People's Republic of China, Dec. 27 2011

[r_subramanian]

No shark fin soup for Christmas
There is a very interesting article on corruption in China that has appeared in Business Spectator ( an Aussie on-line only business newspaper, recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch ). The author is John Lee who is an academic at Sydney University; he is of Chinese extraction.

The Chinese military budget has been growing at double-digit rates for two decades, with an 11.2 per cent growth in 2012. But senior officers of the People’s Liberation Army have been told to knuckle down by the Central Military Commission, the country’s peak military decision making body.

As official state-media Xinhua reported last week, luxury banquets and alcohol has been banned at receptions. Delicacies such as shark’s fin and turtle soup will be reportedly off limits, as is partaking in the miracle benefits of ginseng-laced concoctions. Red carpets, elaborate floral arrangements and other expensive decorations will be severely curtailed. Luxury ‘civilian’ hotels will become a rarity for officers on overseas trips, and room service and other ‘entertainment’ expenses will be cut -- even if there is no word yet on the appropriateness of first and business class travel. And to rub more salt in the wound, spouses, children and relatives will no longer share the trappings of office.
...
Official corruption comes in many different forms. The most obvious is graft, or outright theft. According to a Chinese Central bank report in July 2011, some 16,000-18,000 officials have stolen more than $US120 billion, and fled overseas since the mid-1990s. That’s around $US7 million per official, with America, Canada, Australia and Europe being the most popular places to deposit the ill-gotten proceeds.
...
It is true that the CCP {Chinese Communist Party} is not one homogenous entity speaking in one voice. But its vast, unaccountable governing structure is part of the problem. Modern China is the second most-governed country in Asia (by number of officials per capita) after Malaysia, even if it is rated one of the poorest governed lands in the region. During the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), there was one official for every 2,927 people. During the more recent Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), there was one official for every 299 people. In today’s China, there are up to 50 million officials, amounting to about one official for every 27 people.
...
It is no wonder that becoming an official is seen by many as a ‘lucrative’ career option. This perception is supported by numerous surveys that indicate that well over 90 per cent of the richest 1,000-10,000 people in China (depending on which survey you use) are CCP officials or their family members.
...

Link: http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs. ... ph&src=rot

There is an interesting comment to the article:

Basically what’s happened in China (and Vietnam) is the greatest theft in history, staged in 3 phases over several decades (No shark fin soup for Christmas, December 24):
1. The State nationalises everyone’s assets

2. The Party takes absolute control of the State’s assets

3. The Party re-privatises and re-distributes the State’s assets to some of its members.

Corruption is a way of taking even more from the part of the wealth that’s still outside the Party’'s control and giving a share of the loot to lowly Party members who have benefited little from the Grand Theft.

Unity within Party ranks - and the Party itself - cannot survive if corruption is curtailed.

[kish]

China school bus crash kills 11 children in Jiangxi

Eleven children have been killed in China when the van taking them to school crashed, Chinese state media have reported.

The children, aged between four and six years old, died when the van apparently plunged into a roadside pond in the southern province of Jiangxi.

[kish]

China: 89 Abducted Children Rescued

The police have broken up nine child trafficking rings, rescuing 89 children and arresting 355 suspects, the Ministry of Public Security announced Monday. According to the official Xinhua news service, the gangs abducted children in several provinces in the south and then sold them elsewhere in China. The raid was part of a nationwide crackdown on kidnappers, who often seize boys. Most of the stolen children are sold to families who want a male heir but face limitations imposed by China’s strict family-planning policies. The Chinese government says that 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, but some experts suggest the number may be as high as 70,000.

In a dictatorship like china, this is not possible without connivance of powerful people. IMHO Communist party officials are involved.

[kish]

China busts trafficking ring, 89 children rescued

CHINESE police have rescued 89 children and arrested 355 suspects after busting a series of child trafficking rings.

Officers from nine regions, including Fujian, Yunnan, Sichuan, Anhui and Guangdong, took part in a joint drive beginning December 18 against the networks, said Chen Shiqu, director of the anti-trafficking office in the public security ministry.

A healthy male infant bought for 30,000 yuan ($4570) in poor provinces such as Yunnan can be sold for 70,000 to 90,000 yuan in the comparatively wealthy provinces of Fujian and Guangdong, Wang was quoted as saying.

