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

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• 人民日报-治理PM2.5，北京要攻坚（今日谈） – P1 people's daily
• 全国宣传部长会议在北京举行–时政–人民网 – propaganda chiefs from around china meet in beijing
• Hong Kong Banks Start Push to Create Yuan ‘Libor’ – WSJ.com – Hong Kong's banking association this week began widely disseminating yuan-lending rates offered by three of the city's biggest banks to their peers, marking an important step toward the development of benchmark rates that could spur growth in the market for offshore yuan loans.
• China Is Upgrading Yuan-Payment System – WSJ.com – China is developing a payment system that will make it more efficient for banks to clear yuan funds across its borders, in another move aimed at promoting the global use of the Chinese currency.
• China Property Malaise Spreads to Furnishings – WSJ.com – friend w a furniture business not having a happy time
• Call for law to protect animal welfare|Society|chinadaily.com.cn –
• Couple’s 25-year garrison on island|China photos|chinadaily.com.cn – Two soldiers, who are also a couple, hold a national flag raising ceremony on Kaishan Island, 7.5 kilometers off Chenjia Port, East China's Jiangsu province, Jan 3, 2012. The couple, Wang Jicai, 53, and his 51-year-old wife, Wang Shihua, have been stationed on the island in the Yellow Sea for 25 years. They insist on holding the flag-raising ceremony every day and have used up more than 150 national flags that they bought themselves. In 1987, the second year of their garrison, Wang Shihua, assisted only by her husband, gave birth to a baby on the island as the typhoon cut off transportation between the island and the coast.
• Year of Dragon stamp arouses debate|Society|chinadaily.com.cn –
• Little Trouble in Big China – By Scott Clement | Foreign Policy – Did Jon Huntsman waste his time as ambassador in Beijing?
• Buy, Build, or Steal: China’s Quest for Advanced Military Aviation Technologies | Andrew S. Erickson –
• ChinaBizGov: End of the Road for Foreign Automakers in China? –
• China’s princelings should not rule alone – FT.com – If you seek a lively leadership campaign, the place for you is not Iowa or New Hampshire but China. Instead of caucusing among voters in schools and halls, these all-action candidates are punishing Walmart in Chongqing and pacifying 13,000 irate villagers in Guangdong.
  Not only is China’s leadership contest more dramatic but it matters more than the eccentric Republican primary to global businesses and investors. Over the next decade, its new leaders will determine whether China grows into the world’s most important consumer market as well as the country where most things are manufactured – or degenerates into chaos and instability.
• F-22 Technology On UAV That Crashed In Iran | AVIATION WEEK –
• 北京公办幼儿园收费标准被指过低 官方称将上调_新闻_腾讯网 –
• What Obama Needs to Learn From China About Taxes – Forbes –
• pangbianr » Michael Pettis on the End of D-22终极线报：Michael Pettis在D-22的最后时刻 –
• 三网融合第二批试点扩容 地方广电反弹抱怨 – 产经 – 21世纪网 –
• Asia Hedge Funds Face a Year of Attrition – Bloomberg –
• Local Governments Cleared Up Almost Half of Debt Irregularities, NAO Says – Bloomberg –
• DaVinci accuses CCTV reporter of extorting 1 million RMB; GM of Beijing Times allegedly helped arrange bribes: Shanghaiist – Meanwhile, Caixin has released a damning audio soundbyte of a meeting between DaVinci CEO Doris Phua and the CCTV journalist Li Wenxue organised by a PR man hired by DaVinci to handle the case named Cui Bin, who himself is supposedly the head of a Hong Kong-listed company. During the meeting Phua was cut off abruptly by Cui when she brought up the 1 million yuan she sent under the table to Li via a mysterious Hong Kong bank account. Cui then promptly lectured Phua and warned her not to bring up the matter while Li appeared to feign ignorance about the money, saying he had already done his part in preventing another 500 minutes of negative coverage from going on air on account of his friendship with Cui.
• 08鞍钢MTN1或事实性违约 债务危机恐慌蔓延 – 市场 – 21世纪网 –
• 千亿房地产信托今年到期 下半年兑付风险巨大 – 市场 – 21世纪网 –
• 中移动终端部总经理吴唯宁涉案被查 – IT观察 – 21世纪网 – Wu Weining, head of China Mobile Handset Department, under investigation
• Dalian Port to ‘Seriously Consider’ Vale-Ship Protests, Owners Group Says – Bloomberg –
• China Cuts TV Entertainment Shows That Contradict Communist Party’s Dogma – Bloomberg – The moves come as the Communist Party is seeking to alleviate social unrest amid concerns protests over widening inequality could undermine its grip on power. So-called mass incidents, including strikes, riots and other disturbances, doubled to at least 180,000 in 2010 from 2006, according to Sun Liping, a sociology professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
  China’s Gini coefficient, an income-distribution gauge used by economists, has climbed to near 0.5 from less than 0.3 a quarter century ago, according to Li Shi, a professor of economics at the School of Economics and Business at Beijing Normal University. The measure ranges from 0 to 1, and the 0.4 mark is used as a predictor by analysts for social unrest.
• China’s Home Prices Slide Amid Speculation of Reserve Ratio Cut: Economy – Bloomberg –
• China: the vultures are coming | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com – The vultures are flying east.

