Today’s China Readings June 17, 2012

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

Happy Father’s Day.

  • 列车票价将首次打折_网易新闻中心
    10-20% price discounts coming to Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail business class june 27
  • Biden Says the ‘Great’ Cities Are in China, Not America | The Weekly Standard
    he must have really liked his lunch in Beijing
  • Video: Secret Space Plane Shatters Orbital Record as Chinese Rival Looms | Danger Room | Wired.com
    15 months in space
  • Secretive US military space shuttle X-37B lands itself at California base | World news | guardian.co.uk
  • TV drama on ‘sent down youth’ too rosy, say critics | SCMP.com
    Prime-time series about urban students sent to learn from farmers during the Cultural Revolution assailed for painting ‘social disaster’ in a positive light
  • Commentator tackles sensitive balancing act | SCMP.com
    Kato Yoshikazu finds job of Japanese writer living in China a subtle – and misunderstood- mission
  • Netizens Reflect As One Chinese Woman Touches Heaven, Another Hell | Tea Leaf Nation
    can you marshal the resources for a space program in a harmonious society? what was us society like during the launch of america’s program? civil rights trampled, vietnam war, race riots in 68, student protests, kent state, watergate…//
  • Two Women reflect nation’s highs and lows | SCMP.com
    Contrasting stories of astronaut and forced-abortion mum prompt internet posts on state of modern China
  • 临沂“掮客”行长落马记|临沂|掮客|落马_21世纪网
    Linyi, Shandong also has a financial scandal
  • China’s Economy Likely to Bottom Out This Quarter, Adviser Says – Bloomberg
    China’s economy will bottom out this quarter and rebound in the following three months as government measures to stabilize a slowdown take effect, according to an academic adviser to the central bank.
    “The second quarter should be the lowest point” this year, Chen Yulu said in an interview at a forum in Beijing yesterday. Full-year growth “should be able to hold up above 8 percent,” he said.
  • China Global Yuan Push Faces Challenges, Adviser’s Report Says – Bloomberg
    China’s efforts to make the yuan a global currency may be hampered by the lack of an independent monetary policy, fragile domestic financial markets and an “unbalanced” economy, a report edited by an adviser to the nation’s central bank warned.
    “In the process of yuan internationalization, it will be hard to gain the confidence of the international community in the value of the yuan if monetary policy lacks sufficient independence,” according to the report from the International Monetary Institute of Renmin University in Beijing. Chen Yulu, the editor-in-chief of the report, is an academic adviser to the People’s Bank of China and president of the university.
  • Beijing bicycles — Shanghai Daily
    BEIJING’S public bicycle service was launched yesterday, with the first batch of 2,000 bikes on offer in the capital’s Dongcheng and Chaoyang districts. The first hour is free, while riders pay 1 yuan (US$0.15) an hour afterwards, up to a maximum daily charge of 10 yuan.
  • Pesticide wrapping fears hit apple exports — Shanghai Daily
    SOME apple exports from a Chinese production center have been suspended following reports alleging growers wrap fruit in pesticide-coated paper.
    Japanese clients have held back from importing apples, including canned varieties, from Yantai in eastern China’s Shandong Province, Liang Chuansong, head of the city’s agricultural bureau said yesterday
  • Aung San Suu Kyi accepts Nobel peace prize | World news | The Observer
    Burmese pro-democracy leader says prize, awarded in 1991, helped shatter her sense of isolation during house arrest..
    Thorbjørn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel committee, who introduced her, said: “Today’s event is one of the most remarkable in the entire history of the Nobel prizes … We hope that Liu Xiaobo [the Chinese political activist] will not have to wait as long as you have before he can come to Oslo.”
  • Burma’s secret capital | World news | The Observer
    This week Aung San Suu Kyi visits Britain for the first time in 24 years. When she returns to her seat in the newly built parliament, it will be in the grandiose, deserted city of Nay Pyi Daw
  • China’s first female astronaut shows how ‘women hold up half the sky’ | World news | The Observer
  • And We Have Lift Off! A Historic Family Day at China’s Space City | World | TIME.com
    The Beijing Space City campus on the outskirts of China’s capital, where much of the design work on China’s space craft is done, is normally highly secretive. Indeed, a poster on the wall of a conference room advises: “There’s nothing people won’t do to steal state secrets — you should provide watertight security!” But on Saturday the hermetic base threw open its doors to family and friends of the facility’s engineers for a viewing party of the launch of China’s latest manned space mission, the Shenzhou-9 space capsule.
  • All Things Nuclear • Shenzhou 9 Launch
  • PLA and the South China Sea | China Power