Since April 2009, when a ministry crackdown began, police have broken up 11,000 child trafficking rings and rescued 54,000 children, according to Chen.

[kish]

13 hurt as bereaved Chinese man drives car into students

Thirteen teenagers were injured on Tuesday after a man who was unhappy over a court’s handling of his daughter’s murder drove a car into a group of students in northern China’s Hebei province.

Police who arrested Yin Tiejun, 48, said he had tried to set fire to the car after he crashed into 23 students from the Fengning No. 1 Middle School in Hebei’s Fengning county, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Thirteen students required hospital treatment, including three with serious injuries, the agency quoted county officials as saying.

Whats with chinese men and children? whenever someone is enraged they vent their anger out on children. Pathetic.

[jamwal]

Halloween decorations carry haunting message of forced labor

The letter came in a box of Halloween decorations purchased at Kmart, but for a year Julie Keith never knew. It gathered dust in her storage, a haunting plea for help hidden among artificial skeletons, tombstones and spider webs.

Keith, a 42-year-old vehicle donation manager at a southeast Portland Goodwill, at one point considered donating the unopened $29.99 Kmart graveyard kit. It was one of those accumulated items you never need and easily forget. But on a Sunday afternoon in October, Keith pulled the orange and black box from storage. She intended to decorate her home in Damascus for her daughter's fifth birthday, just days before Halloween.

She ripped open the box and threw aside the cellophane.

That's when Keith found it. Scribbled onto paper and folded into eighths, the letter was tucked between two Styrofoam headstones.

"Sir:
"If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever."

The graveyard kit, the letter read, was made in unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, China.

Chinese characters broke up choppy English sentences.

"People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month)."

Ten yuan is equivalent to $1.61.

"People who work here, suffer punishment 1-3 years averagely, but without Court Sentence (unlaw punishment). Many of them are Falun Gong practitioners, who are totally innocent people only because they have different believe to CCPG. They often suffer more punishment than others."

The letter was not signed.

If truly created in a forced labor camp, the Halloween graveyard kit from Kmart's "Totally Ghoul" product line could bring a blow to the U.S. chain of discount stores.

Title 19, section 1307 of U.S. Code generally prohibits the importation of all items "mined, produced or manufactured" in any foreign country by convict labor, forced labor and/or indentured labor.

After the Oregonian informed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the letter, ICE's Homeland Security Investigations began looking into the case, public affairs officer Andrew Munoz confirmed.

Sears Holdings Corporation, which operates Kmart, released a statement on the matter:

"Sears Holdings has a Global Compliance Program which helps to ensure that vendors and factories producing merchandise for our company adhere to specific Program Requirements, and all local laws pertaining to employment standards and workplace practices. Failure to comply with any of the Program Requirements, including the use of forced labor, may result in a loss of business or factory termination. We understand the seriousness of this allegation, and will continue to investigate."

[jamwal]

Prison slaves

China is the world's factory, but does a dark secret lurk behind this apparent success story?

Once an isolationist communist state, over the last 20 years China has become the world's biggest exporter of consumer goods. But behind this apparent success story is a dark secret - millions of men and women locked up in prisons and forced into intensive manual labour.
"We were not paid at all, we were forced. If anyone refused to work, they would be beaten, some people were beaten to death."


China has the biggest penal colony in the world - a top secret network of more than 1,000 slave labour prisons and camps known collectively as "The Laogai". And the use of the inmates of these prisons - in what some experts call "state sponsored slavery" - has been credited with contributing to the country's economic boom.

In this episode, former inmates, many of whom were imprisoned for political or religious dissidence without trial, recount their daily struggles and suffering in the "dark and bitter" factories where sleep was a privilege.

Charles Lee spent three years imprisoned for religious dissidence. He says: "For a year they tried to brainwash me, trying to force me to give up my practice of Falun Gong. They figured me out ... so they changed their strategy to force me to feel like a criminal ... because, according to their theory, a prisoner should be reformed through labour .... So they forced me to do slave labour."

[prashanth]

In China, Delhi gang rape spurs online debate, then censorship-The Hindu

[sanjaykumar]

http://www.uschina.usc.edu/w_usci/showa ... eSupport=1


These primitives need to learn to acknowledge the barbarity of their culture.

