Iran - Outnumbered Riot Police Beg Protesters Not To Hurt Them

I've been doing some analysis of Twitter traffic concerning Iran in regards to China. I thought it would be interesting on a small scale, but throughout today a new tag has appeared, #CN4Iran, that is rallying the Chinese on Twitter in support of Iran. It became one of the 'trending topics' on Twitter (namely one of the top 10 'said' things on Twitter in the whole world) and is enjoying considerable use right now.

Here are some links I have gathered.

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The Chinese have been noting their support through the shared usage of the tag #CN4Iran, which is updated live at this URL:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23CN4Iran

A repeating message that is coming through time to time is "First Iran, Then China!"

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=first+iran+then+china

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CN4Iran: Chinese join Iranians over Twitter

http://thenewschronicle.com/cn4iran-chinese-join-iranians-twitter/122802184/

"The Chinese Inspired by the People of Iran" on CNN's iReport.

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-375048

There is some loose talk of hoping for a future "Iran For China' #IR4China

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23IR4China

An example propaganda poster that has come out of China.

http://twitpic.com/vgzmg

As some of you may know, a China Daily supported Twitter-variant was hacked immediately following its launch several days ago by domestic hackers, and that is just one example of how much contention exists in regards to the use of the protocol in China. The Twitter website is blocked in China, as well as many popular tools for using it, but there still remain ways to route oneself out of China.

I've also seen several versions of Liu Xiaobo's 'Charter 08' circulated in Farsi.

I'll be following this closely.

Internet and Unrest-- CASS Blue Book Analysis

The Nanfang Dushibao, Guangzhou, on December 22 discussed a portion of the 2010 CASS Blue Book that remarks that the combination of cell phones and internet to spread information and excite a response exceeds the government's ability to respond to it. In their list of the top 77 incident that attracted wide attention in Chinese society, they found that in 30% of these cases it was postings on the web that attracted great popular attention to these incidents.  The CASS report mentioned cases where local government cut off communications or even ordered hotels not to accept customers to stop information from spreading.

Failing to react, another response, resulted in public confidence in the government declining.  The article concluded with a discussion of some hotlines to which people can complain about inappropriate internet postings and mentioned government websites that accept citizen complaints, mentioning that 37 provincial level leaders and 40 local level leaders have opened up mailboxes to receive complaints.  A list of 20 incidents in which the Internet played an important role is listed after the article.

David Cowhig

I won't make any bold proclamations of how, but if anything was going to be a catalyst for a spontaneous out-of-control series of riots on a nation-wide scale in China, I'd wager it would start online.

To imagine what access to the Internet in China is like, imagine the chaos that would have happened if foreigners showed up in 16th century Europe and implemented 10 television networks. The point I'm getting at is that skipping all the procedural steps of a civilization ('core') developing a civil society domestically has drastic consequences. These procedural steps of civil society's development lead to the construction of new tools like newspapers, telegraphy, radio, television and the Internet that expand civil society further. These tools were all at one point in Western history, the cutting edge 'skin'/boundary of civil society as a communicable idea.

The Internet effectively overlays China's domestic civil society 'core' with a foreign civil society 'skin' it needs to expand to fit. Yet China's civil society 'core' hasn't been gradually expanding, like it did in countries where the 'skin'/tools that are newspaper, radio, television and now Internet were developed over time, it has instead exploded near-instantaneously in every direction out of simply having newfound mobility within the limits of the huge foreign civil society 'skin' it adopted (The World Wide Web).

The fact that the Communist Party wired their entire country in the late 80's and 1990's with the tools/'skin' of western civil society has lead us to where we are now. Rule of law is likely the only answer to these new 'core' civil society demands. However, rule of law hasn't been able to catch up domestically in China because rule of law generally evolves concurrently with the technology/'skin' of a civil society (and Law's origins are primarily to address the issues that the civil society creates). Accordingly, rule of law has historically developed through precedent and deliberation on boundary-pushing civil society issues over reasonably longer periods of time. China is being asked to have deliberation and develop precedents at an absurdly fast rate. Shifting to rule of law is important, but there is no other option than to do so gradually; concurrent deliberation around the nation-state concerning issues of the civilization 'core' brought up from the new technology 'skin' must (and will) establish many small precedents for addressing civil society needs that will then build on each other over time to 'reform'. There probably is no alternative.

Much more generally speaking, this case of a foreign civil society 'skin' being overlaid on an economic/geopolitical powerhouse with a radically different civilization 'core' has no real precedent in world history. The consequences of this are going to be ridiculously important to study going forward.

Full article available here.

Chinese Government To Police Social Games

On the Chinese Internet, “harmony” is a euphemism for censorship. Mafia games were “harmonized” over the Summer, for example, as they “embody antisocial behavior like killing, beating, looting and raping” and “gravely threaten and distort the social order and moral standards, easily putting young people under harmful influence” according to the Ministry of Culture.

