Social & cultural | CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon

14/06/2014

Fake UN officials arrested – Global Times

Two men pretending to be United Nations officials were arrested on Saturday in the city of Yueyang, Hunan Province.

English: Emblem of the United Nations. Color is #d69d36 from the image at http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/maplib/flag.htm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wielding certificates that read “special pass of the United Nation‘s maintenance forces’ general headquarters” and “work permit for global maintenance and liaison of world peace,” the two men demanded the release of a prisoner on bail for medical treatment.

They presented their release permits approved by the nation’s top leaders to Yueyang prison officers, Yangtze Information Daily reported, threatening to call Beijing’s Zhongnanhai leadership compound.

The prison guard doubted their story and requested backup while pretending to cooperate with the UN officials.

When the relevant authorities arrived, one huxster reached for his phone and said he was calling a top official in Beijing, flashing photos of the leader and himself at bemused officers.

Police investigators said the conmen had been hired by the prisoner’s relative for their far-reaching connections and ability to solve problems.

via Fake UN officials arrested – Global Times.

Posted in China alert, fake | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Beijing, Emblem of the United Nations, Hunan, Hunan Province, Prison officer, United Nation, United Nations, Yangtze Information Daily, Yangtze River, Yueyang, Zhongnanhai

14/06/2014

BBC News – China’s literal take on World Cup fever

The Global Times started it. The headline in the Communist Party controlled newspaper ran: Soccer fever kicks off fake sick notes.

Citing the painful 11-hour time difference between China and Brazil – meaning games kick-off sometime between midnight and 06:00 – the article suggested that opportunistic online wheeler-dealers were offering the fraudulent diagnoses to enable fans to take the day off.

There are certainly a lot of football fans in China.

The national team may be a long-running embarrassment, having only ever qualified for one World Cup, back in 2002, but the passion is still there.

The time difference with South Africa wasn’t all that much better than Brazil but China still accounted for the largest single-country audience for the 2010 tournament, with an average of 17.5 million tuning in for each live match.

Chinese are known for their love of football

For a relatively small fee, a sick-note can be arranged

A veritable peoples’ army of genuine football craziness, no doubt. But an army of sick-note slackers and skivers?

China’s artistry for fakery has been well documented. Fake bags and watches, fake cars even, are old news. Recent reports uncovered the existence of a fake UN peacekeeping force.

So it is not surprising, and not at all difficult, to find the online services offering bogus medical documentation.

Within minutes we were being asked what ailment we preferred, and from which hospital we would like the diagnosis to be provided.

An hour or so later and our very authentic-looking sick-note was delivered by a man on a moped. Fee charged, roughly $16 (£9).

But is demand for these services really, as the Global Times suggests, soaring as a result of the World Cup?

Our dealer denied it, but we did find another one who suggested that business of late was unusually brisk.

There’s a chance though that it might not be down to devious football fans at all, but rather an upsurge of journalists, like me, trying to prove just how easy sick notes are to obtain.

Following a quick scan of the foreign media I’m saddened to report that the Telegraph’s man in Shanghai has gone down with a respiratory tract infection, the reporter for US National Public Radio has a bad bout of gastroenteritis (beginning this coming Sunday) and someone in NBC News‘s China office has been diagnosed with chronic appendicitis.

May they all get well soon.

via BBC News – China’s literal take on World Cup fever.

VIDEO: Lineker’s four teams to win World Cup

Posted in China alert, fake, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: 2010 FIFA World Cup, Brazil, China, Medical certificate, NPR, World Cup

12/06/2014

BBC News – Another Indian woman found hanging from tree in Uttar Pradesh

A teenager has been found hanging from a tree in a village in northern India, the fourth woman to die in such a way in recent weeks in Uttar Pradesh state.

The family of the 19-year-old say she was raped. A post mortem is under way.

It comes just one day after a woman’s body was found hanging from a tree in a remote village elsewhere in the state.

The gang rape and murder of two girls found in similar circumstances last month sparked outrage. Correspondents say more cases are now being reported.

Such attacks have long taken place in Uttar Pradesh, reports the BBC’s Geeta Pandey in Delhi, but recent outrage over sexual violence has meant that every case is being reported to police and getting media coverage.

Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with more than 200 million people, is also home to a staggering number of poor and it is the poor and the disadvantaged low-caste women who are most at risk of such crimes, our correspondent adds.

