From BBC News: “Jurors will be elected to serve a five-year term and must have at least two years of university education, court officials were quoted as saying. Under the current system, judges are the sole arbiters in China’s courts, which have been widely criticised for their lack of independence. The number of judges will […]
Read MoreFrom Asia Times Online: “Though the timing may be surprising to some, China’s decision to go ahead with the legislative procedure to enact an anti-secession law aimed at Taiwan has been widely anticipated in recent years, given that the Taiwanese authorities have led the island further away from the Chinese mainland politically and culturally. ” […]
Read MoreFrom Asia Times Online: “If Chinese legislators cared to learn a bit more about their own product lines, they wouldn’t have bothered with writing a bill duplicating part of the Chinese constitution on China’s unity.” Read the full commentary here.
Read MoreFrom AFP, via Yahoo News: “Chinese President Hu Jintao has given an unprecedented public dressing down to Hong Kong’s leaders, a day after the territory’s government was forced to postpone a major public property sale. At ceremonies to mark the fifth anniversary of the return of the former Portuguese colony of Macau to Chinese rule, […]
Read MoreFrom UPI, via China National News: “Water quality is deteriorating in China’s most polluted river, the official Xinhua news agency reported Sunday. The quality of water in the Huaihe river, one of the largest in China deteriorated in November, with only 57.8 percent of it considered safe for domestic, industrial or agricultural use, Xinhua said. […]
Read MoreVia the LA Times, Associated Press writer Christopher Bodeen wrote: “Thousands of years of Chinese linguistic heritage have come down to this: a squabble over Tom and Jerry. Dubbed into regional Chinese dialects, the warring cat and mouse have been huge TV hits — and a good way to pass home-grown culture down to the […]
Read MoreFrom the New York Times, via Houston Chronicle: “Last December, China’s minister of foreign affairs, Li Zhaoxing, sat down for a remarkably candid online chat with Chinese Internet users. The exchange was the first time that a senior Chinese official had talked online with ordinary citizens, but its occasion belied the restrictive government’s tenuous relationship […]
Read MoreFrom The Boston Globe: Since the government has only recently withdrawn from many spheres of public life, Chinese society has not learned how to manage competing social interests, the analysts say. Hence the grass-roots mechanisms that open societies rely on to sort out similar ethnic or social tensions must be given time and support to […]
Read MoreCatherine Armitage published this article on The Weekend Australian: “Who knows what might happen? said one of China’s most famous dissidents, tucking into a plate of preserved green eggs at a suburban Beijing restaurant last week. As evening commuters scurried past outside with heads bowed to the cold, we were discussing the political climate in […]
Read MoreFrom BBC News: “The state-run Xinhua news agency says the rules are designed to keep up with ‘rapid socio-economic development’. This transformation has sparked a flurry of religious activity, which human rights groups have accused the Chinese authorities of repressing. But analysts say the wording of the new rules suggest no change in policy in […]
Read MoreFrom TomPain.com: “Been to Wal-Mart or Target for some Christmas shopping? Paying too much for gas to go shopping? Lose your manufacturing job? China. Robert Reich just got back from Australia where he heard Aussie CEOs say Beijing is more potent than America. What should be Bush’s priority #1 is not. ” Robert B. Reich […]
Read MoreYe Guozhu has been sentenced to four years in prison on charges of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble” after he publicly protested forced evictions in Beijing as the city prepares for the 2008 Olympics, according to the BBC. Ye’s family’s house was destroyed in 2003 to make way for new construction.
Read MorePhilip Pan has written a very good piece in the Washington Post about Liu Di’s search for the man who she fears may be a government informer who turned her into police two years ago: “Liu was bewildered by the conflicting information. Over a quiet dinner one night, her father proposed a theory: Li might […]
Read MoreFrom the Guardian: “The rapid growth of large emerging economies, particularly China, is shifting the global balance of economic activity. China is already the world’s second largest economy on one economic measure and, by 2015, could account for around 20 per cent of world output in real terms. It is therefore vital to the UK’s […]
Read MoreChing-Ching Ni from the Los Angeles Times wrote: “China recently shut down newspapers and detained academics, sparking a debate here on whether the government has launched a new era of repression or merely is sending a message to the country’s burgeoning media that they need to practice more self-censorship. Authorities last week shut down the […]
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