Posts tagged ‘Shanghai’

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27/08/2013

Is China Building an “Aircraft Carrier in Disguise?”

If true, another step towards military confrontation.

The Diplomat: “Earlier this month a series of pictures posted on Chinese military forums appeared to show that China was building its first indigenous aircraft carrier, prompting much speculation and commentary including from The Diplomat.

China

Now some claim that this narrative might have been mistaken.

According to Japan’s Kyodo News, Kanwa Information Center, a private Canadian think tank, has published a report that claims that the pictures do not show an aircraft carrier. Instead, the Kanwa report—which is based on Ukraine military sources— says the vessel under construction is China’s first amphibious assault ship capable of carrying hovercraft and helicopters.

In other words, if the report is accurate, China is building a Landing Helicopter Assault (LHA)-like ship not completely unlike the Izumo-class helicopter destroyer Japan launched earlier this month, which Chinese analysts referred to as an “aircraft carrier in disguise.”

Kanwa says the vessel is being built at a shipyard on Shanghai’s Changxing Island and could be commissioned as early as 2015. It will reportedly displace 35,000 tons, roughly double what China’s three existing Type 071 amphibious assault ships, which displace between 17,000-20,000 tons, according to Sino-Defense. The same source says the Type 071 ships were built by Shanghai-based Hudong-Zhonghua Shipyard. The location of Changxing Island, suggests that Jiangnan Shipyard is constructing the new vessel.

Japan’s Izumo-class helicopter destroyer reportedly displaces between 20,000-25,000-tons.

China’s new LHA will carry four hovercraft and up to 20 helicopters, according to Kyodo News, which cited the Kanawa report.

There’s reason to think the Kanwa report is accurate. Indeed, last November a Chinese admiral told CCTV, China’s official broadcaster, that the PLAN was building a 40,000-ton amphibious assault ship similar to the U.S. Navy’s LHA.”

via Is China Building an “Aircraft Carrier in Disguise?” | Flashpoints | The Diplomat.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/2013/08/21/china-japan-and-indias-asian-arms-race/

Posted in China alert, Military, Neighbour conflict, Politics | Leave a Comment »

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31/07/2013

China to invest $375 billion on energy conservation, pollution: paper

Reuters: “China plans to invest 2.3 trillion yuan ($375 billion) in energy saving and emission-reduction projects in the five years through 2015 to clean up its environment, the China Daily newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing a senior government official.

The plan, which has been approved by the State Council, is on top of a 1.85 trillion yuan investment in the renewable energy sector, underscoring the government’s concerns about addressing a key source of social discontent.

China has set a target of reducing its carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 40-45 percent by 2020 from the 2005 level, and raising non-fossil energy consumption to 15 percent of its energy mix, Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), was quoted as saying.

As part of broader plans to curb pollution, the government will also roll out tiered power pricing for eight energy intensive industries, while sectors that struggle with overcapacity will face higher power tariffs, Xie said.

The government will also gradually expand a carbon trading pilot program to more cities starting from 2015, with the aim of creating a national market, he said.

Seven cities and provinces, including Shanghai, were ordered by the NDRC in late 2011 to set up regional carbon trading markets.”

via China to invest $375 billion on energy conservation, pollution: paper | Reuters.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/economic-factors/greening-of-china/

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Posted in carbon emission, China alert, Ecology, Economics, Environment, Green, greenhouse gas, Pollution | 2 Comments »

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24/07/2013

Consumer optimism hits a high

China Daily: “Income growth and willingness to spend more are main driving forces

Consumer confidence in China has topped that in other major economies to equal a record high, and economists are saying this signals that consumption will support the world’s second-largest economy, where growth is slowing.

A survey by global information company Nielsen shows China’s consumer confidence index, based on its market research, rose to 110 in the second quarter from 108 in the first, indicating increased willingness to spend on consumer goods and services.

It also reached 110 in the second quarter of last year.

Zhang Monan, an economist at the State Information Center under the National Development and Reform Commission, said domestic demand, especially consumption, will become crucial to supporting economic growth in the second half of the year.

Tao Libao, vice-president of media research at Nielsen Greater China, said, “With the industrial transformation, consumption will become the growth engine.”

The central government has pledged to promote structural reforms, shifting from investment-driven to consumption-oriented development, while ensuring stable economic growth and secure employment.

The Nielsen Global Consumer Confidence Index, released on Tuesday, rose to 94 in the second quarter, compared with 93 in the first.

A reading below 100 means that consumers are pessimistic about the outlook, while a reading above 100 signals optimistic expectations.

Nielsen said consumer confidence declined in 14 of 29 European countries as government budget cuts, tax rises and high unemployment continued.

Consumer confidence improved in the United States, along with increasing employment opportunities, higher home prices and a rising stock market, the company said.

