longwei points out the houses of families unaffected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. They are few and very conspicuous: imposing grey-walled structures towering over clusters of old dilapidated […]
Read MoreFrom the Financial Times, a look at another implication of China’s recent involvement in Africa: The International Monetary Fund warned on Thursday that China’s emergence as an alternative lender was creating a new wave of hidden debt in Africa as it backed its companies’ expansion overseas with increasingly aggressive lending. Adnan Mazarei, a director at […]
Read MorePan Yue, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, writes for Project Syndicate (via A Glimpse of the World blog): For a decade, the world has wondered when China’s leaders will recognize the staggering environmental crisis confronting their country. This year, we got an answer: a new Five-Year Plan that makes environmental protection a […]
Read MoreFrom Oriental Net via Yulun Jiandu (link), translated by CDT: The legacy of Lei Yuanli, former vice mayor of Hunan‘s Chenzhou City and party secretary of Yongxing County, includes impressive urbanization projects that changed the local landscape, a county version of the People’s Congress Hall at Yongxing, and massive debts from his construction programs. “People […]
Read MoreFrom the Financial Times (link) At first glance, Beijing would appear to have tackled head-on the mountain of bad debt in its state banking system, debt which has built up over some 20 years since the government began opening the economy in the late 1970s. In 1999 the government established bad-debt disposal companies to sell […]
Read MoreFrom Ban Yue Tan/Xinhua News Agency (in Chinese), translated by CDT (link): Village and township debts, after the rural taxation reform, has become a key potential source of complaints from village cadres and rural instability. It is learned that, by 2004, the country’s total amount of debts at the village and township levels went behond […]
Read MoreFrom The International Herald Tribune: Perhaps the only working class that China’s Communist president, Hu Jintao, is still assisting is the American. I am not referring to the flood of cheap Chinese products that are keeping prices down, although that helps the average household. I refer to Hu’s policy of using what is widely regarded […]
Read MoreFrom english.eastday.com: China’s central bank is unwilling to pay off large debts owned by bankrupt financial companies and is working on related financial provisions, its Vice Governor Xiang Junbo was quoted by the Economic Reference as saying. China’s stock markets, which have been bearish since 2001, have triggered the closing of some securities firms, including […]
Read MoreFrom Reuters: The United States rejected on Thursday several of Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s key proposals to reform the United Nations, including a timetable for aid increase, debt forgiveness and expansion of the U.N. Security Council. Annan has presented a series of recommendations in the most sweeping overhaul of the world body since 1945 and urged […]
Read MoreThis week, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), a militant separatist group from Pakistan’s southwestern province, claimed responsibility for a series of coordinated attacks that left 73 people dead across numerous provinces....
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