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

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• 盛大网络私有化退市 中概股回归A股猜想 – 产经 – 21世纪网 – behind shanda’s US delisting, China re-listing plans
• 消失的七天：郴州男青年看守所死亡事件调查 – 宏观 – 21世纪网 – another mysterious death in a detention center, this time in hunan
• “十二五”煤炭新局：将形成12个亿吨级“大鳄” – 宏观 – 21世纪网 – don’t get in the way of the coal interests in china
• 山西多家电厂赴京要求调高电价 煤电博弈升级_新闻_腾讯网 – shanxi power producers in Beijing lobbying for tariff hikes
• 组图：湖北汉宜高速多车连环相撞 6人遇难_新闻_腾讯网 – 40 car pileup in Hubei. Pics
• Reading the fine prints to Venezuela’s Chinese loans | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com –
• Inside the Ring – Washington Times – Rep. J. Randy Forbes is stepping up efforts to try to prevent sensitive U.S. avionics technology from being sent to China’s military through a joint venture between General Electric and the Aviation Industry Corp. of China, known as AVIC.
• Inside the Ring – Washington Times– Former White House national security official Aaron Friedberg, now with Princeton University, took on America’s China policy elite this week during a conference at the American Enterprise Institute. The former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney spoke about his new book, “A Contest for Supremacy,” about the geopolitical struggle between the United States and China.The book says China is too important to be left to the China hands, criticism that miffed many China affairs specialists in government and academia.
• 广电总局拟禁剧中插播广告 娱乐节目排期需抽签_新闻_腾讯网 – SARFT out w new TV entertainment restrictions. Squeezing hard on stations & producers
• China’s leaders jockey for Politburo positions – FT.com –
• 接位在即 习近平向中共党内潜规则宣战_多维新闻网 –
• Prison slaves – Slavery: A 21st Century Evil – Al Jazeera English – China is the world’s factory, but does a dark secret lurk behind this apparent success story?
• Video: China’s Secret Slave Camps | China Digital Times (CDT) – China is hiding a secret network of more than 1,000 slave labour prison camps, in which dissidents are imprisoned without trial and forced to produce consumer goods for export to the west, Al Jazeera reports.
• RENN: Pac Crest Cuts To Hold; Missing Its IPO Promise – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com – RenRen CEO JOE Chen no dummy. He sold $50m in stock in IPO at $14 a share, COO sold $10m or so. Why investors buy into growth stage IPOs when insiders are selling is beyond me. I guess they have so much money they are happy to just give it away?
• Chanos Says China Bank System `Extremely Fragile’ | The Big Picture –
• Undercover Researchers Expose Chinese Internet Water Army – Technology Review – An undercover team of computer scientists reveals the practices of people who are paid to post on websites.
• Where Have All The China Hawks Gone? | Danger Room | Wired.com –
• China to Cancel College Majors That Don’t Pay – China Real Time Report – WSJ – China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.
• The route of urbanisation in China | East Asia Forum– A market-friendly urbanisation policy framework, together with carefully designed government measures to deal with potential positive and negative externalities, will accelerate the urbanisation process in China. At the same time, this will improve the efficiency of the urban economies and thereby play a critical role in sustaining China’s long-term development.Xiaolu Wang is Deputy Director and Senior Fellow at the National Economic Research Institute of the China Reform Foundation, Beijing.
• China’s Super-Rich Buy a Better Life Abroad – Businessweek – Self-made millionaire Li Weijie runs his own ski and golf resort outside Beijing and considers himself a patriot: A lifesize statue of Mao Zedong on a four-meter base towers over the entrance to his resort. What would Chairman Mao say if he knew Li was the proud holder of a Canadian residency card? “I wanted access to the education system and health care of a developed country,” says Li, 43, whose other businesses include one of Beijing’s largest private taxi companies, two car dealerships, and a real estate company. Li now has a $6 million house on Vancouver’s Westside, known for its rich Chinese. His wife tools around Vancouver in a black Maybach while his 20-year-old son drives a dark gray Maserati to classes at the University of British Columbia. His wife and son live in Canada full-time.
• China politics on the 2012 campaign trail – Josh Boak – POLITICO.com –
• China opposes expanded sanctions against Iran – Yahoo! News –
• Spoil the child: “Wolf dad” advocates beating, no friends, no play－global times– By raising four stereotypically successful children, Xiao Baiyou, a 47-year-old businessman from Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, believes he has proved himself a “successful” father. The chubby-faced dad can’t hide his pride when talking about his outstanding children, two of whom were born in the US and the other two in Hong Kong, his eyes crinkled as he smiles.Three of Xiao’s children have all been admitted to Peking University, one of China’s top schools, and his youngest daughter Xiao Bing is now in the second year of high school, and hopes to enter the entering Central Conservatory of Music in two years.

  Behind the academic success of Xiao’s four children, however, is his secret weapon: a cane.

  “The cane is a good thing. It doesn’t lead to a fracture, but definitely hurts. The kids could only remember not repeating the same mistake after feeling pain,” wrote Xiao in his new book entitled So, Brothers and Sisters in Beida (Peking University), which caused controversy as soon as it was published in June. The original book title, suggested by Xiao himself ,was called Beat to Beida.

  The book outlines a series of practices that would see Xiao imprisoned for child abuse in many countries.

