What a performance – not by David – but by the crowd.
20/06/2013
China’s Latest Discount Product: Drones
Will the availability of drones add to or decrease tensions? Will it reduce or increase the chances of open conflict? Wish I knew the answers.
19/06/2013
China’s next food scandal: honey laundering
SCMP: “China‘s National Television has brought another case of “food forgery” to the spotlight in a country where fake eggs, beef and tofu have become staple items in national news coverage.
Police in Chongqing‘s Hechuan district have discovered a production site for fake honey and confiscated about 500 kilograms of the fake nectar, the national broadcaster said in a report on Sunday.
“The artificial honey contained zero per cent real honey,” the report said, showing a chemical analysis report according to which the honey contained 187 milligrams of aluminium residue to every kilogram of honey.
The report has gone viral on Chinese microblogs, where it has been shared more than 300,000 times, making it one of the most trending topics on Wednesday. Newspapers have followed up with reports on how to identify fake honey.
“Artificial honey has a chemical odour, it either has a pungent or a fruity smell, whereas real, pure honey has a subtle scent of flowers,” one report reads.”
via China’s next food scandal: honey laundering | South China Morning Post.
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- Unless You Like Toxic Chemicals, Skip This Chinese Delicacy (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
- Seventy-five percent of honey bought at the supermarket Not real honey (lavanderhoney.wordpress.com)
19/06/2013
The yuan: The cheapest thing going is gone
The Economist: “After enduring a decade of criticism for its weakness, China’s currency now looks uncomfortably strong
TEN years ago, the yuan made its debut as a global economic bugbear. In June 2003, America’s then treasury secretary, John Snow, publicly encouraged China to loosen a policy under which its currency was pegged at 8.28 to the dollar. The next month four senators wrote an angry letter urging Mr Snow to investigate China for “currency manipulation”. The country was intentionally undervaluing its currency, argued Charles Schumer, a Democratic senator for New York. “The result is that everything they sell to other countries is the cheapest thing going.”
A decade later, Mr Schumer and other senators are still bashing the yuan: eight of them re-introduced a bill last week that would slap duties on currency manipulators. But much else has changed. Now allowed to float by 1% a day on either side of a reference rate set each morning by the central bank, the yuan closed trading on May 27th at 6.12 to the dollar, 35% stronger than its June 2003 rate. It has risen more against the dollar since March than it rose in the whole of last year, and its climb against Japan’s currency has been even steeper. Since November, when the markets began to anticipate dramatic monetary easing in Japan, the yuan has gained over 20% against a weakened yen.
China’s competitiveness on world markets depends not only on the price of its currency but also on the price of its goods and workers at home. The Bank for International Settlements calculates a “real” exchange rate for 61 economies that takes account of inflation differences between them. Since 2010 China’s real exchange rate, weighted by trade, has risen faster than any other, with the sole exception of Venezuela’s.
The price of labour is also rising faster in China than in its principal trading partners. The Economist has calculated an alternative “real” exchange rate, weighted by trade with America, the euro area and Japan, which takes account of unit labour costs in all four economies. By this measure, China’s real exchange rate has strengthened by almost 50% since Messrs Snow and Schumer began their currency-bashing ten years ago. If the yuan was the cheapest thing going back then, now its cheapness has all but gone. Some economists, such as Diana Choyleva of Lombard Street Research, even wonder if the yuan is now overvalued.”
via The yuan: The cheapest thing going is gone | The Economist.
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- China’s Currency Gains On Dollar (forbes.com)
- Rising yuan lowering China’s exports (wantchinatimes.com)
- China Names Yuan Convertibility Plan as Goal This Year – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
- Meet the New Gold-backed World Reserve Currency (theburningplatform.com)
19/06/2013
Rich Chinese Provinces ‘Outsource’ Pollution to Poor Ones
BusinessWeek: “A flurry of citizen-led protests against polluting (or proposed) chemical factories in Chinese cities has recently made headlines. And for good reason, as hundreds of peaceful marchers parading in front of government buildings and waving hand-made signs (such as “We Want to Survive” and “Say No to PX,” a hazardous chemical) isn’t something you see every day in authoritarian China.
