Chinese innovations are catching up, fast. There is also the next generation Internet in play already.
05/04/2013
* Chinese overtake Germans as biggest spending tourists
China Daily: “Chinese tourists have overtaken Germans as the world’s biggest-spending travellers after a decade of robust growth in the number of Chinese holidaying abroad, the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) said on Thursday.
Chinese tourists, known for travelling in organised tours and snapping up luxury fashion abroad, spent $102 billion on foreign trips last year, outstripping deep-pocketed travellers from Germany and the United States.
Chinese tourists spent 41 percent more on foreign travel in 2012 than the year before, beating the close to $84 billion both German and U.S. travellers parted with last year.
Tourists from other fast-growing economies with swelling middle classes, like Russia and Brazil, also increased spending in 2012. In recession-hit Europe, however, French and Italian tourists reined in their holiday budgets.
“The impressive growth of tourism expenditure from China and Russia reflects the entry into the tourism market of a growing middle class from these countries,” said UNWTO Secretary-General Taleb Rifai.”
via Chinese overtake Germans as biggest spending tourists |Economy |chinadaily.com.cn.
05/04/2013
* Economic development must be environmentally sustainable, says Manmohan
The Hindu: “Warning that environmental degradation could have serious consequences, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday emphasised that economic growth should be based on optimal use of natural resources and development must be environmentally sustainable.
Often, he regretted, “economic policies designed to promote growth have been implemented without considering their full environmental consequences, presumably on the assumption that these consequences would either take care of themselves or could be dealt with separately.”
Mr. Singh said this while inaugurating the International Workshop on Green National Accounting for India in New Delhi.
He said India’s commitment to planned economic development reflects the government’s determination to improve the economic conditions of people and an affirmation of the role of the government in bringing about this outcome through a variety of social, economic, and institutional initiatives.
“But as the economy develops the capacity to grow rapidly, it gives rise to many new challenges. For instance, natural resources are limited, and final.
“And one needs to decide how to use these scarce resources optimally, both from the economic development and the sustainability perspectives,” Mr. Singh said.
The Prime Minister said there is evidence to suggest that such policies may actually result in a net decrease in human well-being.
Globally, he said, environmental degradation is manifesting itself through the loss of fertile soils, desertification, decreasing forest cover, reduction of fresh water availability, and an extreme loss of bio-diversity.
“These are serious consequences, and it has become clear today that economic development must be environmentally sustainable,” he added.
Mr. Singh said through planned economic development, India aims to attain economic growth and poverty alleviation, and doing so in a sustainable manner.”
via Economic development must be environmentally sustainable, says Manmohan – The Hindu.
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- The past & present of Indian environmentalism (thehindu.com)
- Sustainable Development: Only a Buzzword? (thehindu.com)
04/04/2013
* Rahul pitches for inclusive growth, says India largest pool of human capital
Times of India: “In a veiled criticism of BJP‘s policies, Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said politics of alienating communities affects growth and the Congress stood for inclusive growth even as he sidestepped questions on becoming Prime Minister.
Rahul Gandhi at a rally in Ernakulam, Kerala. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
India had witnessed faster economic growth under the UPA because it had greatly lowered tensions among communities and fostered harmony, the Congress vice-president said.
“When you play the politics of alienating communities, you stop the movement of people and ideas. When that happens we all suffer. Businesses suffer and the seeds of disharmony are sown and the dreams of our people are severely disrupted,” he said, adding that this damage takes a very long time to reverse.
“It is very dangerous to leave people behind. Inclusive growth is a win-win for everybody,” Rahul said addressing the Annual General Meeting of the CII here.
Likening India to a movement where a billion people were trying to break the shackles, he said there was a need to use the energy and ideas generated by this exercise to help everybody.
“There are two ways this movement can go. It can go harmoniously or it can go disruptively. The idea of the Congress party is that it should go harmoniously and everybody should move together and happily,” he said.
