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

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• 归真堂再开放参观者跪拜谢罪 微博遭数万人咒骂_新闻_腾讯网 –
• 中石油中石化93号汽油颜色不同引发质疑(图)_新闻_腾讯网 –
• China’s Surprising Rebalancing Act – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – China’s economy fared better than most had expected in 2011. Though growth has gently slowed, it remains the world’s best performing large economy and strongest economic engine.
• MIKE DAISEY: David Pogue’s Defense Of Apple And Foxconn’s Workplace Standards Is Ridiculous –
• NY police spying programs produced mixed results -AP –
• Centre for Health Protection – CHP actively follows up with Ministry of Health on SARS rumor –
• “Beijing Besieged By Garbage” Photo Essay by Wang Jiuliang | dGenerate Films –
• Letter from China: Campaign 2012 With Chinese Characteristics : The New Yorker – used to be very common taiwan//

  “One candidate is giving away four thousand for each vote” she said, “and in the other race, the candidate is offering five thousand. Not bad.”

  I’ve heard of vote-buying in local Chinese elections, but this is an impressive new standard: nine thousand yuan—that’s more than fourteen hundred dollars—is several months’ salary for many Chinese workers. “Last fall,” Yang went on, “when we elected the Party secretary, I got enough out of it to buy an iPad.”

• 徐唯辛的微博 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – Xu Weixin on Sina Weibo
• A Visit to Xu Weixin’s Studio –
• Voices « China’s historical figures: 1966-1976 – Xu Weixin's brief exhibit at the Today Art Museum in Beijing in 2008
• China’s Cultural Revolution: portraits of accuser and accused | Art and design | The Guardian – interviews my spouse about her dad//

  The Cultural Revolution was a time when pupil turned on teacher, when friend turned on friend… Now artist Xu Weixin has painted both victim and perpetrator. Tania Branigan asks him why and hears the personal stories behind the portraits

• China’s Cultural Revolution remembered by artist Xu Weixin – video | World news | guardian.co.uk –
• William Farris – Google+ – Sina Weibo Joins Baidu, Sogou, and Youdao in Censoring "Li… – As I noted in my last post, on February 21, 2012, China Economics Net published an article entitled "Changes at the Top at Core Enterprises: Li Huidi Takes Post as Deputy General Manager of China Mobile Communications Corporation" (央企领导人员任免：李慧镝任中移动副总经理). By the morning of February 23, Sogou had joined Baidu and Youdao in returning no results for a search for "Li Huidi" (李慧镝).
• China Economic Watch | Capital Account Liberalization and the Corporate Bond Market – The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) released a report (Chinese language) this week that focused on prospects for capital account liberalization. Opening up the capital account would be a major reform, perhaps the most significant in a more than a decade. It would give Chinese savers an escape hatch from financial repression and force the reform of the financial sector.

  The report identifies four necessary, but insufficient factors for capital account liberalization to be successful: macroeconomic stability, competent financial regulation, adequate foreign exchange reserves, and stable financial institutions. The report argues that these factors are beneficial to capital account liberalization, but do not explain the entirety of why liberalization has been a success for some countries and a failure for others.

  Instead, it’s important to look at the risks that come from capital account liberalization and where China stacks up.

• Chinese developer Hoolai on how half its iOS revenue got eaten by virtual currency scams last fall –
• Chinese Nuclear Modernization: Smaller and Later » FAS Strategic Security Blog – The point is not that China is not modernizing its nuclear forces (like the other nuclear weapon states, it unfortunately is) or that the intelligence community makes mistakes. The point is to remind that projections like these always tend to promise too much too soon.

  Last week’s threat assessment is probably no different but it is interesting because it shows, when compared with previous assessments, that China’s nuclear modernization has been slower than anticipated a decade ago. And there is no indication that China has embarked upon a nuclear build-up intended to “sprint to parity” with the United States or Russia.

  That at least ought to be taken into account by those who use China’s nuclear modernization to argue against deeper U.S. (and, by implication, Russian) nuclear reductions.

• Child Pornography Cases Hit A New High In Japan – Japan’s National Police Agency announced recently that there was an all-time high record of criminal cases involving child pornography production and sales in Japan for 2011. 1455 cases involving minors under 18 were uncovered.
  Japan is one of the last countries together with Russia, where it is illegal to sell, display and produce child pornography, but still legal to possess such material.
  In 2010, UNICEF urged Japan to ban possession of child pornography, saying the law at the time was insufficient. However, the latest report shows that in 2011, there were 32 more cases than the previous year.
  Last April, Japan’s internet service providers launched a system to block child porn images. The police have cracked down on child porn cases by focusing on images posted on the Internet. However, the system does not affect file sharing.
• S.E.C. Charges Reveal Fraud in Chinese Company – NYTimes.com – Puda Coal//
  But what is most amazing is how easy it turned out to be to discover the fraud. It was basically spelled out in documents that were publicly available in China months before American and Canadian investment banks, advised by major law firms, raised the money from investors. But it appears no one bothered to look — not the underwriters and not the auditors.

