"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner
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- China’s economic rebalancing already underway | East Asia Forum – But with a decreasing trade surplus, declining foreign exchange reserves and even occasional expectations of a currency depreciation, estimates of the renminbi’s undervaluation have been significantly re-evaluated downwards. Wages have in fact grown rapidly, and while regulated interest rates did not change much, the proportion of financial intermediation subject to market-based interest rates has risen sharply. These are exactly the types of changes that are driving a rebalancing of the Chinese economy and recovery of consumption.
Reports of China’s declining consumption share are exaggerated, and the official statistics are partly to blame. Rather, the opposite appears to be true, with China’s consumption share already starting to expand.
Yiping Huang is Professor of Economics at Peking University and Professor at the China Economy Program, the Australian National University. He is also Chief Economist for Asia at Barclays Bank, Hong Kong and co-authored the report The Great Wave of Consumption Upgrading (January, 2012).
- Iran’s Ahmadinejad to Travel to China Before March 19, Fars Says – Bloomberg –
- China tells banks to roll over local government loans: FT – Yahoo! News – China has instructed its banks to embark on a huge roll-over of loans to local governments, the Financial Times reported, aiming to give itself more time to deal with a debt hangover from the global financial crisis.
China encouraged banks to lend to local governments for new projects during the financial crisis to buoy the economy, but its provinces and cities now face $1.7 trillion in debts. More than half those loans were scheduled to come due over the next three years, the newspaper said.
Banks had started extending maturities for local governments to avoid a wave of defaults, the paper said, citing bankers and analysts familiar with the matter. One person briefed on the plan said in some cases the maturities would be extended by as much as four years, it said. - As Xi visits, China’s U.S. crop demand a balm for tensions – Yahoo! News – China last year bought $20 billion, or 14 percent, of record U.S. agricultural exports and it is now the largest buyer of U.S. soybeans, while becoming an increasingly important importer of U.S. corn and pork. The farm exports, up from $18.6 billion in 2010, now represent about one fifth of American sales of goods to China and U.S. officials are hoping for a lot more.
Beijing is not only buying food that will go directly to feed its 1.3 billion people but also for feedstuff that is going to the animals raised to meet increasing demand for meat and dairy produce that more Chinese can now afford.
Public policy experts say a wealthier China's increasing reliance on the American farm belt's enormous strengths – bountiful grain, advanced seed technologies and equipment – is likely to be a stabilizing influence on Sino-U.S. relations, which are fraught in a number of areas. - 民资进金融领域细则将敲定 –
- JeremyLin林书豪的微博 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – jeremy lin has 780,000 followers on sina weibo
- 中国国家图书馆特色资源（民国专栏-民国图书） –
- What makes a perfect spy tick? – The Washington Post –
- Xi Jinping, China’s Presumptive Next Leader, to Visit U.S. – NYTimes.com – Whatever their views, major policy changes will have to run a gantlet of scrutiny — and potential opposition — by a new Politburo and other Communist Party powers, including Mr. Hu, who, like his predecessors, is expected to still play a signature role.
And the changes are unlikely to be swift. Many near-term economic policies have already been laid out in the party’s latest five-year plan, unveiled last year. Until Mr. Xi manages to fill important jobs with his own allies, a process that will take years, Mr. Hu’s economic blueprint will be the guide.
For some years to come, Mr. Hu is going to be “an overlord,” one economist who has advised party leaders said in an interview late last year. “If Xi has any hope, it’s in his second term” — that is, the last five years of his expected decade-long stint as president.
- 团宝折戟启示录：失效的互联网“三段论” – 产经 – 21世纪网 – 团宝网资金链出现危机，无法正常结算合作商家的欠款，并开始大规模裁员。
- 苹果商店刷票调查：“360下架”引爆的灰色产业链 – 产经 – 21世纪网 –
- Red Bull pulled over additives — Shanghai Daily – SOME supermarkets in Shanghai have pulled Red Bull energy drinks off their shelves after illegal additives that may generate effects similar to those of psychiatric medicines were spotted on its ingredient list.
The sales suspension took place after a disturbing discovery this week by the food watchdog in northeast China's Harbin City that some ingredients printed on the drink's can are neither registered with the market supervisors nor approved for vitamin functional beverages.
The ingredients include carmine pigment and the preservative sodium benzoate. The latter, if combined with caffeine in the drink, may produce a substance considered an A-class medicine for psychiatric treatment, whose overdose could cause headache, stress, anxiety, tinnitus, tachycardia and addiction, according to doctors.
- Marijuana lung findings unlikely to change minds – latimes.com – still cant be good for lungs//
Marijuana smoke does not damage lungs in the same manner as tobacco smoke, according to a study released Tuesday. But that conclusion probably will not change minds as to whether the drug should be legalized.
The study found that smoking marijuana on an occasional basis does not appear to significantly damage the lungs. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., the paper supports previous research that has also failed to find a link between low or moderate exposure to marijuana smoke and lung damage. Marijuana contains many of the same chemicals as tobacco smoke.
