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

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• 北京日报：流言止于负责任者_新闻中心_新浪网 –
• 公安部认定6名东突分子 曾实施喀什恐怖袭击_新闻_腾讯网 – [导读]公安部网站今日公布第三批恐怖人员名单，包括6人。主要为“东伊运”骨干，为首的努尔麦麦提-麦麦提敏曾在新疆喀什等地实施一系列杀人、爆炸、放火等恐怖活动，造成多名群众和民警死伤。
• 徐明失踪调查 疑涉足坛扫黑及土地内幕交易 – 上市公司调查 – 21世纪网 – 核心提示：大连实德的内部文件未对事由做任何进一步的说明，只是称，“集团未收到任何关于徐明董事长的正式讯息，更无任何部门、单位到实德集团以及所属进行审查的情况”。
• 重庆货车载万发炮弹赴吉林系正常军品运输_新闻_腾讯网 –
• China’s Ultra-Rich Fly Into Sanya – Scene Asia – WSJ – A battle is unfolding in the South China Sea: the fight to win the pocketbooks of China’s richest citizens.

  Over the next four days, 300 of China’s wealthiest are being flown in on private jets by makers such as Boeing and Cessna, as an unprecedented number of companies pile onto Hainan Island. The occasion? The annual Hainan Rendez-Vous yacht and jet show in Sanya, southern China’s travel hotspot for the ultra-wealthy.

• CRT Exclusive: Inside China’s Real-Estate Data System – China Real Time Report – WSJ – Official data show 2.98 billion square meters of residential property under construction at the end of February. Wall Street Journal calculations show that is more than two square meters for every person in China and enough to satisfy demand for almost the next three years without a single extra apartment being built.

  Ms. Zhao cautions that the real-estate-under-construction figure covers a wide variety of different projects. “Newly started projects, projects where construction is ongoing, and projects that have paused and then restarted are all included in the data”, she said.

  “Some projects might be under construction in the reporting period, then construction could stop.”

  The wide variety of different projects included in the under-construction figure means that while some might be about to come to market, others might not do so for an extended period.

  A glimpse at developers’ own views on the outlook also suggests that fears of a sudden collapse in construction activity might be overdone. A survey of 30 residential real-estate developers by Standard Chartered published last week found that more than two-thirds were planning to either increase construction or hold activity constant in the next three months.

• Neil Heywood "considered leaving China" after rift with Bo Xilai – Telegraph – Neil Heywood, the British businessman found dead in a Chinese hotel room, told a friend he had once considered leaving the country after falling out with his patron, the powerful politician Bo Xilai.
• Danwei is hiring a client & research director – We don't care if you're from Ningxia or Nigeria, but you have to be able to operate efficiently in China and be completely at home doing business in Chinese, with Chinese people.

  ———-Requirements———-

  – Experience in financial journalism, financial reporting, or any business servicing multi-national clients and / or hedge funds and financial institutions

  – Experience working in teams and managing people

  – Fluent English and Chinese

• Singapore Partnership Creates Dissension at Yale – NYTimes.com – Yale announced a year ago that it was creating the “first new college to bear the Yale name in 300 years” at the National University of Singapore, and last week, after reviewing 2,500 applications, it sent out the first handful of faculty job offers for Yale-N.U.S. College.

  So it is distinctly awkward timing that members of the Yale College faculty, which never voted on the plan, are now raising concerns about joining their storied institution with an autocratic city-state where drug offenses can bring the death penalty, homosexual relations are illegal and criminal defamation charges are aggressively pursued.

• Hacker claims breach of Chinese defense contractor | Reuters – A hacker has posted thousands of internal documents he says he obtained by breaking into the network of a Chinese company with defense contracts, an unusual extension of the phenomenon of activist hacking into the world's most populous country.
  The hacker, who uses the name Hardcore Charlie and said he was a friend of Hector Xavier Monsegur, the leader-turned- informant of the activist hacking group, LulzSec, told Reuters he got inside Beijing-based China National Import & Export Corp (CEIEC).
• Online whispers: The anatomy of a coup rumour | The Economist – Mr Li, a magazine journalist and the author of several books including “Goldman Conspiracy”, is fond of fanciful and unsupported theories about Goldman Sachs’ desire to undermine the Chinese state, in part through privatising state-owned enterprises–precisely the sort of theories that Mr Bo’s Maoist partisans devour. Nevertheless, on March 19th Mr Li may have become implicated in a conspiracy theory that was not of his making. Although the details of his case are not entirely clear, his experience is an object lesson in the spread of rumours in the age of microblogs. It also shows precisely why the government is so nervous about rumours, which state media call the “malignant tumours” of the internet (see here in Chinese).