  “They charge a lot for due diligence,” says the man who uncovered the fraud, Dan David, a 43-year-old money manager from Skippack, Pa. “But they don’t do it.”

• Is Prosperity Strengthening Beijing’s Iron Grip? – NYTimes.com – have these people read james mann's "china fantasy"?

  Mr Kagan makes a point of limiting his focus to foreign policy and explicitly excluding economics. But from his very different vantage point, he arrives at a version of Mr. Acemoglu’s paradox — China owes its rise to Western democratic capitalism, but that very success may put it at odds with the social order that created it. Call it Apple authoritarianism — what happens when the ideas from the freest valley in the world end up underwriting the planet’s most powerful dictatorship.

• 唯冠楊榮山的微博 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿 – proview CEO yang rongshan has opened a sina weibo account, says will use it to update info on apple dispute
• Concrete to be laid on Pacific seabed near Japan’s damaged nuclear power plant – Telegraph – Operators of Japan’s damaged nuclear power plant in Fukushima have unveiled plans to cover a vast swathe of seabed with cement to prevent the spread of radiation.
• Daily Deals Market in China Sees Groupon Failing Badly, Movie Tickets in Demand | Tech in Asia –
• China Premier’s Son Propels Satellite Stock – China Real Time Report – WSJ – News that the son of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao has taken the helm of APT Satellite Holdings Ltd.’s state-owned parent sent shares of the Hong Kong-traded small cap up nearly 50% this week, as investors bet that the high-profile appointment could spur better growth opportunities for the satellite services provider.
• Mandarin Overtakes English as Hong Kong’s Second Language – China Real Time Report – WSJ – how many speak it well?//

  Move over, English. In Hong Kong, Mandarin is fast emerging as a new lingua franca.

  Fresh on the heels of a fracas between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese ignited in part by controversies over language, Hong Kong’s latest official census report reveals Mandarin has eclipsed English as the language second most commonly spoken by residents of the special administrative region.

• Bull Market for Bear Bile Leads to China IPO: Adam Minter – Bloomberg – On Feb. 1, with little fanfare, the China Securities Regulatory Commission released a list of 217 companies seeking approval to hold initial public offerings in the coming months. It included manufacturers, property developers and, if you looked hard enough, a firm primarily engaged in the business of selling bile extracted from the gallbladders of live bears.
  Bear bile has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries to treat a range of ailments including pain, fever and inflammation, the treatment of gall stones and vision problems. But farming bears for their bile is an unconscionably cruel act, long derided by activists in and outside of China.
  While China’s stock analysts and business journalists largely ignored the list of companies seeking IPOs, China's animal rights activists were paying close attention.
• Romney’s Economic Closet – NYTimes.com – Mr. Romney is so deeply committed to insincerity that neither side can trust him to do what it considers to be the right thing.
• Changing migration patterns: Welcome home | The Economist – After three decades of migrating to the coast, the inland population is increasingly working closer to its roots
• The impact of Chinese migration: We like to move it move it | The Economist – Few forces have influenced the modern world economy as much as Chinese migration
• What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found – NYTimes.com –
• 王立军事件最新爆料：维基解密收到文件 – wikileaks has received documents from Wang Lijun?

  据海外消息人士称，维基解密创办人阿桑奇几天前收到数千份文件，包含文字，图片，录音，视频等。经过紧张整理工作，已经按时间顺序录入了服务器。情报提供人自称重庆市公安局长王立军，声明如果失踪超过一个月无联系，授权维基解密分期分批公开这批文件。

• Mainland developers escalate price war as sales fall | China Business Watch | Latest Hong Kong, China & World News | SCMP.com – Mainland developers have started another round of large-scale price cuts after property sales slumped in January.

  The latest price war has been triggered by China Merchants Property, which has cut prices by as much as 20 per cent or more on 22 developments in 14 cities, including first-tier cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as well as second and third tier cities like Chongqing, Nanjing, Suzhou and Tianjin.

• Rules issued to curb nepotism among China’s civil servants – Xinhua | English.news.cn – China has issued regulations to limit public servants' association with their spouses and relatives at work, a move hoped to curb corruption and interferences with their duties.