In the second quarter, China had the fifth-highest reading of indices among 58 countries based on surveys covering more than 29,000 global respondents.

Fast growth of disposable income and people’s willingness to spend more on improving quality of life, especially in large cities, was the main driving force behind this, the company said.

The average disposable income of urban Chinese residents was 13,649 yuan ($2,201) in the first half of the year, up 9.1 percent from a year earlier, while the disposable income of rural residents rose to 4,171 yuan, up 13 percent year-on-year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Retail sales of consumer goods rose by 12.7 percent in the first six months to 11.08 trillion yuan, compared with a 12.4 percent growth rate in the first quarter, the bureau said.

Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with 7 percent of China’s population, contributed about 25 percent of the country’s spending on consumer products and services, Nielsen said.

As urbanization speeds up and consumers pursue a better quality of life, they will have a deeper understanding of consumption, said Yan Xuan, president of Nielsen Greater China.”

via Consumer optimism hits a high |Economy |chinadaily.com.cn.

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

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21/06/2013

China: Panic during David Beckham’s visit

What a performance – not by David – but by the crowd.

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

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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.

The sun sets behind commercial buildings shrouded in haze in Shanghai

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/

Posted in carbon emission, China alert, Climate change, Ecology, Economics, Environment | 1 Comment »

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29/05/2013

When blue becomes the new white

FT: “My maid and her husband, a driver, have scrimped and saved and crammed themselves into a tiny flat in Shanghai for decades with one goal in mind: to give their only son a crack at the “Chinese dream”.

Newly graduated Chinese students gather for a convocation ceremony at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei in east China's Anhui province

Now those decades of deprivation have reached their climax as the cherished child of these hard-working people graduates from university and takes his first job: as a construction worker. And he counts himself lucky to have a job.

Small wonder that Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has recently been out gladhanding graduates who are facing one of the toughest job markets since the Communist party stopped giving them careers by fiat. For, like obesity and diabetes, a glut of unemployed graduates seems to be one of the unintended side-effects of economic development in China.

Sound familiar? Many readers of the Financial Times will know what it is like to have an unemployed graduate in the family – or to have been one themselves. Maybe job shortages are just part of the human condition, one that now affects the Chinese like the rest of humanity. (When I graduated from university in 1980, media jobs were so thin on the ground that I ended up teaching at a university in Ghana that had no books, few lights and little running water – landing a job without a flushing toilet was presumably not part of my parents’ university plan for me.)

Mr Xi pointed out on his jobs-fair visit that – like all the other flaws of capitalism – the scourge of graduate unemployment these days is global. But it would be hard to find people who have suffered more to take their place among the ranks of the white-collar unemployed than the Chinese.

This week alone, millions of students across the country will be skipping sleep, baths and online war games to study, while millions of parents take up to a year off work to cook, clean and nag them round the clock. Millions will pass next week’s dreaded college entrance exam (or gaokao) – only to end up unemployed or wearing a hard hat.

Increasing numbers are wondering if it’s all worth it, and are coming up with alternatives that range from the tragic to the downright postmodern. A Chinese newspaper reported this month that a fed-up teenager in central China hired a hit man to kill his father and older sister because – he said – they put too much pressure on him to study. And after this year’s three-day May Day public holiday, a 15-year-old boy in eastern China jumped to his death because he did not finish his holiday homework. Another teen in the same town rose at 4am to finish homework but was found hanging from the staircase before he got to school.

The overwork doesn’t stop with gaokao: just this month Chinese newspapers reported that two twenty-somethings in southern China dropped dead after taking on too much overtime – and such stories are not uncommon. Xinhua, the state news agency, said this week that 40 college graduates were found sharing one 130-square-metre room in Beijing while looking for jobs – living like the construction workers that they may be lucky to become.

So more and more students are opting instead for that most un-Chinese of solutions: time off the treadmill – or what the rest of the world knows as a “gap year”. Li Shangcong, a top student at his high school and vice-president of the student union, decided to skip gaokao altogether and cycle to the Cannes Film Festival – via Siberia. He never made it to France, having been deported by Russian immigration for an expired visa.

When his parents spluttered about the need to make something of himself, he said what teenagers around the world have been known to say in such circumstances: that he is attending the university of life and they should get off his back. He is currently on another trip to Russia.

Shi Zheying at least had her father onside: she skipped the high school entrance exam to “travel 10,000 miles rather than read 10,000 books first” – with her dad. The phrase immediately became popular among China’s “netizens”. Her grandparents, themselves teachers, were force-tutoring her at night, refusing to accept examination results that placed her as low as 16th in her class. After she decided to quit school, she was placed fifth.

China is not the land of “turn on, tune in, drop out” quite yet. But it’s a far cry from a world where terminal overwork is the only option.”

via When blue becomes the new white – FT.com.