Anger, hatred and prejudice did not contribute to growth, he added.
Spelling out his priorities for India’s growth, Rahul Gandhi said: “The biggest danger is excluding people, excluding the poor, the middle class, the tribals, the Dalits.”
“Whenever we excluded women, the minorities, Dalits… we have always fallen back,” the 42-year-old Gandhi scion said.”
via Rahul pitches for inclusive growth, says India largest pool of human capital – The Times of India.
02/04/2013
* China’s next generation Net is way ahead of the West
The Nation: “The Net is getting creaky and old: it is rapidly running out of space and remains fundamentally insecure. And it turns out that China is streets ahead of the West in doing anything about it.
Internet! (Photo credit: LarsZi)
A report published in the “Philosophical Transactions” of the Royal Society this month details China’s advances in creating a next-generation Internet that is on a national level and on a larger scale than anything in the West.
At the root of the problem are “two major gaps in the architecture of the Internet”, according to a report from the New England Complex Systems Institute, compiled in 2008 for the US Navy and released to the public this month. First up is the Internet’s inability to block malicious traffic as a whole. While malware can rapidly replicate and distribute itself across the Net, organisations can only respond to individual instances of online aggression.
China is already coming up with better defences. One of the most important aspects of its next-generation backbone is a security feature known as source address validation architecture (SAVA). Many of the existing security problems stem from an inability to authenticate IP addresses of computers that try to connect to your network. SAVA fixes this by adding checkpoints across the network. These build up a database of trusted computers matched up with their IP addresses. Packets of data will be blocked if the computer and IP address don’t match. Steve Wolff, one of the Internet’s early pioneers, calls it a “model that should be much more widely adopted”.
Even setting security worries aside, the Internet is running out of room. The current standard for assigning space to computers – known as Internet Protocol Version Four (IPv4) – uses a numbering system which has just under 4.3 billion possible spaces. Internet engineers have been working on the new standard for years. It is called IPv6 and will boost the number of available Internet slots by a mind-boggling 80,000 trillion trillion times. But progress on IPv6 has been painfully slow, and time is running out. IPv4 slots are due to run out in multiple regions around the world this year.
But China has been planning for that day for a long time, under pressure from its massive population, all of whom want to be connected to the Net. So says Donald Riley, an information systems specialist at the University of Maryland, who also chairs the Chinese American Network Symposium.
“China has a national Internet backbone in place that operates under IPv6 as the native network protocol,” says Riley. “We have nothing like that in the US.”
China is already running next-generation services: Internet service provider 3TNet provides television over IPv6, streaming programmes in high definition. It is the basis for a system that monitors and controls traffic flow over the Internet and provides remote medical services – even long-distance, real-time violin lessons in high definition. All have the potential to reach more people at higher speeds than any equivalent service on the old Internet.
“If you are thinking about the future of the Internet, anyone that explores that territory and maps it out first has a definite competitive advantage,” Riley says, “especially with the resources available to China.””
via China’s next generation Net is way ahead of the West – The Nation.
Related articles
- China Jumps to IPv6 While U.S. Moves Slowly Away From IPv4 (dailytech.com)
- China’s internet architecture (thedroidguy.com)
- China’s new internet backbone explained: verified sources, IPv6 at the core (engadget.com)
- China’s Internet Architecture Gives the Rest of Us a Run for Our Money (gizmodo.com)
25/03/2013
* Third Pole glaciers shrinking, affected by black carbon
China Daily: “About 90 percent of glaciers in the Third Pole region are shrinking, accelerated by black carbon being transferred from South Asia to the Tibetan Plateau, a top scientist has warned.
The Third Pole region, which is centered on the Tibetan Plateau and concerns the interests of the surrounding countries and regions, covers more than 5 million square kilometers and has an average altitude of more than 4,000 meters.
The area has the largest number of glaciers outside the polar regions and exerts a direct influence on the social and economic development of some of the most densely populated regions on earth, including China and India.
