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

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• 实德足球违规史：暧昧的幕后操纵者 – 产经快讯 – 21世纪网– more on dalian shide, this time about why they were never punished in the crackdown on football corruption. bo xilai was of course known during his time in dailian as 足球市长／／这些年，徐明和实德一直被媒体质疑，在2001-2005年实德系纵横绿茵场期间涉嫌数场假球，但在足球打黑行动中，尽管这些假球场次一次又一次地被点名。但每一次，实德都岿然不动。
• Neil Heywood death: Bo Xilai’s son ‘escorted from his home near Harvard university by US officials’ – Telegraph – Bo Guagua, the Harrow- and Oxford-educated son of Bo Xilai, was slipped out of his luxury flat near Harvard University late on Thursday night, in a pre-arranged pick-up by law-enforcement officers.
  Wearing a dark jacket and pulling a roller suitcase, the 24-year-old, who was preparing for final exams of a postgraduate degree, was driven away in a dark SUV by a besuited officer wearing a badge.
  “He did not look frightened, but he seemed anxious to go with them,” a source told The Daily Telegraph. “He had clearly been expecting it”. Mr Bo was accompanied by a female friend.
  Speculation was mounting that the younger Mr Bo may have sought protection from American authorities. The FBI’s Boston office declined to say if the man was one of their agents. It is understood that he was not from the local or university police departments.
  He was picked up at about 10pm on Thursday, after his female friend told the doorman to expect a visitor and gave him an electronic key fob to let him into the underground car park. She is believed to have left later in Mr Bo’s Porsche, after collecting more luggage.
• On Fang Lizhi (1936–2012) by Perry Link | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books – Perry Link
• 温州悖论：泡沫制造者缺席创投盛宴 – 基金要闻 – 21世纪网 –
• 真酒面容初露：90%茅台是假酒？ – 产经快讯 – 21世纪网 – 90% of maotai/moutai is fake?
• China Murder Suspect’s Sisters Ran $126 Million Business Empire – Bloomberg– great reporting by bloomberg. scary precedent for beijing. if good reporters can do this about gu, they can probably do this about others as well. the bo takedown very dangerous; they all live in glass houses, they better aim their stones very carefully//The sisters of Gu Kailai, who is suspected of murdering a U.K. citizen and is the wife of disgraced Chinese official Bo Xilai, controlled a web of businesses from Beijing to Hong Kong to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million, regulatory and corporate filings show.

  Gu Kailai, 53, was the youngest of five sisters of a People’s Liberation Army general, according to a Chinese- language website affiliated with the Communist Youth League. She rose from a butcher’s assistant during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution to become a lawyer who argued cases in the U.S.

