China continues advance into South China Sea; military base to be built on artificial island
Serving the People: Chinese Law Student Opens Noodle Shop, Kicks Off Debate – China Real Time Report – WSJ
A Peking University law student who was worried about finding a job and set up a noodle shop last month has become a social media sensation.
Zhang Tianyi has won online praise for his entrepreneurial spirit – though the 24-year-old has attracted heaps of criticism that he is wasting his skills. But his effort has struck a chord with many college graduates who are also finding it hard to land a job.
This week he got an official pat on the back from a senior government official who hailed Mr. Zhang, likening him to hugely successful entrepreneurs like Jack Ma, who founded Alibaba and turned it into an e-commerce powerhouse.
“I’d like to try those noodles,” said Xin Changxing, vice minister of human resources and social security, speaking at a news briefing. “He’s innovating and looking for a market niche.”
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The law student who started all the online chatter, a native of the southern province of Hunan, is about to graduate from law school. But employment prospects aren’t looking so great so he teamed up with three fellow students and set up shop in a 37-square-meter basement of an office building in Beijing’s financial district.
Mr. Zhang told China Real Time that apart from his passion for hometown delicacies, he started his own business because he couldn’t line up a job in the legal profession.
“It’s difficult to find good jobs and the jobs we can find are not so good,” said Mr. Zhang who had a double major in English and law as an undergraduate.
Mr. Zhang said his shop serves up 4,000-5,000 bowls of noodles per day.
“We work from dawn to dusk, but we’ve learned a lot,” the law student said.
Most college graduates in China expect to work in white collar jobs, not in the kitchen serving beef noodles to white collar workers.
China’s market for factory jobs has remained strong even as the economy starts to show slower growth. But college graduates are having more trouble finding work as universities continue to crank out armies of graduates. The government expects a record 7.27 million college graduates in 2014, the State Council, or the cabinet, said last week. It has rolled out a series of measures, including loans and tax breaks, to encourage graduates to start their own business. (in Chinese)
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Does China Pose a Threat to Global Food Security? It Says No – China Real Time Report – WSJ
Twenty years ago, environmental advocate Lester Brown got in hot water with Beijing for writing a book called “Who Will Feed China?”
China was displeased with the suggestion in his book that the country’s growing population and water scarcity could drastically burden the world’s food resources. Beijing publicly criticized the author – then began a series of reforms including improving farming techniques and adopting a national policy of self-sufficiency in grain consumption that vindicated Mr. Brown’s arguments. It paved the way for a gradual rapprochement with the American, now 80.
Détente is over.
On Wednesday, China’s agriculture ministry issued a statement again criticizing Mr. Brown. It took umbrage with an essay he wrote titled “Can the World Feed China?” a riff on his earlier book. The essay details Mr. Brown’s concerns that rising domestic pressures on food consumption could result in spiking food prices and political unrest as China joins in a global “scramble for food.”
It isn’t clear why Mr. Brown was singled out for criticism; many analysts have in one form or other also articulated these trends, though arguably not as directly or pungently. But the move underscores how increasingly sensitive China is to the growing impression that it can’t feed itself and that its acquisitions of global food assets are posing a risk to food security for the rest of the world. China has been keen in recent years to head off any impression that it’s on a global grab for natural resources.
Mr. Brown wasn’t immediately available for comment.
The government is unhappy with the notion it’s being blamed for sharpening global competition for food. Mr. Brown’s essay said China’s rising grain imports mean “it is competing directly with scores of other grain-importing countries.” He also warned that China’s purchase last year of U.S. pork producer Smithfield Foods “was really a pork security move.” So too, he said, was China’s deal with Ukraine to provide $3 billion in loans in exchange for corn. “Such moves by China exemplify the new geopolitics of food scarcity that affects us all,” he wrote.
Not likely, ministry spokesman Bi Meijia said in the government’s statement. Mr. Bi said 97% of China’s grain consumption comes from its own output, not imports.
“On the issue of food security, China not only does not pose a threat to the world, but makes a contribution to global food security,” he said. China intends to continue its existing policies, he said.
Mr. Bi said rising grain imports aren’t due to domestic shortages, but because global prices are lower than domestic prices. The ministry also pointed out that imports accounted for just 2.6% of domestic grain production volume in 2013, and just 4% of global output.
via Does China Pose a Threat to Global Food Security? It Says No – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
‘No Gene for Invasion in Chinese People’s Blood,’ Says Xi, Amid Sino-Vietnam Tensions – Businessweek
As tensions grow between China and its neighbors, some words of reassurance are certainly welcome. Still, it’s questionable just how calming Xi Jinping’s recent ones were.
China does not accept that “might is right,” said China’s president and party secretary, speaking yesterday at a commemoration ceremony in Beijing for the 60th anniversary of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. “There is no gene for invasion in Chinese people’s blood,” Xi continued, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on May 16.