The glaciers are at the headwaters of many prominent Asian rivers.
Influenced by global warming, its alpine glaciers have seen drastic changes in recent years, such as thinning and shrinkage, which pose potential geological hazards to people both on and around the plateau.
Like Antarctica and the Arctic, the Third Pole is drawing increased attention from the international academic community, but the results of former international studies in this area are inconsistent, said Yao Tandong, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences‘ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research.
The scientist, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee, said some people believe the glaciers will retreat and finally disappear by 2030, while others argue they will remain unchanged.
There are even people who argue that the glaciers have even moved forward, he said.
Researchers at Yao’s institute say they can now draw a more comprehensive picture of the region, by showing data on the glaciers’ status over the past 30 years. An investigation using topographic maps and satellite images revealed the retreat of 82 glaciers, area reduction by 7,090 glaciers and the mass-balance change of 15 glaciers.
“Systematic differences in glacier status are apparent from region to region, with the most pronounced shrinkage in the Himalayas, the southeastern part of the region.
Some of the glaciers there are very likely to disappear by 2030,” Yao said.
“The shrinkage generally decreases from the Himalayas to the continental interior and is smallest in the western part. Some glaciers there are even growing.”
He said changes in the glaciers will be accelerated if the planet continues to warm.
Potential consequences would be unsustainable water supplies from major rivers and geo-hazards, such as glacier lake expansion and flooding, which could threaten the well-being of people downstream.”
via Third Pole glaciers shrinking, affected by black carbon |Society |chinadaily.com.cn.
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- How will climate change affect the Himalayas? Scientists trek to find out. (csmonitor.com)
- Where has all the ice gone? (treehugger.com)
- Between Glacier And Dam: Living With Climate Change On Tibetan Plateau (chimalaya.org)
- Nepal’s glaciers retreat – but why? (climatenewsnetwork.net)
- Glaciers in the Himalayas Are Retreating – But Why? (climatecentral.org)
- Study Shows Canada’s Far North Glaciers Are Melting Fast (climatecentral.org)
- Canada’s Glaciers Could Shrink by a Fifth by 2100 (themoderatevoice.com)
25/03/2013
* China pulls 1,000 dead ducks from Sichuan river
BBC: “Around 1,000 dead ducks have been pulled from a river in southwest China, local officials say.
Residents found the dead ducks in Nanhe river in Pengshan county, Sichuan province, and alerted the environmental department, they said.
Local residents and livestock were not at risk as the river was not used for drinking water, officials added.
The news comes as the toll of dead pigs pulled from Shanghai’s Huangpu river passed 16,000.
Speaking in an interview with China National Radio on Sunday, Liang Weidong, a deputy director in Pengshan’s publicity department, said that the authorities were first made aware of the ducks on Tuesday.
Officials discovered over 50 woven bags which contained the carcasses of around 1,000 ducks in the river.
They were unable to determine the cause of death as some of the ducks were already decomposed, Mr Liang said, adding that the bodies had been disinfected and buried.
An initial investigation suggested that the duck corpses had originated from upstream and were not dumped by local Pengshan farmers, he said.”
via BBC News – China pulls 1,000 dead ducks from Sichuan river.
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- Dead pigs in China river exceed 13,000 (seeddaily.com)
25/03/2013
* Behind China’s Switch to High-End Exports
WSJ: “As rising labor costs push manufacturing of T-shirts, jeans and the like out of China, the country has been able to offset that loss by grabbing the high end.
![[image]](https://i0.wp.com/si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-CB859_CEXPOR_G_20130324184514.jpg)
And nowhere is that on better display than the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
When the switch is flipped each night for the span’s two-year artistic light show, the electricity flows through sophisticated power devices made by Gary Hua’s factory not far from Shanghai.
In the six years since it was founded, his company has grown to 1,000 employees, who last year made three million power-supply units for high-efficiency light-emitting diodes. The company, Inventronics Inc., expects to double production this year and export more than half that output.