  With Mr Li believed to be in custody (and unreachable; his mobile phone is switched off), it remains unclear what exactly he observed or heard about on the morning of March 19th, and whether any security measures might have had some official, innocuous purpose. ..
  In a narrow sense, this crackdown could have a chilling effect on the likes of journalists like Mr Li and perhaps even more for Mr Shen and Mr Pan–journalists and weibo celebrities whose tweets might be noticed. The Public Security Bureau summoned Mr Pan to give him a warning about his tweeting, according to a spokeswoman. Some others who tweeted or forwarded tweets about the rumours that night were also at least telephoned by police.

• Afghanistan’s ‘dancing boys’ are invisible victims – The Washington Post – A growing number of Afghan children are being coerced into a life of sexual abuse. The practice of wealthy or prominent Afghans exploiting underage boys as sexual partners who are often dressed up as women to dance at gatherings is on the rise in post-Taliban Afghanistan, according to Afghan human rights researchers, Western officials and men who participate in the abuse.

  “Like it or not, there was better rule of law under the Taliban,” said Dee Brillenburg Wurth, a child-protection expert at the U.N. mission in Afghanistan, who has sought to persuade the government to address the problem. “They saw it as a sin, and they stopped a lot of it.”

• 重庆货车载万发炮弹赴吉林在湖北被查获_新闻中心_新浪网 –
• 湖北交警查获载有上万发炮弹重庆货车_网易新闻中心 – 核心提示：4月1日，湖北利川交警在沪渝高速查获一辆载有12033发炮弹的货车。该红色货车有标示危化品运输的反光条，而该高速段禁止易燃易爆危化品运输车辆通行。交警检查时发现杀伤爆破弹和穿甲弹，共236箱重10多吨。司机称不知情，是受一个重庆公司托运将货运到吉林。
• The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition): Daily News from Korea – Prosecutors Seek Death Penalty for Chinese Skipper – Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Cheng Dawei, a Chinese skipper accused of fatally stabbing Korean Coast Guard sergeant Lee Cheong-ho during a raid on trawlers that were illegally fishing in Korean waters in December.
• The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : China, India and the lesson of Megara’s burning pigs – General V.K. Singh's leaked letter on deficits in India's defence has fostered hysteria. Fearsome as China's military build-up might be, it isn't clear why Indians should be fearful…
  For India to shape a serious response to the military rise of China, its intelligentsia and military establishment ought be studying China far harder. India's universities, intelligence services and military all have large shortages of staff even familiar with the language of our most important neighbour, let alone the intricacies of its strategic thinking. India may well need more hardware — but it needs to think about what hardware it needs, and how to use it to best effect like the Megarans.

  India's pre-1962 military, the official history recorded, conducted “no studies of Chinese war tactics.” “No debriefing was done,” it continues, “after the Korean war to learn about their ways of working and fighting. Nobody seems to have cared to know [sic].” Few, it seems, still do.

• The Hindu : Opinion / Op-Ed : Stepping out of Deng’s shadow – The study holds significance for emerging economies and Asian powers caught in the middle of the two most likely arenas of Sino-U.S. rivalry — competition for influence in global multilateral institutions and in the India-Pacific region. One of the four major changes in the international system flagged by Wang as driving this new Chinese thinking is the emergence of developing countries like India, Brazil and South Africa.

  Here his analysis is on shaky ground, as it invests the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) and BASIC (the Brazil, South Africa, India and China climate alliance) groupings with the importance of powerful political blocs, despite little evidence to suggest that they have emerged as such. Wang echoes the views of many Chinese scholars and officials when he asserts that emerging powers like India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa are “challenging Western dominance,” with “their coordination of economic and foreign policies [serving] as a counterweight” and the G20 replacing the G8 as a more effective international mechanism. He does, however, gloss over the many differences among these countries.

