China Readings for November 9th

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

  • “限娱令”、“限酒令”推涨 标王出茅台 – 产经 – 21世纪网 – follow the money, the SARFT rule limiting entertainment programming on provincial TV stations has led to large ad rate increases on CCTV
  • China Economic Watch | How Quickly is the Chinese Property Market Correcting?– Even though a genuine slowdown appears to be underway, the government continues to play a shrewd game in managing expectations. Premier Wen recently declared “there will not be the slightest wavering in China’s property-tightening measures,” dousing  widespread hopes that government may ease up on credit tightening soon. Wen’s statement indicates that the government is trying to dampen expectations that the property market will soon spring back to its white hot growth of earlier in the year.The tightening polices of the past two years have caused the real estate industry to groan and cry for mercy, but Chinese policymakers wisely are not ready to declare mission accomplished. As long as the dynamics of financial repression are in place (low interest rates on deposits, closed capital account, lack of alternative investments) the property bubble remains in danger of reinflating. Absent significant financial sector reform, the Chinese government will have to remain vigilant in suppressing a property bubble that is almost the inevitable result of a distorted financial system.
  • China: social media marketing tips | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com –
  • Alibaba, Softbank Said to Seek Yahoo Partners – Bloomberg – Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Softbank Corp. (9984) are talking with private-equity funds about making a bid for all of Yahoo! Inc. without the company’s blessing, people with knowledge of the matter said.
    Alibaba and Softbank, in an effort to buy back stakes owned by Yahoo, have grown impatient with a lack of progress in direct talks with the company, said the people, w
  • Audi Spurns China Company-Car Role to Rebuild Market Share: Cars – Businessweek –
  • The China Divide and the Future of the GOP – Right Web – Institute for Policy Studies – Romney’s Asia-Pacific working group has a more moderate cast. It includes Evan Feigenbaum, a South and Central Asia expert who generally has counseled moderation towards China; Aaron Friedberg, a former adviser to Dick Cheney and founding member of the Project for the New American Century who has argued that the long-term relationship between the United States and China will depend on Chinese democratization; and Kent Lucken, a retired diplomat who sits of the board of the U.S.-Asia Institute, an organization dedicated to improving U.S. relations in East Asia.
    Given this set of advisors, Romney’s pronouncements on China have demonstrated a degree of schizophrenia. Romney’s military stance aims squarely at confrontation with China. In his well-publicized speech at the Citadel on October 7, Romney warned of a grim future: “China has made it clear that it intends to be a military and economic superpower. Will her rulers lead their people to a new era of freedom and prosperity or will they go down a darker path, intimidating their neighbors, brushing aside an inferior American Navy in the Pacific, and building a global alliance of authoritarian states?”
  • China Telecom Plans to Offer Own-Brand Wireless Service in U.S. Next Year – Bloomberg – huawei handsets?
  • 张志新亲属造访画室 – 徐唯辛的博客 | 徐唯辛的博客 | 博联社 –  最近接到美国著名小提琴家高翔（左一）的电话，说他想和家人来我工作室瞻仰大姨张志新的肖像。上周五他们如约来到我在学院的画室。同来的有张志新的两位胞妹，二妹张志慧(右二)和三妹张志勤（左四），高翔的母亲是四妹张志玲，目前居住在美国。
    张志慧和丈夫陈叔平教授（右一）目前仍住在人大校园内一个家属楼里，距我画室仅几百米。2007年11月27日在北京今日美术馆《历史中国众生相1966——1976》作品展开幕式上，我还向在场的上千名观众介绍了这对亲临画展的老夫妇。
  • FT Alphaville » Pettis and Kroeber go glass-half-full on China– Well, everyone needs a change sometimes.We’ve written about so much bearish questioning on China that it wouldn’t be fair to ignore a couple of more upbeat comments from economists who are not the usual China bulls.
  • 看中共如何清除美国文化在华影响 « 多维博客 –
  • Housing Drop Threatens China Growth – WSJ.com– An unanswered question is whether China can gently let the air out of its real-estate bubble or whether the bubble will burst, undermining economic growth. With the European Union and U.S. struggling to kick-start their own economies, global growth depends increasingly on the health of the Chinese economy, the world’s second-largest.Beijing’s top officials say they plan to stay the course. “I will especially stress that there won’t be the slightest wavering in China’s property-tightening measures—our target is for prices to return to reasonable levels,” Premier Wen Jiabao said in a speech on Sunday in Russia.
  • China’s ‘Third Affliction’ – NYTimes.com – Behind the bravado lies deep anxiety about what some in China have called the “third affliction,” its negative image in the world. With its economy now the envy of the world, China has symbolically thrown off the affliction of poverty. With its powerful and modernizing military, it is no longer afflicted by the threat of foreign aggression, as it was during its “century of shame.” Yet the country’s international prestige remains constrained by the cultural dominance of the West. Each time China is castigated by the international human rights community, or criticized by the Western media, the country’s leaders feel more and more that global public opinion is stacked against them. Western culture and values have gone global in a way that Chinese culture and values have not, and Beijing wants to do something about this.
  • China National Biotec Said to Plan $2 Billion Hong Kong Initial Offering – Bloomberg – National Biotec, based in Beijing, is the largest biotechnology company in China and the fourth-biggest vaccine maker in the world, according to the company’s website. It has about 8.6 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) of assets and annual sales of more than 5 billion yuan, the website shows.
  • 杜导正：我对中国的前途持乐观态度_共识网 –
  • A chilling tale for Journalists Day – China Media Project– Today, November 8, is International Journalists Day, and a number of Chinese media have marked the holiday — but none perhaps so forcefully as China Youth Daily, a newspaper published by the Communist Youth League of China.China Youth Daily, which has been known for its strong professional reporting tradition since the 1980s, tells the story in today’s edition of Fujian television journalist Deng Cunyao (邓村尧), who was brutally attacked on October 18, 2010, while leaving his office, in what was apparently a reprisal for critical reporting.