    Finally, Ma’s statement highlights a central feature of China’s strategy in the South China Sea.  During the latest round of tensions, which began in around 2007 and accelerated between 2009 and 2011, China hasn’t used its naval forces to actively press its claims against other states.  Instead, China has relied on diplomacy and vessels from various civilian maritime law enforcement agencies, especially the State Oceanic Administration’s China Marine Surveillance force and the Ministry of Agriculture’s Fisheries Law Enforcement Command.  The emphasis on using maritime law enforcement agencies to maintain a presence in disputed areas suggests a deliberate effort to cap the potential for escalation while asserting China’s claims.Of course, China will continue to assert its claims.  But the PLA’s support for a diplomatic approach and limiting the potential for escalation should be noted.
  • Former WB economist returns to teaching – Xinhua | English.news.cn
    Justin Yifu Lin, who served a four-year tenure as World Bank chief economist and senior vice president, will soon return to work at Peking University, one of China’s top academic institutions, according to the university.
  • Confucius Institutes and Controlling Chinese Languages | China Heritage Quarterly
    If free discussion, research and teaching on aspects of Chinese life and culture that the Chinese party-state finds unpalatable cannot be carried out within the borders of China, then it is the responsibility of those who teach about China outside those borders to provide a sanctuary in which such things can thrive, not merely to replicate the regime’s positions and views. If teaching and research about things Chinese outside China is forced through the spread of Confucius Institutes into universities to be at the beck and call of the Chinese state, we will all end up understanding less about China rather than more, much to the impoverishment of Chinese Studies worldwide
  • 阎焱:吴长江近期滞留境外|阎焱|吴长江|雷士照明_21世纪网
  • Chongqing Lighting Tycoon Rumored To Have Been Detained – Economic Observer News- China business, politics, law, and social issues
    A lighting entrepreneur is rumored to have been detained by police in Chongqing, the city where Bo Xilai was ousted as communist party secretary earlier this year.Wu Changjiang, the 47-year-old founder and former chairman of Hong Kong-listed NVC Lighting Technology Corporation (NVC), has denied the rumors on his weibo account, although its unclear whether the microblog is run my him or one of his managers. The EO was also told that his wife has been taken away.
  • How a Mexican Drug Cartel Makes Its Billions – NYTimes.com
    In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto — he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. “How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?” Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli’s case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.) Placido also pointed out that, as a precursor guy, Zhenli was on the low end of the value chain for meth. It makes you wonder about the net worth of the guy who runs the whole show.
  • 29省党代会闭幕 山东籍常委遍布21省_多维新闻网
  • 强化民主集中 18大部署牵动19大 _多维新闻网
  • Consequences of the one-child policy: Perils of motherhood | The Economist
    For Ms Guo and her twin boys, it was her personal connections, or guanxi, that helped. At first she was asked to pay 20,000 yuan, a 50% discount in light of her failed sterilisation. She appealed to authorities through her brother, who went to school with the town chief, and got a further discount. In the end she paid only a nominal 1,000 yuan.“But I still feel indignant”, she says. “Bringing up children is already a huge burden and the government provides no assistance—instead they take from parents. In my eyes they are thieves.”
  • The Clark: Retracing an Epic Chinese Journey – WSJ.com
    In 1908, long before Singer Sewing Machine heir Robert Sterling Clark ever bought an Impressionist painting or thought of founding a museum, he led a 17-month scientific expedition to the remote reaches of northern China. Now that sojourn is bearing fruit for the institution that bears his name.This summer, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., is presenting four shows about its founder and China, including “Unearthed: Recent Archaeological Discoveries From Northern China,” which will display newly discovered burial objects from Shanxi and Gansu provinces, the territory Mr. Clark explored.
  • 假装在纽约的微博 新浪微博-随时随地分享身边的新鲜事儿
    among the more poignant recent weibo posts. putting a woman in space while forcing abortion at 7 months. so disturbing. retweeted by han han with 6 words. “one country two words–ripping apart”
    我们可以把一个女航天员送上天,也可以强行堕掉一个村妇7个月的胎儿。33岁的刘洋和22岁的冯建梅,两个女人命运的对比,是这个国家撕裂现状最好的写照——光荣与梦想映照着耻辱与绝望,最尖端的科技伴随着对人最无耻的践踏,飞船上天而道德探底,大国崛起而万民下跪,最好的时代就这样遇上最坏的时代。
  • Art in China: A coup for Hong Kong | The Economist
    Along with the gift that covers 310 artists, Mr Sigg also sold the M+ museum 47 of his most valuable Chinese works from the 1970s and 1980s for $177m. He was not parting with everything, he said. Some of his favourites would stay behind in Switzerland for his personal pleasure. Those paintings presumably include the portraits that Mr Sigg commissioned Chinese artists to paint of himself.
  • With or without foreigners, tourism grows in Tibet – Yahoo! News
    Tibet is seeing a boom in Chinese visitors, meaning that the government’s latest ban on foreigners following self-immolation protests against Beijing’s rule has barely dented the region’s tourism industry.

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