Archive for November, 2013

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04/11/2013

China sends graft busters to more provinces, government departments | Reuters

As the anti-corruption campaign gathers pace, one cannot but be reminded of the Joe McCarthy ‘red under every bed’ anti-communist ‘witch hunt’ of the 50s in the US. See – http://www.coldwar.org/articles/50s/senatorjosephmccarthy.asp.  

The main difference, I suppose, is that there were far fewer ‘commies’ than McCarthy suspected; but one wonders if there will be far more corrupt officials than the Chinese Watchdog suspects.

“China has sent anti-corruption investigators to six more provinces and four government departments, the Chinese Communist Party\’s corruption watchdog said on Monday, in the government\’s latest move to tackle graft.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has dispatched inspectors to government departments that include official news agency Xinhua and the Commerce Ministry, the watchdog said in a statement on its website.

Other targets include the southern economic powerhouse of Guangdong, coal-rich Shanxi and the Ministry of Land and Resources.

Since taking office in March, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called corruption a threat to the ruling Communist Party\’s survival and vowed to go after powerful \”tigers\” as well as lowly \”flies\”.

Authorities have already announced the investigation or arrest of a handful of senior officials. Among them, former executives from oil giant PetroChina are being investigated in what appears to be the biggest graft probe into a state-run firm in years. These investigations are unrelated to this new round of probes, or the previous one, which began in May.

The May probes, which lasted through the summer and reported back in September, targeted five regions and five departments, including the poor southern province of Guizhou, the southeastern province of Jiangxi and coal-rich Inner Mongolia, as well as the state-owned China Grain Reserves Corporation and the China Publishing Group Corp.

The party has so far given few details of the outcome of the first round of investigations, in line with its secretive nature, though the anti-corruption watchdog publishes website reports of a steady stream of minor officials being probed.

Speaking to officials in October ahead of this new round of probes, Wang Qishan, the head of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, urged colleagues to spare no effort in rooting out corruption.”

via China sends graft busters to more provinces, government departments | Reuters.

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04/11/2013

In China’s Xinjiang, poverty, exclusion are greater threat than Islam | Reuters

If the analysis in this report is correct, then it is good news for China and Xinjiang. Alleviating poverty is difficult, but far easier than eliminating religious extremism.

“In the dirty backstreets of the Uighur old quarter of Xinjiang\’s capital Urumqi in China\’s far west, Abuduwahapu frowns when asked what he thinks is the root cause of the region\’s festering problem with violence and unrest.

A police officer stops a car to check for identifications at a checkpoint near Lukqun town, in Xinjiang province in this October 30, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/Files

\”The Han Chinese don\’t have faith, and the Uighurs do. So they don\’t really understand each other,\” he said, referring to the Muslim religion the Turkic-speaking Uighur people follow, in contrast to the official atheism of the ruling Communist Party.

But for the teenage bread delivery boy, it\’s not Islam that\’s driving people to commit acts of violence, such as last week\’s deadly car crash in Beijing\’s Tiananmen Square – blamed by the government on Uighur Islamist extremists who want independence.

\”Some people there support independence and some do not. Mostly, those who support it are unsatisfied because they are poor,\” said Abuduwahapu, who came to Urumqi two years ago from the heavily Uighur old Silk Road city of Kashgar in Xinjiang\’s southwest, near the Pakistani and Afghan border.

\”The Han are afraid of Uighers. They are afraid if we had guns, we would kill them,\” he said, standing next to piles of smoldering garbage on plots of land where buildings have been demolished.

China\’s claims that it is fighting an Islamist insurgency in energy-rich Xinjiang – a vast area of deserts, mountains and forests geographically located in central Asia – are not new.”

via In China’s Xinjiang, poverty, exclusion are greater threat than Islam | Reuters.

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Posted in China alert, Dissident, Economics, Ethnic clash, Freedom, Human rights, immigration, income-wealth gap, Inequalities, Instability, Insurgency, Internal politics, Politics, self determination, separatism | Leave a Comment »

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04/11/2013

Seven killed in rebel attack in India’s Assam state – BBC News

At least seven people have been killed in an attack by suspected militants in India\’s north-eastern state of Assam, police said.

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Rebels belonging to the Garo National Liberation Army opened fire on migrant workers who were playing cards late on Sunday in Goalpara district.