Foreshadowing the government’s imminent policing of social games, Chinese netizens are now picking—not stealing—crops from their friends’ farms.  Five Minutes, the developer of the smash hit Happy Farm (the first SNS farm game), confirmed that the terms had been voluntarily changed in an interview with BloggerInsight.  This comes as the government is “considering specific social gaming laws and regulations, to be enacted as early as next year… to end the chaotic market conditions,” according to ChinaNews, which scooped the story on Wednesday last week.

A string of negative press has hit social games in China, which may signal a propaganda campaign by the government to besmirch social games.  Many of the stories are fake, according to industry insiders. Just last month, a doctor’s fatal neglect of an infant in critical condition wasblamed on his play of Happy Farm while on duty, though further investigation concluded that he was on a QQ Chinese Chess Game. Happy Farm is also blamed for destroying jobs and relationships.

This is a classic case of attempting to do something about a problem by going after the symptoms instead of the cause. While there is something to be said for removing "stealing" from an online game and preventing "virtual vandalism", the point of the matter should be that these behaviors ought not to carry over into the real world so readily and easily. If these behaviors are so prevalent, removing the factors that lead to them existing in social games isn't going to disperse the mentality, only prevent its expression.

The real question here is why exactly are these online games bringing out these traits in people, and what does it say about a government when its chief reaction to an undesirable trait is to block the expression of it rather than acknowledge and confront it? There is an interesting analogy later on in the piece of social media games as being an addictive substance to be regulated ala cigarettes, and a digital space to be regulated similarly to casinos. It is odd that in the country which invented the term to 'brain-wash' there is little action being done to encourage people away from these addictive habits, but instead to regulate them firmly. Profit is tantalizing, but repressing desires through institutional restraints does not get to the core of the problem. In the United States, regulation on speed limits has proven to be a moot piece of legislation; where the average speed of most cars exceeds it by 5mph on any given trip. 

It is also interesting that the article notes 'Chinese games are more competitive' by their very design. If one thing is certain, expecting a social game to be fun without any notion of competition is going to be a concept very hard to come by. The fact that this competition is expressed through in-game outlets such as vandalizing property and stealing doesn't speak so much of desire, but of what is considered an acceptable means of expressing it, serves as an interesting lens to what it means to compete in China.

Read the full article here.

Accused of plucking Plurk, Microsoft pulls microblog service

Canadian startup Plurk, a Twitter-like social networking site that has gotten quite popular in China, accused Microsoft China of not only stealing the service's design, but 80 percent of the service's code too. In response, Microsoft has pulled its microblogging site, which goes by the name of Juku and was developed by a third-party vendor for the company's MSN China joint venture. Redmond has also started working with the joint venture to thoroughly investigate the charges, and so far has "acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property."

The whole story begins with a Plurk blog post explaining that the team could not believe Microsoft's blatant theft. "We were first tipped off by high-profile bloggers and Taiwanese users of our community that Microsoft had just launched a new Chinese microblogging service that looked eerily similar to Plurk. Needless to say we were absolutely shocked and outraged when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft's new offering had with Plurk. From the filter tabs, emoticons, qualifier/verb placement, Karma scoring system, media support, new user walkthroughs to pretty much everything else that gives Plurk its trademark appeal, Microsoft China's offering ripped off our service."

Plurk did code comparisons to come up with the 80 percent figure.

 This is a really astounding example of the absolute worst case scenario of what intellectual property theft can be. Yet it is just downright surprising that a company as vast and expert in programming as Microsoft would  end up in a situation of having picked such a failure of a contract partner. Forget all of the positive rhetoric and examples as of late by the Chinese government going after intellectual property fraud, this is going to be extremely humiliating to China's tech world and cause every company with coders in China to re-evaluate and investigate their work.

As much as I try to take an even-handed approach on issues regarding China, this is a case where there is truly no excuse for what has gone wrong. It is downright criminal to both believe one could get away with such code theft and then trying to sell it to a prestigious company as your own with almost no modification. It is both a tremendous breach of any semblance of legal society, no doubt violating both IP laws as well as the written contract signed, it also breaks the important bond of trust between groups that all societies know and value.

Microsoft has done the best it can to cover for this disaster, but what is going on here will not be good for Sino-American corporate relations. This scandal will be a case-study that all other major companies will be taking note of when they consider working with China, and presents the greater challenge of achieving respect for copyright, and more generally the rule of law, in the Chinese state. 

Read the full article here.