With labor costs increasing in China, the country is now shifting its manufacturing focus to high-tech exports such as computers and sophisticated power devices. Shaun Rein of China Markets Research tells the WSJ’s Jake Lee how Western countries are reacting.
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Inventronics exemplifies China’s shift toward producing the higher-end products that are fueling the country’s export growth. China has been increasing exports in industries as varied as computers, car parts, high-technology lamps and optical-surgical equipment, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Chinese, European Union and U.S. trade data.
HSBC economists estimate that China’s share of global exports increased to 11% last year, from 9% before the 2008 financial crisis and around 5% at the turn of the millennium. China’s exports rose 8% last year while global trade expanded just 1.6%, according to the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
Chinese employment in higher-value industries such as electrical- and communications-equipment production has jumped since 2008 and now exceeds employment in textiles, garments and leather making, says Royal Bank of Scotland RBS.LN +0.68% economist Louis Kuijs.
High-tech goods are more valuable and are a bigger market than clothes. Over the past two years, Chinese exports to the U.S. of high-tech electronics, auto parts and optical devices rose 24%, to $129 billion, while exports of clothes and footwear rose just 5% to $47 billion. That has caused China’s share of the U.S. trade deficit to expand $20 billion last year to a record $315 billion, according to a U.S. government analysis.
A chunk of what is marked “Made in China” is made up of parts and design that originated elsewhere, making trade data a little fuzzy. The chips in Inventronics’ LED drivers are from the U.S., for example.
But China’s exports contain a rising percentage of materials that were made in the country, according to the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2009, the latest year for which figures are available, 28% of the value of Chinese exports came from foreign producers. In 2005, the figure was 36%.”
25/03/2013
* Wages Rising in Chinese Factories? Only For Some
Working in these Times: “If we are to take recent news reports at face value, the collective conscience of the worlds consumers can be eased, because conditions at Chinese factories are improving.
Last year, The New York Times told us that these workers are “cheap no more,” and just this February, the Heritage Foundation, touting the virtues of global free trade, claimed that Chinese factory wages have risen 20 percent per year since 2005. Foxconn, Apples major supplier and the manufacturer of approximately 40 percent of the worlds consumer electronics, says it will hold free union elections every five years.
But Pollyannas should take pause: The average migrant workers $320 monthly salary in 2011 was actually 43 percent less than the $560 national average, according to government statistics. And though its true that Foxconn will permit the election of union leaders, we have yet to see how much Chinas so-called democratic unions can empower the workers they purport to represent.
Skepticism and caveats aside, the reality is that the lot of formal production workers in China is indeed advancing, however slowly and painfully. But that is true only for formal workers. What many consumers and observers fail to note are the perilous conditions of Chinas temporary production workers and the increased tendency among Chinese factories to use such workers to manufacture the brand-name products that fill your home.
Factories supplying Apple and Samsung, for example, make heavy use of temp workers. According to official statistics, temp workers make up 20 percent of Chinas urban workforce of 300 million, though the proportion in individual factories often tops 50 percent. As China turns into a land of short-term workers, there are grave implications for labor, companies, and Chinese society.”
via Wages Rising in Chinese Factories? Only For Some – Working In These Times.
Related articles
- * Where Have China’s Workers Gone? (chindia-alert.org)
- Foxconn Inland China Push Spurred by Labor, BI Says (bloomberg.com)
- Union for iPhone workers is pure PR (salon.com)
- Foxconn Workers Organize In Communist China (news.firedoglake.com)
- Where Have China’s Workers Gone? (bloomberg.com)
- Foxconn plans Chinese union vote (edition.cnn.com)
- As China Changes, Infamous Foxconn Goes Robotic (forbes.com)
- Chinese factories turn to outsourced workers (wantchinatimes.com)
- China’s trade union reforms aim to control its militant workforce | Richard Seymour (guardian.co.uk)
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