Nine workers were also injured in the attack, police said.

Assam has been plagued by ethnic clashes and separatist violence in recent years.

Goalpara has witnessed violence between the Rabha and Garo tribes.

Reports say that Sunday night\’s violence happened after Garo militants from neighbouring Meghalaya state fired at a group of Hindi-speaking migrant workers who were playing cards and gambling to celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights.

\”These militants in army dress came and fired indiscriminately… after the attack, they retreated to Meghalaya,\” AP Raut, a senior Assam police official, told the NDTV news channel.

Correspondents say many tribespeople resent the presence of outsiders, who they believe are taking their jobs and marrying local women.

via BBC News – Seven killed in rebel attack in India’s Assam state.

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

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03/11/2013

Jurassic parks rise in east as China catches dinosaur fever | The Times

National pride, an epic drive for museum construction and an unprecedented number of holes in the ground mean that the global future of dinosaur hunting will be Chinese.

Chinese archeologist uncovering dinosaur fossils at a site in Zhucheng, known as “dinosaur city,” in northeast China’s Shandong province. Archaeologists in China have uncovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, believed to be more than 100 million years old, state media reported on February 7, 2010, in an area said to be the world’s largest grouping of fossilised bones belonging to the ancient animals, after a three-month excavation at a gully in Zhucheng

The Chinese enthusiasm for palaeontology and regional one-upmanship, played out with 150 million year-old skeletons, could have a dramatic effect on the dinosaur names learnt and loved by children around the world.

China’s rich subterranean reserves of dinosaur fossils have already produced the Tsintaosaurus and Shantungosaurus, named decades ago after the places in which they were found. More recent additions include the Zhuchengtyrannus (from Zhucheng) and the Huanghetitan liujiaxiagensis, the latter named after a reservoir.

In many cases, discoveries of new species in China have prompted a fundamental rethink about dinosaur biology, their evolution and the way they were dispersed around the world. Discoveries in eastern China of thousands of fossilised eggs and embryos brought new theories about how dinosaurs grew; the world’s largest “graveyard” of dinosaurs in Shandong province offered the intriguing insight that dinosaurs of different species shared nests.

With Chinese funding increasingly available to domestic and international teams, the next two decades could see the familiar pantheon of Tyrannosaurus rex, Diplodocus and Triceratops joined by herds of newly discovered species named in honour of obscure corners of China where local governments are eagerly financing dinosaur digs. Only last month, a study in Shanxi province near the Yungang grottoes announced the discovery of a new hadrosaurid dinosaur from the late Cretaceous period: Yunganglong datongensis. It was greeted with huge excitement, because it could throw light on how a whole class of dinosaurs, the Hadrosauridae, evolved. New Chinese names have an element of whimsy: in April this year, international researchers agreed that a fossil found in the remote western Xinjiang region in 2006 was a 161 million year-old meat-eating theropod. It was named Auron Zhaoi after the dragon king in China’s most famous folk tale.

Although it has been clear for nearly a century that China is fabulously blessed with fossils, domestic interest has historically been limited, said Xu Xing, the senior professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. However, the past decade has seen a surge of interest that has corresponded with China’s protracted economic boom.

“When I started, there was just one person applying to study palaeontology — me. Now this institute alone has intakes of 20 students a year and there are new institutes opening around the country,” Professor Xu said. Local governments from Inner Mongolia to Hunan were competing to build museums around dinosaurs found on their patches and financing digs that might make a name for them, he added. Huang Dong, curator of the new £10 million Heyuan Dinosaur Museum in Guangdong province, said that it receives around 120,000 visitors a year. A further £40 million of investment in a dinosaur park is planned.

via Jurassic parks rise in east as China catches dinosaur fever | The Times.

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03/11/2013

China’s Jiboazhai Museum Closed After Artifacts Discovered To Be Fake – Huffington Post

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/11/03/a-culture-of-bidding-forging-an-art-market-in-china-ny-times/

“China is known worldwide for its pandas, its cranes, and unfortunately, its forged goods. According to a UN report, 70 percent of the world\’s counterfeit goods produced between 2008 and 2010 originated from China. The forgeries have found their way into markets and stores around the world, and even, it was revealed this month, into China\’s own museums.

museum fake

On Monday, authorities in Hebei Province shuttered Jibaozhai Museum after announcing that many of the Chinese historical artifacts it displayed were forgeries. An official from the Hebei Provincial Cultural Heritage Bureau told Global Times that the museum\’s license had been revoked and its managers were currently under investigation.