Twenty-two Rules for Zhejiang Businessmen

Twenty-two Rules for Zhejiang Businessmen
The following document was reportedly found on the wall of a Zhejiang businessman’s office, and has since been circulated widely among Chinese bloggers.
Chinese link: http://jiaren.org/2009/11/30/zhejiang-businessman-22-rules/ 

Twenty-two Rules for Businessman from Zhejiang Province
1. Persist in watching CCTV-1 News.
2. Don’t readily trust an agreement or a contract.
3. You yourself must keep your word, as a promise is worth a thousand ounces of gold. But this doesn’t apply to those who always break their word.
4. Don’t conduct business where you can afford the win yet can’t afford the loss.
5. Don’t input too much in advance, and save enough strength for yourself.
6. There’s nothing in the world that you can’t do, yet businessman can achieve something while refusing to do something else.
7. Be careful when choosing a partner.
8. Don’t have family members in your team.
9. Don’t sleep with a woman who has a conflict of interest with you.
10. Don’t tell the details of your business to your woman.
11. You can bribe but don’t be a tainted witness at court
12. Don’t commit tax evasion or tax fraud, but learn how to do legal tax avoidance.
13. You can make use of journalists but don’t trust them.
14. Don’t be ostentatious, unless you’re a real Mr. Big.
15. Stand in the middle, and don’t engage in any political faction battles.
16. Don’t care much about the gain and loss of money and interests.
17. Don’t show off your money.
18. The right to speak lays with the capital. But you shouldn’t let others know easily how much right to speak you hold.
19. Learn from other people’s success and failure, gain and loss, yet you can ignore the cases outside China.
20. Don’t employ the rules of the gang to solve business conflicts.
21. Don’t take care of every single thing personally under the precondition of controlling the overall situation.
22. Leave yourself a route to retreat, in case you are deserted or betrayed by friends and allies.

 This is a really fascinating find that has been, as of late, circulating wildly in the Chinese blogosphere for particularly obvious reasons. For one thing, it sums up in 22 points pretty much what the mentality is towards money is in China, how it relates to power, and what dangers come with having it. We can see from this list the degree to which China's economic model could be described as Social Darwinist and Leninist; there is a sense of survival of the fittest combined with a Leninist model of purging those who are unpopular or unfit for the regime.

Suffice to say, both of those traits are well encoded into this list. We can see that bribery is not a problem, only being caught is. We can also see that, in the last point, there is an overwhelming sense of paranoia that you are in this alone and that the only person you can fundamentally trust in the end is your own self. This is particularly worrisome, because when combined with #2 (that you should never trust a contract) the Chinese are indicating that they do not have a remarkable amount of faith in the western concepts of legal obligation.

As far as this list goes, it seems quite clear that China is a society very different from the world it is interacting with (particularly since #19 says that this is true, and that any cases outside of China do not apply inside China). What we are looking at here is both a list into the Chinese economic psyche, but as a consequence also the political psyche. If an economic environment cannot have faith on an impartial judicial system and legislative system to both mediate conflicts and design regulations that are enforced, this style of thinking is likely to persist.

Yet the problem with a legal society...is that those with power have to also submit themselves to the law. Will this happen in China in the next decade? I would say it is doubtful...

China Curbs Property Speculators, Boosts Consumption

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- China scrapped a tax break on property sales and extended subsidies for auto and home appliance purchases, seeking to cool speculation while sustaining a recovery in the world’s third-largest economy.

The State Council will re-impose a sales tax on homes sold within five years after cutting the period to two years in January, the cabinet said in a statement yesterday. The government will scale back some tax breaks for car buyers, while continuing to fund vehicle purchases in rural areas.

China’s property prices rose in November at the fastest pace in 16 months, a government survey showed today, reinforcing concern that record lending and a $586 billion stimulus package may lead to asset bubbles. The benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closed 0.5 percent higher as households-goods makers and some auto stocks gained. Property companies fell.

 There is a legitimate concern here that credit from the Chinese stimulus package may have fueled some incredible bubbles that are getting close to a bursting scenario. China has recently been suffering from cases of overcapacity in everything from steel to car production, and with every province vying to get its bigger share of the stimulus, a lot of bubbles have emerged in the property markets as well. There is little doubt that China is going into a property bubble right now, primarily fueled by the injection of so many funds into construction and the industries behind them, and while China has always been able to make the case that "there is eventual demand" given its huge rural population, the bubble may be growing too fast for reality to catch up. Putting these sales taxes back on the property markets will probably help to curb this, but the chances of it eliminating it are less than likely.

Boosting consumption is, of course, China's #2 goal now for as long as the tail of the fiscal crisis is considered to be where we currently are. The export market, accounting for over half of China's GDP, is now beginning to normalize with its domestic consumption due to helpful tax breaks on items such as automobiles. There is some speculation that a great many of these car purchases could be by local provincial governments, eager to make consumption appear high in their areas and get more funding, but reports from reputable China economy experts in the Wall Street Journal have recently cast doubt on such a wild scenario.

Read the full article here.

China closes file-sharing sites in crackdown

BEIJING — China has closed one of the country's largest file-sharing sites in what it says is a fight against copyright infringement, but could be seen as another measure aimed at controlling what content the country's Web users can find online.

