Archive for May, 2013

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29/05/2013

Settlers in Xinjiang: Circling the wagons

The Economist: “In a region plagued by ethnic strife, the growth of immigrant-dominated settlements is adding to the tension

MANY hours’ drive along what was once the southern Silk Road, through a featureless desert landscape punctuated by swirling dust-devils and occasional gnarled trees, a curious sight eventually confronts the traveller: row upon row of apartment blocks with vivid red roofs, as if a piece of Shanghai suburbia has been planted in the wilderness (see picture). Following the military-style nomenclature of immigrant settlements in China’s far west, it calls itself 38th Regiment. It is home to thousands of people, in a spot where just a few years ago there was nothing but sand.

The town is the latest addition to a vast network of such communities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China’s biggest province by land area and also its most ethnically troubled. Neighbouring Tibet has long been roiled by ethnic tension, too, but rarely has it witnessed the kind of violence that has troubled Xinjiang: a low-level insurgency involving ethnic Uighurs whose Muslim faith and Central Asian culture and language set them apart from the Han Chinese who dominate places like 38th Regiment. On April 23rd, 21 people were killed near Kashgar during an encounter between police and alleged separatists. An explosion of inter-ethnic violence in 2009 in the regional capital, Urumqi, that left nearly 200 dead, by official reckoning, exacerbated the divide. The expansion of the settlement network is deepening it further.

To use its full name, the 38th Regiment of the 2nd Agricultural Division is part of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. This state-run organisation, usually referred to as the bingtuan (Chinese for a military corps) controls an area twice the size of Taiwan, broken into numerous parts scattered around the province (see map). A few bits are city-sized. Most are more like towns or villages. Of their total population of more than 2.6m people, 86% are ethnically Han Chinese. In Xinjiang as a whole, in contrast, Han officially make up just over 40% of the 22m inhabitants. The rest are Uighurs and a few other ethnic groups.”

via Settlers in Xinjiang: Circling the wagons | The Economist.

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Posted in China alert, Dissident, Ethnic clash, Inequalities, Instability, Insurgency, Internal politics, Politics | Leave a Comment »

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29/05/2013

A Premium Milk Brand for India’s Elite

WSJ: “India’s rich and elite like their premium services, from hopping on private jets to receiving Dior goods at their doorstep. But the simple things apply, too.

A premium milk labeled Pride of Cows counts among its consumers the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, industrialist Mukesh Ambani’s family and Bollywood actor Hrithik Roshan, according to Parag Milk Foods Private Ltd.

Parag Milk Foods, the founder of Gowardhan dairies, launched the Pride of Cows milk in July 2011, initially marketing it as a “by invitation or reference only product” to select celebrities and industrialists.

According to a 2011 survey by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, 70% of the milk consumed in the country is adulterated.

Parag Milk Foods Chairman Devendra Shah says the Pride of Cows brand functions by the rule that “happy cows give better milk.” At its Bhagyalaxmi Dairy farm in Pune, around 3,500 Holstien Friesan cows are pampered with music, showers and specially designed nutritional meals, Mr. Shah says. “The result is milk full of love and high nutritional values.”

Parag Milk says it breeds its cows with imported bull semen from North America. Feed is tailor-made for cows of different ages, and the menu is changed regularly to include fresh seasonal crops and specials.

“This way we have complete control over the breed, feed and health of our cows, which in turn leads to complete control over the quality of milk,” said Mr. Shah.

“We have implemented ‘cow comfort’ technology, wherein our cows have soft rubber mats to lie on, streaming music, air-coolers to keep them cool, automated scrubbers to clean them and regular preventive healthcare checks,” added Edmund Piper, a U.K. national who was hired as the farm’s manager four years ago.

Parag Milk Foods signed up celebrities like writer Shobha De as Pride of Cows brand ambassadors, while it can count industrialist Raj Kundra, co-owner of the Rajasthan Royals cricket team, as a fan.