[member_23858]

In China, Delhi gang rape spurs online debate, then censorship-The Hindu

prashanthji......gandhis gift as a leader to modern India was peace and nonviolence...
but in a country run by a psychotic Mao what more can you expect.....hence RAPE is heinous act in INDIA, But in China it is perpetuation of habits of Glorious leaders

[VikramS]

http://www.uschina.usc.edu/w_usci/showarticle.aspx?articleID=13037&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1


These primitives need to learn to acknowledge the barbarity of their culture.

sanjay:

You can make your case without using words like "primitives". It shifts the focus away from the message.

[sanjaykumar]

I advisedly used that term, the Global Times editor tweeted the word 'backward' for India (the merits not withstanding), he is one of the few in China privileged to read this site thus it was quite deliberate.

[kish]

Now China's new leaders will have to work hard

How they deal with future economic challenges and the Tibet crisis will test whether the claim to wise meritocracy is credible

The Chinese Communist party has just been through its most interesting year since 1976, when the Deng Xiaoping faction purged Mao's widow and her three key supporters in the weeks after Mao's death. In case anyone had missed the point, photographs of Mao's memorial ceremony – which in their originals featured the Gang of Four prominently – were republished following their arrest with fuzzy gaps in the places where they had stood.

Maoist treatment for mao's family.

[kish]

Japanese release Chinese fishermen detained for... fishing

A Chinese fishing boat that was detained on Saturday by the Japanese Coast Guard near the island of Kagoshima was released yesterday, according to the Chinese ambassador to Japan.

The boat and its crew were arrested by the Japanese for illegally entering Japanese territory. The captain admitted entering Japanese territory and will pay a fine of 4,280,000 Yen (about 300,000 RMB).

On Saturday evening the captain and two crew members were interrogated on the island while the remaining six crew members were detained on the boat. They were visited by a representative from the Chinese Embassy in Japan while being detained.

This is the latest in the Sino-Japanese standoff over the Diaoyu Islands, which sit in prime fishing waters and over what are believe tot be large oil and gas reserves.

[Bade]

http://newindianexpress.com/world/article1404764.ece

A number of workers were trapped when an under-construction tunnel of a metro line collapsed in a Chinese city Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

The incident occurred in the afternoon in Guangxi Zhuang Region's in Nanning city.

Firefighters managed to pull out one of the workers and sent him to hospital. The exact number of workers trapped in the tunnel could not be immediately ascertained.

[abhishek_sharma]

Heirs of Mao’s Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility

[abhishek_sharma]

The Disappeared: Even the Soviet Union eventually acknowledged Stalin's Great Famine. Why does China still hide evidence of its own mass starvation under Mao?

[vina]

Nicholas Kristof's opinion on China.. Looking for a Jump-Start in China

First off, contrary to what our dear drones have been saying here, it seems that Hu Jintao is widely regarded as a failure!

Now his predictions.

The new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, will spearhead a resurgence of economic reform, and probably some political easing as well. Mao’s body will be hauled out of Tiananmen Square on his watch, and Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning writer, will be released from prison.

It helps that the bar is low for Xi: he follows President Hu Jintao, who is widely regarded in China as a failure. Even government ministers complain that he squandered his 10 years as leader. Today there is pent-up demand for change.

President Hu, who always reads speeches from texts, is a robot who surrounds himself with robots. One such robot aide is Ling Jihua, whose 23-year-old son was driving a Ferrari one night last March with two half-naked women as passengers. The car crashed on a Beijing road, killing the young man and badly injuring the women, one of whom later died.

Ling feared a scandal and reportedly began a cover-up. He went to the morgue, according to the account I got from one Chinese official, and looked at the body — and then coldly denied that it was his son . He continued to work in the following weeks as if nothing had happened. The cover-up failed, and the episode underscored all that was wrong with the old leadership: the flaunting of dubious wealth, the abuse of power and the lack of any heart.

How Crash Coverup Altered China's Succession

Thank you. I’m well. Don’t worry,” read the post on a Chinese social networking site. The brief comment, published in June, appeared to come from Ling Gu, the 23-year-old son of a high-powered aide to China’s president, and it helped quash reports that he had been killed in a Ferrari crash after a night of partying.