    The assailant, riding a red motorbike and covering his face, drove up behind Deng and hacked at his left leg with a large knife. Deng, a producer at Fujian’s Longyan Television Station, recalled to the China Youth Daily reporter: “I wanted to run, but my leg had been broken by the slash, and I fell.”

  • Tax Protests in Zhili Reveal Seething Social Conflicts-Caijing – A seemingly random event exposed the multiple, intertwined social contradictions in migrant population management and industrial restructuring in China.
  • China Seeks a Cultural Influence to Match Its Economic Muscle – NYTimes.com– The next day, he said, agents of the local Public Security Bureau interrogated him about one work, a collection of peppercorns arranged to form numbers. Security officers had already photographed the piece, studied it for an entire night and consulted cryptography experts to divine its message.As they eventually discovered, the numbers were in a computer language, Unicode, spelling out five phrases that Chinese censors have banned from the results of Internet search engines. And the pungent peppercorns were a metaphor for what Mr. Yue called people’s undue sensitivity to ordinary words.
  • China inflation: a big fall ahead? | beyondbrics | News and views on emerging markets from the Financial Times – FT.com– Where is Chinese inflation heading? The question will be officially answered (for October at least) on Wednesday, but one interesting indicator suggests it will head sharply downwards.Michael McDonough, Bloomberg Brief Economist put this chart on Twitter on Monday. A quick look tells you pretty much all you need to know. The Bloomberg Brief Daily Food index tracks Chinese food inflation very closely – and it’s just fallen off a cliff.
  • SEAL’s Account | Osama Bin Laden Death | Fairy Tale | The Daily Caller– Forget whatever you think you know about the night Osama bin Laden was killed. According to a former Navy SEAL who claims to have the inside track, the mangled tales told of that historic night have only now been corrected.“It became obvious in the weeks evolving after the mission that the story that was getting put out there was not only untrue, but it was a really ugly farce of what did happen,” said Chuck Pfarrer, author of Seal Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden.
  • Analysis:Some Chinese firms in U.S. turn tables on short sellers | Reuters– The turnaround suggests that while a number of Chinese companies clearly did have dubious accounting or other major problems, there may have been others unfairly tarred with the same brush.The successful Harbin deal shows that short sellers will have to “raise their game,” said Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based consultant and analyst.

    He said that up until now if a short seller put out a negative report on a Chinese company, the assumption had been “to shoot first and ask questions about whether or not it’s a correct report later.” That may now change, he said.