“Being a British-born Indian, I’ve always missed the milk from the UK. I can’t tell you how happy I was to sample this milk – it’s world class. I can finally start drinking milk and enjoying my cereal,” says an endorsement by Mr. Kundra on the Pride of Cows website.

Pride of Cows isn’t available in shops; it’s only delivered – in insulated boxes with ice bags — on subscription. It costs 75 rupees ($1.35) a liter, making it an expensive alternative to other milk, which generally costs around 35 rupees to 50 rupees in the markets. Nestlé milk is among the other brands available in India, costing 62 rupees a liter.”

via A Premium Milk Brand for India’s Elite – India Real Time – WSJ.

Posted in Affluence, Economics, food security, India alert | Leave a Comment »

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29/05/2013

When blue becomes the new white

FT: “My maid and her husband, a driver, have scrimped and saved and crammed themselves into a tiny flat in Shanghai for decades with one goal in mind: to give their only son a crack at the “Chinese dream”.

Newly graduated Chinese students gather for a convocation ceremony at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei in east China's Anhui province

Now those decades of deprivation have reached their climax as the cherished child of these hard-working people graduates from university and takes his first job: as a construction worker. And he counts himself lucky to have a job.

Small wonder that Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has recently been out gladhanding graduates who are facing one of the toughest job markets since the Communist party stopped giving them careers by fiat. For, like obesity and diabetes, a glut of unemployed graduates seems to be one of the unintended side-effects of economic development in China.

Sound familiar? Many readers of the Financial Times will know what it is like to have an unemployed graduate in the family – or to have been one themselves. Maybe job shortages are just part of the human condition, one that now affects the Chinese like the rest of humanity. (When I graduated from university in 1980, media jobs were so thin on the ground that I ended up teaching at a university in Ghana that had no books, few lights and little running water – landing a job without a flushing toilet was presumably not part of my parents’ university plan for me.)

Mr Xi pointed out on his jobs-fair visit that – like all the other flaws of capitalism – the scourge of graduate unemployment these days is global. But it would be hard to find people who have suffered more to take their place among the ranks of the white-collar unemployed than the Chinese.

This week alone, millions of students across the country will be skipping sleep, baths and online war games to study, while millions of parents take up to a year off work to cook, clean and nag them round the clock. Millions will pass next week’s dreaded college entrance exam (or gaokao) – only to end up unemployed or wearing a hard hat.

Increasing numbers are wondering if it’s all worth it, and are coming up with alternatives that range from the tragic to the downright postmodern. A Chinese newspaper reported this month that a fed-up teenager in central China hired a hit man to kill his father and older sister because – he said – they put too much pressure on him to study. And after this year’s three-day May Day public holiday, a 15-year-old boy in eastern China jumped to his death because he did not finish his holiday homework. Another teen in the same town rose at 4am to finish homework but was found hanging from the staircase before he got to school.

The overwork doesn’t stop with gaokao: just this month Chinese newspapers reported that two twenty-somethings in southern China dropped dead after taking on too much overtime – and such stories are not uncommon. Xinhua, the state news agency, said this week that 40 college graduates were found sharing one 130-square-metre room in Beijing while looking for jobs – living like the construction workers that they may be lucky to become.

So more and more students are opting instead for that most un-Chinese of solutions: time off the treadmill – or what the rest of the world knows as a “gap year”. Li Shangcong, a top student at his high school and vice-president of the student union, decided to skip gaokao altogether and cycle to the Cannes Film Festival – via Siberia. He never made it to France, having been deported by Russian immigration for an expired visa.

When his parents spluttered about the need to make something of himself, he said what teenagers around the world have been known to say in such circumstances: that he is attending the university of life and they should get off his back. He is currently on another trip to Russia.