It only later emerged that the message was a sham, posted by someone under Mr. Ling’s alias — almost three months after his death.

Ahh.. In china , dead men post in social networking sites, photos of Al-31F are passed off as latest WS-DingDong XX .....

But Mr. Hu suffered a debilitating reversal of his own when party elders — led by his predecessor, Jiang Zemin — confronted him with allegations that Ling Jihua, his closest protégé and political fixer, had engineered the cover-up of his son’s death

[Suraj]

The Disappeared: Even the Soviet Union eventually acknowledged Stalin's Great Famine. Why does China still hide evidence of its own mass starvation under Mao?

This stuff is incredible. Article quotes:

Some were excruciating to read, for instance, a report written by an investigation team noting the case of a boy in a Hunan village who had been caught stealing a handful of grain. A local Communist Party cadre forced his father to bury the boy alive. The father died of grief a few days later.

Other documents presented the famine's horror in the sterile language typical of communist bureaucracy. A police report I discovered in one provincial archive listed some 50 cases of cannibalism, all in a city in Gansu, a province in northwestern China:
Date: 25 February 1960. Location: Hongtai Commune, Yaohejia Village. Name of Culprit: Yang Zhongsheng. Status: Poor Farmer. Number of People Involved: 1. Name of Victim: Yang Ershun. Relationship with Culprit: Younger Brother. Number of People Involved: 1. Manner of Crime: Killed and Eaten. Reason: Livelihood Issues.

But despite months of patient work sifting through mountains of yellowing folders, I never came across a single photograph of the catastrophe in those archives.

Historians in Beijing explained away the lack of photographic evidence by telling me that party cadres at the time did not have any cameras, as China was still a poor country. It's not a convincing explanation: The archives are replete with criminal investigations that contain exhaustive photographic evidence from the 1950s and 1960s -- mug shots of criminals, photos of crime scenes, even rolls of film documenting land disputes between collective farms. Certainly the state propaganda machine never lacked for photographic equipment. Today, it's easy to find online black-and-white photos from 1958 to 1962 showing peasants cheerfully driving the latest tractor model through the fields; rosy-cheeked children gathering around tables laden with fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat in collective canteens; and Chairman Mao plodding through the fields in a straw hat and cotton shoes, or marveling at a bumper harvest. There are even photos of Mao's nemesis, head of state Liu Shaoqi, investigating the famine in his home district in Hunan province in 1961.

So what happened to the visual evidence of one of the world's most horrifying atrocities?

The Red Guards, Mao's armed revolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution, probably destroyed it. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, in part to eliminate senior officials who criticized his reckless economic experiments that had led to the famine. As Red Guards started seizing state institutions by force in 1967, government servants destroyed records and any visual material en masse -- anything that could have discredited Mao's Great Leap Forward. Individuals with photos of the brutal starvation acted with the same impulse. Rae Yang, the daughter of a family of diplomats who had served abroad, saw her parents burn all the letters they had kept, as well as some old photographs, flushing the ash down the toilet.

But not all the evidence was reduced to ashes. It's a pretty good guess that photographs of the famine are still locked away deep inside party vaults. After all, some of the most sensitive material on the Great Leap Forward remains classified. Entire collections -- most of the central archives in Beijing, for instance -- remain beyond the reach of even highly accredited party historians. In their acclaimed biography of the chairman, Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday report that during the Cultural Revolution, when senior officials like Liu were tortured to death, security personnel took photographs and sent them to Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai. These, too, are probably filed away in some secret gallery of horrors.

For four years, I studied Mao's famine, and only once have I seen a visual illustration of its awfulness. In 2009, I visited a historian in a drab concrete building in the suburbs of Beijing. He, too, had been working on the history of the Great Leap Forward, burrowing in archives for more than a decade and obsessively documenting the starvation that had decimated the region of his birth, a county barely 100 miles north of Mao's hometown in Hunan. Stacks of photocopied archival material bulged out of filing cabinets in his sparse office. I asked him whether he had ever seen a photograph of the famine. He frowned and reluctantly pulled out a folder with a reproduction of the only picture he had discovered. It came from the files of the party committee in his home county and was from a police investigation into a case of cannibalism. The small, fading picture showed a young man standing against a brick wall, peering straight into the camera, seemingly emotionless. By his feet stood a large pot containing the parts of a young boy, his head and limbs severed from his body.

