PRC Economy and Industry: News and Discussions

[Vasu]

Amit, countries such as China and other dictatorial states go to many lengths to indoctrinate their populations to believe that loving their country is akin to loving their government. I suppose in that context, the government knows whats best for the country, and does not want to risk the people getting a chance to see any other option or opinion out there. I suppose I speak nothing new here, because control of the media stems from this same thought.

Unfortunately, the Chinese people may never have the pleasure of abusing their politicians and government in the most ingenious ways possible, a right which we take for granted here (without being labeled unpatriotic or seditionist). They may never get to relish a columnist calling his government a bunch of lemmings, or a cartoonist showing his national leaders as the most hilarious caricatures.

[amit]

Unfortunately, the Chinese people may never have the pleasure of abusing their politicians and government in the most ingenious ways possible, a right which we take for granted here (without being labeled unpatriotic or seditionist). They may never get to relish a columnist calling his government a bunch of lemmings, or a cartoonist showing his national leaders as the most hilarious caricatures.

Exactly my point Vasu, very well put. The point is all of the above is the soft power side of a nation. And it's as much needed as hard power. In their pursuit for hard power, the CPC has totally neglected the soft power. Which is why they were so easily fingered with the Nobel prize for Liu. While I acclaim Liu's work which was done with full realization of the consequences, he is no Aung San Suu Kyi who could have been a threat to the CPC.

In fact before this Prize thingy very few people in Beijing knew who he was. Yet the prize had the government in a tizzy and provided a convenient pressure point for others to needle China. If the Chinese had just totally ignored the prize by showing indifference, then it would have come out of it much better. Instead it reacted almost like clock work in a predictable manner, thus showing immaturity.

As long as such pressure points will allowed to exist, all this talk about being a superpower and leader of the world, is a chimera. You cannot lead the world with hard power and money power alone.

[Theo_Fidel]

http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/31/wha ... rom-egypt/

What Uprising? China Censors News From Egypt

Everybody's talking about a revolution. Except, that is, in China.

As the unrest in Egypt stretches on, China has blocked the country's name from micro-blogs and is scrubbing related comments from the web. Has all this talk of freedom got them on edge?

What's more interesting is what they have said about the protests. On January 30, Global Times, a state-run newspaper, published an editorial warning, essentially, that democracy would fail in Tunisia and Egypt. An excerpt:

"In general, democracy has a strong appeal because of the successful models in the West. But whether the system is applicable in other countries is in question, as more and more unsuccessful examples arise.
In the West, democracy is not only a political system, but a way of life. Yet some emerging democracies in Asia and Africa are taking hit after hit from street-level clamor
Democracy is still far away for Tunisia and Egypt. The success of a democracy takes concrete foundations in economy, education and social issues."

In other words, revolution won't bring democracy. So don't even try

[svinayak]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/01/ ... tated.html

What if China’s GDP is Seriously Overstated?
Michael Pettis has released one of his carefully reasoned posts, this one on the dark art of guesstimating what China’s GDP really is, given the notorious unreliability of its official data.

The strength of Pettis’ approach sometimes works to his advantage. He does a great job in breaking down his arguments to clear, easy to understand, step-by-step reasoning. That tends to make his posts pretty long. In this case, that meant that the part I though was most provocative came towards the end, when impatient readers might have figured they had gotten the drift of his gist and moved on.

In this one, he starts with the last GDP release, and in particular, the implications the fact that its alarmingly high investment rate continues to increase at a stunning clip. But he then turns to the rather tiresome debate as to when China’s economy will overtake that of the US, and discusses the possibility that the GDP figures touted now could well be overstated by a considerable degree:

What if China’s GDP numbers seriously overstate the true value of China’s economy?

There are at least two very good reasons to believe that they might. The first is environmental degradation. To understand why, it is worth remembering that if an individual earns $100, but in so doing destroys $100 worth of his own assets, then a strict accounting would say that he earned nothing.

The same is true with the environment…For example here is an article that came out four months ago on Bloomberg:

China, the world’s worst polluter, needs to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product a year — 680 billion yuan at 2009 figures — to clean up 30 years of industrial waste, said He Ping, chairman of the Washington-based International Fund for China’s Environment. Mun Sing Ho, a senior economist at Dale W. Jorgenson Associates and a visiting scholar at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put the range at 2 percent to 4 percent of GDP.