The file-sharing site BTCHINA — a major source of overseas movies, television shows and games in the country — has been closed since Friday, and another site, VeryCD.com, was down Wednesday. A report in the Southern Metropolis Daily said other file sharing sites would be closed in the coming days.

It is almost always too easy in the west to cry foul of any operations on the Internet by the Chinese government to be manipulation of free speech and access to content. In truth, while it remains to be seen if this is a token act meant at appealing to angry foreign copyright lobbies, there is a good chance that this effort is sincere in accordance with the Communist Party desires to build up a legal society and a domestic consumer culture for the sake of stability.

Up until now, it has been and still is inexcusibly easy to acquire copyrighted content in China on any major websites. In terms of crackdown on actual filesharers, there have been very few attempts that are mostly for show. What differentiates this act is that the Chinese government appears to be going after a service rather than a scapegoat, which would imply a sea change in how they are viewing copyright infringement in their country.

In terms of a domestic consumer culture, an assault such as this on pirated content is an absolutely neccessary huge first step to take. By making everyone who uses the Chinese Internet take notice, the government will then proceed to target additional resources and start issuing threats to hosting companies that find themselves in violation of copyright. How effective this will be will remain to be seen, as even in the United States copyright law is frequently ignored in favor of the convenience and speed of illegal digital downloads. However with the ability to impose as high a sentence for copyright infringement as they please, this aspiration toward legal society via arbitrarily set punishments may be met with an ironic series of unprecedented court battles over individual and corporate rights. Though the path will be hard, such an act might just be what China needs to focus itself on legal reform and promote a prosperous domestic economy.

Read the full article here.

China's rise named decade's most read news story

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - The rise of China as an economic superpower was the most read news story of the past decade, surpassing the Iraq War and the attacks of Sept. 11, according to an analysis by a U.S.-based media tracking group.

The Global Language Monitor, which uses an algorithm to search printed and electronic media and the Internet for trends in word usage, said there was strong interest in the Asian powerhouse, which is the world's third biggest economy.
A dragon used in traditional Chinese dance is seen at a residential community in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, September 13, 2009. he rise of China as an economic superpower was the most read news story of the past decade, surpassing the Iraq War and the attacks of Sept. 11, according to a U.S.-based media tracking group.

"It is with little surprise that its ongoing transformation has topped all other news stories in a decade bespotted by war, economic catastrophe, and natural disasters."

 Well I should hope that one isn't too surprised to hear that China reached the #1 spot, simply due to the fact that next to the search term "terrorism", there probably hasn't been as much of an influx of a type of people into world consciousness as there has been of this decade's entry of the Chinese. While all of these events are ongoing, one can really see tha while wars and terrorist attacks affect a localized population, China's economic rise has delivered a significant impact to many ordinary people's lives.

Another important thing is that when it comes to learning about China, it is doubtful that one could just hope to find all the information one would need on the subject in a single, or even a dozen, articles. It would take quite a lot of research, investigation, fact-checking, and comparison of various analysts opinions to just gain the slightest of understanding of what contemporary China is today on the world stage. This discounts the entire element of required history to learn even a bit of why China where it is today.

Finally, there is the huge cultural element. People are going to want to understand not only what China is and its history, but what the people are about and interested in. To learn this is a vast undertaking that will inspire many people to look into countless articles and even venture into foreign language areas to just get a sense of what 'Chineseness' is and how it is creating local culture and preparing to affect international trends as well. It is with little doubt that the Chinese are going to be sculpting a considerable amount of cultural identity in the coming decades, and people are going to want to understand it so they can be a part of it, and profit from it.

Read the full article here.

Straight talk about homosexual therapy

During a public forum over the weekend, Yi Huso posed a rhetorical question to his mostly gay audience, and then went on to answer himself.

"How do you know a person is gay?" said Yi, a research fellow at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at Columbia University in New York and a visiting assistant professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing.

After pausing and staring at the crowd of people who were in same-sex relationships or wanted to hear what an expert had to say about the confusing signals around them.

"Maybe gays love chocolate?" he asked jokingly.

Though Yi tried to be relaxed during his talk but wanted to convey a serious point to his audience of mostly young people looking for guidance.

"Homosexuality was classified as an illness," he said during his speech entitled "The harm of sexual orientation conversation therapy" during the forum Saturday that was aimed at Beijing's gay community. "Why do some professionals continue to provide a cure for which has been judged not to be an illness?"

China has been a particularly surprising place in regards to many modern issues that are also afflicting their Western counterparts, but it is in the understanding of homosexuality as a state of being that they have proven themselves to be quite comfortable. While the idea is anything but mainstreamed in China, there is a growing consensus amongst the medical elite of the nation that there is absolutely no scientific mechanism by which one’s sexuality can be ‘deleted’ ‘cured’ or otherwise ‘changed’. Perhaps due to this longstanding ethos of ‘scientific development’ as a cultural phenomenon in China, there is now an increasing consensus that those who are educated and follow the scientific method cannot be told they are wrong.