  Civil servants and their spouses, relatives within three generations or relatives-in-law can not hold two posts which report to the same director, nor should they have the director-subordinate work relationship, according to the regulations.

  In terms of geographical limitations, the regulations say that civil servants may not serve as heads of prefecture-level Communist Party of China (CPC) committees or governments in their hometowns.

• 公务员被禁在成长地任正职 近亲不得为上下级_新闻_腾讯网 –
• Dispute rages over trial by <EM>weibo</EM>|Society|chinadaily.com.cn – A court case in Guizhou province has sparked a heated discussion over whether trial proceedings should be aired on micro blog.
  Last month, a gang-related case involving 57 defendants and more than 40 lawyers began in the Xiaohe People's Court in the provincial capital Guiyang. But a dispute between lawyers and judges in the trial has caught the public's attention rather than the case itself.
  During the hearing, several lawyers queried jurisdiction and procedures, causing disruption to the point where the judge in one instance ordered three lawyers from the court.
  But more controversially, some lawyers in the court have been broadcasting information about the trial and their opinions of the judge through the Sina Weibo website.
• China to guarantee migrants access to public services – Xinhua | English.news.cn –
• 我国将控制直辖市人口规模 地级市3年可落户_新闻_腾讯网 –
• 全国打击“地沟油”专项行动_腾讯新闻_腾讯网 – nationwide campaign against "gutter oil". egregious violators can be sentenced to death. must be a big problem if it is getting this much press now
• 归真堂否认麻醉黑熊 称只要国家不禁就一直取胆_新闻_腾讯网 –
• China Leading Index Has Faster Advance in January, Conference Board Says – Bloomberg –
• U.S. Puts Sanctions on Japan Organized Crime Group – WSJ.com – The U.S. Treasury singled out the largest group within Japan's Yakuza as well as seven members and associates of the Brothers' Circle network. The sanctions freeze any assets in the U.S. owned by the designated group or individuals and were made under an executive order issued by President Barack Obama last year.

  The Brothers' Circle is a multiethnic network that includes the leaders of criminal groups in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The Yakuza comprises the major Japanese organized crime syndicates.

• Video – Hong Kong’s Million-Dollar Watches – WSJ.com – In Asia, a watch is more of a status symbol than a time-piece. Some advertisers use the watch you wear to assess your social standing. We take a trip inside a VIP watch-shopping room to look at what makes a watch go for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.
• Shenzhen cop flees country with prison inmate’s fortune | Nanfang Insider – A cop in Shenzhen, Zhang Yongguang, has taken punishing the wicked way too far, stealing nearly 1 mln RMB from a prisoner.
  As described by police in the city, in December 2010, Zhang—just 28 years old at the time—first removed 770,000 RMB from an inmate’s bank account then tricked the man’s family out of an additional 150,000 RMB in the form of a bribe. By the time the Nanshan People’s Court approved an arrest warrant for Zhang for the crime of fraud, the man had already fled the country.
• Simon Johnson: Behind the Federal Reserve’s Closed Doors – NYTimes.com – Just on the Volcker Rule — the provision in Dodd-Frank to limit proprietary trading and other high-risk activities by megabanks — Fed board members and staff members apparently met with JPMorgan Chase 16 times, Bank of America 10 times, Goldman Sachs nine times, Barclays seven times and Morgan Stanley seven times (as depicted in a chart that accompanies the Wall Street Journal article).

  How many meetings does a single company need on one specific issue? How many would you get?

  For example, Americans for Financial Reform, an organization that describes itself as “fighting for a banking and financial system based on accountability, fairness and security,” met with senior Federal Reserve officials only three times on the Volcker Rule.

• 南方周末 – 林书豪：“左宗棠”之后纽约最爱的亚洲人 –
• French Photographer’s Video From Homs Shows Urban Warfare in Vivid Detail – NYTimes.com –
• Nuclear proliferation: Bombing Iran | The Economist –
• UltraViolet | Tell President Obama: No to Summers at the World Bank! –
• Assad masses Syrian cyber army in online crackdown – New Scientist – New Scientist –
• The OpenBTS Chronicles: Some Comments on Satellite Phones – on the insecurity of satellite phones? how does Beijing view satellite phones?
• Chinese Demand Return of Documents | Washington Free Beacon – Gertz says head of the princeling faction. clueless, casts doubt on all his claims in this otherwise "interesting" article
• Phone hacking: News of the World bosses ordered emails to be deleted – Telegraph – in US you would likely get real jail time for this

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