The body of the latest victim was found in a village in the state’s Moradabad area, just three hours’ drive from India’s capital, Delhi.

via BBC News – Another Indian woman found hanging from tree in Uttar Pradesh.

Posted in Crime, Gender issues, India alert, Social & cultural, Women's rights | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Delhi, Geeta Pandey, Hanging, India, Moradabad, northern india, Rape, Types of rape, Uttar Pradesh

11/06/2014

China targets officials who sent families abroad

China’s anti-graft campaign is now targeting officials who have sent their spouses and children abroad, where they can create channels to potentially funnel illicit gains and establish footholds for eventual escape from the mainland.

Nearly 900, mostly mid-level, government officials in the southern province of Guangdong have been demoted or forced to resign or retire early after being identified as having spouses or offspring with permanent residency or citizenship abroad while they themselves continue to work on the mainland. Because they remain without their families, they are known colloquially as “naked officials” – a term popular with the public because of its mocking tone. It is the first time a provincial government has taken action against them. The move signals a new approach in President Xi Jinping‘s anti-corruption campaign that takes aim at a phenomenon in Chinese politics that has hindered the Communist Party’s efforts to curb the flight of crooked officials and their ill-gotten assets. “The perception among the Chinese public is that these officials use their positions for their personal gains, then they send their families away and when the time comes, they are going to bail,” said Dali Yang, a China expert at the University of Chicago. Guangdong authorities said they found more than 1,000 such officials, among whom about a fifth had promised to try to get their families to return to China.

Though it’s up for debate, the general definition of “naked officials” excludes officials whose children are only studying abroad but not holding foreign residency or passports – allowing the sons and daughters of top leaders to pursue expensive college degrees at top overseas universities.

via China targets officials who sent families abroad.

Posted in China alert, corruption, Politics | Leave a Comment »

Tags: China, communist party of china, Dali Yang, government officials, Guangdong, officials, Overseas Chinese, Politics of the People's Republic of China, President Xi Jinping, University of Chicago, Xi JinPing

11/06/2014

Why Chinese Officials Are Resigning From Company Boards Left and Right – China Real Time Report – WSJ

In concept, a company’s independent directors serve to check abuse of power and protect shareholders. In practice here in China, they’re often seen as a vehicle for corruption, as companies stack their boards with government officials who accept handsome compensation for the post and do an indifferent job.

China’s central authorities have been cracking down on the phenomenon, with the Communist Party issuing a circular last October banning officials and college professors from holding second jobs. According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, as of this week, more than 200 listed companies have reported independent director resignations.

October’s directive—which also said officials could only take on such posts following a three-year cooling-off period once they leave office—isn’t the first time that the party had cracked down on such activities: In 2009 and 2011, the country’s education and finance departments also banned cadres from taking outside jobs or holding independent director posts.

Still, according to statistics from the party-controlled China Youth Daily, in a survey of 5,760 independent directors at Shenzhen and Shanghai-listed companies conducted last year, fully 45% had government backgrounds.

A Monday editorial in party mouthpiece the People’s Daily said it was important for cadres “not to mistakenly convert their public power into private power, or to mistakenly think they have captivating backgrounds, when in fact all people are seeing is their backgrounds.” Official resignations from company boards, the paper said, would be a way to “purify” the party.

The move to purge company boards of officials comes as President Xi Jinping has pushed a broader anti-corruption drive that has encompassed a crackdown on everything from lavish weddings and funerals to red carpets and even luxury mooncakes. After decades of breakneck economic growth that has disproportionately benefited companies and individuals with political connections, the party is eager to erase the notion that the country’s economic system is rigged, particularly as growth has begun to slow, political analysts say.

via Why Chinese Officials Are Resigning From Company Boards Left and Right – China Real Time Report – WSJ.

‘Naked officials’ demoted for plans to leave China

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

Tags: China, Communist Party, Official, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Xi JinPing

08/06/2014

China taps tech training to tackle labor market mismatch | Reuters

China is waking up to a potentially damaging mismatch in its labor market.

A record 7.27 million graduates – equivalent to the entire population of Hong Kong – will enter the job market this year; a market that has a shortage of skilled workers.

Yet many of these university and college students are ill-equipped to fill those jobs, prompting the government to look at how it can overhaul the higher education system to bridge the gap. The problem is part structural, part attitude.

