China Readings for April 2nd

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

  • Starbucks to Ramp Up China Business, Triple Outlets and Work Force – WSJ.com – Starbucks Corp. plans to triple the size of its work force and network of shops in China over the next three years, a top executive at the Seattle-based coffee chain said Sunday.
  • Deadly Thai Blasts Follow Tense Weeks – WSJ.com – Suspected Muslim separatists launched the deadliest attack in years in Thailand's troubled southern provinces Saturday, killing at least 14 people and wounding hundreds more with a series of coordinated car bombs, propelling the security situation in the south of the country to a fresh crisis point after years of brutal violence.
  • Why Are the Fed and SEC Keeping Wall Street’s Secrets? – Bloomberg – let’s not pretend that the Fed’s carefully scripted, and untimely, release of a disk of public information to me is even remotely the way FOIA is supposed to work. Where are the documents and e-mails about how Goldman was allowed by the Fed to become a bank holding company? Where are the documents from the SEC about Goldman? Where, for that matter, are the SEC documents related to the short-dated, out-of-the-money puts that investors spent millions of dollars buying in the last week of Bear Stearns’s existence? The SEC said it was investigating who bought and sold these puts, but it has never made the results of its investigation public despite my FOIA request.
    If our government agencies continue to do everything in their considerable power to keep hidden information that belongs in the public realm, all the regulatory reform in the world won’t end the rot on Wall Street.
  • 大连实德集团否认被调查_网易新闻中心 – 核心提示:大连实德集团表示,目前集团运转正常,未受到任何司法部门的调查,但徐明已失去联络半个月,对于徐明被中纪委调查的传言不予置评,称找到徐明才能澄清事实。大连警方称没有对徐明进行过立案或调查。
  • 韩寒重开微博被指受利益所趋_网易新闻中心 – 核心提示:4月1日,韩寒关闭2年的微博重开,并发表一篇纪念张国荣的长微博,随后遭方舟子及部分网友揶揄。媒体称,韩寒重开微博或为利益所趋,也是为了自己积攒人气,此前他曾和蔡康永利用微博为某洋酒做宣传。
  • 大连实德确认徐明已失联半月 警方否认对其立案_新闻_腾讯网 – 昨日,大连实德集团对近来盛传的徐明疑似遭纪委调查一事进行了回应。依照集团办公室的说法,徐目前处于失去联络阶段,截至目前集团本身运转正常,也没有相关部门前来调查。
  • « China’s High-Tech Military Threat Commentary Magazine – Bill Gertz Cover Story in COmmentary Magazine//

    Those who were long suspicious of China’s military intentions have won the day, at least for now. But the battle over Air Sea Battle is not over. 

    The next fight will take place in the budget arena, where the Obama administration is planning to cut up to $1 trillion from defense spending over the next 10 years. There, the story of America’s education on China’s military should serve as a lesson for those who still seek to shrink U.S. fighting capabilities in the face of growing threats. Barack Obama, in looking to cut defense spending across the board, is repeating the mistakes of the benign-China school on a much larger scale. Motivated by faith in a benign global order, against all evidence, this would undercut America’s ability to lead the free world.

    As the road to Air Sea Battle shows, wishful thinking is often overtaken by cruel reality. Moreover, when ideology overwhelms evidence, the beneficiary is always the enemy. While benign-China officials denied the facts, China was quietly allowed to field an array of new weapons systems designed for one purpose: to defeat the United States in a future conflict. The Obama administration deserves credit for shifting American strategy to respond to the genuine Chinese threat. According to one senior Obama administration official, “Air Sea Battle is to China what the Maritime Strategy [of the 1980s] was to the Soviet Union.” But Cold War strategy wasn’t implemented along with a simultaneous effort to defund it. If Air Sea Battle is under-resourced and gutted from within, it may prove as ineffective—and dangerous—as the wrongheaded strategy that preceded it.

