Readings for September 6th

"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner

These are my links for September 6th:

  • 一批物资两次捐赠 施正荣妻子卷入“诈捐门” – 产经 – 21世纪网 – wife of Suntech CEO Shi Zhengrong embroiled in charity fraud. lots of people need help, but charity business in china too corrupt, only give if you can give the money directly to those who need it, or if you or your close friends run your own charity
  • China Ties Suffer if Arms Sales Confirmed: Libya – Bloomberg – Libya’s relations with China will suffer if there is confirmation of a report that Chinese state companies offered to sell Muammar Qaddafi $200 million worth of arms during the rebellion, the North African nation’s new leaders said.
    “If indeed the Chinese government agreed to sell arms to Qaddafi only a month ago, definitely it will affect our relationship with China,” the National Transitional Council’s finance minister, Ali Al Tarhouni, told Al Jazeera television yesterday. The outcome would be “not favorable,” he said.// China holding frozen libyan assets hostage in exchange for the NTC shutting up about this inconvenient arms deal allegation?
  • Chinese state media walk a tightrope in coverage – latimes.com – China’s media, faced with international events that are too big to ignore, have had to satisfy both their political masters and an increasingly savvy public in their reporting.//LA Times Barbara Demick consistently one of best foreign correspondents in China
  • Conoco Defends China Spill Response in Face of Public ‘Wrath’ – Businessweek – Government expects Conoco Phillips to make abject public apology. And clean up the mess
    “The U.S. company was ordered to halt output after “delays, negligence, cover-ups and cheating,” the People’s Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, said yesterday. ConocoPhillips’s local unit is “facing the wrath of the Chinese public,” the Xinhua News Agency reported on Sept. 4.”..“Unless Conoco apologizes sincerely and properly cleans up the spill, the firm has no future in China,” said Gordon Kwan, head of regional energy research at Mirae Asset Securities Ltd. in Hong Kong. “I doubt Conoco will apologize, although it’s prudent for them to do so if they understand Chinese culture.”sounds like COP running their crisis PR out of US. Bad idea, it is showing
  • <EM>Crazy English</EM> founder accused of beating wife|Hot Issues|chinadaily.com.cn
  • Watch: An (Almost) Inside Look at XCon2011, China’s Top Information Security Conference – China Real Time Report – WSJ
  • 北京地铁八通线试点公布早高峰拥挤度_新闻中心_新浪网 – beijing subway so under built, access may be limited at rush hour at some stations
  • China confirms visit from Gadhafi representatives – Yahoo! News – Representatives of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi visited Beijing in July seeking to buy arms, though no contracts were signed and no weapons were shipped, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Monday.
  • Huawei Sri Lanka: A Major Player With An Iron Grip On The Market – 12.2009
  • Diabetic Moms Portend China’s Looming Crisis – Bloomberg – Luo Ting is snacking on a salt-free cracker in a Beijing maternity ward, part of a regimen to curb the glucose in her blood that threatens to cause lifelong harm to the baby she’s due to deliver this week.
    Luo, a 29-year-old sales clerk, says she didn’t know pregnancy could trigger gestational diabetes until a test in April. Now she’s among 15 percent of expecting mothers in Beijing who develop the condition, which can spur excessive fetal growth and raises the diabetes risk for them both.
    As China’s population of diabetes sufferers approaches 100 million, health officials are trying to arrest an obesity-driven explosion in cases that’s stretching hospitals and striking down working age men and women. The disease afflicts 1 in 10 adults in China, making it almost as common as in the U.S., and costs about $26 billion a year in medical bills, according to the International Diabetes Federation.
  • Cable Viewer-SUBJECT: WHEN HU JINTAO COMES FOR DINNER: LOCAL PARTY SECRETARY DESCRIBES HU’S 2007 VISIT TO RURAL VILLAGE – Classified By: Political Minister Counselor
    Aubrey Carlson. Reasons 1.4 (b) and (d).¶1. (C) SUMMARY: In an October 28 meeting with PolOffs, Shi Jing (protect), a former municipal party secretary in Gansu Province, described a 2007 Chinese New Year visit by CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao to his district and offered insights into how Hu’s domestic trips are organized.
  • China Govt Econ: Tightening Is ‘Crashing’ The Economy: Press | mninews.deutsche-boerse.com – Chinese GDP growth could plunge to below 7% if the government doesn’t act now to shift the focus of policy to a more accommodative stance from the current anti-inflationary bias, an economist and advisor to the National Development and Reform Commission said in comments published Monday.”The government should abandon its loan quotas as soon as possible
    and boost money supply growth to at least 17%. Now is the key time to shift the focus of policy to pro-growth from anti-inflation,” said Wang Jian, director of the China Society of Macroeconomics, a research institution backed by the powerful economic planning body.Wang told hexun.com, a financial portal, that M2 growth last month decelerated to just above 13% y/y versus the 14.7% rise at end-July.

    “Tightening is crashing the economy. 17% money supply growth is appropriate. 13% growth is smothering the economy,” he said, forecasting a marked slowdown even if the government takes his advice now.

    He said GDP growth will fall below the targeted 8% in the first quarter next year and decelerate to 7%, though a global recession could push growth lower.