Failure to spend that much — equivalent to the annual GDP of Vietnam — may cost the Chinese economy half as much again in blighted crops, health costs and pollution-related expenses, He said: “The cleanup can’t catch up with the speed of pollution” if spending is less.

This article suggests that a significant portion of Chinese growth came with a destruction of value that should have been deducted from that growth. After all, if you create net $100 of chemicals, but in so doing you pollute a nearby river to the extent that future economic production associated with the river is reduced by $100 (there will be less fishing, perhaps, or less agricultural production, or less usable water, or more health care costs), then the net value you created is 0, not $100, although of course you as the polluter might earn $100 today while the rest of the country loses $100 over the future.

There is no objective way to figure out how much of Chinese GDP growth should be reversed because of environmental degradation (and in this China is simply an extreme case – most countries to a lesser extent have this problem), but there is no question that the number is big, and the result is that we overestimate China’s GDP growth today and will underestimate GDP growth tomorrow. In other words environmental degradation simply causes us to take future growth and count it today.

i bet anyone by 2020 chinese aviation industry will give US&EU duopoly a run for thei money.”

I’ve seen no improvement in the quality of Chinese fasteners in the last 20 years – they break at the slightest provocation (i.e. the use of a non-Chinese tool. Chinese tools will of course break before Chinese fasteners). Given that tens of thousands of fasteners are required to fashion an aircraft, and Chinese aircraft will undoubtedly be made with Chinese fasteners, how reliable do you think these Chinese aircraft will be? How long before a plane falls out of the sky because a 1 Yuan bolt broke? Who would be dumb enough to fly in a Chinese plane? I can’t imagine doing so myself. “Made in China” is synonymous with “Made of Shi+”. I would not bet on that changing by 2020.

[shynee]

The Choking of China - and the World by Johann Hari

[amit]

Paging Theo.

Here's a report which is a nice companion piece to your earlier series of posts about the mad building rush in China.

This talks about where the aam aadmi lives in Beijing - their equivalent of Dharavi if you will. The only difference is that Dharavi is out there for everybody to see - you can see it when your plane is landing at Mumbai airport. In Beijing, in tradition of the super efficient Chinese, everything has been sent underground!

Read on:

Underground world hints at China's coming crisis

To understand how far ordinary Chinese have been priced out of their country's property market, you need to look not upwards at the Beijing's shimmering high-rise skyline, but down, far below the bustling streets where nearly 20m people live and work.

There, in the city's vast network of unused air defence bunkers, as many as a million people live in small, windowless rooms that rent for £30 to £50 a month, which is as much as many of the city's army of migrant labourers can afford.

In a Beijing suburb, beneath one of the thousands of faceless residential tower blocks that have carpeted the city's peripheries in a decade-long building frenzy, one of Beijing's "bomb shelter hoteliers", as they are known, agrees to show us his wares.

"We have two sizes of room," he says, stepping past heaps of clutter belonging to residents, most of whom work in the nearby cloth wholesale market. "The small ones [6ft by 9ft] are 300 yuan [£30] the big ones [15ft by 6ft] are 500 yuan."

Beijing is estimated to have 30 square miles of tunnels and basements, some constructed after the Sino-Soviet split of 1969, when Mao's China feared a Soviet missile strike, and many more constructed since to act as more modern emergency refuges.

The fact Mr Zhao can easily rent out 150 such rooms, with the connivance of the city's Civil Defence Bureau with whom he has signed a five-year contract and invested nearly £150,000, is testament to China's massive unfulfilled demand for affordable housing.

"Some 80pc of our tenants are girls working in the wholesale market and the rest are peddlers selling vegetables or running sidewalk snack booths," he adds. "There are dozens of similar air defence basement projects in residential communities. In this area, they say 100,000 live underground."

To buy a small flat (860 sq ft) in the tower block above – a typically grim, grey concrete affair – currently costs more than £200,000. In a city where the average monthly salary is 4,000 yuan, the average person would take 50 years to buy such an apartment, assuming they saved every penny they earned.

{That's a telling testament to the workers' paradise}

Here's what an aam admi worker earns:

"I can earn 4,000 yuan on a good month with commissions," she says, "but sometimes it is only 2,000. I could maybe afford something a little better, but I need to save money so this is how I have to live."

A survey of global investors by Bloomberg last week found that 45pc of them expect a financial crisis in China within the next five years, with another 40pc anticipating a crisis after 2016.

{Lies, damn lies, just propagandu!}

However, many analysts remain sceptical that the curbs, allied to further interest rate rises expected this quarter, will do much more than stabilise prices which rose by 26pc in Shanghai and 12pc in Beijing last year despite an earlier round of cooling measures.