  From Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which recently announced plans to set up shop in Hong Kong, to Apollo Management and US financier Wilbur Ross – China, it seems, is on the forefront of many distressed debt investors’ mind.

  You can’t blame them. With China’s economic growth tailing off, the view is that companies which have overleveraged themselves during the boom years are going to start to drop.

  But feasting on the carrion is likely to be easier said than done.

• $64 Million House for Sale in Hong Kong – Scene Asia – WSJ –
• 人民日报:中国有条件避免房地产市场硬着陆_中国经济网――国家经济门户 –
• 中共再内斗 党刊炮轰温家宝 « 多维博客 – bigger story from 1.1 issue of seeking truth an attack on wen jiabao?
• DaVinci, a Chinese Retailer, Calls TV Accusations Distorted – NYTimes.com – Last July, China’s biggest state-run television broadcaster accused a luxury retailer named DaVinci Furniture of passing off low-quality goods from a factory in southern China as premium imports from Italy and other foreign lands.

  Now, DaVinci has pointed the cameras and microphones back at the broadcaster, according to a report in current issue of the weekly magazine Caixin. The magazine is regarded as one of the most authoritative business publications in mainland China.

  DaVinci says that it has video and audio evidence that the big state broadcaster, China Central Television, known as CCTV, distorted and even fabricated evidence against DaVinci, and that people close to the television program might have tried to extort money from the company.

• 汪洋推乌坎模式：改进村级组织_多维新闻网 –
• Review & Outlook: China’s New Cultural Revolution – WSJ.com – It's not only the rhetoric that harkens back to Mao. Campaigns focusing on culture are often a sign of strife among the political elite. It's no coincidence that Mr. Hu's campaign coincides with the run-up to a major power transition at the end of 2012. Word out of Beijing says the jockeying for position is heated.

  Such feuds often end badly for China. That's because the competition is framed in terms of loyalty to the Communist Party's core values of control.

• China Takes Aim at U.S. Naval Might – WSJ.com –
• It is the China naysayers who are doomed to fail – Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China (2001), updated his prediction last week. In an article published in Foreign Policy, Chang admitted his prediction of the CPC's fall by 2011 was wrong, but insisted he was "only off by a year." Now he invites people to bet on the coming collapse of China in 2012.

  The astounding prediction apparently brought instant fame for Chang a decade ago.

