2nd February 2010

The Lion Awakes 

News at a Glance

今天的中国新闻

A compilation of Headlines + Brief Summary from Chinese & International Publications relating to China.

Just 5 Minutes each day to be up-to-date on the News of China

Combined with Kaixin’s boutique SITE SEARCH ENGINE, it is a unique source of knowledge about China"

China News Archive

From 2008

China Daily

Beijing furious at arms sales to Taiwan

The deal, which the Pentagon said would "serve US national, economic and security interests", is pending approval of the US Congress.

Beijing responded furiously with a raft of reprisals.

"Cooperation between China and the US on key international and regional issues will also inevitably be affected," the ministry said in an official protest to the US.

Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and Vice-Foreign Minister He Yafei also protested the deal.

"Certainly, the US has to pay a heavy price for the deal," said Ye Hailin, a professor in international relations at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "We have more than one card. On problems related to Afghanistan, the DPRK and Iran, Washington needs our cooperation."

Trial margin trading plan issued by March

He also pointed out that the launch of margin trading and short selling business will not cause a stock-market slide. Buying securities with cash borrowed from a broker when the stock market is at a low point will spur the price to rise and selling securities borrowed when prices are too high will effectively curb excessive speculations.

Kaixin - should have an interesting impact on the Chinese sharemarket. Hold on to your hats .... Mind you, the logic behind it did not work during the GFC in the west. Short selling was banned and borrowers on margin tended to lose their shirts

Farmers set to get more support

The central document said priority in the budget should be given to infrastructure construction in rural areas and programs, which are aimed at improving agricultural output and farmers' livelihood.

More subsidies will also be channeled to increase the output of crops, potato, highland barley and peanut, as well as the purchase of agricultural machinery, it said.

The government will implement more policies to purchase and stockpile major agricultural products, including corn, soybean and oilseeds, to stabilize the prices of major farm produce.

More efforts will also be made to strengthen financial services including micro-credit loans and insurance services in rural areas, the document said.

To that effect, basic banking services will be made available in all villages and towns in the next three years.

"It called for more efforts to develop village banks, loan-extending companies, and mutual funds to guide more capital flows into the rural financial market," Zhang Hulin said.

The current gap between urban and rural development is very large and that is harming the country's future progress, so it is high time the government gave more support to rural areas, he said.

Door for talks with Dalai still open: CPC official

BEIJING: Chinese authorities said Monday that the door for contacts and talks remains open to the Dalai Lama, but no concessions would be made on issues concerning national sovereignty.
Du Qinglin, head of the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, had met with Lodi Gyari and Kelsang Gyaltsen, private envoys of the Dalai Lama, in Beijing, said a statement from the department Monday.

China pledges support for Copenhagen Accord

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has reiterated his country's support for the Copenhagen Accord and China's commitments to addressing climate change.

In separate replies to letters from Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Wen said the Copenhagen Accord resulting from the UN climate change conference in the Danish capital last year laid the foundation for advancing international cooperation on climate change and pointed the direction for future negotiations.

The New York Times

China's New Travelers Aren't Far From Home

The National Tourism Administration said domestic tourists had made 1.9 billion trips in 2009, an increase of 11 percent over the previous year, and generated 1 trillion renminbi of revenue, up 15 percent from the previous year.

But Ms. Cockerell of the World Travel and Tourism Council said the sector still had room to grow.

“For China, two billion trips is small,” she said. “When they start traveling like Americans, the numbers will be phenomenal.”

China Rejects Demands for Greater Tibetan Autonomy

BEIJING — Chinese officials have rejected demands by the Dalai Lama that Tibetan areas of China receive greater autonomy and be governed as a single region, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported Monday.

Kaixin – Therein lies the difference. Note the inflammatory language used in the headline and the lead paragraph. It is a ‘cause celebre’ bandwagon onto which all the usual suspects can leap from time to time to pronounce their deeply held concerns for the world.  They stay dancing on that bandwagon until the next one lumbers past onto which they can leap and keep the party going.

The Australian

China goes ballistic over Taiwan arms sale

All the major Chinese media led their front pages and bulletins yesterday on the controversy, including headlines such as China Daily's "Beijing furious at arms sales".

The newspaper said that Beijing's scrapping of military contacts with the US and its warning of an end to co-operation on "key international and regional issues" comprised "its toughest response in three decades to US arms sales to Taiwan". It said: "China's response, no matter how vehement, is justified."

Beijing is being careful not to attack Taiwan because it now has a leader with which it feels it can deal, and does not wish to boost the pro-independence camp.

Kaixin - a clever, but almost patronizing headling.

The Age

China to carry out sanctions threat
JOHN GARNAUT, BEIJING

CHINA is likely to follow through on its threats of trade sanctions and reduced international co-operation in retaliation against Washington's $US6.4 billion ($A7.2 billion) package of weapons sales to Taiwan, Chinese scholars say.

Chinese state media yesterday vented outrage over perceived US interference in China's national sovereignty.

The People's Daily attacked America's ''Cold War mentality and moral hypocrisy'', while the Guanghua Daily said the arms sales had ''hurt the feelings of the Chinese people''.

China goes silent on Google battle

GOOGLE'S opposition to censorship in China was a topic left off the table last week in Davos - at China's request.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Cyber attacks take aim at the heart of the American empire

Al-Qaeda demonstrated on September 11, 2001, how a handful of scruffy extremists could use asymmetrical warfare to damage key US assets. Now imagine that the asymmetrical warfare against the US is being waged not by a few fanatics but by one of the world's most powerful nation states.
This is why China's cyber attacks are so serious.

The Chinese know a bit about the asymmetrical warfare. It was set out some 2500 years ago by the clan whose wisdom is collected under the name Sun Tzu: "If he is superior in strength, evade him. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared; appear where you are not expected."

Kaixin - if you want to understand China, then get a copy of Sun Tzu.

Asia Times Online

BOOK REVIEW
The skeleton in the cupboard
China: Fragile Superpower by Susan L Shirk

Reviewed by Dmitry Shlapentokh

A photograph of Susan Shirk shaking hands with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier almost 30 years ago, illustrates that the author has had a long career studying China. This is an important book from several other perspectives.

The second problem, and this is the most serious, is that Shirk fails to demonstrate that China has made such a great economic leap not only because it engaged in market reform - the former Soviet Union and East European countries did the same and with disastrous results for their economies - but because China has preserved the totalitarian skeleton of its past.

This is what has allowed China to produce real goods instead of resorting to the service bubbles of the US and those East European and post-Soviet countries which followed the advice of American experts. It is the totalitarian aspects of China that make it possible for the leaders to pursue policies that benefit the country in the long run; they do not think about quick profits that enrich the few - which is what has pushed the US into an economic abyss.

China's US spending passes landmark
By Benjamin A Shobert

Outbound investment by Chinese businesses in United States entities last year exceeded for the first time US investments in Chinese companies, according to a recent report from Dealogic, a fact too easily lost amid cries of concern over China's ownership of US Treasuries, now estimated at around US$789.6 billion.

More critically, China's desire to take this next step, to foster increasingly large investments between the two country's private sectors, sends a strong message of mutual reliance. For those who would look otherwise negatively at China's outbound investment in the US, it might be wise to consider what the other options are: distance and distrust. Neither should be an option for the US or China.

Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc a consulting firm dedicated to helping Asian businesses bring innovative technologies into the North American market.

Iran caught up in China-US spat
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Just days after United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the occasion of a speech in Paris to lecture China on its national security interests and warned Beijing of "economic insecurity and diplomatic isolation" if it did not sign onto new sanctions against Iran, China hit back.