From The New York Times: WILLIAM A. REINSCH, an avowed free trader, welcomes China’s rising stature in the international economy. After all, he is the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, an organization founded in 1914 to promote an “open world trading system.” Indeed, when he was a senior trade official in the Clinton […]
Read MoreFrom the Guardian, via A Glimpse of the World: Fifty years ago this month, when China was finally at peace after decades of war, Mao Zedong launched a new revolution in the countryside – for reasons that are still highly controversial. Mao insisted that the peasants wanted more and bigger cooperatives; they were a “blank […]
Read MoreFrom A Glimpse of the World Blog: In their new biography, Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, a best-selling memoir of oppression under Mao, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, show Mao Zedong not as a great philosopher, social idealist, or romantic hero of the downtrodden, but as a tyrant who manipulated anyone and […]
Read MoreFrom Beijing Youth Daily, via the Press Interpreter: “This revaluation caused many to be surprised, but it makes sense. China’s struck out some independent space for its currency!” was the reaction of Gao Huiqing, Ph.D., of the Development and Research Department of China’s National Information Center. From the perspective of the current national and international […]
Read MoreFrom the Weekend Standard: ‘There would be no Bruce Lee and no David Beckham,” said the old lady. “If it weren’t for Zheng He, you wouldn’t have our kung fu and we wouldn’t have your football.” Well, maybe. And maybe it wouldn’t matter all that much. Still, the old woman speaking at a Shanghai celebration […]
Read MoreFrom the Sunday Telegraph: The Chinese government has failed to provide global health agencies with vital information on recent bird flu outbreaks – caused by a lethal mutating virus that experts say could rapidly spread around the world and potentially kill tens of millions of people. Three outbreaks of avian flu have affected western China […]
Read MoreFrom the International Herald Tribune: A revealing book has just been published about a closed and secretive East Asian country that devotes a huge portion of its budget to developing nuclear weapons, even as millions of its people starve to death… Readers should be forgiven for guessing that the book in question concerns North Korea, […]
Read MoreFrom the New York Times: Oil is the ultimate geopolitical commodity – it is “The Prize,” as Daniel Yergin titled his epic history of petroleum and international politics. And even if Cnooc fails to grab Unocal, the pursuit has pushed the two sides of the Chinese challenge together and into the spotlight of public debate. […]
Read MoreFrom the AP, via the Columbia Daily Tribune: Farmers had long feared the runoff from the pharmaceutical factory. It turned irrigation water to a greasy, red sludge and stunted vegetable crops. They blamed it for a local rise in cancer and birth defects. When a drought concentrated pollutants such as never before, they turned to […]
Read MoreFrom the Toronto Star: Buzz over China is everywhere: just as the Financial Times recently produced a weekend supplement on “China hype,” Time magazine ran a cover story with Mao Zedong dressed in Gucci. While Chinese companies stalk North American assets like Noranda or Unocal, financial newsletters promise untold riches through the China boom. Once […]
Read MoreFrom the Washington Post: While the dollar peg has been immensely beneficial to China’s development, it has not been without cost. While it helped create millions of badly needed export jobs for Chinese workers, it also robbed those workers and their companies of the full value of their labors by underpricing their products. And to […]
Read MoreFrom Asia Times: While Bollywood and some of its stars are busy fending off allegations of underworld links, some of the biggest Hollywood movie studios are quietly entering China’s dream factories. With more than US$150 million in new investments, they have plans to push the growing Chinese film industry into a higher orbit in the […]
Read MoreFrom the New York Times, via the International Herald Tribune: Shunned by Western leaders and investors for his government’s human rights policies, Zimbabwe has begun a determined campaign to hitch its plummeting fortunes to China’s rising star. Mugabe calls the policy “Look East” and has relentlessly promoted it as another way to thumb Zimbabwe’s nose […]
Read MoreFrom The LA Times: In 2003, the Chinese government stipulated that newspapers and magazines must earn at least half of their revenue from voluntary subscriptions. In the following months, it shut down 673 publications that did not comply. Since then, many newspapers have effectively become financially independent, and a number have adopted flashy tabloid-style formats […]
Read MoreFrom The China Daily: After working in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen for seven years, electronic products dealer Yi Deqing and his wife cannot make up their minds whether or not to buy an apartment. “We hope we can settle down here, but without a hukou (registered permanent residence), we don’t feel like the city […]
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