Amazing. Fathers burying sons alive for theft. Brothers eating brothers. No wonder China fears revolutions.

[chaanakya]

At least 42 dead in China landslide

A LANDSLIDE killed at least 42 people including seven from a single family when it smashed into a remote village in southwestern China on Friday, state media said.

Another two people were sent to hospital after being rescued from the debris while at least two more were still missing after the landslip engulfed 16 homes in the village of Gaopo, the official news agency Xinhua said.

Photos posted on Yunnan Web, run by the Yunnan provincial government showed rescuers in orange uniforms digging in wide swathes of clumpy mud against a backdrop of snow-covered, terraced hills.

A video posted on a Chinese social networking site appeared to show a group of villagers digging through thick mud and debris to uncover a body, which was carried away on a stretcher.

"The landslide, which brought about several hundred thousand cubic metres of watery mud to the village, buried all of the houses there," Xinhua quoted a local rescue team leader, Sun Anfa, as saying.

Same news from Yawn.

BEIJING: A landslide killed at least 42 people including seven from a single family when it smashed into a remote village in southwestern China on Friday, state media said.

Another two people were sent to hospital after being rescued from the debris while at least two more were still missing after the landslip engulfed 16 homes in the village of Gaopo, the official news agency Xinhua said.

Photos posted on Yunnan Web, run by the Yunnan provincial government showed rescuers in orange uniforms digging in wide swathes of clumpy mud against a backdrop of snow-covered, terraced hills.

A video posted on a Chinese social networking site appeared to show a group of villagers digging through thick mud and debris to uncover a body, which was carried away on a stretcher.

“The landslide, which brought about several hundred thousand cubic metres of watery mud to the village, buried all of the houses there,” Xinhua quoted a local rescue team leader, Sun Anfa, as saying.

The conditions “created great difficulties for rescue efforts amid low temperatures”, he added.

More than 1,000 rescuers were sent to the site of the landslide, which was estimated to be 300 metres long, 80 metres wide and 30 metres deep, according to authorities.

Snow was visible in images of the rescue, in an area that has experienced unusually low temperatures in recent weeks, with China suffering what authorities have called its coldest winter in 28 years.

The Communist Party’s top leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, along with Premier Wen Jiabao, ordered “all-out efforts to rescue victims”, Xinhua said, adding that more than 1,000 rescuers were on the scene.

Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, is a relatively impoverished area of China, where rural houses are often cheaply constructed.

Gaopo is in Zhenxiong county, in the northeast of Yunnan, a temperate province known for its tobacco industry and for being the home of Pu’er tea.

But its mountainous areas are prone to landslides and it is also vulnerable to earthquakes. Two in September, one of magnitude 5.7, left 81 people dead and hundreds injured.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao made an overnight trip to the quake zone at the time to comfort survivors, many of whom had taken refuge in tents erected on a public square.

A county neighbouring Zhenxiong was hit by a landslide in October that killed 18 children, after one which killed 216 people in 1991, according to the United States Geological Survey.

An earthquake in neighbouring Sichuan province in 2008 claimed around 70,000 lives, the worst natural disaster to hit China in three decades, with shoddy buildings blamed for the high toll.

[prashanth]

Ganesha being inked in body tattoos in China-TOI

Strange.

[krithivas]

http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/chinas-first-tamil-author-looks-to-build-bridges/article4316604.ece

For Zhao Jiang, who prefers to go by her Tamil name Kalaimakal, writing a book in Tamil would have seemed unthinkable when she first began learning what appeared to be an undecipherable script in a Chinese university classroom some 15 years ago

Building bridges or string of pearls?

[jamwal]

Propaganda-Style Kung Fu

Now, there's nothing new about Japanese villains in kung fu films. Historically speaking the Chinese have good reason to cast them in this role, and in a lot of cases they use the Japanese as default villains in the same way Hollywood uses Nazis or Germans, as in the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Die Hard franchises. What's new is that Westerners have joined the stable of villains in a big way. In the 1970s and '80s Westerners were, in my viewing experience, rarely cast as villains. The trend seems to have started with Jackie Chan's The Legend of Drunken Master (1994), in which nefarious Brits are smuggling Chinese artifacts out of the country. The difference between the kung fu films from the '70s and today's films is that there's a hysterical and fearful vibe to the anti-Japanese/Western theme. In sum, it feels like the Hong Kong film industry has become the unofficial propaganda wing of the Chinese government.