  • China’s Steve Jobs Debate & Deng Xiaoping – The Washington Note– Certainly no one in the current Chinese leadership appears to have the talent and latitude to punctuate Chinese history as definitively as Deng Xiaoping — and in America, we don’t see the likes of Steve Jobs too often either.  Both had their dark sides and moments — but they were brilliant and both changed the world and more importantly, the expectations of people about what may yet still be possible.I’m an outsider over here in Beijing, but my response to the Chinese who lament whether or not they could ever produce a Steve Jobs is that they actually did. His name was Deng.
  • Chinese military wanted Motorola secrets carried by China-bound engineer – Chicago Sun-Times– Sure it was a random search at the airport. Wonder how they knew. Mole? //The petite woman, bearing short, pixie-styled hair, was barely audible in a federal courtroom Monday.

    Hanjuan Jin, 41, answered “yes” when asked if she, a former Motorola software engineer, wanted her economic espionage trial to happen before a judge and not a jury.

    With that, federal prosecutors tore into Jin, saying she purposely stole trade secrets from the Schaumburg-based tech giant so she could pass on the much-desired cellular technology to the Chinese military and a business in China.

    Jin is accused of downloading hundreds of documents from Motorola Inc. — including ones the company says it considers trade secrets — as she negotiated a job in China with a competing firm.

  • China’s ‘Third Affliction’ – NYTimes.com– HONG KONG — “Almost a full house!” Zhao Dayong said, his eyes glinting as we gazed over rows of filmgoers shuffling into their seats. It was a moment neither of us could have imagined two years earlier, as we filmed the Lisu tribespeople through a chilly Christmas in mountainous Fugong, in southwest China, not far from the border with Myanmar.Zhao’s unapproved independent documentary, “Ghost Town,” an unflinching look at a remote community on China’s margins – one of those left behind by the country’s breakneck development – was having its moment at last. But the ovation that followed the film’s world premiere in 2009 at Lincoln Center in New York could not shake the bittersweet recognition that this moment would never have been possible in Zhao’s own China.
  • No. 89 Shimen Road Leads Winners of China Independent Film Festival | dGenerate Films – Last week the 8th China Independent Film Festival concluded with Shu Haolun’s film No 89. Shimen Road taking the prize for Best Feature Film. The film is the narrative debut of Shu, who has directed the award-winning documentaries Nostalgia and Struggle.
  • China wealth fund prepares to restructure – Caixin Online – MarketWatch– BEIJING ( Caixin Online ) — China’s sovereign-wealth fund China Investment Corp. (CIC) is preparing to separate its overseas business operations to expand into a newly established international investment subsidiary.A source close to CIC told Caixin that restructuring is aimed at clarifying CIC’s investment activities in overseas and domestic markets.
  • China’s Xinjiang Goldwind Gets $1.6 Billion in Support – Bloomberg – Goldwind, based in Urumqi, Xinjiang, will have access to loans supporting fixed assets, working capital, acquisitions, trade finance, project financing and export credit over the next two to three years, according an e-mailed statement today.
    Renewable energy is one of seven “strategic” industries receiving government support in China. ICBC and other state- controlled banks are signing billions of dollars of credit lines with wind and solar manufacturers including Sinovel Wind Group Co. and Suntech Power Holdings Co. Ltd. to fund capacity expansion and overseas business, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
  • Chinese-funded hydropower project sparks anger in Burma – The Washington Post– After five years of cozy cooperation with Burma’s ruling generals, China Power Investment Corp. got a shock in September when it sent a senior executive to Naypyidaw, this destitute Southeast Asian nation’s showcase capital, a Pharaonic sprawl of empty eight-lane highways and cavernous government buildings.Armed with a slick PowerPoint presentation and promises of $20 billion in investment, Li Guanghua pitched “an excellent opportunity,” a mammoth, Chinese-funded hydropower project in Burma’s far north.

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  • Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince On The Challenges Of China’s Internet Restrictions | TechCrunch –
  • Probe traces bogus military parts to China – Checkpoint Washington – The Washington Post– A probe into counterfeit electronic parts in the military supply chain has led investigators to a familiar suspect: China.The Senate Armed Services Committee on Monday released some of the findings of its months-long investigation into bogus parts in the Defense Department’s labyrinthine supply chain. The probe uncovered 1,800 cases of suspect counterfeit electronic parts, with the total number of suspect parts exceeding 1 million.