• In China, a prominent leader faces scandal | Marketplace from American Public Media– The sisters of Gu Kailai, who is suspected of murdering a U.K. citizen and is the wife of disgraced Chinese official Bo Xilai, controlled a web of businesses from Beijing to Hong Kong to the Caribbean worth at least $126 million, regulatory and corporate filings show.Gu Kailai, 53, was the youngest of five sisters of a People’s Liberation Army general, according to a Chinese- language website affiliated with the Communist Youth League. She rose from a butcher’s assistant during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution to become a lawyer who argued cases in the U.S.
• Don’t Push China: Vice-Chief of Joint Staff Says “We Can All Get Along”– “Don’t push China.” Even as the Chinese and America’s Philippine allies engage in their latest standoff at sea over the disputed Scarborough Shoal, the message from an array of elder statesmen is that the U.S. needs to avoid any kind of confrontation with China — and the Obama Administration seems to be listening.”We are often accused of this so-called pivot to the Pacific being all about China,” said the Vice-Chief of the Joint Staff, Adm. James Winnefeld on Wednesday morning, addressing the annual conference of the relentlessly centrist Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the US has many other interests in the region — most notably at the moment North Korea, but also the reform process in Myanmar (aka Burma) — where it and China have common ground. “It should be viewed not as containing China, it should be viewed as balancing China,” Winnefeld said of the new strategy. “I don’t think China should view this as a threat….We can all get along out there.”
• Why JPM’s “Chief Investment Office” Is The World’s Largest Prop Trading Desk: Fact And Fiction | ZeroHedge– Finally, the most damning evidence that JPM’s World’s Biggest Prop DeskTM, elsewhere known as the CIO, has to be dismantled lest it suffer the fate of all other massive prop desks, which promptly blew up in the days after the Lehman failure, is the following:One public sign that the chief investment office does more than hedge: Its trading risk is on par with that of JPMorgan’s investment bank.
  JPMorgan’s annual report for 2011 shows that the CIO stood to lose as much as $57 million on most days of the year. That compares with $58 million for the investment bank, which includes Wall Street’s biggest stock- and bond-trading units.
  Another sign: The relationship between the CIO and the investment bank’s sales and trading desks is strained, two former employees said. Employees in the CIO get a smaller share of their trading profits than those in the investment bank, giving Dimon a cost-management incentive to direct more trading through the CIO, one former executive said.
  Hence: JPMs “Chief Investment Office” = World’s largest prop trading desk. But hey, just repeat “Assymetric Service Initative” … “Assymetric Service Initative”  … “Assymetric Service Initative” three times … and it becomes truth.
• Yogurt and jelly makers worry about blogs’ effects[1]|chinadaily.com.cn – Insiders in the yogurt and jelly industries said on Wednesday that their businesses may suffer setbacks in the next few weeks as a result of two posts on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, that have called on the public to avoid their products.
  The messages, which were posted online on Monday morning, warned consumers that yogurt and jelly might contain industrial gelatin made from discarded leather shoes.
• JPMorgan Said to Transform Treasury to Prop Trading – Bloomberg – sounds like jamie dimon has been lying publicly..shocked//
  JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has transformed the bank’s chief investment office in the past five years, increasing the size and risk of its speculative bets, according to five former executives with direct knowledge of the changes.
  Achilles Macris, hired in 2006 as the CIO’s top executive in London, led an expansion into corporate and mortgage-debt investments with a mandate to generate profits for the New York- based bank, three of the former employees said. Dimon, 56, closely supervised the shift from the CIO’s previous focus on protecting JPMorgan from risks inherent in its banking business, such as interest-rate and currency movements, they said.
  Some of Macris’s bets are now so large that JPMorgan probably can’t unwind them without losing money or roiling financial markets, the former executives said, based on knowledge gleaned from people inside the bank and dealers at other firms. Bruno Iksil, a London-based trader in Macris’s group, gained attention last week after moving markets with his trades, drawing a comparison to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s power in the government-bond market.
• Microsoft’s Leung Quits as Head of China, Prompting Reshuffle – Bloomberg – Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world’s biggest software maker, reshuffled top executives at its European and Chinese operations, after the company said Simon Leung quit as chief executive of the greater China region.
  Leung is leaving for “personal and family reasons,” and will be replaced by Ralph Haupter, currently vice-president at Microsoft Germany, the company said in a statement today. Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft U.K., will take over as chief operating officer for greater China from Michel van der Bel, who is moving into Frazer’s U.K. role, it said.
• Champagne, shisha parties and VERY little work: How playboy son of Chinese ‘murder’ couple was hated by tutors at Oxford | Mail Online – Bo Guagua, who is now in hiding, frustrated his tutors by becoming well known for hosting wild parties at his room at Balliol College, Oxford
  He later moved to a flat with ‘gold taps, a concierge and a vineyard’
  PPE student forced to sit ‘penal’ exams after failing to work hard enough
  But powerful parents tried to prevent tutors disciplining him
  Now fall from grace after mother becomes prime suspect in murder of Briton
• China: what’s in the dumplings? | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com– Just another week in the life of a Chinese housewife: first it was yogurt made from old shoes, then tea tainted with pesticides and now comes news that even the sacred xiaolongbao – small steamed dumplings, the signature dish of Shanghai – may be harbouring dangerous additives.The week began with stories in Chinese newspapers claiming that industrial gelatin extracted from old shoes was being used to thicken the new “solid” yogurts which have proved wildly popular for several local dairies in China, where sour milk products were previously drunk rather than spooned.

  Then came a report from Greenpeace claiming that even the pride of Chinese teas are tainted by excessive pesticide residues.

  And now it is the turn of the humble dumpling. Shanghainese awoke on Friday to stories in state-owned media denying that their beloved dumplings are being made with commercial gelatin rather than homemade pigskin jelly. Such a denial is a sure signal to most Shanghainese, schooled by decades of deceptive state news management, that things are not right in the dumpling world.