Those with a bearish outlook, such as Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Beijing's Peking University, question whether China's leaders will dare hit the brakes hard enough when so much of China's economy relies on property investment to hit its politically sacrosanct annual growth targets. {Nothing new for regulars on this thread}

Even last year's soaring retail figures – sales of furniture rose by 37.2pc, household appliances by 27.7pc – appear to flatter the strength of China's real economy, he argues in a note, since they are "as much an indication of soaring real estate investment as of rising consumption".

[Theo_Fidel]

Amit,

That's is a good read. It is a shocker that someone with a annual income of ~ 50,000 Yuan or about $8000 is forced to live in such a hell hole. I have said this before, the vast majority of Americans could not afford to live in these Tower complexes. Most Americans live in houses that cost $150,000 or less. Something like 60%. And this is despite the extreme skewing from the expensive cities on both coasts.

This matches my observation that there is zero mid - low end housing going on. The reason for this is not hard to see. The Chinese model of development is the kick out the farmer/'slum' dweller, bring in expensive utilities, roads, etc and then auction the land to the highest bidder. This produces obscene profit for the party apparatchik. The developer having shelled out this money now crams in as many 'flats' as he can into as little area as possible with the highest price tag possible.

Some 60% of the Chinese GDP now consists of construction.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/40605908/China_O ... all_Chanos

“Construction is 60-plus percent of GDP, compared to exports of 5,” said Chanos, who is the founder and president of Kynikos Associates.

The real killer part is that the over confidence has led China to believe that exports is not that important anymore to their economy! Witness their 20%+ inflation in wages while still manufacturing only low end assembly stuff. They think they can overnight graduate to the higher end skill products. You are going to need some IP protection and genuine research for that one.

[rsingh]

[youtube]8y8kbCiiVBs&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

[Prem]

http://www.businessinsider.com/gary-shi ... ing-2011-2
Gary Shilling On The Chinese Hard Landing That's Going To Prick The Global Commodity Bubble

China's economy is, "in for a hard landing...this year or next year," according to Gary Shilling, who spoke at Bloomberg's China Investment Strategies conference. He doubts the ability of the Chinese government to control the economy, and described its monetary policy as "very crude."Shilling said the hard landing scenario would mean GDP growth of 6% or less in China. That's because the country needs at least 8% growth to accommodate people moving from inland China to its coastal cities, Shilling said.The result of the slowdown would be the pricking of the global commodities bubble. While that would have a direct impact on the prices of a multitude of commodities, Shilling said it would also hit currencies tied to commodity production, like the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, and New Zealand dollar.
Shilling went so far as to describe Australia as a "Chinese colony" saying its role is to dig up raw commodities and ship them off to China.Because of the amount of speculation present in the global economy on the side of continued Chinese growth, Shilling sees the slowdown there leading to a global downturn.

http://www.businessinsider.com/gary-shi ... z1CqwuWJu6

[amit]

We've all been well educated about the greatness of the HSR system that the Chinese Railways have built. After being suitably impressed, it's perhaps time to see how that super duper system serves the aam admi which does the annual domestic migration during the annual Spring Festival and Chinese New Year.

Please read on...

China's railways world leader, except in service

Fed up after waiting in vain to get train tickets home for the lunar new year, migrant worker Chen Weiwei became China's latest Internet sensation, standing unclothed except for his gray jockey shorts and socks, after he stripped and shouted in protest.

Chen's frustrations are shared by tens of millions of other Chinese.

The country's drive to develop high-speed rail technology rivals its space program in terms of national pride and importance.

{Oh boy, don't we know about this!}

But the annual scrum for tickets home for the year's major festival -- the world's biggest annual migration involving 230 million people -- highlights the wide gap between showcase Chinese infrastructure and the often abysmal services available to the public.

{And here I was stupid Me thinking service is more important than construction of Manly infrastructure!}

The railway system, run by the Ministry of Railways, employs nearly 3.2 million people -- more than the country's 2.3 million army troops. New, modern railways snake across vast deserts and Himalayan tundra, while dozens of cities are connected by high-speed rail "bullet trains" that have vastly cut travel times -- for travelers who can afford them.

{Didn't we hear about how even the poorest of poor are surging to get up on these HSR trains?}

But all of that showcase technology has done little to alleviate the struggles of working class Chinese, especially migrant laborers who scrimp and save all year for their one visit back home. With railways running fewer slow, cheap trains, migrants like Chen and Yin often have to try for days to buy a ticket.