  • China’s Challenge at Sea – NYTimes–Aaron Friedberg– AMERICA’S fiscal woes are placing the country on a path of growing strategic risk in Asia.With Democrats eager to protect social spending and Republicans anxious to avoid tax hikes, and both saying the national debt must be brought under control, we can expect sustained efforts to slash the defense budget. Over the next 10 years, cuts in planned spending could total half a trillion dollars. Even as the Pentagon saves money by pulling back from Afghanistan and Iraq, there will be fewer dollars with which to buy weapons or develop new ones.Unfortunately, those constraints are being imposed just as America faces a growing strategic challenge. Fueled by economic growth of nearly 10 percent a year, China has been engaged for nearly two decades in a rapid and wide-ranging military buildup. China is secretive about its intentions, and American strategists have had to focus on other concerns since 9/11. Still, the dimensions, direction and likely implications of China’s buildup have become increasingly clear…

    In the words of the ancient military theorist Sun Tzu, China is acquiring the means to “win without fighting” — to establish itself as Asia’s dominant power by eroding the credibility of America’s security guarantees, hollowing out its alliances and eventually easing it out of the region…

    China’s military policies are not the product of a misunderstanding; they are part of a deliberate strategy that other nations must now find ways to meet. Strength deters aggression; weakness tempts it. Beijing will denounce such moves as provocative, but it is China’s actions that currently threaten to upset the stability of Asia.

  • Lafite-Rothschild 300-Bottle Collection Tops $7.6 Million Hong Kong Sale – Bloomberg – A 300-bottle collection of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild, spanning every year from 1981 to 2005, was the top lot in a two-day Hong Kong auction that raised HK$59.5 million ($7.6 million).
    The sale ended last night with 547 lots successful, 96 percent of those offered, according to an e-mailed statement from London-based auction house Christie’s International. The auction was once estimated to raise as much as $8.3 million.
    The Lafite-Rothschild’s HK$4.2 million ($539,291) price, including fees, made it the most expensive single lot of wine auctioned this year. The 25 cases of the Bordeaux first-growth, said to have been kept in pristine condition, sold to an absentee bidder, described as a Chinese private buyer, on Sept. 3, without a hand raised in the silent room.
  • China Carmakers Told to Seek Fuel Efficiency, Not Sales – NYTimes.com– TIANJIN, China — After a decade of nurturing China’s auto industry to become the largest in the world, this country’s leaders are having second thoughts.A succession of government officials at a weekend conference called for China’s automakers to shift their focus from making ever more cars and toward producing more fuel-efficient and more advanced models, including gasoline-electric hybrids and all-electric cars.“The government must take the leading role in controlling unrealistic growth” of the auto industry, Jiang Kejun, the influential director of the Energy Research Institute at the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, said Sunday during a speech at the conference.
  • China Sought to Sell Arms to Qaddafi, Documents Suggest – NYTimes.com
  • Li Yang of Crazy English accused of domestic violence by laowai wife – Shanghaiist– Li Yang, the self-styled evangelist of the English language who’s known around China for his high energy, high intensity Crazy English lessons, is in trouble.A woman, believed to be his American wife Kim Lee, has gone on Sina Weibo to accuse him of domestic violence, and she has the pictures to prove it.Last Wednesday, the woman began by posting a picture of her swollen forehead along with the comment “I love losing my face = I love hitting my wife’s face?”. The comment was sent as a post in response to a tweet by Li Yang exhorting his 570,000 Weibo followers to “enjoy losing face”, “enjoy making mistakes” and “enjoy being laughed at” because “the more mistakes you make, the more progress you will make”.

    The following day, she posted a picture of her bruised knee, telling Li Yang to “Love China, love yourself, do not use violence toward me in front of our child.”.

  • Public discontent grows against ConocoPhillips over lingering oil spills– BEIJING, Sept. 4 (Xinhua) — ConocoPhillips China (COPC) is facing the wrath of the Chinese public after deceptively announcing that it had cleaned up oil spills in north China’s Bohai Bay.China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said on Friday in a statement that COPC failed to meet the SOA’s requirements for finding potential sources for oil spills and sealing previous oil leaks before an Aug. 31 deadline.However, the company on Wednesday submitted a report to the SOA claiming that the two goals had been met.

    Photos of polluted seawater and disgruntled fishermen have been widely posted on Weibo, a popular Chinese microblogging website, arousing the public’s concern about possible economic and environmental losses resulting from the spills.

  • 危机公关帮不了康菲(人民时评)–观点–人民网 – People’s Daily-Crisis PR Won’t Help Conoco-Phillips.
    Do COP shareholders have any idea how screwed COP is in China? Do they care?
  • Women entrepreneurs in China | chinastudies on blip.tv
  • Fund file: China managers’ blues | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com– Some foreign fund managers who have set up joint ventures with mainland Chinese asset management companies are having second thoughts, according to a report in Monday’s FTfm.A survey by PwC of 29 groups that have set up ventures with Chinese partners found eight were expecting zero revenue growth in 2011.  (Rules stipulate foreign asset managers can only do direct business in mainland China through a minority stake in a joint venture with a Chinese partner.)“Nobody said it was going to be easy, and it’s not been easy,” says Robert Grome, a partner with PwC in Hong Kong.
  • Chinese consortium buys CCB stake – FT.com– A Chinese consortium was the biggest buyer of the China Construction Bank stake that Bank of America sold last monthThe State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which manages most of China’s $3,200bn in foreign reserves, the National Social Security Fund, and Citic Securities bought the CCB shares.
    MoreThe Chinese involvement was kept closely under wraps. Safe, which operates with great secrecy, worked with Hopu Capital, the Beijing investment firm established by Fang Fenglei.
  • The DOJ’s escalating criminalization of speech – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – that Constitution thingie a nice idea once
  • Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult | Truthout – wonder what reaction will be if translated into Chinese. Doesn’t make democracy look so good
  • Secret Beijing project heralds eviction woes – FT.com – expanding official housing near zhongnanhai? 54,000/sqm compensation far too low. market price 150k+