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Beware the Waking Dragon
Jianshe village in Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture, Sichuan province, shared about 13.11 million yuan ($2.17 million) in bonuses with the 340 households in the village, on Jan 14, 2013. The village became rich after piloting a land circulation project, which introduced a new farming company and an investment company. One household received 314,000 yuan.
via Villagers in SW China share the wealth[1]- Chinadaily.com.cn.
Nearly half a century after Bian Zhongyun was beaten, kicked, tormented and left to die, bloody and alone, at the Beijing girls’ school where she was deputy principal, a daughter of the Communist Party elite has offered public penance — of a kind that instantly brought controversy — for her part in one of the most notorious killings of the Cultural Revolution.
Growing numbers of aging Red Guards have declared their contrition for violence perpetrated from 1966, when Mao Zedong urged students to turn against the school and party authorities he accused of stymieing his vision of a revolutionary society cleansed of ideological laxity.
But the apology from Song Binbin, reported by The Beijing News on Monday, quickly drew attention and was featured on many Chinese news websites. Here was a daughter of a veteran revolutionary apologizing for what has been widely described as the first killing of a teacher in the decade-long Cultural Revolution.
Ms. Song’s father was Song Renqiong, a general who served as a senior official under Mao and later Deng Xiaoping. Ms. Song herself won fame as a member of the first wave of Red Guards when she was photographed meeting Mao. But for years, many of them spent in the United States, she was muted about the death of Ms. Bian, a deputy principal at the elite Beijing Normal University Girls High School, where she was a student. The Cultural Revolution remains a sensitive, and heavily censored, chapter in China’s history. President Xi Jinping mentioned it only once and briefly in a speech last month celebrating the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.
On Sunday in Beijing, Ms. Song, who was born in 1949, told a gathering of former students and teachers from the school that she was sorry.
via Bowed and Remorseful, Former Red Guard Recalls Teacher’s Death – NYTimes.com.
This post is a commentary.
In 1965, L.M. Singhvi addressed India’s lower house of parliament and told parliamentarians that the need for an anticorruption ombudsman was overdue.
“It is for the sake of securing justice and for cleansing the public life of the Augean stable of corruption, real and imaginary, that such an institution must be brought into existence,” he told lawmakers at the time.
Almost half a century later, on Jan. 1, the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act, to create a corruption watchdog, became the first law made in 2014.
It gives Lokpal, or the “caretaker of the people”, jurisdiction to investigate allegations of corruption made against government officials up to the rank of prime minister. Even nongovernmental organizations with foreign donations above one million rupees ($16,252) annually will fall within its purview.
The new anti-corruption machinery involves the services of federal investigators — the Central Bureau of Investigation — and the Central Vigilance Commission, which have both been made more robust and independent for the purpose.
via Inside Law: The Year Lokpal Comes of Age – India Real Time – WSJ.
China will invest 16 billion yuan (2.6 billion U.S. dollars) to protect Sanjiangyuan, the cradle of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers in northwestern Qinghai Province.
English: Sanjiangyuan National Nature Reserve, Qinghai,PRC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The second phase for the ecological protection and restoration of Sanjiangyuan was officially launched on Friday.
According to the protection plan, the restoration area will be expanded to 395,000 sq km, or 54.6 percent of the total area of Qinghai.
Although the first stage has brought remarkable improvements, the overall ecological degradation of the area has not been fundamentally curbed, said Du Ying, vice director of the National Development and Reform Commission.
The second phase will involve protecting the environment, improving people\’s livelihoods and achieving coordinated economic, social and cultural development, said Li Xiaonan, a Qinghai official for the Sanjiangyuan project.
With an average altitude of 4,000 meters, the Sanjiangyuan region has long been a paradise for herders, rare wild animals such as the Tibetan antelope and medicinal herbs like the Tibetan snow lotus.
via China invests 2.6 bln USD to protect major riverheads – Xinhua | English.news.cn.
India\’s environment ministry has cleared South Korean steel giant Posco\’s planned $13 billion steel plant in eastern India but has asked the company to spend more on social welfare, an official said Friday.
The clearance was given a few days ago and will allow Posco to go ahead with the massive plant in Odisha state, the official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. He did not give further details.
The clearance comes days before South Korean President Park Geun-hye is to begin a four-day visit to India on Jan. 15.
The Odisha steel plant would be the largest-ever foreign investment in India. The country has been embroiled in fierce debates over how to protect its environment while lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty through investment and infrastructure development.
via Posco plant in India gets environment clearance – Businessweek.
Travelers arriving at Mumbai’s international airport can soon expect to be rid of the long immigration lines, chaotic baggage claim experience, and hopefully, the stench.
On Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh inaugurated a new terminal at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, which will be operational starting February 12.
The new T2 international terminal will be able to accommodate 40 million passengers per year — nearly a third more than the old terminal, according to a spokesman for GVK Power and Infrastructure Ltd., which has been operating the Mumbai airport in partnership with the Airport Authority of India since 2006. The new terminal cost around 55 billion rupees ($890 million) to build, the spokesman added.
The last time a new airport terminal created such a buzz in India was when the T3 terminal was launched at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, with its automatic walkways, aerobridges and a sports bar. The terminal boasted an Indian look partly thanks to its installation of a series of giant hands showing “mudras” or hand gestures that are typical of classical Indian dance forms.
Photo courtesy GVK
The art wall at the new airport terminal, Mumbai.
The new Mumbai terminal may well outdo that, with a 1.9 mile art wall displaying around 7,000 works of contemporary Indian art and lotus-shaped chandeliers at the boarding gates.
The terminal’s design draws inspiration from the peacock, India’s national bird.
via Softer Landings at Mumbai’s New Airport Terminal – India Real Time – WSJ.