Speaking of invasions, that is what China did when it sent troops into northern Vietnam in 1979, a foray that sparked a short-lived but bloody war between the two countries. China and Vietnam have a history of “collaboration and cordiality, but also tumult and hostility” going back as far as the first century B.C., wrote Dennis McCornac, a professor at Loyola University Maryland, in 2011.
via ‘No Gene for Invasion in Chinese People’s Blood,’ Says Xi, Amid Sino-Vietnam Tensions – Businessweek.
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China to build new hi-tech power network to help fight pollution | South China Morning Post
China will build the world’s largest high-power electricity transmission network as part of the country’s efforts to battle smog and pollution.
The State Grid Corporation of China – the world’s largest state-owned utilities company – said on its website that the central government would soon approve plans for the construction of 12 power lines connecting the energy-rich interior with heavily industrialised coastal areas. The initial investment is estimated to be at least 210 billion yuan (HK$264 billion).
The 12 projects include eight ultra-high-voltage (UHV) lines, which offer distinct advantages over conventional power lines by transmitting electricity over significantly longer distances with far greater efficiency. Energy losses from UHV power lines are five to six times lower than the conventional ones, studies show.
Despite some concerns about the project – especially the vulnerability of such a broad network to system-wide failures – the emerging technology is being hailed as an ultimately far cleaner, more efficient way to deliver electricity across the country.
State Grid claims UHV power lines can reduce the density of PM2.5 smog particles, which are considered most dangerous to human health, by 4-5 per cent in central and eastern regions and cut coal consumption by 200 million tonnes a year.
via China to build new hi-tech power network to help fight pollution | South China Morning Post.
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China’s Young Migrant Workers Earn More, Send Less Home – Businessweek
China’s younger migrant workers are better educated, spend more, save less, and prefer living in China’s bigger cities. They make up close to one-half of the migrant workforce, according to a survey released Monday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
Those from the younger generation, born after 1980—or balinghou (literally, “80 after”)—number 125 million, or 46.6 percent of China’s 269 million migrant workers. One-third have a high school education or higher; that’s 19.2 percentage points more than the older generation, the survey shows.
Unlike their parents, they aren’t inclined to scrimp devotedly in order to send hard-earned kuai back to the countryside. The average younger migrant worker remitted 12,802 yuan ($2,054) to a hometown in rural China; that’s about 30 percent less than older workers did.
via China’s Young Migrant Workers Earn More, Send Less Home – Businessweek.
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China in numbers: building a trading empire, brick by imitation brick | The Times
5,137 . . . is the number of shops on Alibaba’s Taobao ecommerce platform that claim to sell Lego — a favourite toy of a pushy Chinese middle class convinced that the Danish bricks will make their children creative, inventive and generally more brilliant.
The prices offered at many of the Lego-selling online stores are often ridiculously and suspiciously cheap. The Taobao trading system, one of the shinier jewels in Alibaba’s crown as the internet titan seeks what could be the world’s biggest tech listing in America, allows customers to haggle directly with the vendor. An aggressive-enough negotiation can land you a substantial bag of Lego-esque bricks for the equivalent of a couple of quid.
Alarms bells rightly ring. Not all of these 5,137 Taobao-based Lego stores, needless to say, are selling genuine Lego. Lego itself does not publicly guess at the extent to which its product is ripped off: lawyers with the battle scars of Chinese infringement suits suspect the proportion of those 5,137 selling fake Lego may be as high as 80 per cent.
The notion that China is a seething, nest of counterfeiting, trademark infringement and fraudulence is not new; nor is the fact that the stratospheric growth of ecommerce in China has significantly enlarged the speed and volume at which fake goods change hands.
The big question, as lawyers and companies arrive in Hong Kong this week for the world’s biggest intellectual property convention, is whether anything much is changing. Jack Lew, the US Treasury Secretary, will arrive today in Beijing and demand greater protection of intellectual property. It is unclear whether that will change much either.
The signals are not great. Last week, the Chinese food and drug authority warned that 75 per cent of foreign-branded drugs sold online (though mostly not through Taobao stores) in China were fake. The extent of the problem was especially grisly for cancer sufferers, whose online pursuit of cheap generic oncology medicine will, eight times out of ten, land them with fake drugs.
The difficulty here is that Taobao’s greatest quality — its huge accessibility for vendors — is also the source of the problem. Even if a store selling counterfeited goods is closed down, there are no barriers to prevent its owner opening a new one, under a new name, hours later. As the operator of Taobao, Alibaba has undertaken a limited range of regulatory functions. But on one critical issue it does not step in: if a company such as Lego believes that fake bricks bearing its brand are being sold from a Taobao store, Lego bears the burden of proving that the product is fake. Crucially, Lego cannot use the laughably low prices of the fake Lego as evidence.