{This, mind you in the Workers' Paradise}

Those who don't will often opt for a long-distance bus, rather than splash out their hard-earned savings on airfare or on tickets for China's newly built "bullet trains," which often cost just as much as traveling by air.

"The goal is to bump people up-market to faster trains, but they misjudged and people are instead taking the buses," said Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University. "Their cash is precious, their time is less so."

The troubles with trains reflect the failure of China's planners, obsessed with projecting a modern image both at home and abroad, to fully consider the appropriateness of the technology they are deploying, he said.

So for most of the 1.3 billion Chinese, travel during Spring Festival remains an ordeal from start to finish: Travelers who manage to get tickets then must endure crushing crowds just to get into and out of the trains.

"The annual problems with the railways during the Spring Festival are caused by shortages in capacity due to excessive investment in the wrong kind of railways," says Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University.

"The solution lies in stepping up construction of regular railways. But China is headed in the wrong direction. It's a big problem," Zhao said.

"The cost is rising incredibly fast, beyond what we can afford," he said. "I don't care how fast the new trains run, but I do care about buying tickets easily, so that I can get home to have New Year's Eve dinner with my family."

[wrdos]

Hehe, once more the old method of western journalist.

- The famous naked man asking tickets.
The man was trying to buy a ticket at Jinhua, a city in Zhejiang Province and happened without a high speed line.

- the Forgotten Guangzhou.
Guangzhou is the city with the largest migration workers. It had been almost always the picked up one when reporting the Chinese new year railway rush period. Thanks the recently opened HSR, tickets from/to Guangzhou become much more available for both HSR trains and ordinary trains. Thus it disappeared from the report.

The reporter intentionally chose some terrible cases happened in cities where HSR is still under construction to try to mislead the audience to believe that HSR is useless for improvement of Chinese rail travel.

Thanks God, the western reports have almost zero incredibility in China now. We will build our HSR. It will become the largest in the world and larger than all western countries combined, right in this year.

[wrdos]

Hehe, just watched the video on the underground apartment in Beijing.
Sure, the lowest 5% of Beijingers live there.

However, there is reliable electricity supply, running water, water-washing toilet, and even broadband internet connection for every room in those underground apartments.

Please don't pretend the Dharavi people have the similar conditions.

There is the good guy Rishirishi, who often travels China. Despite that, he insisted that Indian laborers have higher salary than China. He insisted that most Guangzhou people live in "back streets" just like an Indian slum.

Although he agreed that even in the "Guangzhou slum", every window has a working air conditioner under it.

Paging Theo.

Here's a report which is a nice companion piece to your earlier series of posts about the mad building rush in China.

This talks about where the aam aadmi lives in Beijing - their equivalent of Dharavi if you will. The only difference is that Dharavi is out there for everybody to see - you can see it when your plane is landing at Mumbai airport. In Beijing, in tradition of the super efficient Chinese, everything has been sent underground!

[biswas]

^ Okay that is rubbish. I had a relative that lived in a slum for a while for the experience and just from that video (a critical news piece as well) it is very evident, that the conditions for the underground dwellers is far far better than anything a slum dweller in India may have access to.

[biswas]

Dharavi is like a city within a city. There will obviously be trade and such inside such a place. You can not compare the GDP of Dharavi to place to like Guangzhou which is essentially like a giant apartment complex.

I don't remember which slum he stayed in, but I doubt living conditions could be worse than what can be observed by a Dharavi google search.

[Shankas]

Please don't pretend the Dharavi people have the similar conditions.

I completely agree with you. Dharavi is not a gated community with guards

Beijing starts locking up migrant villagers

[rsingh]

Wrdo........Dharvi people get sun light at least. Fresh air , sunlight and ability to see sky...........it is minimum. Heck in Europe, eggs from chicken kept in open are costlier then those kept in Chinese conditions

[Suraj]

Dharavi isn't merely a slum - it's not even just a halfway house for the massive influx of people into Bombay from the hinterland. It's an entire economy of its own, with a maze of commercial and small scale manufacturing establishments that generated $1.5 billion in economic output back in 2005 or so, and probably much more so now. It may lack in terms of reliable utilities, but then it is hardly a planned residential area. Yet, there's a massive amount of economic activity within that's frequently ignored with the emphasis on the word 'slum'.