Shi Zheying at least had her father onside: she skipped the high school entrance exam to “travel 10,000 miles rather than read 10,000 books first” – with her dad. The phrase immediately became popular among China’s “netizens”. Her grandparents, themselves teachers, were force-tutoring her at night, refusing to accept examination results that placed her as low as 16th in her class. After she decided to quit school, she was placed fifth.

China is not the land of “turn on, tune in, drop out” quite yet. But it’s a far cry from a world where terminal overwork is the only option.”

via When blue becomes the new white – FT.com.

Posted in China alert, Economics, graduate, unemployment | 1 Comment »

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29/05/2013

China’s spurned mistresses can’t be relied on to bust graft

(Reuters) – “China must not rely on whistle-blowing mistresses to expose corrupt officials, China’s top newspaper said on Wednesday, after a string of such incidents has led to some people hailing the girlfriends as graft-busters.

Liu Tienan, then deputy chairman of China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), attends a news conference in Beijing in this February 27, 2009 file photograph. REUTERS/Stringer/Files

President Xi Jinping has singled out corruption as a threat to the Communist Party’s survival, and the keeping of mistresses in lavish apartments, which breaks party rules, has come to represent to many people the excesses of power in China.

In a recent high-profile case, Liu Tienan, once the deputy chief of China’s top planning agency, was sacked after his mistress told a journalist that Liu had helped defraud banks of $200 million, state media reported.

But the People’s Daily, the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, questioned the woman’s motives and said China could not rely on such people to fight corruption.”

via China’s spurned mistresses can’t be relied on to bust graft: paper | Reuters.

Posted in China alert, corruption, whistle blowing | Leave a Comment »

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28/05/2013

* China Building Beachhead in Europe With $5 Billion Belarus City

Business Week: “China is building an entire city in the forests near the Belarusian capital Minsk to create a manufacturing springboard between the European Union and Russia.

China Building Beachhead in Europe With $5 Billion Belarus City

Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko allotted an area 40 percent larger than Manhattan around Minsk’s international airport for the $5 billion development, which will include enough housing to accommodate 155,000 people, according to Chinese and Belarusian officials.

Lukashenko, who’s led his former Soviet state of 9.5 million for two decades, is turning to China to help revive a $60 billion economy that’s needed $6.5 billion of bailouts from the International Monetary Fund and Russia since 2009. The hub will put Chinese exporters within 170 miles of EU members Poland and Lithuania and give them tax-free entry into Russia and Kazakhstan, which share a customs union. It will also let them draw from a workforce that’s 99.6 percent literate and makes $560 a month on average, half the Polish wage.

“This is a unique project,” Gong Jianwei, China’s ambassador to Belarus, said on state television May 17, after the project won regulatory approval. “Nobody will be able to build anything like this industrial park anywhere else in Europe anymore. The infrastructure is so powerful.”

The “modern city on the Eurasian continent,” as it’s called in marketing documents, will be built around the M1 highway that links Moscow and Berlin via Belarus and Poland. A speed-rail network will tie the airport to the center of the city, which will be powered by a $10 billion nuclear plant, Belarus’s first, which Russia agreed to finance and build by 2018. The first stage of the park is scheduled to be completed by 2020, with the second stage taking another 10 years.”

via China Building Beachhead in Europe With $5 Billion Belarus City – Businessweek.

Posted in China alert, Economics, GeoPolitics, Politics | Leave a Comment »

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27/05/2013

* As China’s middle class grows, so do its concerns

Taipei Times: “Beijing is facing increasing public pressure to deal with issues such as pollution, food safety and education driven by the 10 percent of its population who now count as middle class

W ith two cars, foreign holidays and a cook for their apartment, one Beijing family epitomizes the new middle class created by China’s decades of rapid economic growth — and its resulting worries.

Li Na, 42, is a caterer at the Beijing Zoo, and her husband, Chi Shubo, 48, works for a state-owned investment company. The couple have seen their fortunes transformed since Li arrived in Beijing 20 years ago from Shandong Province.