China aims to impose a nationwide ban on smoking in public places this year, as authorities move to stamp out a widespread practice that has taken a severe toll on citizens\’ health.
China, home to some 300 million smokers, is the world\’s largest consumer of tobacco, and smoking is a ubiquitous part of social life, particularly for men.
Tougher regulation of smoking is a priority this year, officials from the National Health and Family Planning Commission said this week, adding that the agency was pushing lawmakers to toughen laws on tobacco use.
\”Compared to the damage to health that smoking causes, tobacco\’s economic benefits are trivial,\” Mao Qun\’an, a spokesman for the commission, told a news conference on Tuesday.
The drumbeat to reduce tobacco use has grown steadily louder in the past few years, but experts say China\’s powerful tobacco industry, which has resisted raising cigarette prices and use of health warnings on cigarette packs, has been a tough opponent.
The nationwide smoking ban has long been in the works. Several cities have banned smoking in public places, but enforcement has been lax.
Beijing pledged in 2008 to prohibit smoking in most public venues, including government offices, but no-smoking signs are frequently ignored.
Steps recommended by the commission range from beefing up education on the dangers of tobacco to banning smoking in schools and hospitals.
An official in the tobacco control office of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention said in December that lawmakers would consider the nationwide ban on smoking in public places this year.
The commission\’s statement follows a government circular urging Communist Party cadres and government officials not to light up in schools, workplaces, stadiums, and on public transport, among other places, so as to set a positive example.
via China aims to ban smoking in public places by end of the year | Reuters.
China, the world’s biggest consumer of illegal ivory, crushed six tons of tusks and carved ornaments in public Monday, in an event that signaled it would do more to join global efforts to protect African elephants from rampant poaching.
About 25,000 of the estimated 500,000 elephants in Africa are illegally slaughtered each year for their tusks, conservationists say. It is a $10 billion industry that draws in global crime syndicates and African rebel groups, and threatens to wipe out elephants from parts of the continent within a decade.
Although Chinese authorities have stepped up anti-trafficking efforts in recent years, the trade in illegal ivory has continued, in part because many Chinese people do not know elephants have to die for the ivory to be taken.
On Monday, workers in overalls fed scores of weighty tusks and hundreds of small, intricately carved objects into a large, noisy green crushing machine in front of a crowd of officials, diplomats, conservationists and journalists in this small town just outside the southern city of Guangzhou.
“We also hope this event will raise the public awareness of conservation and intensify the responsibilities of enforcement agencies,” said Zhao Shucong, director of the State Forestry Administration. Zhao admitted that ivory smuggling was “still raging” and said that China was “in urgent need of sincere collaboration with different countries and international organizations” to support elephant conservation.
Past efforts to curb ivory poaching have at times disintegrated into finger-pointing between officials in Africa — where corruption and weak law enforcement have allowed poachers to prosper — and countries such as China, where most of the ivory ends up.
Chinese officials are exploring ways to curb smoking as deaths mount and medical costs rise, an effort that has generated one proposal to take apart the nation’s vast and politically connected government-run tobacco monopoly.
Within the next year, China’s legislators will accelerate efforts to enact a national regulation banning smoking in public places in China, said Yang Jie, deputy director of Tobacco Control Office for the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, at a news briefing on tobacco-related health problems in China. Mr. Yang said China’s State Council, the country’s cabinet, is currently planning the regulation and it is expected to be enacted next year.
“We can see what is happening in the rest of the world,” said Mr. Yang, suggesting that China is due to follow the smoking cessation trends of other countries.
The statement follows the release of a book by China’s Central Party School, an elite Chinese Communist Party think tank, in recent months urging officials to shake up China’s tobacco monopoly, which is responsible for tobacco production and sales and has the freedom to donate to schools and sell cigarette cartons without pictures of black lungs for warnings. Its authors call for higher tobacco taxes, halting government financing to tobacco companies and encouraging them to find alternative business models.
China’s State Tobacco Monopoly Administration wasn’t immediately available for comment. The tobacco industry pulled in 865 billion yuan ($142.5 billion) from taxes and profit in 2012, up 16% from a year earlier, according to the State Tobacco administration.
A farmer smokes in a cabbage field in Huaiyuan county, eastern Anhui province. Associated Press
China is the world’s largest consumer and producer of tobacco, home to more than 300 million smokers and 43% of the world’s cigarette production, according to the American Cancer Society and the World Lung Foundation. Tobacco is also a leading cause of death in China, causing 1.2 million deaths annually and expected to cause 3.5 million deaths annually by 2030, the groups said.
Nearly nine out of 10 Chinese children aged 5 and 6 are able to identify at least one cigarette brand, according to a recent study by Johns Hopkins University on the effects of tobacco marketing on children in low- and middle-income countries. “Rather than thinking ‘I’m going to be Superman,’ young boys are aspiring to smoke,” said Bernhard Schwartländer, the World Health Organization’s representative in China.
via China Explores Smoking Ban in Effort to Reduce Tobacco-Related Deaths – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
China has stripped dozens of powers away from central government ministries as it bids to cut red tape and prevent Beijing\’s army of bureaucrats from micromanaging the world\’s second-largest economy.
China\’s cabinet, the State Council, announced on Tuesday that it was removing 82 powers from a number of central government ministries, including the powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Environmental Protection.
In a series of sweeping reforms published in November, China\’s ruling Communist Party promised to free up the market by simplifying administration and \”restrict central government management of microeconomic issues to the greatest possible extent\”.
via China cuts more red tape, paves way for NDRC slim-down | Reuters.
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
continuously updated blog about China & India
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 