• Kennedy School Student Entangled in Chinese Scandal | News | The Harvard Crimson – weak story on bo guagua
• 奔驰车主暴打夏利男 | 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – “你开个破夏利，是不是不想活了？”4月11日下午，北京昌平区一辆奔驰车车主不满一辆熄火夏利挡道，叫来一辆奥迪Q7拦住夏利，并殴打车主beijing benz owner beats up xiali owner.
• Eight Questions: David Wolf Makes the Connection – China Real Time Report – WSJ– Two of China’s most innovative technology companies, Huawei and ZTE, are also two of its most controversial. With the telecom equipment makers expanding beyond China, governments have grown concerned that the companies could be used by Beijing to monitor their communications networks abroad.In his new book “Making the Connection,” David Wolf, chief executive of marketing strategy firm Wolf Group Asia, traces the rise of Huawei and ZTE from regional equipment suppliers to global telecommunications giants, taking time to attack myths around the companies along the way…
  Many complain about the way Huawei and ZTE have hired out representatives in the U.S. You received a grant from Huawei to write this book, but state that the opinions in the report are your own. In this regard, where does the line between clever marketing and cynical lobbying lie?

  I wrote “Making the Connection” to provide the context to the emergence of these firms that has been sorely lacking from the debate about their rise. I’ll leave it to the readers to decide whether that makes the companies more or less acceptable. But to me, the story is more about the weakness of state capitalism as a model, and the fact that for all of Beijing’s industrial policies, the Chinese companies that are successfully going global are the firms forged in the furnace of market forces.

• 北大医院一教授在诊室被歹徒刺伤颈部_新闻_腾讯网 –
• 重庆日报：伍德死亡是薄谷开来等个人行为_新闻_腾讯网 –
• China growth: bottoming out? | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com– But before Wen Jiabao unfurls the ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner on the good ship rebalancing, it’s worth remembering that “consumption” includes certain elements of government spending, and so doesn’t necessarily mean that your average Chinese consumers have been out buying more washing machines.What they have been buying more of is furniture, which chimes with a pickup in housing transactions. But new house building fell 5.5 per cent, and developer land acquisition fell 3.9 per cent, together described by Citi as a “harbinger for further slowdown [in property investment] in the months ahead”.

  Despite that, most analysts seem relatively bullish on where the Chinese economy goes next, at least over the rest of 2012. The hard landing theories can go back in the freezer for now, but don’t throw them away yet.

• World-Famous Chef Ferran Adrià Kicks Off “Joy of Food China” Documentary Series | the Beijinger Blog | Dining | Apr 13, 2012 | thebeijinger.com – Beijing got its share of gourmet star power all in one place yesterday when food writer Shu Qiao and renowned chefs Ferran Adrià and Da Dong got together to launch “Joy of Food China,” a documentary series and nonprofit organization dedicated to recording and celebrating traditional Chinese cooking.
  Led by Shu, the “Joy of Food China” (Yueshi Zhongguo 悦食中国) team plans to visit cities around China over the next year to record local handmade cuisine practitioners and promote sustainable food development and “gourmet charity.” I’m told Chengdu, Dali and Nanjing will all be on the itinerary.
• Sophia Lian | Beijing OM YOGA 42° Hot Yoga Studio|北京静心堂42度热瑜伽(小索瑜伽) –
• Protecting Intellectual Property in China | Alizila – funny post from folks who run taobao, 1 of biggest piracy platforms
• 南方周末 – 军队反腐新语境 – “提高军事经济效益、促进军队反腐倡廉建设。”纯洁，成了军队建设的新关键词。
  军队要稳中求进，“法治才是军队建设的正轨。”
  2012年4月6日，中央军委成立全军审计领导小组。这标志着，审计作为预防性举措，正在深度影响中国依法治军。
  中国政法大学军事法专家丛文胜注意到，根据2007年1月颁布的《中国人民解放军审计条例》，军队审计部门设在中央军委的领导之下，日常工作则由总后勤部领导。此次在军委层面设立专门的全军审计工作领导小组，虽然人马班底不动，但无疑意味着军队审计监督工作“将更上一层楼”。
• New Clarity on China Internet Outage – China Real Time Report – WSJ– The company’s engineers also found that, contrary to what would be expected if the blackout were due to an equipment failure or break in an undersea cable – as many originally speculated after Wednesday’s magnitude 8.6 earthquake near Indonesia – only certain types of data had stopped flowing. China Telecom and China Unicom HTTP traffic – connections between clients and sites directly – mostly stopped, but other types of traffic that flow through different ports like Skype calls, email transfers and DNS traffic (which functions like a phone book to link a web address with an IP address) continued to flow.Although Mr. Prince stresses that their conclusions remain speculative, he said the fact that non-HTTP traffic continued likely points to the cut off being the result of web filtering. An engineer at his firm who declined to be named said: “Non-HTTP (or DNS) traffic was able to pass, which suggests that someone made a mistake when filtering something – likely they filtered the entire internet.”
• China gags widow of Briton in murder scandal | Reuters – The Chinese widow of a British businessman thought to have been murdered in a case that has rocked China’s political establishment has been gagged by local police, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said.
  Neil Heywood, 41, was found dead in his hotel room in China’s southwestern city of Chongqing last November. The family initially did not suspect foul play. But in a stunning twist, state media announced that Gu Kailai, wife of Chongqing’s disgraced Communist Party boss Bo Xilai, and a household assistant were “highly suspected” of killing Heywood and have been detained.Heywood’s widow, Wang Lulu who lives with her two children in a gated community of expensive villas on the outskirts of Beijing, has not commented publicly about the case. State media cited a dispute over unspecified “economic interests” between Gu and Heywood.