While most liberal arts students are still looking for work after graduating this summer, 22-year-old Li Xidong is preparing to start a job as an electrician that he landed well before finishing three years of training at a small vocational school.

Li’s diploma may appear less impressive, but his coveted job in a tight labor market may hold the key to the employment conundrum in the world’s second largest economy. The machinery sector alone projects a gap of 600,000 computer-automated machine tool operators this year, media have reported.

“We’re trained as skilled workers, it’s quite easy for us to find jobs while still in school,” said Li, who is in the final stretch of a 3-year program at Hebei Energy College of Vocation and Technology in Tangshan, an industrial city 180 kms (112 miles) east of Beijing.

“Seventy percent of our class found work and some others are starting their own businesses,” Li noted, as he waited for a friend at a recruitment fair in the capital, where fewer than a third of this year’s university graduates had found work by end-April.

The government has said it plans to refocus more than 600 local academic colleges on vocational and technical education – replacing literature, history and philosophy with technology skills such as how to maintain lathes and build ventilation systems. Course curricula will be tailored to meet employers’ specific needs.

Pilot programs will be launched this year, and 150 local universities have signed up for the education ministry’s plan, the official Xinhua news agency has reported.

via China taps tech training to tackle labor market mismatch | Reuters.

Posted in China alert, Economics, education | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Beijing, China, college students, Demographics of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, labor market, Labour economics, Li Xidong, skilled workers, Tangshan, Vocational education

06/06/2014

Telemedicine in India might be just what the doctor ordered | India Insight

Between surgeries and hospital rounds one recent day, Dr. Rajiv Parakh made a dash into his Gurgaon office for an appointment he couldn’t miss: a consultation with a patient who lives hundreds of kilometres away.

Seated before his laptop in this city on the outskirts of India’s capital, the surgeon listened as a patient in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka described his swollen legs. For the next 20 minutes, Parakh examined the patient via Web camera, made a diagnosis and prescribed treatment.

The bespectacled Parakh, a practising doctor for nearly 30 years, spoke in Hindi during the session, enunciating his words for clarity.

Medanta, the multi-specialty hospital where he works, started its free telemedicine service about a year ago as an outreach service for patients who cannot visit the hospital.

“In-person consultation is obviously the gold standard,” Parakh told India Insight. “But if we have a doctor at the patient’s end, especially somebody who he trusts and who he knows, we can be reasonably comfortable about prescribing treatment.”

Medanta is one of several e-health providers that say they want to change how healthcare is delivered in India, and address the industry’s two biggest problems: accessibility and lack of manpower.

India has 0.7 physicians per 1,000 people — BRIC peers Russia (5), Brazil (1.5) and China (1.5) have better ratios — and most Indians travel about 20 kilometres to reach a hospital, according to a 2012 report by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

via Telemedicine in India might be just what the doctor ordered | India Insight.

Posted in Economics, Good news, Health, India alert, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Bangladesh, Brazil, BRIC, Dhaka, Gurgaon, India, India Insight, India’s capital, Medanta, Parakh, Rajiv Parakh

06/06/2014

Short skirts, bad stars and chow mein: why India’s women get raped : Reuters

The 2012 Delhi bus rape case and an ever-longer list of rapes and murders in India have prompted politicians and public figures in India to cite plenty of implausible reasons why rape happens and why men brutalise women or portray women in ways that suggest they had it coming. Many people when speaking out tend to minimise the crime or rationalise it in ways that sound to ludicrous to many. We created this list of such comments more than a year ago, but it seems like it’s time to add some new entries.

(Updated June 5, 2014) Babulal Gaur again: ”This is a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong… Until there’s a complaint, nothing can happen,” Gaur told reporters. More, from CNN-IBN: “Unless the person wants, no one can dare touch her. The item numbers in films create a bad environment,” … The minister cited the instance of a Hindi movie actress who was kissed on the cheek by a leading Hollywood actor on stage in Delhi in 2007. The actress had seen nothing wrong with it, he said. He also suggested that women learn karate and judo to defend themselves, CNN-IBN reported. (Reuters and CNN-IBN)

Samajwadi Party leader and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s uncle Ram Gopal Yadav, speaking after the recent rape and hanging of two teenaged girls in Uttar Pradesh: ”vulgarity, obscenity and violence shown on TV channels” was to blame for the multiple incidents of rape and assault in UP. He also said, “In many places, when the relationship between girls and boys come out in open, it is termed as rape.” Mulayam Singh Yadav’s son, UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, suggested that reporters look on Google to see that UP isn’t the only Indian state where rape happens. (NDTV)

via India Insight.