• On Top of the World: Life as a long-term Lhasa resident – GoChengdoo: Chengdu & Sichuan living, business, travel – Marion Chaygneaud-Dupuy, 30, from France, has spent the last decade in Lhasa after a trip in her teens had a profound impact ("I decided I wanted to study Buddhism in Asia, and I asked my parents when I was 16, and they said, "OK, but you can leave when you're 18, so I [did]"). She now runs the Lhasa branch of Global Nomad, a travel and fair-trade consulting agency she set up in 2008 with two compatriots.
• Beijing advertisement video debut in Times Square on New Year’s Eve – Beijing launched its new publicity campaign to attract tourists by screening a publicity video during the New Year's Eve Countdown Ceremony in Times Square in New York City.
• Amazon.com: Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan (9780307378798): Jake Adelstein: Books – terrific book
• Jake Adelstein, American Reporter Among Japanese Yakuza : The New Yorker – PROFILE of crime reporter Jake Adelstein and the yakuza crime organizations in Japan
• China’s surplus of men: after long years of preference for sons attitudes toward girls may be shifting | chinadialogue – Sons have long been preferred over daughters by Chinese families, and the country now has a surplus of men. But old habits and beliefs are eroding, writes Tania Branigan, and attitudes toward girls are shifting.
• Think Again: Intelligence – By Paul R. Pillar | Foreign Policy – I served in the CIA for 28 years and I can tell you: America's screw-ups come from bad leaders, not lousy spies.
• Letter from China: The Writing on the Wall : The New Yorker – I barely paused at the cheery patriotic exhortations across the flag—Is that a sign I’ve been here a while?—and my eye fell instead on a curious thing about the family: it has two kids.

  I first noticed that two-kid families had begun popping up in advertisements for KFC and General Electric a little over a year ago, but political advertising is something else entirely. The Party has held much of China to a one-child-per-family policy for thirty years, and, by and large, it still does.

• Global Growth Slows to 3.9% – Bloomberg – The positive contribution that came from an expanding workforce in China will turn negative in 2013, wiping at least half a percentage point off the potential annual growth rate, according to Wang Feng, a director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.
  “China’s shooting itself in the foot” with the one-child policy, said Wang. “It needs to think of ways to encourage young couples to have more children.”
• 南都记者卧底油厂揭黑幕__鲜橙互动 南都网 南方都市报 新闻互动网站 南都数字报 – fake peanut oil produced in guangdong, sold in many parts of china, may have included unrefined cottonseed oil

  据南都记者近日以打工者身份应聘该厂调油工，发现该厂用大豆油、棕榈油、花生油香精加粗制棉油勾兑成花生油，日产约3.5吨，销往深圳、东莞、佛山及省外的广西、湖南、江西等地

• Global Times–Group incidents no reason to panic – It is unrealistic for China to expect too much social stability in the future. We should form a reasonable attitude toward group incidents when dealing with problems. This is necessary to realize long-term social stability.

  It is never easy to correctly forecast the situation in China. Misjudgments have repeatedly occurred in the history of the country. Nowadays, free expression brought about by the Internet further complicates things.

  The Chinese public's support for the country's current development path and their tolerance for protests are greatly underestimated. Facing the Arab Spring, some people mistakenly compared those states, which have failed to globalize, with China, arguing that protests could also have a similar effect here. China should smash such misconceptions.

  China finds itself in a golden age for development unprecedented in modern times. Will the country lose hope owing to some social dissonance? The public is too smart for that.

  Rationally handling group incidents doesn't go against solving problems. Combining the two is necessary to meet the demands of China's complex situation. Minor matters will not cause the country's development to stagger.

  We should welcome the opening of the 18th Party Congress in a normal state of mind. This is indispensable for China's development.

• China mulls plans to boost domestic consumption: report – Yahoo! News – The Chinese government is planning new policies to boost domestic consumption, especially of vehicles and appliances, in a bid to offset the effects of sagging export demand, the China Daily reported on Wednesday, quoting a government official.
  With tax rebates on vehicles and domestic appliances either having expired or due to expire, the government is working on new measures, said Huang Hai, former assistant minister of commerce and a member of the economic and trade policy consulting committee linked to the Ministry of Commerce.

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