Morality and social normality in China is anything but consistent across its provinces, and it is frequently from the top that what is moral and what is immoral is frequently decided upon. Insofar as homosexuality has not been a discussed topic, it has made it less defined as a negative or a positive. This state of neutrality has been relatively beneficial for the gay communities in China, who are not exactly sure they are in any way eager to follow the stratified and sub-culturized path of Western societies that celebrates, perhaps too overtly, the sexual dynamic of their relationships. Gay bars and other institutions have popped up with relative ease in major metropolitan areas, although their clientele are less rigidly defined than in the West. While a community may be emerging, it is if anything very sexually conservative in terms of societal behavior. This will probably help the Chinese gay community, as an overt celebration of alternative sexuality only puts it in opposition to the norm. It ought to be discussed why it is there is no ‘straight and gay pride’ parade in the west, when there is little if no reason not to have one for the sake of reducing tension between the two groups.

Yet of course, it is not all wonderful over in China, and the social consequences of being found out to be homosexual remain anything but good in the less liberal areas away from the cities. It is much more the issue of being exposed than of actually being homosexual that frightens many Chinese, and so long as they can continue their habits without being a nuisance to others or inciting a moral panic it will likely be relatively easy to engage in homosexual activity. If these campaigns against old ideas of homosexuality as a disorder or a social blight can be repaired, China will be well on its way to being a very sexuality tolerant country.

Read the full article here.

China Faults Wall Street Over Losses

BEIJING—A Chinese economic official blamed "fraudulent practices" at some international investment banks for large losses incurred by Chinese state-owned companies on derivative contracts, in the government's strongest criticism yet of the role played by foreign banks.

Li Wei, a vice chairman of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, cited contracts tied to energy prices sold by banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co. and Morgan Stanley, to aviation and shipping firms.

Mr. Li, writing in the latest issue of the Study Times, a newspaper published by the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, also criticized Citigroup Inc., along with Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, for developing "extremely complicated" derivatives products. He said 68 state-owned enterprises incurred combined book losses of 11.4 billion yuan ($1.67 billion) on 125 billion yuan worth of derivatives investments by the end of October 2008. Foreign investment banks were the "chief culprits" behind the huge losses, he said.

Now while no one likes being blamed, lets be very straightforward here: our derivative system caused this failure and it was both of our own creation of it and of our own blind trust in it that led to the near destruction of the financial system in the fall of 2008. That Chinese counterparts were willing to sign up to participate in this complex market, as well as agree to put money down on an extremely overvalued commodity such as oil (whose high prices were heavily linked to grossly exaggerated profits for large government owned oil companies in both Russia and China alike), suggested that there was far, far too much optimism that this bubble would not burst.

Now to be fair, the way the bubble burst was so drastic, and so unlike anything almost anyone with a positive spin was predicting (and lets be further fair by pointing out that during a boom market, people are idiots and won't listen to the pessimists) that the losses were far more devastating than ever before. The fact that  companies gambled on put options for their cash earned from derivative trading on subprime mortgage loans, in turn based on inflated property values, onto a stock like oil that was clearly being driven up by potentially lucrative high prices, shows an extremely complicated, and downright risky, chain of actions for which the fault lies in the risk taking of individual companies such as China Eastern Air Holding Co. AND American companies like Costco Group.

We should remember that we are in this together, and I personally am surprised that the Chinese would take any of these risks. While it is one thing to develop trust with the individuals who are selling you potentially lucrative trade ideas, it is your own corporate responsibility to be objective when it comes to analyzing the potential dangers of risk that face your company's investment. In this case, almost anyone could tell you that it was 'extremely complicated'; that it was should have been reason for any company, Chinese or American, to step back and rethink their perspective.

Read the full article here.

Rethinking the Chinese Yuan’s Re-Peg to the Dollar

 “China may not have simply re-pegged to the dollar,” Keidel told us. “My analysis leaves open the real possibility that China has simply been following its ‘basket guidance’ with one huge exception: if basket guidance would tell it to devalue with respect to the U.S. dollar, it sticks with the dollar instead.”

Yes, he said “devalue.” Keidel notes that for a while – prior to July 2008 – China did seem to be following a policy of gradual appreciation against a basket of major currencies. The yuan was appreciating the dollar, and its gains partially matched the euro’s own appreciation against the dollar.

But investors’ rush to the relative safety of the dollar during the financial crisis pushed the dollar sharply up against the euro – the dollar rose 27% against the euro between July and November 2008. At that point, strictly following the basket rule would have meant pushing the yuan down against the dollar. And that would have looked a lot like Beijing dealing a blow to U.S. exporters just as the American economy was teetering on the brink of oblivion.