The deceit was initially revealed in a July 6 blog by Chinese writer Ma Boyong on the Sina blogging platform. As Shanghai Daily reports, Ma had posted photos of the forged pieces, which included items purportedly signed by Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, in simplified Chinese characters. However, such characters did not come into use until the 20th century, 4,500 years after the Yellow Emperor died.

According to the report, another vase had a label identifying it as dating back to the Tang Dynasty-era (618–907 AD), even though the five-color wucai technique it displayed was not invented until the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD).

via China’s Jiboazhai Museum Closed After Artifacts Discovered To Be Fake.

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03/11/2013

A Culture of Bidding: Forging an Art Market in China – NY Times

When the hammer came down at an evening auction during China Guardian’s spring sale in May 2011, “Eagle Standing on a Pine Tree,” a 1946 ink painting by Qi Baishi, one of China’s 20th-century masters, had drawn a startling price: $65.4 million. No Chinese painting had ever fetched so much at auction, and, by the end of the year, the sale appeared to have global implications, helping China surpass the United States as the world’s biggest art and auction market.

But two years after the auction, Qi Baishi’s masterpiece is still languishing in a warehouse in Beijing. The winning bidder has refused to pay for the piece since doubts were raised about its authenticity.

“The market is in a very dubious stage,” said Alexander Zacke, an expert in Asian art who runs Auctionata, an international online auction house. “No one will take results in mainland China very seriously.”

Indeed, even as the art world marvels at China’s booming market, a six-month review by The New York Times found that many of the sales — transactions reported to have produced as much as a third of the country’s auction revenue in recent years — did not actually take place.

Just as problematic, the market is flooded with forgeries, often mass-produced, and has become a breeding ground for corruption, as business executives curry favor with officials by bribing them with art.

Fraud is certainly no stranger to the international art world, but experts warn that the market here is particularly vulnerable because, like many industries in China, it has expanded too fast for regulators to keep pace.

In fact, few areas of business offer as revealing a view of this socialist society’s lurch toward capitalism as the art market. Like many luxury businesses in China, the explosion of buyers for art here has been fueled by the pent-up consumerism of the newly rich. The demand is so great that last year, in a country that barely had an art market two decades ago, reported auction revenues were up 900 percent over 2003 — to $8.9 billion. (The United States auction market for 2012 was $8.1 billion.)

While the luxury-buying habits in China often mimic those in the West, the demand for art reflects uniquely Chinese tastes. While the rest of the world bids up Pollocks and Rothkos, Chinese buyers typically pursue traditional Chinese pieces, some by 15th-century masters, and others by modern artists, like Zhang Daqian, one of many who have chosen to work in that old style.

Ceramic vases and jugs dry before being fired in the kilns at the Xiong Jianjun factory, one of China’s best-known makers of reproductions, in Jingdezhen, the ancient center of porcelain making. ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

This very reverence for the cultural past is now contributing greatly to the surge in forgeries. Artists here are trained to imitate the old Chinese masters, and they routinely produce high-quality copies of paintings and other works, such as ceramics and jade artifacts. That tradition has intersected with the newly lucrative art market, in which reproductions that so many have the skills to create are often offered as the real thing. It would be hard to create a more fertile environment for the proliferation of fakes.

via A Culture of Bidding: Forging an Art Market in China.

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03/11/2013

China? They’ll make it cheaper in Yorkshire | The Sunday Times

We spotted this trend – initially called “reverse outsourcing”, now re-labelled Reshoring – 15 months ago.  See:

Reshoring is surely gathering pace.

“THE EXODUS is over. British business is coming home.

A growing number of firms, like fashion chain Zara, are looking to bring their manufacturing operations to Britain

A decade ago, companies began to move to the Far East on the promise of cheap labour. Thousands were lured offshore as they sought to keep up with more nimble foreign rivals.

Today, that trend may be reversing. The boardroom buzzword is “reshoring” as a growing number of firms of all sizes look to repatriate their manufacturing operations to Britain.