Then, she cycled for hours from a shared dormitory to visit her husband’s workplace. Now she commutes in a US-made car and the couple holiday with their 11-year-old daughter in Japan, South Korea and the US.

Tens of millions of other Chinese have made a similar transition. About 10 percent of China’s 1.35 billion people now count as middle class, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a figure that is set to rise to 40 percent by 2020.

However, their concerns about air pollution, food safety and China’s education system show the challenges facing the country’s newly appointed leaders, who have promised a shift away from the model of growth at all costs.

Every year, Li and her husband set a goal to improve their lives.

“We always have a plan,” Li said. “For example, this year I might want a new camera and my husband will help make that come true.”

The family’s four-bedroom apartment in a Beijing suburb was the most important purchase of their lives.

“We struggled half our lives to buy it,” Li said over a breakfast of fried eggs and bacon.

In a picture of comfortable suburban living, their daughter, who goes by the name Nancy, sprawls on a vast sofa opposite a huge flat-screen Sony television, nuzzling the family’s fluffy brown dog.

Li says her top priority is Nancy’s education. It is not a school day, but Li’s iPhone alarm rings to signal that it is time for her daughter’s first lesson.

She steers her Chevrolet Epica sedan past forests of near-identical apartment blocks to the Haidian Youth Palace, a relic of Maoist-era China which now holds classes aimed at boosting children’s creativity.

At weekends, Nancy has lessons in traditional Chinese calligraphy and a badminton class “with a private coach,” Li said.

In the past year, the young girl swapped learning the piano for a new instrument, the ocarina, a pocket-sized flute.

Nancy has only three or four hours of free time a day on weekends, Li said, as she seeks to hold her position in China’s highly competitive education system.

A glut of graduates created by the expansion of China’s university system means that the graduate unemployment rate is higher than that of the general population, making winning a place at the very best colleges ever more crucial.

Getting into a top school is also not always about ability, Li said, with cash donations sometimes involved.

“Sometimes parents need to do extra work, give out red envelopes and even then, success can depend on your contacts,” she said.

This year has bought some more worrying lessons. When thick smog blanketed northern China, sending pollution levels soaring in the capital, Nancy learned about PM2.5, the name given to invisible pollutants which can damage children’s lungs.

She reached into the pocket of her mother’s car seat and pulled out a face mask.

“My mum made me wear this every day in January and February because the PM2.5 was very bad,” she said.”

via As China’s middle class grows, so do its concerns – Taipei Times.

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Posted in Affluence, China alert, Economics, middle class | 2 Comments »

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27/05/2013

* Henan residents on rampage over Honda driver’s sense of entitlement

SCMP: “When the side rearview mirror of a black Honda bumped a 10-year-old girl on her way home from school, the driver – instead of helping the child – insulted and hit the mother. “I come from an influential family,” the driver said.

screen_shot_2013-05-27_at_4.02.24_pm.png

The incident on Friday evening in Henan province soon attracted an angry crowd of people who smashed and overturned the 26-year-old woman’s car. A man surnamed Zhang tried to set it on fire, according to a police report.

It took police until midnight to pacify the crowd as photos and video footage of the scene circulated online. Many of the comments represented outrage against the sense of entitlement of the privileged few.

As the gap between rich and poor is increasing, examples of nepotism and favouritism are striking a nerve. Such distaste from the public has been characterised by the phrase “My dad is Li Gang” – the words of a police official’s drunken son when he tried to avoid arrest after a student died in a car crash in 2010.

The phrase has become synonymous with fuerdai and guanerdai, second-generation rich and cadres, and has turned the 22-year-old son, now in jail after a public outcry, into the archetype of abuse of power.”

via Pictured: Henan residents on rampage over Honda driver’s sense of entitlement | South China Morning Post.