The last line of this article pretty much sums up the crux of the financial issues surrounding the state of the yuan: it absolutely, under no circumstances, wants to devalue itself against the dollar. If it does this, the tremendous export industry in China, which is by some estimates over 35% of its economy, would be dealt a massive blow across all regions. Yes, unsurprisingly, the Chinese government is doing what will protect domestic stability and, more importantly, preserve jobs.

Of course, the other side to this equation is that China needs the US economy to recover and start spending more. While there is much talk of the Chinese buying up our treasuries in record amounts, there is good reason for that: the more they buy of our debt, the more we can spend on their goods. Yet this system almost became horribly decoupled last year during the crisis, where a collapsed US (and most certainly EU) economy would have lead to a staggering termination of exports from China. The consequences of this would have been nothing short of enormous for China's internal stability. These factories are frequently manned by some of the most poor and otherwise disadvantaged groups of China's society; particularly dangerous is the massive 'floating population' of roughly 10 million migrant workers that is hard to keep tabs on.

So what the world is seeing in regards to the yuan is a simple protectionist act that is based on intense phobia of having the Chinese domestic export sector suffering loses in any shape or form. The yuan may well appreciate, but it will appreciate as soon as the dollar appreciates. What this means is that it is certainly likely China and the US will remain friends, simply because their destinies are now so intertwined. Other regional blocks such as the EU are going to find themselves in a lose-lose situation in regards to pushing either the US or China to get something done about the currency devaluation. Yet as the dollar continues to devalue, the treasuries the Chinese have bought will also continue a steady decline in net worth. If the Chinese have a stronger yuan than the dollar, they will begin to lose money on their treasury investments.

Strictly speaking, the Chinese have absolutely no reason to bow to any pressure to adjust this yuan-dollar relationship.

Read the full article here.

China says wants US talks with NKorea to succeed

BEIJING — China voiced hope Tuesday that a rare direct meeting between North Korean and American officials next week would result in Pyongyang returning to talks on dismantling its nuclear program.

President Barack Obama's special envoy, Stephen Bosworth, is to travel to Pyongyang next Tuesday to discuss restarting the six-nation talks, in the first one-on-one talks between Pyongyang and Washington since Obama took office in January.

"We hope the dialogue between the DPRK and the United States can be held and can be successful," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference, referring to the country by the initials of its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

North Korea pulled out of nuclear talks in April to protest international criticism of a long-range rocket launch. It then conducted its second-ever nuclear test in May and has pushed for direct talks with the U.S.

It is my hope that anyone who has read this article in conjunction now with the one I wrote last week will be able to put aside any 'China is buddy buddy with the North Koreans' argument. Admittedly, however, this possibility of establishing diplomatic relations with North Korea may not be the right path for the United States to take. The six party talks, convened by China itself (who frequently has to drag North Korea to the table with it), are a more than satisfactory method of interacting with North Korea. In fact, in one particular regard, that being the ability to bring in other nation's voices in the East Asia sphere, they are the better choice for pursuing diplomatic goals.

What might just well happen with the North Korean government in this case is that a particular power group within it, particularly Kim Jong-Il's, is trying to gain face as the right group to continue ruling in the event of his death and succession by his son. Considering how eager they were to have Bill Clinton come over in recent months, and the completely independent of China's input detonation (much to their fury) of nuclear devices, it is likely North Korea is anything but internally stable. It may well be in the United States interest to back off and see what might happen if the west left the regime alone.

Yet this goal, of internal reform or collapse, is exactly the opposite of what the Chinese seek to get out of this entire debacle with North Korea. They more than anything want the regime to remain stable there so as to protect their stability interests in Manchuria. There is nothing worse than coming to the aid of a collapsing regime's people when you are loathe to do it and have absolutely no interest in keeping them in your territory.

Read the full article here.

Auto Show with Chinese Characteristics: Male Models

Auto shows around the world, notably those in Milan, Seoul, Frankfurt, and Tokyo, are known for featuring scantily-clad women posing with the latest cars for photographers – many of whom focus on the human models rather than the new car models. There are Web sites that devote much of their content to those show girls.

But male equivalents have been rarely seen at those events and Web sites – except in China. At the Guangzhou auto show, which ends today, a host of carmakers, including both established global names and Chinese upstarts, have been using male models to promote their new cars. Among those seen in Guangzhou mobilizing male models: Audi, Volkswagen, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, and Peugeot, as well as China’s Chery and Lifan.

The male models tend to be fully clothed, and executives say they’re there to appeal to both men and women. A Beijing-based executive with Mercedes-Benz says suggesting how people could dress to drive a certain car fashionably is “a good way” to communicate to the consumer what kind of vehicle the carmaker has designed for people.

Other cultures are a fantastic lens through which one can come to see unusual activities within one's own. From the western habit of saying 'Bless You!" when someone sneezes to the very concept of standing in queues, certain things that one might think are universal traits are quickly proved false with exposure to 'the other'. In this case we have an unusual take on gender stereotyping and sexuality in the form of China's new habit of putting male models next to its cars.