The IP Man films and Legend of the Fist (all starring Donnie Yen, as it happens) are good examples of this hysteria. The Japanese and Brits (and some other Westerners) are vilified and demonized with relentless enthusiasm, far exceeding what's necessary to establish them as conventional villains. After a certain point you begin to realize that what's going on here is an attempt to make Chinese audiences wary, if not actually intolerant, of the non-Chinese world.

What's curious is why the Chinese government feels it's necessary to mount this propaganda campaign. China's economy and political clout is growing every day, but the kind of propaganda on view in these kung fu films feels like it's being created to bolster a fragile sense of self-esteem. Another example of this comes from Skyfall, the latest Bond film. In one throwaway scene a European hitman kills a Chinese security guard. Chinese censors snipped this scene out, apparently because the idea of a Chinese citizen falling victim to a European is too harrowing for Chinese audiences.

I'm guessing that the real reason for this propaganda effort is that some people at the higher levels of the Chinese government are scared at the pace of change in China. Few nations in history have undergone such sweeping changes in the course of one generation, and it would appear that some Chinese politicians and bureaucrats feel that the increasing Westernization of China's culture must be combated. It's also possible that this propaganda effort is also designed to create domestic support for some of China's more belligerent diplomatic efforts; the quarrel with Japan over the Senkaku Islands immediately comes to mind. Whatever the reason, this shift in the tone of some modern kung fu films drains them of their charm and leaves a rather bitter taste.

Even Jackie Chan acted in one such movie glorifying a Chinese smuggler and human trafficker who was killed in an encounter with Japanese police.

[Christopher Sidor]

^^^^
Some of these movies are what the Chinese want to watch. It is just a function of what the people, in this case the Chinese, want to see. Even in India, look at the Sas-Bahu soap opera sagas. Most of the serials start of with high minding principles, child marriages, women empowerment, etc and then slowly and surely degenerate into a typical SAS-Bahu conflict. No sane Indian producer is going to create a serial about homosexuality or about beggars or about ordinary lives of people.

So instead of viewing these movies as propaganda stuff, it should be viewed as what it is. A mirror to what the Chinese public feel. A sense of anger if not down right hostility towards the Japanese.

And for that it is not the Japanese who are to blame. Japan has been the most pacific and anti-militaristic nation in the entire East Asian Region for the more than the past 60 years. The same cannot be said for China or North Korea. In fact just like the Pakistan ruling establishment filled hatred against India and Indians the Chinese have done something similar. The WW-II and the Japanese occupation of China ended in the last century but they have not moved on.

[kancha]

Photos: Buildings Vanish as Land Collapses in Guangzhou

A large piece of land collapsed near a subway construction site on Guangzhou's Kangwang Road, dragging surrounding buildings underground. The collapsed site is 300 sq metres wide and nine metres deep, and still expanding.

According to local residents, this is not the first such collapse along Kangwang Road.

No word on casualties

[Vipul]

China's looming worker shortage threatens economy.

China's demographic time-bomb is ticking much louder with the first fall in its labour pool for decades, analysts say, highlighting the risk that the country grows old before it grows rich.

The abundant supply of cheap workers in the world's most populous nation has created unprecedented cost efficiencies that underpinned its blistering economic expansion over the past 35 years, propelling the global economy forward.

But now the inexorable consequences of the one-child policy imposed in the late 1970s are beginning to appear, and threaten to impact its future growth.

China's working-age population, defined as 15-59, fell 3.45 million last year, official data showed earlier this month -- the first decline since 1963, after tens of millions died in a famine caused by the Great Leap Forward.

The immediate effect may be small in a nation of 1.35 billion people, but the cumulative effects will accelerate over the coming decades.

The number of people aged between 15 and 64 will drop by around 40 million between 2014 and 2030, said Wang Guangzhou, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a government think-tank -- more than Poland's entire population.

