"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner
- China’s younger generation: lifestyle counts as much as work – Yahoo! News – Beijing – Early this year Song Hao, a stocky, bearded video editor in his late 20s, began to feel that the job he’d been doing for nearly four years was boring, leading nowhere, and certainly not worth the overtime he was made to do every evening.
“I wanted to take a break and use the time to do something I really liked, even if it didn’t earn me any money,” Mr. Song said one recent evening over a cappuccino in a Beijing cafe.
So he quit. - Newt Gingrich Inc.: How the GOP hopeful went from political flameout to fortune – The Washington Post – corruption, american-style
- No Academic Freedom for China – The Daily Beast – As more American universities open campuses in China, they’re bending to the country’s censorship rules. Isaac Stone Fish reports from Beijing.
- AF-PAK Sitrep » Counterpunch – It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”
- Chinese developer livid at Iceland’s rejection of resort – Yahoo! News– could a foreigner buy this much land in China? No, so no hypocrisy//A multimillionaire Chinese developer is livid at Iceland’s rejection of his plan to build a sprawling resort, saying it reveals western “hypocrisy and deep prejudice.”
- GroupM On The Rise And Fall Of Chinese Facebook Clone Kaixin001 | DigiCha – Kaixin001, which failed in its attempts to IPO in the US, recently raised money from Tencent, probably saving the company from going the way of Myspace. According to various reports Tencent invested less than $50m for about a third of the company. Sina ($SINA) owned around 20% of the firm before the Tencent round. I guess Sina management was either not interested in putting more money into Kaixin or lacked the ability to block Tencent from effectively turning Kaixin001 into a Tencent affiliate.
- 围攻淘宝头号人物现身 电子商务信用体系引热论-搜狐IT –
- 解放军设战略规划部 冀在南海争端中拿回主动权_新闻_腾讯网 –
- Returning to China, Engineer Finds Jail and Then Limbo – NYTimes.com– BEIJING — After two decades of working as a successful engineer in the United States, Hu Zhicheng decided to return to China in 2004 and apply his rich experience to designing catalytic converters for the nation’s booming automotive industry.“I saw how polluted the air was here, and thought I could make a difference,” said Mr. Hu, a naturalized American citizen who has a doctorate in engineering.Now it seems he cannot leave.
- How Alice Waters United West and East With a Dinner in Beijing – Corby Kummer – Life – The Atlantic– “It needs a little je ne sais quoi,” Alice Waters said, looking at a table covered with an enormous basket of apples. It wasn’t an easy request. The table was set against a painted-brick wall in the austerely handsome, clearly institutional complex that is the American embassy in Beijing, which employs about 1,000 people and looks more like a foundation or a well-endowed secondary school than like Chez Panisse.Few of Waters’s requests for a dinner inaugurating the first U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture were easy.
- Shanghai Scrap » Rich Gluttons Hold Extravagant Meal at US Embassy, Beijing, Congratulate Selves for Promoting Healthy Eating in China.– But, sadly, contributions – at least in the world that Waters and the US Embassy Staff occupy, are more along the lines of this one, as recounted, without shame, by the Atlantic’s correspodent:[Lilian] Chou [of Time Out Beijing] supervised the packing up of the leftovers to go to an orphanage that, she’d heard, hadn’t been able to pay its staff since July because of budget cuts.As the orphans gratefully licked their fingers of Liu Yang’s organic ricotta (at least, the ones who aren’t lactose intolerant), I wonder if Chou considered how many of those salaries might’ve been paid had she just donated the cost of the organic Chinese cheeses served at the dinner, outright
- Governing China: The Guangdong model | The Economist –
- China, India perform dangerous new dance – The Washington Post– NEW DELHI — It was billed as a new assertiveness, when India’s usually meek Prime Minister Manmohan Singh supposedly looked his Chinese counterpart in the eye at a summit in Bali last weekend and defended his country’s “commercial” right to explore for oil and gas in the South China Sea.But it was also a sign of rising frictions between India and China, and of what experts see as a dangerous new game between the world’s most populous nations.