Rapidly rising wages and energy costs in Asia have soured the dream for many businesses. By contrast, falling real wages in Britain are making domestic production look attractive again.

Detailed numbers are difficult to come by but Zara, the fashion chain, Symington’s, the food manufacturer, and Hornby, the model train producer, are among those that have pledged to produce more domestically.

Tony Caldeira’s textile company is another. It has been shrinking its operations in China and ramping up production in Britain.

“The tide began to turn about 18 months ago with a worsening exchange rate and increasing labour and freight costs,” he said.

Ten years ago, in the face of growing pressure to compete with more efficient foreign competitors, Caldeira closed a factory in St Helens, Merseyside and opened one in Hangzhou, a city of nearly 9m people in eastern China.

“Overseas rivals were selling goods cheaper than we could produce them. Our customers said we needed to lower our prices or they would go elsewhere. We thought, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’,” Caldeira said.

Hangzhou is the textiles capital of the world, with about half the industry’s production emanating from within a 100-mile radius of the city, including many of Caldeira’s suppliers.

The company’s transport costs fell dramatically and it grew quickly. It moved into a new factory four times in five years, on each occasion into larger premises.

But the benefits began to decline as the value of the renminbi climbed. When Caldeira arrived in China, the exchange rate was 14 renminbi to the pound; now, a decade later, it is less than 10.

The biggest factor pushing many British companies to abandon China has been soaring labour costs. From 2000 to 2008, real wages in Asia rose 7%-8% a year, according to the International Labour Organisation. In China, pay jumped 19% a year between 2005 and 2010, according to Boston Consulting. In advanced economies, real wages increased less than 1% over a similar period.

“We redid the maths and realised it was no longer cost-effective,” Caldeira said.

The company’s Chinese workforce has been halved from 150 to about 70. In Britain, it has hired 25 cutters, sewers, warehouse workers and designers.

Caldeira doesn’t plan to pull out of the Far East altogether. China still has some benefits, and he plans to make some goods there and others back home. “For us, it is literally the best of both worlds,” he said.

James Laxton’s timing was brave, if not suicidal. In 2009, as the financial crisis was unleashing misery around the globe, he decided to shut down the overseas operations of his family’s 100-year-old wool manufacturing company and open a mill in Yorkshire.

The company’s products had been produced in Turkey and China for eight years but its foreign partners were becoming increasingly unreliable. Laxton, great-grandson of the company’s founder George, decided to try it himself.

“The issues were getting bigger and bigger. Delivery times were getting longer, the service was deteriorating and transport costs were rising,” he said.

Since opening the Yorkshire mill at the start of 2010, the company has made two further investments so it can expand and upgrade the plant. Employee numbers have grown from 3 to 25.

“The quality of our goods and services has improved and we can bring new products to market much quicker,” he said.

Bathrooms.com, a maker of bathroom products, recently cancelled orders worth £1m with Chinese manufacturers and awarded them to businesses in the Midlands.

“Instead of taking nine months from design to production, it can take as little as two months,” said Ian Monk, the company’s founder.

But it won’t be bringing all its manufacturing back to Britain. Some products, such as shower doors, are produced so cheaply in China that others can never compete.”

via China? They’ll make it cheaper in Yorkshire | The Sunday Times.

Posted in China alert, Economics, Reshoring, Reverse off-shoring | 1 Comment »

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02/11/2013

Fandry puts a harsh spotlight on India’s caste system – Reuters

Nagraj Manjule grew up as a Dalit, an untouchable, scorned by a caste system that he says never lets you forget how low you are. The short-film director channeled the shame and the ridicule of his childhood into his first feature film, “Fandry” (“Pig”) which won the Jury Grand Prize at the Mumbai Film Festival last month.

The movie is about a Dalit schoolboy named Jabya (Somnath Awghade) who  lives on the outskirts of a village and struggles against the caste system by daring to dream, and eventually rebelling against the perpetrators of that system.

He harbours a crush on a fair-skinned, Brahmin class-mate, dreams of buying fancy new blue jeans, and uses talcum powder to try to make his dusky face fair. Through scenes with his father, his best friend and the village maverick who becomes friends with Jabya, Manjule tells the audience that little has changed. The powerful climax gives the audience a glimpse into Jabya’s insecurities, his reluctance to accept his identity, before he finally snaps, retaliating against those ridiculing him and his family.