Posted in China alert, Economics, graduate, unemployment | 1 Comment »

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27/05/2013

* Gutter oil to be used as auto fuel

China Daily: “Authorities aim to keep waste from returning to the kitchen

Gutter oil to be used as auto fuel

Processed gutter oil is expected to be used as bus fuel within two years in Shanghai, as part of efforts to advance a circular economy and prevent recycled cooking oil from returning to the kitchen.

A China Eastern Airlines ground crew fills an airliner with biofuel made from gutter oil and palm oil at Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport on April 14. The Airbus A320 succesfully made a one-and-a-half hour test flight with the fuel. CHEN FEI / XINHUA

The Shanghai Municipal Food Safety Committee will cooperate with Tongji University and six businesses that process used cooking oil into biodiesel that can power vehicles, said Yan Zuqiang, the committee’s director, in an interview with a local news portal on Saturday.

Owing to the comparatively high cost of transforming recycled cooking oil to vehicle diesel, those who use the oil will receive subsidies, he said.

Lou Diming, a professor at Tongji’s School of Automotive Studies who has led the study for the past three years, said after many experiments it is now the right time to turn the application of recycled cooking oil for vehicles into a reality.

His team has experimented with using mixed diesel fuel on more than 300 taxis, buses and lorries.

A regulation regarding the proper disposal of waste oil, including a clarification of the qualifications of oil collectors, came into effect in Shanghai in March.

The municipality leads the country in supervising the collection of waste oil, and at least 90 percent of its oil has been recycled appropriately, according to Yan.”

via Gutter oil to be used as auto fuel |Society |chinadaily.com.cn.

See also: https://chindia-alert.org/economic-factors/greening-of-china/

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19/05/2013

* Chinese shoppers bringing bags of cash

Manila Bulletin: “Lin Lu remembers the day last December when a Chinese businessman showed up at the car dealership he works for in north China and paid for a new BMW 5 Series Gran Turismo -in cash.

“One of his friends carried about $60,000 in a big white bag,“ Mr. Lin recalled, “and the buyer had the rest in a heavy black backpack.“

Lugging nearly $130,000 in cash into a dealership might sound bizarre, but it’s not exactly uncommon in China.

This is a country, after all, where home buyers make down payments with trunks filled with thick wads of renminbi, China’s currency. And big-city law firms hire armored cars to deliver the cash needed to pay monthly salaries.

For all China’s modern trappings -the high-speed rail networks and soaring skyscrapers -analysts say this country still prefers to pay for things the old-fashioned way, with cash.

Doing business in China takes a lot of cash because Chinese authorities refuse to print any bill larger than the 100-renminbi note. That’s equivalent to $16. Since 1988, the 100-renminbi note, graced by Mao Zedong‘s face, has been the largest note in circulation, even though the economy has grown fiftyfold. No major economy has limited itself to such a low denominated bill as China.

By making the 100-renminbi note the largest bill, the nation’s citizens need more of it to buy a television, never mind a car, home or a yacht.

Chinese economists and govern ment officials often suggest that printing larger denomination notes might fuel inflation. But there is another reason.

“I’m convinced the government doesn’t want a larger bill because of corruption,“ said Nicholas R. Lardy, a leading authority on the Chinese economy at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, noting that it would help facilitate corrupt payments to officials. “Instead of trunks filled with cash bribes you’d have people using envelopes. And there’d be more cash leaving the country.“

All the buying, bribing and hoarding forces China to print a lot of paper money. China, which a millennium ago was the first government to print paper money, accounts for about 40 percent of all global paper currency output.

Although China’s coastal cities have flourished during the 30 years of economic prosperity, economists say the country’s interior remains poor and disconnected from the more modern aspects of the financial grid. As a result, the poor prefer to do business in cash. The rich also like to deal in cash, and they typically hide their money in the underground economy to avoid government scrutiny.

“The average Chinese trusts neither the Chinese banks nor the Communist Party,“ said Friedrich Schneider, an authority on shadow economies and a professor of economics at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz in Austria.

That lack of trust fosters a game between the government and its subjects, analysts say. Executives make secret cash deals to earn outside consulting fees while working at state-run companies. The government responds by trying to penetrate a vast underground economy, where transactions are conducted almost entirely in cash.

Often, the culprits are the very government officials who are supposed to be upholding the laws.

Take the case of Wen Qiang, the former police chief in the city of Chongqing. He was caught in 2009 with nearly a million dollars in renminbi, carefully wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in a water tank at a relative’s home.

To keep a lid on the illegal cash transfers, China restricts cross-border money transfers and places limits on foreign currency exchange.