- Huntsman misread China’s Internet generations-global times– It is possible that Huntsman may confuse young people’s democratic calls with the ones from Chinese separatists groups in the US. Although they all talk about democracy and freedom, the later has been attempting to overthrow the Chinese government for their own political gain and financial benefits, while the younger generations in China, including some of the famous activists well-known in the Western world, are simply trying to improve the politics and governance in China.But Huntsman’s comment is indeed a slap in the face for some of Chinese who once trusted him. They were encouraged by Huntsman to bring democratic change to China. And although they have been labeled as “pro-US” and even “traitors” due to their alleged obsession with the US system, they have disregarded these labels as nonsense, because they have faith that the changes they are calling for will bring good to their homeland. But now Huntsman, as the candidate for the US presidency, has indicated that the changes they are calling for will “take China down.” How will they react?Huntsman’s comment implied that he believed what has happened in North Africa recently may happen in China. This is an alarm bell to China. The younger generations may start to lose their patience if many social problems that come along with the country’s rapid transition found no quick and effective solutions.The government needs to improve governance to continuously keep up the younger generations’ confidence in Chinese system.
- China’s younger generation: lifestyle counts as much as work – Yahoo! News – Beijing – Early this year Song Hao, a stocky, bearded video editor in his late 20s, began to feel that the job he’d been doing for nearly four years was boring, leading nowhere, and certainly not worth the overtime he was made to do every evening.
“I wanted to take a break and use the time to do something I really liked, even if it didn’t earn me any money,” Mr. Song said one recent evening over a cappuccino in a Beijing cafe.
So he quit. - Newt Gingrich Inc.: How the GOP hopeful went from political flameout to fortune – The Washington Post – corruption, american-style
- No Academic Freedom for China – The Daily Beast – As more American universities open campuses in China, they’re bending to the country’s censorship rules. Isaac Stone Fish reports from Beijing.
- AF-PAK Sitrep » Counterpunch – It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”
- Chinese developer livid at Iceland’s rejection of resort – Yahoo! News– could a foreigner buy this much land in China? No, so no hypocrisy//A multimillionaire Chinese developer is livid at Iceland’s rejection of his plan to build a sprawling resort, saying it reveals western “hypocrisy and deep prejudice.”
- GroupM On The Rise And Fall Of Chinese Facebook Clone Kaixin001 | DigiCha – Kaixin001, which failed in its attempts to IPO in the US, recently raised money from Tencent, probably saving the company from going the way of Myspace. According to various reports Tencent invested less than $50m for about a third of the company. Sina ($SINA) owned around 20% of the firm before the Tencent round. I guess Sina management was either not interested in putting more money into Kaixin or lacked the ability to block Tencent from effectively turning Kaixin001 into a Tencent affiliate.
- 围攻淘宝头号人物现身 电子商务信用体系引热论-搜狐IT –
- 解放军设战略规划部 冀在南海争端中拿回主动权_新闻_腾讯网 –
- Returning to China, Engineer Finds Jail and Then Limbo – NYTimes.com– BEIJING — After two decades of working as a successful engineer in the United States, Hu Zhicheng decided to return to China in 2004 and apply his rich experience to designing catalytic converters for the nation’s booming automotive industry.“I saw how polluted the air was here, and thought I could make a difference,” said Mr. Hu, a naturalized American citizen who has a doctorate in engineering.Now it seems he cannot leave.
- How Alice Waters United West and East With a Dinner in Beijing – Corby Kummer – Life – The Atlantic– “It needs a little je ne sais quoi,” Alice Waters said, looking at a table covered with an enormous basket of apples. It wasn’t an easy request. The table was set against a painted-brick wall in the austerely handsome, clearly institutional complex that is the American embassy in Beijing, which employs about 1,000 people and looks more like a foundation or a well-endowed secondary school than like Chez Panisse.Few of Waters’s requests for a dinner inaugurating the first U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture were easy.
- Shanghai Scrap » Rich Gluttons Hold Extravagant Meal at US Embassy, Beijing, Congratulate Selves for Promoting Healthy Eating in China.– But, sadly, contributions – at least in the world that Waters and the US Embassy Staff occupy, are more along the lines of this one, as recounted, without shame, by the Atlantic’s correspodent:[Lilian] Chou [of Time Out Beijing] supervised the packing up of the leftovers to go to an orphanage that, she’d heard, hadn’t been able to pay its staff since July because of budget cuts.As the orphans gratefully licked their fingers of Liu Yang’s organic ricotta (at least, the ones who aren’t lactose intolerant), I wonder if Chou considered how many of those salaries might’ve been paid had she just donated the cost of the organic Chinese cheeses served at the dinner, outright