In recent years, such environmental demonstrations have erupted in the prosperous coastal cities of Xiamen, Dalian, Ningbo, and the southern city of Kunming. Middle-class citizens, wielding smartphones and sharing information about pollutants via social media, have organized the protests. When developers’ plans have been put on hold—as happened last month in Kunming—popular Chinese and Western media have declared a victory for nascent people power in China.
But what happens next? Chances are that factory plans won’t fizzle entirely, but rather that construction will move to another location—usually in a poorer province, with a less informed and media-savvy local population.
In a paper published in the June 10 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (pdf), researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Maryland, and University of Cambridge mapped the flow of goods, money, and interprovincial emissions to document what they call the “outsourcing” of pollution “within China.” Their study focused in particular on CO2 emissions, which spew from the same coal-fired power plants and other factories responsible for smog-causing domestic pollution.
As the researchers discovered, “the most affluent cities of Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, and provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, outsource more than 50% of the emissions related to the products they consume” to provinces in the central and western hinterlands. In short, eastern urbanites enjoy the fruits of energy, steel, cement, and other goods produced in China’s less-developed regions. (To be sure, Western consumers also benefit from goods produced in China, at an even greater distance from the pollution.)
“Although China is often seen as a homogeneous entity, it is a vast country with substantial regional variation in physical geography, economic development, infrastructure, population density, demographics, and lifestyles” the researchers wrote. One example: The carbon footprint of residents of Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin, three wealthy eastern cities, is four times higher than that of residents of Guangxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou, three poor southwestern provinces.”
via Rich Chinese Provinces ‘Outsource’ Pollution to Poor Ones – Businessweek.
See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/06/19/china-launches-trial-carbon-trading-scheme/
19/06/2013
Wang Shu, China’s Champion of Slow Architecture
BusinessWeek: “The day after Chinese architect Wang Shu was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s equivalent of a Nobel, in May 2012, he returned to the old Beijing neighborhood where he grew up and found it in the process of being demolished. The hutong, with its maze of narrow streets and traditional courtyard houses, was being sacrificed to make room for a new philosophy center.
While European cities that exploded with industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are still sorting out the consequences of modernization, their boom times appear sedate compared with China’s last two decades. By 2030 the mainland will be home to 13 megacities—those with a population of 10 million or more—up from six today, estimates a McKinsey report. That breakneck urbanization is fast obliterating 5,000 years of architecture and culture. “Cities today have become far too large,” Wang says. “I’m really worried, because it’s happening too fast and we have already lost so much.””
via Wang Shu, China’s Champion of Slow Architecture – Businessweek.
19/06/2013
Chinese Voice Anger and Nostalgia Over Urbanization
From NY Times: “Chinese Voice Anger and Nostalgia Over Urbanization
Chinese residents have turned to the microblogging site Weibo to express their feelings on the government’s efforts to drastically expand the urban population. While there are glimmers of hope about the prospects of city life and the opportunities afforded by compensation, the majority of the discussion focuses on resentment over perceived corruption and sadness over the loss of land, farm animals and a way of life. Here is a selection of recent posts presented in their original Chinese and translated into English.”
Weibo.com Logo (Photo credit: bfishadow)
19/06/2013
China’s Dalian Wanda to buy UK yacht maker and hotel
BBC: “Dalian Wanda Group, a Chinese property developer, has said that it will spend £1bn ($1.6bn) to buy a British yacht maker and property in London.
Wanda will pay £320m for alm
ost 92% of Sunseeker International, famous for providing yachts for James Bond movies.
It will also invest £700m to develop a five-star hotel in London.
The luxury hotel in London will be the first such development to be operated by a Chinese firm overseas. The move was welcomed by the Mayor of London.