  “Police officers questioned her recently and warned her not to speak to foreign media,” the source with direct knowledge of the case told Reuters, requesting anonymity.

• Fang Lizhi | The Economist – Fang Lizhi, physicist and dissident, died on April 6th, aged 76
• Passengers punished for halting plane at Pudong airport — Shanghai Daily – SHANGHAI police said yesterday that they have handed down administrative punishment to the 20 angry passengers who took their protest onto a taxiway at Pudong International Airport to demand compensation for their delayed flight on Wednesday.
• Neil Heywood mystery: Bo Guagua, the student playboy who earned contempt of tutors, and forced Chinese diplomats into pleading his case – Telegraph – Mr Bo was later suspended from the university for a year, and lived in Oxford’s Randolph Hotel before moving into a flat which was said by a student newspaper to feature “taps of gold, a concierge and a small vineyard”.
  He sat finals without any teaching, and surprised friends by gaining a 2.1. Mr Bo had “spectacular, wonderful” references from Harrow, but a contemporary said tutors would “speak quite openly about their disdain for him”. Balliol refused to give a reference to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where Mr Bo is studying for a masters in public policy.
  Mr Bo’s father, Bo Xilai, and an “entourage” visited Balliol in the summer of 2007, records show, but sources at the college and the university deny the family made a donation to the college, or that Neil Heywood had “introduced” them.
  Friends remember Mr Bo as a generous individual, but who bore a strong ambition to rise within the Oxford Union.
• Neil Heywood’s wife may be unable to leave China – Telegraph – mayb she is a material witness. us would keep her too
• Heywood told friend he was in trouble shortly before he died – The Irish Times – Fri, Apr 13, 2012– The expulsion of Mr Bo has been compared to previous purges in the Communist Party, such as the removal of Shanghai party boss Chen Liangyu in 2007 and the mysterious aircraft crash in 1971 which killed Lin Biao, amid rumours that he was planning a coup to depose Mao Zedong.However, a difference this time is that the Bo Xilai affair has been playing out on popular microblog services such as Weibo, which have hundreds of millions of users in China. “That is changing the game,” said Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based commentator. “I haven’t seen anything this big, and now the party is coming out with messages in the People’s Daily and the army newspaper that the crisis has passed and they are talking about unity.

  “They wouldn’t be able to do this so forcefully if they didn’t have some consensus at the top.”

  Kerry Brown, head of the Asia programme at Chatham House, said he believed this was exactly what happened when a political elite with too much power for its own good was combined with an underworld of family interests, vested interests and unaccountable networks.

  “The end result: a real mess like this. The leadership now has to use this case to show that they are serious about rule of law, about the need for internal reform, and about changing the system. Otherwise, the legitimacy of this leadership transition is looking very shaky,” said Dr Brown.

• 人民日报-消除戾气需要春风化雨（人民论坛） ——如何疏导社会情绪之二 –
• The Chinese Government Did Censor Kate Winslet’s 3D Breasts, But The Quote You Read Explaining Why Is Totally Fake –

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