  • China Manufacturing Gain Masks Exporters’ Woes as Loosening Seen – Bloomberg – A stronger reading for a Chinese manufacturing gauge failed to end predictions for policy loosening as analysts described the gain as seasonal and a separate survey showed exporters struggling.
    A Purchasing Managers’ Index (CPMINDX) rose to a one-year high of 53.1 in March, China’s logistics federation and the National Bureau of Statistics said yesterday. The gauge has a pattern of rising each March. In contrast, a PMI from HSBC Holdings Plc and Markit Economics showed manufacturing contracting and export orders falling.
  • Stalin’s Siberian Enclave Revives as Putin Seeks Mines for China – Bloomberg – Chinese Money
    “The only advantage is its natural resources,” he said. “A steel mill there will be uncompetitive compared with western Russia or China, where labor and electricity are cheaper and the climate is better. The Tsarist minister Petr Stolypin gave out land for free there to motivate people to move. It’s possible to subsidize power tariffs, maybe create a special tax regime.”
    Other options lie over the border, where Chinese business has funding for projects that yield the raw materials it needs.
    Among works that have won money from China is a 2,300-mile oil pipeline from Siberia to Daqing, near Harbin. China overtook Germany as Russia’s largest trading partner because of the line. Russia also plans to ship Siberian gas to its neighbor, helping to boost trade to $200 billion by 2020, according to Putin.
    Further cementing ties between the two nations, China State Grid Corp. plans to study a 900-mile transmission link to bring power to its northeast from Siberian plants, Volynets said
  • Stalin’s Siberian Enclave Revives as Putin Seeks Mines for China- Bloomberg
  • Where Have All the Neurotics Gone? – NYTimes.com – If chronic Facebook or Twitter posting is not an exercise in neurosis, then nothing is.
  • 对造谣传谣者就该勇敢亮剑_新闻_腾讯网 – 近期,有个别网民在互联网上特别是微博中编造、传播所谓“军车进京、北京出事”等谣言,产生了恶劣的社会影响。北京市公安机关对在网上编造谣言者依法予以拘留,对在网上传播相关谣言的其他人员进行了教育训诫;国家互联网信息办公室对一批传播谣言的互联网站依法进行了查处。
  • 财政收入负增长:改革号角_形势_财经国家新闻网 – 面对财政紧张最省事的招数是加强税收征缴,吃力的招数是改革,后者却利在千秋
    在经济减速与房地产调控的双重背景下,地方政府的财政收入在2012年将成大问题。北京市副市长吉林3月28日在参加“2012年推进城南行动计划”工作部署会时透露,今年前两个月,北京市财政收入呈现负增长,到3月20日仍然是负增长0.9%。事实上,前两个月财政收入出现负增长的不仅是北京,在上海、广州、重庆等城市,财政收入都出现了罕见的负增长。
  • 大连实德迷局_竞争力报告_财经国家新闻网 – 大连实德集团有限公司(下称实德)突然遭遇生死一役。

    经两个独立消息源证实,3月15日晚间,大连实德董事长徐明因涉嫌经济案件被相关部门控制。随后的消息是,与大连实德有着密切业务关联的中国建设银行(下称建行),已经开始追缴实德的贷款,并对其全面停贷。

  • 财经国家新闻网_财经国家新闻网
  • 徐明或违规套取银行贷款_公司报道_财经国家新闻网
  • Q. and A.: North Korea’s Choked Environment – NYTimes.com – Although it remains one of the world’s most implacably closed societies, North Korea has become more open to gingerly discussing its environmental problems in recent years in the hope of finding solutions.

    The country’s current environmental crisis began in the 1950s during the Korean War, when forest fires swept through the country. Although reforestation efforts were made afterward, widespread famine in the 1990s led people to harvest recovering forests for fuel and food. This denuding of the landscape has led to desertification, soil erosion, nutrient depletion and epidemics of pests that further contribute to the country’s food insecurity.

  • More Asian-Americans Marrying Within Their Race – NYTimes.com – today, the majority of Ms. Young’s Asian-American friends on Facebook have Asian-American husbands or wives. And Ms. Young, a Boston-born granddaughter of Chinese immigrants, is married to a Harvard medical student who loves skiing and the Pittsburgh Steelers and just happens to have been born in Fujian Province in China.

    Ms. Young said she hadn’t been searching for a boyfriend with an Asian background. They met by chance at a nightclub in Boston, and she is delighted by how completely right it feels. They have taken lessons together in Cantonese (which she speaks) and Mandarin (which he speaks), and they hope to pass along those languages when they have children someday.

  • » “Spring Breeze” Is China’s Latest Cleverly Titled Campaign Against The Internet Beijing Cream – They have a way with words, don’t they? First there was “sweeping the yellow” — which in Chinese is the poetically sibilant saohuang – targeting organized prostitution. Then there was the Green Dam, a “filtering” software that one of China’s ministries wanted to require every locally produced computer to preinstall. And now? Spring Breeze. As Xinhua reports (in an article posted yesterday that has been removed from its website but remains on China Daily), “Beijing police on Saturday said they have arrested 1,065 suspects and deleted more than 208,000 ‘harmful’ online messages as part of an intensive nationwide crackdown on Internet-related crimes conducted since mid-February.”