• Background Briefing on Burma-US Department of State –
• China’s People’s Daily news portal launches $84 mln Shanghai IPO | Reuters – The online news portal of Chinese government mouthpiece, the People's Daily, has launched an initial public offering in Shanghai, aiming to raise about 527 million yuan ($83.6 million).
  People.cn Co Ltd will sell 69.1 million shares through the IPO, it said in its prospectus posted on the Shanghai stock exchange website late on Wednesday.
• Yuanfen Flow –
• Fostering China’s Creative Entrepreneurs – Scene Asia – WSJ – David Ben Kay has been an anti-piracy czar and an arts guru. But after more than 20 years in Beijing, he’s started a new adventure: as a kind of mother hen to creative entrepreneurs looking to break into China.

  Formerly Microsoft China’s general counsel focusing on intellectual property, the 57-year-old Colorado native opened Yuanfen, a new-media art gallery in Beijing’s trendy 798 arts district, in 2008. In September he transformed the gallery into Yuanfen Flow, a business incubator that nurtures start-ups that combine art, business and sustainability with technology.

• US searches for plane that tracked Chinese — Shanghai Daily – THE US Coast Guard and a mega-yacht owned by billionaire Paul Allen are searching the Pacific for an American pilot and two Republic of Palau police officers whose plane disappeared as they tried to track down a Chinese vessel that was allegedly fishing illegally.

  The search follows a deadly confrontation between Palau officers and a smaller Chinese boat that was part of the same fishing operation. One fisherman was killed on Saturday after police fired on the fishing vessel as it tried to ram the officers' boat, Fermin Meriang, a spokesman for Palau's president, told the Pacific Daily News.

• CBRE Global Sees Buying Chance in China as Curbs Cool Market – Bloomberg – CBRE Global Investors, manager of $94.8 billion of real-estate assets, said the next one to two years will be a good time to invest in China’s property market as it slows on the government’s tightening policies.
  The fund is “on track” to make its first residential investment in China in five years by acquiring shares in a joint-venture project in the second quarter, Greater China Country Manager Richard van den Berg said in a phone interview. It is also seeking to develop retail space in mixed-use development projects with a strong residential base because they are “especially attractive,” while prices of completed retail and office projects are “quite steep,” he added.
• China’s military rise: The dragon’s new teeth | The Economist – A third phase began in the early 1990s. Shaken by the destructive impact of the West’s high-tech weaponry on the Iraqi army, the PLA realised that its huge ground forces were militarily obsolete. PLA scholars at the Academy of Military Science in Beijing began learning all they could from American think-tanks about the so-called “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), a change in strategy and weaponry made possible by exponentially greater computer-processing power. In a meeting with The Economist at the Academy, General Chen Zhou, the main author of the four most recent defence white papers, said: “We studied RMA exhaustively. Our great hero was Andy Marshall in the Pentagon [the powerful head of the Office of Net Assessment who was known as the Pentagon’s futurist-in-chief]. We translated every word he wrote.”
• In China, Following in Footsteps of Reform – NYTimes.com – think comparison of late qing to contemporary prc are facile and spurious//

  Into this brittle mix, Yu Jianrong, one of the country’s leading scholars, has dropped a detailed proposal for political reform.

  We’ve been here before.

  In 1895, an equally prominent scholar, Kang Youwei, led a group of thinkers that submitted proposals for far-reaching reform to the intrigue-ridden Qing court. Three years later, the Emperor Guangxu set in motion the “Hundred Days’ Reforms,” comprehensive changes to education, the economy, the military and the bureaucracy aimed at modernizing China.

• Asia’s balance of power: China’s military rise | The Economist – It is in China’s interests to build confidence with its neighbours, reduce mutual strategic distrust with America and demonstrate its willingness to abide by global norms. A good start would be to submit territorial disputes over islands in the East and South China Seas to international arbitration. Another step would be to strengthen promising regional bodies such as the East Asian Summit and ASEAN Plus Three. Above all, Chinese generals should talk far more with American ones. At present, despite much Pentagon prompting, contacts between the two armed forces are limited, tightly controlled by the PLA and ritually frozen by politicians whenever they want to “punish” America—usually because of a tiff over Taiwan.