• No End to Interest in Chinese E-Commerce, as 2011 Sees 7 Billion RMB Invested | Tech in Asia –
• New social insurance laws could hit Beijing’s international schools hard | Beijingkids Blog | cost of living | Nov 23, 2011 | beijing-kids.com –
• China Shunning Ships Shows $2.3 Billion Vale Mistake: Freight – Businessweek– he Vale Brasil, the biggest commodity ship ever built, was designed to carry iron ore to China from South America. After six months in operation, it hasn’t done that once.China’s refusal to accept the Brasil has derailed Vale SA’s push to control shipments to its biggest customer by building up a fleet of 35 ships, each almost as large as the Bank of America Tower in New York. Rio de Janeiro-based Vale, the world’s biggest iron ore miner, ships about 45 percent of sales to China, the largest consumer of the steelmaking ingredient.
• Murdoch’s News Corp accused of trying to bribe Australian senator | Media | guardian.co.uk – does an Australian senator cost more or less than an America one?
• Astronauts may need to ‘shelter in place’ as debris nears space station – The Washington Post – Less than a week after a three-man crew arrived at the international space station, the new residents may need to “shelter in place” as a chunk of a destroyed Chinese weather satellite veers close to the station.
• China’s “Leftover” Women : Ms Magazine Blog –
• Google mail crypto tweak makes eavesdropping harder • The Register– What kind of backdoor did Google give the NSA?//Google engineers have enhanced the encryption offered in Gmail, Google Docs, and other services to protect users against retroactive attacks that allow hackers to decrypt communications months or years after they were sent.

  The feature, a type of key-establishment protocol known as forward secrecy, ensures that each online session is encrypted with a different public key and that corresponding private keys are never kept in long-term storage. That, in essence, means there’s no master key that unlocks multiple sessions that may span months or years. Attackers who recover a key will be able to decrypt communications exchanged only during a single session.

  Google security guru Adam Langley said his team built the feature into Google’s default SSL protection using a preferred cipher suite that’s based on elliptic curve cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange method. They have released their code as an addition to the OpenSSL library to reduce the work necessary for other websites to implement the protection.

• Accounting exam grades sold－Global Times– explains a lot//China’s national accounting certificate exam is once again trying to solve a problem that does not involve math.

  Just months after a scandal involving leaked exam answers, test participants have reported they have been offered better test scores for a fee.

  The exam, known as Uniform CPA Examination, was held in September and scores are scheduled to be released by mid-Decemb

• The Agony and Ecstasy—and ‘Disgrace’—of Steve Jobs | The Nation– Far more significant are the societal roles Jobs played. And here, despite the myriad ways his companies improved our lives, Jobs was a hero only in the Ayn Randian sense. A living, breathing character out of Atlas Shrugged, he treated the people who actually manufacture Apple products like serfs and hoarded his $8.3 billion fortune to no apparent purpose.Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much…) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers.
• Solvitor | Problem Solved – Annotum is a product of Solvitor LLC with heavy lifting by Crowd Favorite. Special thanks to: Google, PLoS, NIH/NLM/NCBI, and Automattic.
• Annotum – We are pleased to announce the release of Annotum version 1.0 as a hosted theme on WordPress.com, a free theme on WordPress.org, and a freely available download on GitHub (forks welcome). I could write a long post about the long months of hard work by many people at Google, PLoS, NLM, and particularly Crowd Favorite, all of whom deserve, and receive, my sincere thanks. But instead I want you to get started using this fantastic new tool to author and publish beautiful, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and journals.
• Google Knols Move to WordPress: The Annotum Platform — Blog — WordPress.com – Starting today, those same authors can move their articles and collaborative journals to WordPress—and they have the power to choose whether to move to a self-hosted WordPress installation powered by the freely-available, open-source Annotum themes, or to have their Annotum-powered site hosted for free here on WordPress.com. Knol will slowly shut down over the next year, and we’ve worked closely with Google, Solvitor LLC, and Crowd Favorite to make this transition as simple as possible.
• Chinese Colleges Recruited In Go Abroad Push- SCMP.com – academic and think tank world will need much better donor disclosure//
  Central government offers funds in soft-power scheme to bolster the international standing of Chinese universities’ research in social sciences…
  The Ministry of Education would contribute money to the initiative, which would include translation and publication of Chinese academic works and the creation of international think tanks, said Zhang Donggang , the deputy head of a ministry department overseeing teaching and research in social science.The effort is part of a joint blueprint for the next decade issued by the ministries of education and finance. “These initiatives will allow China a greater say in international academic circles and will greatly expand the influence of Chinese academic research overseas in the next 10 years,” a campaign statement said.
• Shanghai Scrap » Against exceptionalism: here’s what a housing start really looks like (one for the Minnesotans). – None of this comes as a surprise to anyone who spends any time in China – even fleetingly. It is the stuff of daily life. But back in the US, and back home, in Minnesota, especially, I can’t help but get the sense that there’s an almost purposeful denial that what’s happened, and is happening in China is fleeting; that, in some shape or form, everything will go back to normal and sooner or later Minnesota will have more housing starts than China (or, at least, Foshan), again. We just need to cut taxes. Or spend more on K-12 education. Pick your favorite solution to the current economic malaise, whatever that may be, and it’ll set things back to 1985, again.

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