Posted in China alert, Politics, power & privilege, public protest | Leave a Comment »

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27/05/2013

* Gutter oil to be used as auto fuel

China Daily: “Authorities aim to keep waste from returning to the kitchen

Gutter oil to be used as auto fuel

Processed gutter oil is expected to be used as bus fuel within two years in Shanghai, as part of efforts to advance a circular economy and prevent recycled cooking oil from returning to the kitchen.

A China Eastern Airlines ground crew fills an airliner with biofuel made from gutter oil and palm oil at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport on April 14. The Airbus A320 succesfully made a one-and-a-half hour test flight with the fuel. CHEN FEI / XINHUA

The Shanghai Municipal Food Safety Committee will cooperate with Tongji University and six businesses that process used cooking oil into biodiesel that can power vehicles, said Yan Zuqiang, the committee’s director, in an interview with a local news portal on Saturday.

Owing to the comparatively high cost of transforming recycled cooking oil to vehicle diesel, those who use the oil will receive subsidies, he said.

Lou Diming, a professor at Tongji’s School of Automotive Studies who has led the study for the past three years, said after many experiments it is now the right time to turn the application of recycled cooking oil for vehicles into a reality.

His team has experimented with using mixed diesel fuel on more than 300 taxis, buses and lorries.

A regulation regarding the proper disposal of waste oil, including a clarification of the qualifications of oil collectors, came into effect in Shanghai in March.

The municipality leads the country in supervising the collection of waste oil, and at least 90 percent of its oil has been recycled appropriately, according to Yan.”

via Gutter oil to be used as auto fuel |Society |chinadaily.com.cn.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/economic-factors/greening-of-china/

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27/05/2013

* Beijing to shut coal-fired boilers to clean up air

China Daily Mail: “Beijing has vowed to eliminate most coal-fired boilers in the city center by the end of 2015 to reduce pollution from fine particulate matter, especially during the heating season.

Beijing to shut coal-fired boilers to clean up air

After reducing coal use by 700,000 metric tons last year, the capital plans to cut another 1.4 million tons this year and use no more than 21.5 million tons, according to the 2013 coal consumption reduction plan released by the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau and Commission of Development and Reform.

Workers with the Beijing District Heating Group destroy two coal delivery channels with cranes on April 25, marking the beginning of the transformation of energy from coal to gas in the last coal-burning power plant in Beijing. CHENG NING / FOR CHINA DAILY

The capital used 26.35 million tons of coal in 2010, the environmental bureau said.

Beijing still has a large number of coal-fired central heating boilers that give off large amounts of coal dust, and noise during the heating season.

Richard Saint Cyr, a family medicine doctor at United Family Health in Beijing, said he has noticed an uptick in discussions about the worsening air quality with many patients since winter.

He said that air pollution in the past winter was unusually serious and he had never witnessed such collective anxiety in Beijing.

Fine particulate matter poses a serious threat to people’s hearts and lungs, he said.”

via Beijing to shut coal-fired boilers to clean up air |Society |chinadaily.com.cn.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/economic-factors/greening-of-china/

Posted in carbon emission, China alert, Economics, Environment, greenhouse gas, Pollution | Leave a Comment »

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27/05/2013

* China parents apologise after teen’s Egypt graffiti exposed

BBC: “The parents of a Chinese teenager exposed and condemned by internet users for vandalising ancient Egyptian artwork have apologised, reports say.

This photo taken at the Luxor Temple in Egypt on 6 May 2013 shows graffiti reportedly from a Chinese tourist

On Friday a micro-blogger posted a photo of graffiti at a temple complex in Luxor, Egypt, which said: “Ding Jinhao was here”.

Angry internet users then managed to identify the teen, posting his date of birth and school online, reports said.

His mother told a local paper they were sorry for his actions.

Luxor is home to a large temple complex, located on the bank of the Nile River, believed to be some 3,500 years old.”

via BBC News – China parents apologise after teen’s Egypt graffiti exposed.

See also: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22573572

Posted in China alert, Culture, Social & cultural, tourist | 3 Comments »

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