  America’s response should mix military strength with diplomatic subtlety. It must retain the ability to project force in Asia: to do otherwise would feed Chinese hawks’ belief that America is a declining power which can be shouldered aside. But it can do more to counter China’s paranoia. To his credit, Mr Obama has sought to lower tensions over Taiwan and made it clear that he does not want to contain China (far less encircle it as Chinese nationalists fear). America must resist the temptation to make every security issue a test of China’s good faith. There are bound to be disagreements between the superpowers; and if China cannot pursue its own interests within the liberal world order, it will become more awkward and potentially belligerent. That is when things could get nasty.

• So much for China’s year of doing nothing – FT.com – actually dont think people should be surprised. things just move slowly here. i wrote this in feb 2011: "The Chinese leaders are not stupid; quite the opposite in fact. They know that inflation, unaffordable housing, labor issues and corruption are huge problems that may ultimately threaten their rule. Various special interest groups (such as real estate developers, local governments and SOEs) have grown quite powerful and have thwarted progress on some of these issues, especially real estate and further economic liberalization. But the Party has proven itself amazingly resilient over the last six decades, and most analysts underestimate its ability to adapt and neutralize both external and internal threats to its rule.

  Egypt may turn out to be the catalyst that leads to the reigning in of the special interest groups that hamper further economic reform and threaten both future economic growth and regime stability. Yes these groups are powerful and have representatives at the highest levels of power, but ultimately no one and no group will be allowed to threaten the Party’s rule.

  Note that I make no mention of Western-style political reform. That is not in the cards, and in fact the propaganda apparatus is using the chaos in Egypt to further deposition Western-style political reform as a contributor to instability." http://www.sinocism.com/?p=1986
  //

  But instead of resulting in the policy paralysis that many had predicted, the political turmoil appears to have prompted a round of long-stalled financial reforms.
  Tentative signs have started to coalesce into a more concrete reform road map that appears aimed at forcing the outdated and unwieldy financial system on to a more efficient path.

• Inside the Ring: New North Korea ICBM – Washington Times – The all-but-invisible power struggle in China has taken several turns since it was first brought to light by would-be Chinese defector Wang Lijun, who was turned away from the U.S. Consulate in neighboring Chengdu by what U.S. officials say was a decision by the White House not to grant his request for asylum.

  An official said Mr. Wang had not only signed a formal request for political asylum, but also asked to be flown out of the country on a U.S. jet.

• 国内多地官员财产公示试点遇“零投诉零异议”_新闻_腾讯网 – 从“第一个吃螃蟹的”新疆阿勒泰市，到之后陆陆续续进行试点的浙江慈溪、湖南浏阳、宁夏银川、宁夏青铜峡等地，包括官员财产申报、公示在内的领导干部个人事项公示制度，虽然各地具体操作有较大差异，但结果却非常相似——没有结果。
• 人民日报-满怀信心迎接党的十八大 – page 1 today
• China Economic Watch | Wen Jiabao Has the Wrong Solution for China’s Banks – Wen addresses the right problem, excessive bank profits, but has the wrong diagnosis and therefore the wrong solution. It only takes a few competitors with the right incentives to do away with a monopoly. This is one element a lot of observers seem to miss when bemoaning the continued influence of state-owned enterprises in China. Take mobile phone services. The market is dominated by three state-owned firms, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom. Despite all being owned by the government, these firms compete fiercely amongst each other for customers. This has lowered the cost of service and led to a high level of mobile phone penetration and better service than in most developing countries.
• Uncertain politics: Reimposing order | The Economist – The internet crackdown may be a sign that China’s leaders are closing ranks again. Neither hardliners nor reformists want trouble on the streets. When ethnic unrest gripped the remote north-western region of Xinjiang in 2009, the government shut off access to the entire internet across Xinjiang. It has now issued a warning to China’s enthusiastic microbloggers that it might not scruple to do the same to their forums as well.
• China’s Internet Censors Decide Comments Are Dangerous – Bloomberg – Now that the moratorium is over, all seems to be back to normal; comments are piling up below posts just like before. But here and there, if you look hard enough, there’s a sense that something has changed. What, precisely, is difficult to finger: The bureaucracy that controls China’s Internet has never taken direct credit for suspending the comment function.
  One netizen, based in Shenzhen, offered an opinion that’s been shared frequently the last 24 hours: “After the three day comment moratorium, I feel that Sina is deleting posts more frequently now.”
  Tellingly, that’s one tweet Sina Weibo -– and its overseers — hasn’t yet found fit to delete.

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