- 汤灿的微博 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – Tang Can has not updated her Sina Weibo since Dec 9, right before rumors hit that she had been taken away for investigations
- 汤灿被调查行内早有她与数名官员交往密切的传闻!_平凉热线 –
- 汤灿_百度百科 – celebrity tang can caught up in gen gu junshan case, and maybe other corruptions investigations?
- 信力建 : 方韩论战的冷思考 – 一五一十部落 | My1510 – 方韩论战是今年春节期间广受关注的大事件，这场惊动学术界、法律界、文化界，甚至医疗界，以及无数围观群众的混战，赋予韩寒提出的“革命、民主、自由”三大命题值得玩味的注解。但相对于纠结谁对谁错，深层次分析下的方韩论战更值得玩味。
- 外媒周观中国:中国好战说荒谬在哪儿? – 新华国际 – 新华网 – 据称，中国的军事“挑衅”行为越来越多，对南海提出出格领土要求,抨击胆敢挑战其主张的希拉里,在公海与日本、菲律宾对峙，大幅增加军费、建造该国首艘航母……
没错，共产党是在提升军力，但中国绝不会入侵其他国家或对抗美国的军事优势。一直以来，中国人主要关心的是防御。从其历史看，这是可以理解的。在中国，几乎每座观光（古）建筑都是出于自我保护目的兴建的：长城是为抵御游牧民族入侵。紫禁城是抵御蒙古人的堡垒，里面有深沟、塔楼及迷宫般的结构。南方客家族建起庞大的圆形建筑，全族人居住其中，可抵御外部攻击……
时至今日，中国的这种自我保护本能仍随处可见。上海旧租界的宅邸虽漂亮，但外面围着厚实的高墙，墙顶拉上带刺铁丝网。舒肤佳（Safeguard）香皂畅销多年，因为它具有“除菌护体”功效。订婚戒指更多代表承诺而非浪漫，武术讲究防守而非进攻，连出租车都装有保护司机的铁栏。
- 疯狂比亚迪:目击者称肇事司机酒驾_快报_看看新闻网 – crazy drunk driver in shanghai pudong kills three
- 解放军总后勤部开展党委班子建设风气整治活动_新闻_腾讯网 – 另据解放军报报道，从2月10日开始，总后勤部机关将集中利用20天时间、分4个阶段展开“讲政治、顾大局、守纪律”学习教育活动。中央军委委员、总后勤部部长廖锡龙出席动员部署大会并讲话。
- The Washington Post, Recast for a Digital Future – NYTimes.com – grew up reading this paper. not even a shadow of its former self//
Marcus Brauchli, The Washington Post's executive editor, has overseen sweeping change in the newsroom, where editors now often emphasize things like online metrics.
- Amazon.com: The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army eBook: Marc Ambinder, D. B. Grady: Kindle Store – The U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has proven to be the most lethal weapon in the president's arsenal. Shrouded in secrecy, the Command has done more to degrade the capacity of terrorists to attack the United States than any other single entity. And counter-terrorism is only one of its many missions. Because of such high profile missions as Operation Neptune's Spear, which resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, JSOC has attracted the public's attention. But Americans only know a fraction of the real story.
In The Command, Ambinder and Grady provide readers with a concise and comprehensive recent history of the special missions units that comprise the most effective weapon against terrorism ever conceived. For the first time, they reveal JSOC's organizational chart and describe some of the secret technologies and methods that catalyze their intelligence and kinetic activities. They describe how JSOC migrated to the center of U.S. military operations, and how they fused intelligence and operations in such a way that proved crucial to beating back the Iraq insurgency. They also disclose previously unreported instances where JSOC's activities may have skirted the law, and question the ability of Congress to oversee units that, by design, must operate with minimum interference. - Kim Jong Nam: Prodigal Son or Chinese Ally? « SINO-NK – The righteously false storm of Kim Jong Un rumors which passed over the Internet yesterday make today’s essay particularly relevant. How safe are the Kim sons in Beijing? How factionalized, in fact, is the Kim family? What are the current dynamics between Kim Jong Nam and the Chinese state? Is Kim Jong Nam China’s prefered face of North Korean reform and opening up? And what does all of this suggest about the future (really, the multiple futures) of the Korean peninsula? Nick Miller, SinoNK’s Analyst for Chinese Geostrategy, takes on these questions in a new post:
- Pollution in China: Clearing the air | The Economist – World Health Organisation guidelines suggest that PM2.5 levels above ten micrograms per cubic metre are unsafe. Ms Hsu has found (as the map shows) that almost every Chinese province has levels above that. Indeed, much of the country’s population endures air so foul that it registers above 30 micrograms per cubic metre. Beijing averages 35. Shandong and Henan top 50. And because these readings reflect the average pollution that a typical resident in a province is likely to endure during a given year, they underplay the sharp spikes in pollution seen on particularly dirty days, when spot readings go much higher.