    The article does not explicitly state this latest campaign targets sex (preferring instead the publicly popular “smuggling firearms, drugs and toxic chemicals, as well as the sale of human organs, the counterfeiting certificates and invoices and trade in personal information

  • Police Tracking of Cellphones Raises Privacy Fears – NYTimes.com – Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.
  • Censorship in China: Crackdown on bloggers as rumours of coup swirl | World news | The Observer – "Tackling 'rumours' is the way they are sugar-coating this intensified control. It seems relentless," said David Bandurski, of Hong Kong University's China Media Project. "This is a phenomenon we will probably see through the rest of the year. For China this is the ultimate sensitive year.

    "I have no doubt they will keep exploring ways to disrupt the conversation on [microblogs] as much as they have to [by] keeping control of discussion on sensitive issues and speculation, some of it well-grounded."

  • 茅台董事长撰文:中国企业成长更需要包容_网易财经
  • 袁仁国:茅台在变革中寻找成长的力量–地方–人民网
  • 武汉小学生着制服列队迎领导视察-《财经网》 – wuhan middle students in uniform and ranks welcoming "leader"
  • 大连实德董事长徐明被调查-《财经网》 – caijing has special section on detention of dalian's xu ming. caijing still better on politics than caixin
  • 河南项城公开处理数十名犯罪嫌疑人-《财经网》 – public trials in henan…scary pics from something that should have been relegated to history
  • 大连万达一高管称集团经营没问题 一独董称资金链正常-《财经网》 – Dalian Wanda "nothing to see here, all normal". sure..
  • 1930年杨开慧最后一篇手迹:他一定是丢弃我了_历史频道_凤凰网
  • 农民深山搭窝棚生五胎 孩子无学可上-《财经网》
  • 河南项城公开处理数十名犯罪嫌疑人-《财经网》
  • Parody of famous poet is a PR stunt – China.org.cn – A parody of a well-known poet that has swirled around China's cyber world in recent weeks is actually a sophisticated online marketing ploy to promote a museum, Jinling Evening News reports.

    Caricatures of portraits of Du Fu (AD 712-770), one of China's greatest poets and still a household name today, was rampantly circulated on Sina Weibo, China's largest micro blog, since early March.

    "Most of the images of Du Fu have been made and released by our team," said Xue Yongyu, an expert on Internet marketing and promotion. "It is part of the project we are doing for a museum in an attempt to arouse more attention to it."

  • Financers and Sex Trafficking – NYTimes.com – THE biggest forum for sex trafficking of under-age girls in the United States appears to be a Web site called Backpage.com.

    This emporium for girls and women — some under age or forced into prostitution — is in turn owned by an opaque private company called Village Voice Media. Until now it has been unclear who the ultimate owners are.

    That mystery is solved. The owners turn out to include private equity financiers, including Goldman Sachs with a 16 percent stake.

  • Riding the Trans-Mongolian Railway through Russia, China and Mongolia – WSJ.com – Taking on Genghis Khan's land, with a journey on one of the world's most storied train lines
  • VPN DNS Guide | WiTopia.Net
  • 北京警方清理网络黑市:网站存隐患将被约谈_中国经济网??国家经济门户 – 昨天,记者从北京警方获悉,自今年2月14日清理整治网络黑市“春风行动”专项行动以来,警方共破获以网络诈骗为主的各类涉网案件1001起,抓获违法犯罪嫌疑人1065人,刑事拘留967人、行政拘留98人,清理网上违法信息20.8万余条,行政处罚违规互联网单位3100余家。
  • 河北香河县多个楼盘涉嫌土地违规引发退房潮-大河网 – xianghe still a great story that has everything wrong w society & the economy in it .and a day trip from beijing
  • China March PMI unexpectedly jumps to 53.1, 11-month high | Reuters – (Reuters) – China's official purchasing managers' index (PMI) unexpectedly jumped in March t o an 11-month highs of 53.1, the government said on Sunday, as surprisingly firm demand boosted new orders and new export orders for factories.
  • Neil Heywood ‘feared for his safety’ as strains grew around Bo Xilai, his powerful Chinese friend – Telegraph
  • 7000万嫁女煤老板再追问_21世纪网-21cbh.com