[shynee]

China in the Midst of a Lewis Turning Point, Coupled With Nasty Inflation

[Prem]

U.N. Food Agency Issues Warning on China Drought
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/busin ... ml?_r=1&hp

China has been essentially self-sufficient in grain for decades, for national security reasons. Any move by China to import large quantities of food in response to the drought could drive international prices even higher than the record levels recently reached. “China’s grain situation is critical to the rest of the world — if they are forced to go out on the market to procure adequate supplies for their population, it could send huge shock waves through the world’s grain markets,” said Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, in the Philippines. The state-run news media in China warned Monday that the country’s major agricultural regions were facing their worst drought in 60 years. On Tuesday the state news agency Xinhua said that Shandong Province, a cornerstone of Chinese grain production, was Chinese state news media are describing the drought in increasingly dire terms. “Minimal rainfall or snow this winter has crippled China’s major agricultural regions, leaving many of them parched,” Xinhua reported. “Crop production has fallen sharply, as the worst drought in six decades shows no sign of letting up.” Xinhua said that Shandong Province, in the heart of the Chinese wheat belt, had received only 1.2 centimeters, or about half an inch, of rain since September. The report did not provide a comparison for normal rainfall for the period. bracing for its worst drought in 200 years unless substantial precipitation came by the end of this month.

Currently, the ground in the country is so dry from Beijing south through the provinces of Hebei, Henan and Shandong to Jiangsu Province, just north of Shanghai, that trees and houses are coated with topsoil that has blown off parched fields.

[vina]

Cross Posting.

Uh oh. China suffers worst drought in 60 years . Major wheat growing areas have received as little as 15% rain /winter snow. Expect agri commodity prices to hit the roof . Wheat prices are set to soar.

Expect Pawkistan and the rest of it's Arap birathers in places outside the oil rich countries (Egypt, Syria, Jordan etc) to have the "revolutions" running full steam ahead soon, as China starts importing unprecdented quantities and jacks up prices around the world.

Well, China seems to be having the US equivalent of the dust bowl of the 1930s, when the entire midwest was a mass of blown dust from severe environmental degradation and damage . Maybe it is the environmental costs of China's abuse of mother nature catching up.

[Raghavendra]

^ but china has rice, plastic rice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT3JTUCaB_4

[wen]

^ but china has rice, plastic rice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT3JTUCaB_4

The daily food/meat/vegetable consumption for the average Chinese is more than these in Japan or Korea, I think indians are very naive to try to make fun of China in this department since the average Indian food consumptions is barcomparable to the average of sub-saharan Africans.

I can provide citions for that, actually you can see for yourself through the official website of Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations here (to save you from the embrassments, I prefer not to post the numbers, so you can go to see for yourself):

http://faostat.fao.org/site/610/default.aspx

And yes, according to the UN report, in terms of malnutrition rate of the youths, India is even worse than that of sub-saharan Africa.

I really find its so ironic that a country such as India, by almost all means and measures, economily-wise is just comparable as Sub-sahara africa today, always has the werid imaginations that as if they are the rivial to some far more advanced country like China.

[wen]

Just because some American peanuts butters contain poisions and others contains rocket-fuels doesnt mean all american foods are poisionous, and doesnt change the fact that USA is still a developed country nor it.

So I hope people can understand the simple principle that never throw stones on the people walking on the street when you live in a glass house.

[Hari Seldon]

^^^ uh-oh, seems like jingoes on here have stepped on (grandpa) wen's H&D sensibilities only.

Wonder why it is that people from such a great superior country like china should bother at all about what a bunch of Yindians say about them in some remote corner of the web, eh? LOL.

Trying that prove that many Yindians are poor and materially deprived is a no-brainer. It is not denied, especially on here. However, I don't see why that automatically prevents Yindians from calling what they see as ridiculous about china as ridiculous only. Anyway, this wen chappie could well be another trolley, will know soon enough. Why bother, I guess.

goo'bye n goo'luck.

[Theo_Fidel]

Guys! Troll alert! I should ignore but can't resist. These fools are so easy like shooting fish in a barrel.

Extra! Extra! Super advanced country below! All who disagree will be shot.

The sad thing is that in its need for H&D these folks will be rounded up and shot if they protested. Yet this is still 95% plus of China.


Sad looking lady with Space age laser tool.


Desperate looking man with love of party on his mind.


Couple advancing rapidly having invested in orange space age thread coupling device.


Man leading futuristic food production module fitted with methane production unit. Secondary back up unit in background.