"The population is aging so fast that we are running short of time to deal with it," said Li Jun, also of CASS, adding the family planning policy had exacerbated the problem.

China's proportion of over-65-year-olds is projected to double from seven to 14 percent over only 26 years -- a key demographic measure that took the United States 69 years to complete.

"Undoubtedly it will substantially slow down China's potential growth rate," Yao Wei, an economist with Societe Generale in Hong Kong, told AFP.

An ageing population not only means fewer people available to employ and higher labour costs, but investment -- a key driver of China's growth -- will be harder to maintain as families spend their savings on health care, she said.

Chinese authorities maintain that controlling its population growth has been key to increasing its prosperity.

But while China has risen to become the world's second-largest economy, on a per capita basis it still lags far behind the US and other developed countries.

Industrial disputes have become more common in recent years, as workers demand higher pay and better working conditions on the back of growing awareness of their rights and the shortage of skilled staff.

Multinational companies are looking to other developing economies with lower wages for further expansion, with some already moving production bases out of China to rivals such as Indonesia and Vietnam.

In a survey of 514 Japanese manufacturers by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation last year, the number of respondents voting China as the top destination for overseas business fell by more than 10 percentage points on 2011.

Economists said China must look to speed up the transformation of its economic model and move up the value chain.

"The golden period of the manufacturing industry, particularly those depending on exports, has gone," said Yao.

[Anand K]

>>Re Jamwal's post

IIRC the old Jimmy Wang Yu howlfests of the early 80s and 90s also showed Westerners in a negative light. In fact, other staple villains were drug smuggling Mahakala worshiping Tibetan Monks , Indian Yoga Gurus , vampirish Japanese karatekas, trippin' Thai kick-boxers (bhy o bhy ?) and grim fat Koreans. Then there was Fist of Fury with the cool British dude in suspenders and the sardarji who prevents Bruce Li-ji from entering the garden.

This trend actually whittled down in the late 90s-00s! The Fist of Fury was remade with Jet Li as "The Legend" in which the Japanese are shown in a less cartoon-villain manner. There's even an old Jap Master who bests the nearly superhuman Chinese hero by quickly adapting to the hero's (new mixed martial arts) style and using his years of experience against him. The hero himself kicks the living sh1t out of his ideologically blind (traditional Kung Fu trumps everything!) cousin with his mixed martial arts. Once Upon A Time in China series also showed the British as supportive of Chinese interests (sanctuary to Sun yat Sen's boys IIRC?). Donnie yen's Ip Man (Part-1) was actually a good film where the main antagonist, the Jap general was actually a honorable fighter. Jet Li's Fearless, another good movie, spends some time on the friendship and mutual respect between Huo Yuanjia and his Japanese opponent.... one snippet also shows a Western challenger accepting defeat graciously to the hero.

OTOH Ip Man-2 was an out and out return to the good ol' days of multi-cultural villains insulting Chinese pride.... and as a result was a trashy flick. Well, except for the sheer joy of seeing Sammo Hung in kick-a$$ mode once again. Then of course there was "Hero" with the "One Land" fundae. And now this Skyfall thing. I wonder if they cut similar (Oh they killed a Chineeeesssseeeee) scenes from The Dark Knight and MI-3.
Will Chinese movies reflect the Party Line like the old Boy-Meets-Tractor flicks of the USSR? Parkalaam.

[krisna]

China Resorting To Canned Air Because Pollution Is So Bad

Chinese entrepreneur Chen Guangbiao has launched a line of canned air for the Chinese market, to give people something to breathe that isn't the smog-filled Beijing air. Guangbiao, a billionaire who has become known for his stunts, is selling the product to bring more attention to the problems of pollution in China:
It comes with atmospheric flavours including pristine Tibet, post-industrial Taiwan and revolutionary Yan'an, the Communist Party's early base area.

surely they have business acumen.

[Anand K]

Canned fresh air? Heavens! This is straight out Spaceballs! Remember President Skroob snorting in a nosefull from a can?

Remember that tamasha sometime back when massive electrostatic air filters were set up in Zhongnanhai? The Chinese blogosphere was abuzz with people deriding the Royalty for letting rest of China die of clogged trachea while they themselves breath fresh air. The Great Bamboo Wall was clamped down once again and all wazz well.