Posted in Gender issues, India alert, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: Akhilesh Yadav, Babulal Gaur, India, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Ram Gopal Yadav, Samajwadi, Uttar Pradesh

24/05/2014

China’s 430 Million Families Shrink and Age – Businessweek

China’s families keep shrinking in size, says a new report by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, released earlier this month.

It’s well known that the One-Child Policy played a key role in radically reducing the size of China’s households, which have shrunk from an average of 5.3 members in the 1950s to just 3.02 in 2012. (The numbers were 3.96 and 3.10 in 1990 and 2010, respectively.)

But that longtime policy restriction has not been the main driver in recent years, according to the China Family Development Report 2014. Instead, internal migration and changing social norms have been bigger contributors to the phenomenon in recent years. (That also means last year’s loosening of the family planning regulation isn’t going to reverse the smaller household phenomenon.)

By 2010, China had 160 million households made up of either one or two people. That’s 40 percent of the total number of households, a proportion that rose from 25 percent of the total in 2000. Over the same decade, the number of single person households doubled, and those of two people went up by 68 percent, according to the commission.

So what’s driving the surge in little families? In the cities it has a lot to do with young people waiting longer to get married. “A growing number of well-educated people now decide to marry at a later age because of their careers,” the China Daily reported, citing the survey. “Changing attitudes toward marriage also prompted many to stay single.”

As China’s population rapidly ages, more and more families are elderly. China now has 88 million families made up of people over 65, about one-fifth of the total, the report says. That reverses the longtime Chinese custom of older parents living with their children. With some 300 million rural migrant workers living far from their hometowns, the problem is particularly acute in the countryside—that is contributing to a growing problem of poverty among the elderly.

via China’s 430 Million Families Shrink and Age – Businessweek.

Posted in Affluence, aging population, China alert, Economics, Social & cultural | Leave a Comment »

Tags: China, China Family Development Report, Family planning, Household, migrant worker, National Health and Family Planning Commission, one-child policy

23/05/2014

China Moves to Protect Its Language From English – Businessweek

Will the Chinese anti-English (American) language campaign be any more successful than the French one? I wonder.

See – http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/30/france-s-pointless-hopeless-battle-against-english.html

“Chinese authorities are waging a war on American culture and the use of English. In April, China’s media regulators yanked the popular U.S. television shows The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, and The Good Wife from Chinese streaming websites Sohu (SOHU) and Youku (YOKU). The official party newspaper, People’s Daily, ran two editorials in April bemoaning the use of words borrowed from English when speaking Chinese. Then in mid-May came a flurry of reports in the state media confirming plans announced last fall to reduce the importance of English-language instruction and to expand courses on traditional culture in grade school and high school.

The government “wants to make us respect the Chinese language and culture more,” says Guo Jintong, a 16-year-old Beijing high school student, as he sits in a Starbucks drinking a grande cappuccino. “With everyone wanting to go overseas to study, there is a craze for English and the West that you can say has become excessive. This could have a bad effect on China.” Guo says he plans to go to the U.S. for graduate school after getting his bachelor’s in physics in China.

China’s obsession with English dates to the establishment of foreign-language schools and translation centers—mainly for English—along China’s coast after the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century, says Yang Rui, director of the Comparative Education Research Center at the University of Hong Kong. And while Russian was the official second language during the 1950s, English again took primacy when Deng Xiaoping launched economic reforms in 1978 and China was eager for technology and investment from the West. (Yang learned English by secretly listening to banned Voice of America broadcasts during the Cultural Revolution, when speaking a foreign tongue could land you in jail.)”

via China Moves to Protect Its Language From English – Businessweek.

Posted in China alert, Culture, languages | Leave a Comment »

Tags: American culture, Big Bang Theory, China, China Moves, chinese authorities, Comparative Education Research Center, Deng Xiaoping, English language, Guo Jintong, language campaign, Opium Wars, SOHU, starbucks, Yang Rui

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