[wen]

Deleted

[Suraj]

Folks, let's all cool down here and continue normal programming. No need to initiate PRC economy thread derailment #753604978 yet

[Raghavendra]

^ but china has rice, plastic rice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT3JTUCaB_4

The daily food/meat/vegetable consumption for the average Chinese is more than these in Japan or Korea

Keep eating plastic rice mixed with melamine milk topped with inflated statistics, you will get fat as the village pig

come back for more 50 cent slave

[vina]

Couple advancing rapidly having invested in orange space age thread coupling device.

I was stunned when I saw that contraption and the pitiable exercise of the couple trying to irrigate their field with a bucket! All in the most advanced and "soup-e-rear" "gleat" China! Why any idiot in India will hire a diesel pump for an hour along with polyurethane tubing for irrigation!

Man leading futuristic food production module fitted with methane production unit. Secondary back up unit in background.

[starek]

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjQxMDIzNjU2.html
password：railhd.com

[sanjaykumar]

http://en.kanzhongguo.com/

[wen]

Deleted.

[Raghavendra]

Cleaned up

commie slave you can bark all you want with those cooked up statistics, even you master admitted the statistics are fake

China's GDP is "man-made," unreliable: top leader http://www.reuters.com/article/comments ... 7D20101206

fake milk
fake rice
fake statistics
fake wen

[rsingh]

The daily food/meat/vegetable consumption for the average Chinese is more than these in Japan or Korea

And it is better without this food


Finally chinese must never forget who hold the record for induced hunger............yes your very own deal palty killed millions
...............30 million actually.
I know what Chinese troll is thinking .................how come China could not block Google or internet worldwide

[Prem]

[quote="RaghavendraChina's GDP is "man-made," unreliable: top leader http://www.reuters.com/article/comments ... 7D20101206

fake milk
fake rice
fake statistics
fake wen

[/quote]
Fake smile
Fake Claims
Fake Intelligence
Fake Fliendship
Fake Size'

[Vasu]

Come on guys, there's a sustained troll attack on all forums and we're falling for it like suckers. Lets get back to some actual discussion please.

[wig]

new american law to combat Chinese currency manipulation

The legislation introduced on Friday is similar to the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act of 2010, which was passed by the House of Representatives last September by a vote of 348-79.

The legislation, which directs the US department of commerce to treat currency undervaluation as a prohibited export subsidy, will ensure the government is equipped to respond on behalf of American workers and manufacturers by imposing countervailing duties on subsidised exports from countries like China.

"China's unfair currency manipulation has gone on for far too long. With factory doors continuing to close across my state, Ohio workers and small businesses can't afford to wait any more," Brown said.

"The Chinese government has taken small steps to allow the yuan to appreciate, but it is not enough. Congress must take action immediately to address Chinese currency manipulation and pass legislation that will empower our government to combat this illegal trade subsidy," he said.

"One significant contributing factor to the withering of our country's once-unparalleled manufacturing base is the fact that China's government deliberately suppresses the renminbi's value, making Chinese imports artificially cheaper when competing against US products," Senator Snowe said.

Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, estimates that China's exchange rate policy reduces the US GDP by 1.4 to 1.5 percentage points annually and reduces US employment by 1.4 or 1.5 million jobs.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/busi ... 473532.cms

[wig]

disconcerting news of the ills that plague china

online campaign to gather photos of Chinese kids begging on the streets is pressuring authorities to crack down on gangs that kidnap children for exploitation and is helping reunite them with families.

Many of the children seen begging in Chinese cities, often in the arms of women who may not be their mothers, are snatched from their real families by kidnappers and then sold into virtual slavery, forced to beg by gangs that sometimes maim them to elicit greater sympathy

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/ ... 22,00.html

[RamaY]

disconcerting news of the ills that plague china

online campaign to gather photos of Chinese kids begging on the streets is pressuring authorities to crack down on gangs that kidnap children for exploitation and is helping reunite them with families.

Many of the children seen begging in Chinese cities, often in the arms of women who may not be their mothers, are snatched from their real families by kidnappers and then sold into virtual slavery, forced to beg by gangs that sometimes maim them to elicit greater sympathy

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/ ... 22,00.html

Wig, this is the power of a open society. It brings out the ills that plague the society and force the govts to act on them.

Hope this opens few eyes and make them see the perfidy of Communist Party of China.

[sanjaykumar]

Yes but Chinese beggars are not as poor as Indian beggars, Chinese beggar-children are not as maimed as Indian beggar-children.