While it is not unheard of to have a male model for a car show in a western showroom, one could say it is the very tiny exception that has often proved the norm that women are expected to be placed next to objects of intense male desire (or to create the intense male desire for a status indicator and condition women to respecting the indicator). Yet our friends over in mainland China have begun to make us investigate the very point of models near cars, with their take revealing a bit of our own cultural habits when it comes to beauty and fashion.

The Chinese intention with the male model, and sometimes several models of different gender, is to indicate what kind of people are expected to buy this car and to appeal (unsurprisingly) to the female audience who may want their husband to look the way the model does. While purchasing power does tend to rest ultimately in male dominated hands in China, according to the article, the influence of women on expectations of men seems to have retained great traction.

So conversely, what does it say about our culture's overt bias towards female models? Perhaps it is indicating just how much we have relegated fashion and culture to the female gender, with the recent breakouts in male fashion of the last 20 years being more and more oriented to the gay subculture. That being said, there are certainly a wonderful array of male clothing options that straight males are able to wear, but they admittedly are put beneath the surface culturally. China continues a trend observed in Japan of far more culturally accepted male fashion that is consistent with a 'desire for good appearance'.

It is truly fascinating that in a culture based on consumerism, no major retailer has gone to great lengths to push male appearance as a critical issue; as if the men would be 'less inclined to deliver similar returns' or 'just aren't likely to impulse buy'. Most studies on testosterone in men will tell you that men, when their testosterone levels rise, are far more impulsive shoppers than women could even dream to be.

Read the full article here.

China unveils Copenhagen targets

China has unveiled its first firm target for limiting greenhouse gas emissions, two weeks before a global summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

Beijing said it would aim to reduce its "carbon intensity" by 40-45% by the year 2020, compared with 2005 levels.
Carbon intensity, China's preferred measurement, is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted for each unit of GDP.
But our correspondent says it does not mean China's overall levels of carbon dioxide will start falling.

 This is the truth about China that we really need to focus on: they are not going to stop growing in the next 20 or so years and expecting anything in terms of emissions reductions from them is not just unreasonable, it is also downright impossible. In China, there exists a population of 1.3 billion people, 700 million plus of which have not managed to experience the commercial benefits of modernization that has occurred over the past 30 years.

In regards to consumption, all of these individuals will be seeking devices such as cell phones, computers, and televisions in addition to more mainstream devices like hair dryers, washing machines, and refrigerators. The electricity consumption from the use of these devices is likely to be enough to outweigh any developments in green technology China may implement, and this is not even counting the emissions that will go into producing and shipping these technologies to their places of purchase.

Yet one should by no means think China is trying to give the rest of the world the short end of the stick in terms of its efforts on emission reduction; the government simply recognizes that the country will keep growing at a rate that will offset any efficiencies to the point that it will always look as though they are polluting more. China is going to be a huge polluter for the majority of the 21st century, but they are doing their absolute best now to shift their economy onto more energy efficient tracks for the future. Their investments in battery powered cars, hydroelectric power, solar power, and wind power either equal or far outweigh our own. Even though China's emissions may rise, it is very easy that they could humiliate the rest of the world (bar Germany, who rivals it on green energy efficiency) with their admirable and effective transition to green energy sources.

This just goes to show how effective a government can be when it comes to the recognition that an ecological disaster in their country could completely undermine their legitimacy. The last thing the Chinese Communist Party wants to be accused of in the case of any crisis is not having done anything to prevent it.

Read the full article here.

China's health minister warns of HIV spread

SHANGHAI: AIDS is spreading rapidly among high-risk groups in parts of China and is threatening to become a serious epidemic, said Minister of Health Chen Zhu on Tuesday.

A total of 319,877 people had been registered HIV positive, including 102,323 AIDS patients and 49,845 deaths, as of October 31, according to statistics released on a national AIDS control meeting in Shanghai.
But the actual numbers could be much greater as the statistics only included cases reported by medical facilities.

Another 41,000 to 55,000 people would have contracted the virus within 2009, according to the estimation.
Taking combating HIV/AIDS as a high priority, the government had categorized it "as a strategic issue bearing on economic work and social stability," Chen said.

 The HIV/AIDS crisis in China continues to be one of the most unreported epidemics the world is currently seeing in regards to the spread of the disease. While the tone toward HIV/AIDS in the west is one of more optimism, mostly due to a combination of successful preventative efforts and life extending drug concoctions, China continues to struggle with even the simple task of getting its numbers straight.

The problem with statistics in China for any sensitive subject is the issue of local versus central government agendas. A local government wants to look competent in every way it possibly can to curry favor with those slightly higher than them in the system. Throughout the chain of command from local to central government, information on all sorts of negative information, varying from HIV/AIDS statistics to underage internet cafe attendance, is skewed or omitted as each tries to curry favor with their superior.