And then there’s the issue of rodents. In March, a migrant worker in Shanghai discovered that mice had chewed into tiny pieces the $1,200 his wife stored in a closet. A local bank agreed to exchange the money if the man could reassemble at least three-quarters of a bill.

“But the bills are now in small pieces and it’s almost impossible to fix them,“ said Zhao Zhiyong, the 37-year-old worker. “Who could know that the money would be chewed by mice?“ Xu Yan contributed research in Shanghai.

via : http://mb.pressmart.com/manilabulletin/publications/ManilaBulletin/MB/2013/05/18/articlehtmls/Chinese-shoppers-Bring-Bags-of-Cash-18052013648009.shtml

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18/05/2013

* China’s protesters: winning battles?

FT: “Even in China, David sometimes beats Goliath – though it’s sometimes hard to be sure.

This week, residents of Songjiang – a suburb of Shanghai which has gained fame around the world for having over 10,000 dead pigs floating in its water supply – found that though they could not vanquish the porcine invader, they had scared away an intruder from the corporate world. Shanghai Guoxuan High-Tech Power Energy company said it was abandoning plans for a battery factory in Songjiang, after residents protested on the streets and on the internet against it.

In a statement broadcast on local TV, the company said it would return the land allocated by local government and “will not seek any compensation”. It said it was halting its existing operations and pulling out of the area completely.

Residents staged street protests against the plant regularly since late April and more than 10,000 signed a petition against the project with many others voicing their opposition to it on the internet. At least one protester was reported to have been injured by police.

But Chinese citizens know that plants vanquished in one location in China, by “not in my backyard” or “nimby” protests, often pop up in someone else’s backyard. Residents of neighbouring Jinshan, another industrial area on the outskirts of Shanghai, now fear that the plant will end up on their doorstep.

“We already have so many chemical plants. We really cannot tolerate one more battery plant. Shall we protest together?” asks one user on a Jinshan property owner’s online forum.

Ordinary Chinese are less and less ready to pay the environmental price for economic development – or rather, more and more ready to see someone else pay it. This week, up to a thousand people protested in Kunming, in southwest China, the second large demonstration this month against plans to produce paraxylene (PX), a chemical used in making fabrics and plastic bottles, at a plant in the town.

Protestors complained that the environmental impact assessment for the project was suspect, because it was done by one subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corp, the country’s largest oil and gas producer and supplier, while the plant would be operated by another. That is the equivalent of “grandson assessing Grandpa,” said one Weibo user.

Last November, the eastern city of Ningbo suspended a petrochemical project after days of street protests. The year before, big protests against a PX plant in the northeastern city of Dalian forced the city government to suspend it.”

via China’s protesters: winning battles? | beyondbrics.

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Posted in China alert, Economics, Petition, Politics, public protest | Leave a Comment »

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03/05/2013

* Stressed Chinese Leave Cities, Head for the Countryside

BusinessWeek: “Six years ago, Bei Yi did something many people considered crazy. He quit a high-paying job in Shanghai as a manager at an industrial glass company, sold his car and apartment, and left one of China’s most desirable cities. His destination: the town of Lijiang, deep in China’s poor southwest province of Yunnan, once a place of banishment for those who ran afoul of the emperor.

Friends and family were perplexed. “‘How can you come from such a lively, important city and move to a far-off mountain area to live?’ they all asked me. They didn’t understand at all,” recalls Bei, now 34 and proprietor of a guesthouse in Lijiang’s old city, which features rushing streams and ancient alleys. “In some ways, my life in Shanghai would have been considered quite good,” he says, sipping Pu’er tea in the bright sunshine on a recent Friday, with his Old English sheepdog lying nearby. “But I was not happy at all.”

Bei, in Lijiang’s old town, where 95 percent of residents are urban refugees

Bei, in Lijiang’s old town, where 95 percent of residents are urban refugees

Bei’s decision to abandon city life has made him something of a pioneer. Fed up with choking smog, traffic jams, unsafe food, stress, and the general toxicity of life in urban China, a growing number of affluent Chinese are deserting big cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen and settling in remote regions, says Gary Sigley, professor of Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia, who is studying the migration. Bei cites work stress as the No. 1 motivation for his move. (His once-doubting parents have joined him and his wife in Lijiang.)

Although no statistics are available on how many people have moved, Yunnan is a very popular destination. An account of a husband and wife’s decision to leave Beijing and move there was one of the top posts on Sina Weibo (SINA), China’s microblogging site, in late February. Yunnan’s attractions include its tolerance—it’s home to 25 minority groups—and pristine environment. Other than tourism, tea, and tobacco, there is little industry.”

via Stressed Chinese Leave Cities, Head for the Countryside – Businessweek.

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Posted in Affluence, China alert, Economics, life-style, Uncategorized, work-life balance | Leave a Comment »

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