A recent experiment by Taobao to designate all versions of a particular product (not Lego) fake if they fell below a particular price resulted in 42,000 stores being immediately closed. Six months later, almost all had re-opened.
The problem for Beijing is that Alibaba and Taobao are arguably too big to fail. The public cannot live without ecommerce any more and the authorities have identified the encouragement of innovation and the release of entrepreneurial spirits (of the sort being vigorously nurtured on Taobao) as the keys to building a sustainable economy.
As a listed company and as a provider of the medium for immense, minute-by-minute infringement of intellectual property, Alibaba may soon find itself under greater pressure to play the policeman. It may be able to resist that as long as the the plaintiffs are foreigners: it may not find that so easy when the brands being ripped off are Chinese and the complaints are domestic.
via China in numbers: building a trading empire, brick by imitation brick | The Times.
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Zhuhai Bests Hong Kong as China’s Most Livable City – China Real Time Report – WSJ
Hong Kong is no longer China’s most livable city.
It’s been knocked out by Zhuhai, which lies on the southern coast of Guangdong province across the border from Macau, according to the latest rankings from the government-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Factors such as a large proportion of college students, a variety of dining and shopping venues and ample green space gave the city its edge, says Ni Pengfei, the director of the academy’s Center for City and Competitiveness.
Hong Kong and Haikou on Hainan Island placed second and third, respectively, while Shanghai ranked 10th. Beijing came in at 41st out of 294 cities, with the report attributing its low ranking to air pollution and high housing prices.
via Zhuhai Bests Hong Kong as China’s Most Livable City – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
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China’s President Gets a ‘Heavenly’ New Pony – China Real Time Report – WSJ
Xi Jinping is adding a new mane man to his stable of advisers.
The Chinese president is the proud new owner of a Turkmen racehorse, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency. On Monday, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov gave Mr. Xi the horse, an Akhal-Teke, a Turkmen breed known for exceptional speed and endurance, as a gift of friendship during his four-day visit to Beijing. The visit was intended to boost the natural gas trade between the two countries.
The gift has historic resonances. Former presidents Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin were also given Turkmen horses on similar occasions, which currently reside in China’s presidential stable at the Hanxue Baoma Breeding Center in China’s northern city of Tianjin, the same home that also awaits Mr. Xi’s new stallion.
It’s also believed that if leaders ride the horse, they’ll follow the path of one of China’s bravest emperors Li Shimin, who ruled from 626 to 649AD and was known to ride the breed. The emperor led China into one of its most famous, celebrated and culturally rich eras, that of the Tang dynasty. In China, affection for such horses traces back still further in history to around 113 BC, when the emperor at the time was so intrigued on hearing reports about such horses from his ambassadors that he apparently went to war with his neighbors, in part to try and bring some back for his own court. (He succeeded, and dubbed the steeds he brought back “heavenly” horses.)
via China’s President Gets a ‘Heavenly’ New Pony – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
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2 Million Boxes Sold: China Goes Coconuts for Premier-Approved Candy – China Real Time Report – WSJ
Thanks to one Chinese leader’s sweet tooth, one candy maker is feeling pretty happy.
Over the past month, the Hainan-based Wenchang Chunguang Foodstuff Co. has sold about two million boxes of candies, each respectively comprised of a box of “coconut chips” and a box of “coconut milk roll.” The reason? Chinese premier Li Keqiang recently made a similar purchase at a convenience store during a visit in Haikou, capital city of southern Hainan province.
“The demand has been incredibly intense. At the beginning, no matter how fast we produced them, we still couldn’t meet the consumer demand,” Hainan-based sales manager Wu Sisi told China Real Time.
For those of you who might not be familiar with the contents of the “premier set,” the so-called “coconut milk rolls” are comprised of rolled wafers stuffed with coconut cream, while the “coconut chips” are basically flakes of dried coconut. The Chungang products are made from local Hainan-grown coconut, and have long been seen as a popular souvenir for tourists.
For Mr. Li, the humble purchase (total cost: 19 yuan, or $3) might have been motivated by the desire to seem more in touch with the lives of ordinary Chinese, as gesture that echoes a visit by Xi Jinping to a humble bun shop in Beijing last year, where the Chiense president spent just 21 yuan on a meal of stuffed pork buns, stir-fried liver and greens.
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Either way, the candy manufacturer is celebrating. Total sales of the so-called “premier package” of candy, comprising two boxes of dried coconut and “coconut milk roll,” have added up to about 19 million yuan ($3 million) in revenue between April 11 and May 11. That’s nearly as much as the company sold of the product in all of 2013.
via 2 Million Boxes Sold: China Goes Coconuts for Premier-Approved Candy – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
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