What the central government, and subsequently the world, is always left with are inherently underreported numbers. Some accuse the central government of deliberatly manipulating the statistics, to which my prior argument in regards to the effects of bureaucractic showmanship on accurate reporting should disprove. The sad truth of the matter is that the central government is itself unable to get the statistics it wants, and by and large would like to have an accurate picture for itself and to reclaim some of its credibility to international watchdog groups.

All of this aside, the HIV/AIDS issues in China should not be ignored. The government's campaigns against it are well intentioned, though it still remains to be seen whether or not it is having an effect on the migrant worker high risk groups, who are frequently paying for sex, because they have no permanent residence and are thus difficult to gain information on their health in general. No city is going to want to take the plunge of trying to acquire all this information from a population that may not well return the next year, depending on job availability, and would render any long term statistics useless.

The last problem involves the poor female population and the rich male population. Because of relative acceptance of prostitution as a legitimate business in most Chinese cities, at least off the record, there is a particular risk that prostitution has made the disease anything but a poor/rural disease. These numbers are more likely to be reported on, cities having more leeway for bad news if it concerns wealthier individuals,and hopefully dealt with. However, one would be foolish to argue that the solution would be an end to prostitution. Try to explain to the local Chinese government how you are going to replace all of those jobs. Try it. It is harder than it looks.

Read the full article here.

Minister reaffirms China ties to N Korea

China's Defence Minister, Liang Guanglie, has reaffirmed Beijing's military alliance with Pyongyang, and he has been quoted as saying the relationship was ''sealed with blood'' during the Korean War.
The comments appear to undermine efforts by the US President, Barack Obama, in Beijing last week to enlist China's support for nuclear non-proliferation efforts against North Korea.
They follow a series of Chinese overtures to North Korea and other nations that Washington regards as ''problem states'', including Sudan and Iran.

 It is often a very forgotten point that China was North Korea's principal ally during the Korean War over 50 years ago, and that the United States (under the banner of the United Nations) committed a great number of troops to South Korea. This proxy war fought between the United States and China is a lasting tale of what a conflict between the two nations today would cost, and why a regime like North Korea is a likely consequence of any sort of action.

China may be more on the fence about its relationship with its military dictatorship younger brother that it accidentally brought into life, but one should indeed expect them to always be on the good side of the DPRK, regardless of the international costs. The consequences of a regime failure in North Korea are dire, and given that the line between North and South Korea would become something of a disaster if the regime disintegrated and the populace attempted to flee, one can expect the situation on the Chinese border to be worse. The absolute last thing China wants, probably next to a nuclear exchange, is millions of starving North Korean refugees fleeing into northeastern China. China already has a massive migrant worker population, and the addition of millions of refugees who do not speak the language and are educationally brainwashed will be a huge political quagmire.

Having to work out an exchange with South Korea in this case would take months, and the international response would bring pressure to allow foreign NGO's into China in similar ways to the Sichuan earthquake last year. Foreign NGOs have been noted for doing more than disaster relief, including introducing voting methods for assisting in allocating resources and settling disputes. Their presence will also deeply disturb normal economic activity in what is a chief oil, coal, and many other raw materials region.

Long story short, China has no interest in seeing the North Korean/DPRK regime collapse. Lets hope they can continue to play both sides of the coin, because China will never be on the side of destabilization of the Korean peninsula for any ends.

Read the full article here. 

China Elections and Governance Review Issue 4

On October 1, 2009, China celebrated the 60-year anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic with a massive parade intended to showcase the country's military might, social stability, political unity and ethnic harmony.  However, manifestations of social unrest have continued to hinder Chinese leaders in their efforts to project this image of a stable and unified society. Protests and riots highlight the public's frustration with official corruption, social injustice, and economic inequality in certain sectors of society.  Massive riots in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, coming only a year after similar riots in Tibet, have diminished the image of harmonious coexistence between the Han and ethnic minority populations.  Although the government response to these "mass incidents" has typically been to focus on the manifestations rather than the causes, central and local governments have begun to identify more holistic measures geared toward crisis prevention rather than crisis management. Such endeavors have been particularly evident in the efforts of the central and local governments to promote greater governmental transparency and openness with the media and its citizens.

This is an excellent piece that brings up the real conundrum that China faces in regards to media transparency. While on the one side it looks absolutely fullproof to just release more and more information to the public, this is just inherently unrealistic in regards to maintaining what stability there is on the local level. The Chinese central government polices the local governments just as much if not more than it polices local populaces. In fact, the Chinese government has reached a point where one could easily say that they are the friends of the populace far more than the local Hamlet and Township level officials that have been instated by the intermediaries between them and Beijing. Always remember that governance in China is top down, and that the best way to seek reform of the local areas is to inform the upper echelons of why they should care about what is going on locally.

Governance through paranoia of your boss: it only works well if an information conduit exists between the people beneath the local official and the boss.

Read the full piece here.