Then again, given the Chicom nature of faking everything I believe there is a f@rtshop or two in Shenzhen with "workers" gorged on ham briskets in Black Bean Sauce with their a$$es plugged into 50mm PVC pipes..............
East Wind indeed.

[vina]

Canned fresh air? Heavens! This is straight out Spaceballs! Remember President Skroob snorting in a nosefull from a can?

Awesome movie. Chuckle even when I just think of it. But dude, how old are you, if you watched a late 80s movie ! And here I was thinking that BRF is filled with pimple faced kids barely out of their teens like Raja Bose (who is actually quite old being over 25 and hence over the hill) !

[Anand K]

Very early thirties boss. Too old to be a horny buck and too young to be a Dirty Old Man. Been a big fan of Mel Brooks since High School when I stumbled into Silent Movie on Star Movies. (Remember when they showed all those risque Carry On series and Loose Screws series and all before the Red Eye of Sushma "Sauron" Swaraj turned it's malevolent gaze on our midnight masala?). Gag humor and physical comedy like Spaceballs, Blazing Saddles, Carry on up the Khyber, History of the World, Men in Tights ...... and Madeline Kahn and John Candy..... they don't make them like that anymore.

"Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!"
"Mongo only pawn..... in game of life"

Salut!

BTW, coming back to Chinese pollution...... it's said that prolonged exposure to air pollution can cause polyps and other growth which increases nasal volume and warps your face into something out of Lord of the Rings. I mean, if the poor wretches actually survive that long with their lungs turning into gunny bags well before that. we've heard of rumors of landfills/wastelands deep inland with the levels of pollution so high that every other person has unbelievable deformities. The urban Chinese may be easy on the eyes but I guess it's a little different when you go to the a$$ end of Inner Mongolia....

[kmkraoind]

Eight dead as fireworks cause highway collapse in China

A truckload of fireworks intended for Lunar New Year celebrations went off Friday in a massive, deadly explosion that destroyed part of an elevated highway in central China, sending vehicles plummeting 30 meters (about 100 feet) to the ground.

[krishnan]

fireworks causing flyover to collapse ??

[Aditya_V]

fireworks causing flyover to collapse ??

Must be real shoddy construction

[member_23858]

Eight dead as fireworks cause highway collapse in China

A truckload of fireworks intended for Lunar New Year celebrations went off Friday in a massive, deadly explosion that destroyed part of an elevated highway in central China, sending vehicles plummeting 30 meters (about 100 feet) to the ground.

If Chinese Infrastructure cannot handle the local fireworks, one does wonder what will happen in a case of war...

[chaanakya]

Well truck looks intact otherwise? What gives.

[jamwal]

The explosions must have happened in an another vehicle. The picture just shows some damage to the bridge.

[member_22872]

Aren't we asking Chinese help to develop our own infrastructure? I am fine with Chinese roads, it's their funeral, but worried about reports that India wants to take Chinese help in road construction.

[Christopher Sidor]

China's looming worker shortage threatens economy.
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Multinational companies are looking to other developing economies with lower wages for further expansion, with some already moving production bases out of China to rivals such as Indonesia and Vietnam.

Yet there are people who say that India should emulate or try to get some pie of Chinese manufacturing. After all India's wages are lower even in manufacturing as compared to China. There is a concept, use and throw. Manufacturing FDI utilizes this to the hilt. They use the hard work of the natives, imagine people working 6.5 days in 14+ hours shift with timed bathroom breaks with crushing work load, so that consumers in the north Atlantic region can enjoy low inflation, cheap goods. No wonder Chinese get pissed. PRC gave its youth and now once the middle-age approaches, boss there are more younger players in the market.

Manufacturing will chase the lowest cost base. In the past two decades it was china. In the next decade it wil be Indonesia/Vietnam/Bangladesh. After that who knows even Africa may be considered or the newly independent stans of central asia.

[RajeshA]

Christopher Sidor ji,

despite the low inflation and cheap goods, people in the West are still falling in debt traps, and the cost of social benefits are rising because there too few jobs supporting too many unemployed or earning low wages. Low wages are coming to the West as well.

Economy is indeed a sail ship and it is important to catch the wind, whatever wind comes along to push you forward.