    In more than 70 percent of the cases in which investigators were able to follow the supply chain backward, the trail led to China. Nearly 20 percent of the remaining cases were traced back to Britain and Canada, known resale points for counterfeit Chinese parts.

  • Du Daozheng on China’s past and future – China Media Project – In a post later this month we’ll discuss the issue of leadership selection and so-called “intra-party democracy” in China, and the (for many) bewildering notion of the “election differential” (选举差额). For now, however, we turn to a recent interview with retired senior cadre Du Daozheng (杜导正), the publisher of the progressive monthly journal Yanhuang Chunqiu (炎黄春秋).
  • China’s Emerging Twin Pillar Policy in the Gulf – By Geoffrey F. Gresh | The Middle East Channel – In the media tumult following the charges that elements of the Iranian regime sought to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, the prospect of a faltering regional status quo has become a frightening reality. However, while the historic and regional rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran has unquestionably intensified, especially following the Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain this past spring to suppress majority Shi’a protests, recent events obscure the fact that Iran and Saudi Arabia increasingly share a growing economic market and great power ally in China. China’s gradual realignment from squarely backing Iran to courting Saudi Arabia in recent years heralds a geostrategic shift in Chinese foreign policy and marks the stirrings of a Chinese “twin-pillar” policy in the Gulf. Yet the U.S. should not necessarily view this shift as a threat to its strategic national interests in the Gulf. Rather, Chinese engagement with these two regional poles of influence could actually prove beneficial for the U.S. as it begins to rethink its regional strategy and seek ways to maintain stability without a large military presence.
  • Tighter air quality monitoring in Beijing|Society|chinadaily.com.cn – China’s real estate tycoon Pan Shiyi on Sunday joined a growing group of media and public intellectuals to call for using tighter monitoring standards to rein in Beijing’s notorious air pollution.
    Pan, chairman of SOHO China, one of the largest developers in Beijing, initiated a public voting on his micro-blogging space at Sina Weibo to urge the authorities to use PM2.5, a widely used measurement to gauge finest particles in air, to check Beijing’s air quality.
    Beijing’s meteorological authorities have been using PM10, which measures only coarser particles, to track the city’s air pollution.
    More than 33,000 people, about 95 percent of the voters who responded to Pan’s initiative, agreed “the authorities would adopt PM2.5 measurement this year,” four percent of the respondents believed “it can wait until next year” while only 1 percent opted for “there is no need for PM2.5 measurement.”
  • 浙江丽水房产商非法集资55亿获死刑_新闻中心_新浪网 – 非法集资55.69亿余元 集资诈骗14.727亿余元
  • China launches English language TV service – FT.com – China’s state-owned broadcaster has launched an aggressive international push to extend the country’s influence, opening a new headquarters in Washington that will broadcast English-language programming from the heart of the US capital.
    China Central Television, which produces the ruling Communist party’s news shows and other propaganda programmes, is constructing a studio in Washington which will serve as its US broadcasting centre. It aims to begin broadcasting from the site by the middle of 2012 and produce up to six hours of original programming a day, according to people familiar with the plans.
  • Two New Lists of Sina Weibo’s Banned Search Terms | China Digital Times (CDT) –
  • Don’t panic, China’s economy is not on the rocks yet – FT.com – By Michael Pettis
    Two years ago it was hard to find anyone who believed that annual GDP growth in China would ever fall below 8 per cent. Today, as the market fixates on various domestic bubbles, it is becoming almost as hard to find anyone who does not worry that China may be on the verge of collapse.
  • Bank of China: a very iffy Sifi – FT.com – Bank of China’s inclusion on the inaugural list of 29 “G-SIFIs” – global systemically important financial institutions – may have caused some raised eyebrows around the world. Sure, BoC is big, with Rmb11,530bn ($1,820bn) of assets. But ICBC and CCB (not on the list) are bigger, by that measure. Neither does BoC seem to fit the Financial Stability Board’s requirement for “complexity”. Like most of China’s state-owned lenders, it pursues a pretty unexciting mix of corporate, personal and trade finance. And as for “systemic interconnectedness”, with 95 per cent of its assets in greater China, BoC is easily the most insular on the list.
  • 百度动刀子 代理商反水“揭盖子” – 产经 – 21世纪网 – Baidu cleaning up its medical advertising. Again