“You are constantly told you are no good, and never will be. In some way or the other, there is so much humiliation, that after a while you begin to believe that what is being said about you is true,” Manjule said in an interview.

His childhood was much like Jabya’s. One difference was his father, who, unlike Jabya’s somewhat tyrannical father, wanted him to study. Manjule devoured books, reading Marathi and English literature whenever he got a chance. His ticket to a better life came when he left his village to study Marathi literature at the University of Pune.

via India Insight.

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01/11/2013

Chinese land reform: A world to turn upside down | The Economist

MORTGAGING a village home is a sensitive issue in China. A nervous local official has warned residents of Gumian, a small farming community set amid hills and paddies in Guangdong province, that they risk leaking state secrets if they talk to a foreign reporter about the new borrowing scheme that lets them make use of the value of their houses. They talk anyway; they are excited by what is going on.

Urban land in China is owned by the state, and in the 1990s the state allowed a flourishing property market to develop in the cities. That went on to become a colossal engine of economic growth. But rural land, though no longer farmed collectively, as it was in Mao’s disastrous “people’s communes”, has stayed under collective ownership overseen by local party bosses. Farmers are not allowed to buy or sell the land they work or the homes they live in. That hobbles the rural economy, and the opportunities of the farmers who have migrated to the cities but live as second-class citizens there.

Hence the importance of experiments like those in Gumian. Cautious and piecemeal, they have been going on for years. Some are ripe for scaling up. Handled correctly, such an expansion could become a centrepiece of Xi Jinping’s rule.

On October 7th Mr Xi said the government was drawing up a “master plan” for not just more reform, but a “profound revolution”. Such talk is part of the preparations for a plenum of the Communist Party’s Central Committee which will begin on November 9th. It is the third such meeting since Mr Xi came to power; because the first two plenums of a party chief’s term are given over largely to housekeeping matters, including party and government appointments, third plenums are the ones to watch.

And Mr Xi is marking this one out as particularly important. In private conversations with Western leaders he has been comparing the event to the third plenum that, in 1978, saw Deng Xiaoping’s emergence as China’s new strongman after the death of Mao two years earlier, and set the stage for the demise of the people’s communes. Indeed “profound revolution” is a deliberate echo of a phrase of Deng’s.

via Chinese land reform: A world to turn upside down | The Economist.

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01/11/2013

Chinese Rage at the Pension System – Businessweek

This public-sector / private pension imbalance is similar to that in the UK!

“When a Beijing professor recently suggested pushing back the age at which retirees get their pensions, China’s bloggers let loose. “You’re indeed completely without conscience, a mouth filled with poison and cruelty, your heart that of a beast,” wrote one blogger from Shenyang, in Liaoning province, on the online portal Sohu.com, according to ChinaSMACK, a website that translates Chinese Internet content. “The clamor to postpone the retirement age is getting louder, a raging fire burns in my heart,” wrote another from Jiangxi province. “Tsinghua University truly has raised a bunch of garbage professors,” wrote a blogger from Guangdong, referring to Yang Yansui, director of Tsinghua’s employment and social security institute, who raised the idea.

The heated responses reflect the crisis faced by China’s pension system. A shrinking workforce must support more than 200 million retirees. The government has moved in the last few years to add farmers, the unemployed, and migrant workers to its pension rolls, which now cover more than four-fifths of those registered in cities and 43 percent of rural Chinese.

1.6:1—Expected ratio in 2050 of working-age people supporting 1 retiree, down from 4.9 to 1 today

When top officials gather in Beijing on Nov. 9 to map out the next set of reforms, solving the pension crisis could well be high on their list. Last year for the first time, the working-age population—those 15 to 59 years old—declined, falling by 3.5 million to 937.3 million. People older than 60 make up 13 percent of the population. By 2050 that number will rise to 34 percent, estimates the World Bank. Today an average 4.9 Chinese of working age support one retiree. That ratio could fall to 1.6 by 2050, estimates Robert Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.”

via Chinese Rage at the Pension System – Businessweek.

Posted in China alert, Economics, retirement pensions | Leave a Comment »

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