5th January 2009

The International Herald Tribune

China's mounting pink slips

A new icon has recently emerged for today's China: the disgruntled, laid-off factory worker, standing dejected outside a shuttered factory, another victim of the global economic downtown. As startling as these factory closures have been, the fate of another less-heralded figure may be more significant: the laid-off office worker. After 30 years of nearly continuous, even momentous, economic growth - which has lifted millions out of poverty and bolstered the ruling Chinese Communist Party - the economy's manufacturing base is slipping. Last month, exports dipped for the first time in seven years.

Chinese aim for the Ivy League

Now, eight years after the publication of "Harvard Girl," bookstore shelves here are laden with copycat titles like "How We Got Our Child Into Yale," "Harvard Family Instruction" and "The Door of the Elite."Their increasing popularity points to the preoccupation - some might say a single-minded national obsession - of a growing number of middle-class Chinese parents: getting their children into America's premier universities.

Kaixin sees the reverse stating to take place, the first stirrings. The parents who are obsessed with getting their children into foreign universities came through the Cultural Revolution. They have seen the rise of China but are still influenced by times when the best thing you could do for your child was send them overseas to be educated. China’s top universities are world class – perhaps not at the level of Yale, Oxford and the like, but still world class. They are producing graduates who are not out of touch with their society after a decade or so of study abroad. Twenty years ago a foreign degree was highly sort after by employers in China. Now it is starting to be viewed with a degree of scepticism.

Kaixin’s prediction is that over the next twenty years the tide will turn and students from all over the world will go to China to study.

Asia Times Online

The highs and lows of Sino-US relations

By Jing-dong Yuan

MONTEREY, California - Sino-United States relations in 2008 continue to remain relatively stable despite the fact that this was an election year in the United States. In past US presidential elections, the China issues tended to be raised by candidates for partisan and electoral purposes. Bill Clinton, for example, criticized president George W H Bush's China policy while candidate George W Bush characterized China as a strategic competitor. However, this year, China has more or less stayed out of US presidential politics.

A year of tragedy and triumph for Beijing
By Kent Ewing

HONG KONG - The stunning pyrotechnical display that opened the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in August is a fitting image to remember as China closes the book on 2008. Now, of course, although that grand Olympic memory lives proudly on, it has been undercut by an economic crisis that began with high-rollers on Wall Street but may soon threaten social stability among ordinary Chinese.

ASIA HAND
Down and still coupled
By Shawn W Crispin

Hopes that China - with which ASEAN has a trade surplus driven by exports of raw materials and component electronics and computer parts for re-export to third countries - might buoy the region's economies have faltered with recent softening in China's export figures. Meanwhile, economists say that the stimulus package announced last month by China has been tailored mainly to tide over the domestic economy and Beijing has indicated no plans or extraordinary measures to lift the region's sinking economies.