China Readings for March 29th

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

  • Read the FBI Memo: Agents Can ‘Suspend the Law’ | Danger Room | Wired.com – The FBI once taught its agents that they can “bend or suspend the law” as they wiretap suspects. But the bureau says it didn’t really mean it, and has now removed the document from its counterterrorism training curriculum, calling it an “imprecise” instruction. Which is a good thing, national security attorneys say, because the FBI’s contention that it can twist the law in pursuit of suspected terrorists is just wrong.
  • 城市化、户籍制度改革及对投资的影响 – 李晶 – 名家博客 – 博客 – 《财经网》
  • Steve Davis, entrepreneur and rights advocate, to head PATH | Humanosphere – In one sense, his new job leading PATH represents a return to where he started — as a refugee settlement coordinator on the Thai-Laos border in the 1980s and later, as a young attorney, working on human rights issues in China, for gay and lesbian rights here in the U.S. and as a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised in general
  • Huawei’s woes – FT.com – huawei PR wins a victory at FT
  • Scholar Says State Capitalism Not Source of China’s Success – Caixin Online – Liu He, deputy director of the Development Research Center of the State Council, said China has accomplished rapid economic growth by honoring market principles
  • What It’s Like to Get “Monstered” By a Murdoch Tabloid | Murdoch’s Scandal | FRONTLINE | PBS – Murdoch’s Scandal, an investigation into how the News of the World phone-hacking scandal unraveled. Check your local listings here, or watch it online tonight, starting at 10 pm ET.
  • Letter from China: Autopsies, Oligarchs, and Chongqing : The New Yorker – If you want to understand exactly what kind of dramatis personae we’re confronting in China’s biggest political story in two decades, it’s worth beginning with a detail that has been buried in the backstory. Wang Lijun, a one-time police chief, was not a man without hobbies. He liked to perform autopsies in his spare time and he liked to tell people that he had perfected a technique to “carry out more efficient organ transplants from executed prisoners,” as the Financial Times once reported.

    There is much we still don’t know about Wang, but those are beginning to seem like material details.

  • Guest Op-Ed: MEK and its material supporters in Washington – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – Jeremiah Goukla worked as a lawyer in the Bush Justice Department, and then went to work as an analyst with the RAND Corporation, where he was sent to Iraq to analyze, among other things, the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), publishing an oft-cited study on the group. MEK has been in the news of late because a high-powered bipartisan cast of former Washington officials have established close ties with the group and have been vocally advocating on its behalf, often in exchange for large payments, despite MEK’s having been formally designated by the U.S. Government as a Terrorist organization. That close association on the part of numerous Washington officials with a Terrorist organization has led to a formal federal investigation of those officials. Goukla has written and supplied to me two superb Op-Eds on the MEK controversy — one about the group itself and the other explaining why so many prominent Washington officials are openly providing material support to this designated Terror group — and I’m publishing the two Op-Eds below with his consent (as you read them, remember that paid MEK shill Howard Dean actually called on its leader to be recognized as President of Iran while paid MEK shill Rudy Giuliani has continuously hailed the group’s benevolence).
  • Chinese ‘Twitter’ helps Baillieu reach voters – Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu and Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews have embraced the Chinese-language Weibo, a Twitter-like service, in a bid to connect with the Chinese-speaking voters in Victoria.

    Mr Baillieu opened a Weibo account on Monday and attracted more than 23,000 followers within the last two days.

  • Tom Friedman Travels the World to Find Incredibly Uninteresting Platitudes
  • Hong Kong Government Wins Maid Residency Ruling Appeal – Bloomberg – Hong Kong’s government, facing calls to limit strains on the city’s health and social services, won an appeal against a ruling that would have cleared the way for foreign maids to seek permanent residency.
    An immigration ordinance which prevented the helpers from applying for the status is constitutionally valid, Chief Judge Andrew Cheung wrote in a judgment issued today by the Court of Appeal.
  • China Beats U.S. With Power From Coal Processing Trapping Carbon – Bloomberg – After studying chemistry at Shanghai’s Fudan University, Jane Chuan and Wang Youqi pursued doctorates in the U.S. She got hers from what’s now the University of Buffalo in 1988, the year they married. Wang graduated in 1994 from the California Institute of Technology.
    A few years later, they were cashing in stock options in Silicon Valley companies they’d co-founded, one of which created a luminescent chemical to store X-ray images. Their home in Atherton, California, had seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and an acre of land, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its May issue.
    By 2000, Wang was convinced that the research methods he was patenting could help stave off the environmental nightmare he saw unfolding during return visits to his homeland. China, already reeling from pollution, was poised to more than double coal consumption during the decade. That would choke cities with smog and exacerbate global warming.
    Chuan, 61, bespectacled and smiling in her white lab coat, remembers pounding the pavement to pitch U.S. investors on cleaning China’s coal. Only a handful of California’s Internet- obsessed venture capitalists bit, she says.
    So, in 2003, the couple moved back to Shanghai, the city from which they had emigrated 18 years earlier.
  • Apple Seems to Have Tweaked App Store Ranking Algorithm, Many Chinese Apps Plunge | Tech in Asia
  • 哈尔滨6户居民遭强拆案21名涉案者为临时工_新闻_腾讯网
  • 国务院决定设立温州市金融综合改革试验区_新闻_腾讯网
  • Private But Not Alone: China’s Private Equity Flood – China Real Time Report – WSJ – Money has flooded China’s private equity market in recent years — but just how bad a deluge is it?

    “Even when I go to for a haircut, my barber is talking about investing in private equity,” Chang Sun, managing director of Warburg Pincus, said at the SuperReturn China forum in Beijing Tuesday. “The net result is that there’s a huge influx of new entrants into the private equity business and they’re pushing prices up.”