‘Soaring global confidence’
Boris Johnson said that the deal was “yet another sign of the soaring global confidence in London as a world-beating place to live, work and do business”.
Dalian Wanda Group’s Wang Jianlin: “We are going to keep jobs in Poole. We will not lay anybody off”
Wang Jianlian, chief executive and founder of Wanda added that “the London property market has excellent investment opportunities and we have confidence that Wanda’s strength and expertise will help make The Wanda London’s premier hotel, and will further promote development in the area”.
The new hotel will be built by the river in Vauxhall, South London as part of the Nine Elms regeneration.
Wanda, which was founded in 1998 and already operates 34 five-star hotels in China, said that it plans to build a chain of Wanda hotels across other foreign cities as well.
“Through the international development of Wanda Hotels, we are confident that we will be the leader in bringing branded Chinese luxury hotels to the global market, where they have long been absent,” said Mr Wang, who is one of China’s richest men”
via BBC News – China’s Dalian Wanda to buy UK yacht maker and hotel.
See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2012/02/13/pattern-of-chinese-overseas-investments/
19/06/2013
China launches trial carbon trading scheme
Despite not signing up to past Climate Change protocols, China seems to be doing more than most on reducing its carbon footprint.
18/06/2013
Getting China’s Tower of Babel on Record
WSJ: “Michael Wu, 20, a student at Peking University, grew up in Shanghai. But when he wants to talk to his cousins in Hainan, he needs to bring his mother along to interpret the conversation.
The cousins in Hainan speak two kinds of Hainan dialect. “I actually cannot understand either of them,” Wu says. “It’s actually not much good for me to [try to] communicate with them.”
In China, that’s a common problem: The differences in dialects are so vast they amount to different languages—possibly more than 3,000 variations, according to some estimates. It’s one of the reasons that standard Beijing Mandarin has become the lingua franca of schools, businesses and government in China. But that uniformity comes at a cost: the rapid loss of many of these dialects.
Now two Americans have taken on a daunting task: trying to get an audio record of all of the thousands of China’s languages and dialects before they disappear.
Linguists Steve Hansen and Kellen Parker are enlisting volunteers to canvass the country to capture both the languages and the stories of all of China’s 2,862 counties and 34 provincial areas. Phonemica, founded last year, now has about 200 Chinese and Chinese-speaking foreign volunteers lined up to record their friends, parents and grandparents, telling a story in fangyan (regional speech).
“The idea is that we want to record it all,” says Mr. Hansen. “And the only way to do this is through a crowd-sourced approach. We’re trying to get people involved who will go to their hometowns and record friends and relatives.”
“It is absolutely unique,” said Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, by email. “No one else is attempting to do this for Sinitic” (the languages of China).
Phonemica is nearly out of time. Scholars say that a few generations from now, all of China will speak as a first language standard Mandarin, the Beijing dialect that is taught in schools and used by new migrants to cities as well as businesspeople in every province.
Richard VanNess Simmons, a Rutgers professor of Chinese, says that as China’s economy has taken off over the past 20 years, “Mandarin has become the language that gets you somewhere and the language that parents want their kids to learn.” Even parents who speak regional dialects prefer that their children speak Mandarin at home.
“It’s happening so fast it’s almost too fast to document,” he says.
The Chinese government also has taken on the task of recording the country’s dialects, but its Chinese Language Resource Audio Database (中国语言资源有声数据) is still in the “fieldwork” stage, says Mr. Simmons, and “no results have yet been published as far as I know.””
via Getting China’s Tower of Babel on Record – China Real Time Report – WSJ.
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- Trying to Save the Chinese Language From Itself (tealeafnation.com)
- Introduction to the most spoken language in the world (toochinese.wordpress.com)
- About “Chinese” Language (sourcesofknowledge.wordpress.com)
- The Mandarin Chinese dialect (uosm2018.wordpress.com)
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 